Influence And Linage In Art

There are people who will ask me if I like the Abstract Expressionism. And honestly I have to say I am not overly interested in the genre. That may be surprising because my work looks to many to be influenced by that movement.

Firstly though I want to deconstruct the term that is attributed to this period. Many of these terms are pronounced by critics to describe what they see happening in artistic circles, as is so in this case. Artists, of course, resist categorization, and perhaps there were artists from this period who did not agree with this term to describe their work. Certainly for me, neither word has any accuracy.

Abstraction strictly speaking means a derivative or a rarefaction of form. This was certainly occurring in art in the first half of the 20th century with depicted imagery moving away from representations that were for the most part very pictorial. However for me in my work this method of rarefaction is not in my process. My marking is spontaneous and automatic. I do not even think about form or placement on the picture plane when marking. A process of abstraction does not take place.

I also do not see my work as expressive. Again Expressionism was used to describe works also in the early 20th century that tried to create an extreme mood though color and exaggerated imagery. I would not be able to tell you what my work is expressing because I have no intention of expressing anything, emotional nor otherwise. And I have no way to express anything in my process in anyway even if I wanted, as it is again an automatic process. As a side note though I think in this way I solved the great artistic problem put forth by Samuel Beckett in his wonderful early piece “Three Dialogues.”

Again this criticism of the term could be applied to artists of the period whose work deviates in process from an accurate reading of the descriptor Abstract Expressionism, even though their work may be classified as such. In this respect the term may then only be useful in pointing to a group of artists of a certain period and place who hold somewhat similar stylistic concerns.

Coming back now to on viewing my work one would assume that it is influenced by Abstract Expressionism; I can assure you that it absolutely is not. In fact when I started to draw automatically, through involuntary movement, I was very dismayed to do work that resembled that period. Even in my college art days twenty years earlier it was considered a hackneyed form. I did not want to do what I called “splat art”, but was so extremely intrigued by this discovery of an automatic process I had to follow to see it through.

Again I come back to this being automatic to point to the impossibility of this coming from an outside artistic influence. There is no way for a decision of influence to arise in that context. I also must point out that I had no intention of trying out an automatic drawing exercise, which is something that some Abstract Expressionists explored as a visual arts adaptation of Surrealist writing exercises. It just showed up in me as I followed a movement in my body. At one point when opening my eyes after closing them to focus on the movement, I saw my hand moving on it’s own, and the usual link it had to my mind was gone. How can there be any cultural influence to this?

This also calls into question the nature of artistic influence and of artistic linage in general. It is a matter of convenience that art critics and historians portray a movement from period to period as only a development or reaction to a previous period. It is such a common occurrence to ask someone of their influence and expect a list of former artists. But this would only be a minor aspect of influence for an artist overall. This is like in an interview when Sun Ra was asked what were his influences, to which he replied, “The planets, nature, the birds.” He understood the greater creative force, and it is not for me to guess at Sun Ra’s tremendous mind, but I don’t think the idea of artistic lineage even came up for him in response to the question. What prompts an artist to make art as they do, or even engage in the endeavor at all, as fully committed as some do, is a far greater question than can be answered through a model of evolving and passing artistic fashions.

About my my own sense of artistic lineage, here is the telling of a dream and a poem I wrote, both within the first months of when I started to do ecstatic automatic drawing.

The Dream

It is early in the morning and I have the feeling of heat on my chest covering my sternum. I am still dozing, half between sleep and wakefulness. I see an image of a large reddish black lacquer stroke on a yellow sandstone wall which is the same size and shape as the heat on my chest. The image on the wall and the heat on my chest are connected, are in fact the same. I hear the words; every stroke, every letter, every word, every sentence, every page, every volume, as I see that the stroke is now part of a letter, Hebrew in appearance, which is now part of a word and now part of a line and now more lines and even more and more lines that keep multiplying reaching back to a beginning beyond where my eyes can see.

The Poem

STIGMATA

Trying to wash the stigmata away that keeps gushing beneath the faucet as it flows diluted red down the drain forever but the hole doesn't rinse away. It gets deeper, deeper than the width of a hand as it reaches into the well of all blood.

O Stigmata, O Bleeding Stigmata, you stain my life with ink down to each finger which cannot move and not write endless lines of flowing blood flowing like lines of blood flowing like life.

O Blessed Stigmata, please stop your flowing as I am obliged to drip lines of endlessly flowing lines writing the history of all blood lines that connect all life and this I do not want to do.

Stigmata says, Do you know the flow is endless? The lines are endless? I will use you until you are empty and then I will take another to let flow the well of all blood to bleed the endless blood of all blood that writes endless lines of life's blood endlessly.

You are blessed and the bleeding is a bleeding of the blessed blood that flows endlessly until it flows in you no more. You are blessed and you will write the flowing lines of all blood flowing like lines of blood flowing like life.

You are blessed, blessed to bleed the blessed blood of all blood, blessed to be obliged to bleed the endless lines which writes the history of all blood that connects all life. You are blessed to bleed until there is no more blood to bleed. And when you are fully bled then you will be written endlessly in the endless flow of all blood that flows into lines of blood flowing like lines of flowing blood flowing like life.