The search for the real

I have been thinking about Hans Hoffman recently.  A second hand copy of his 'Search for the real and other essays' was going cheap and for a moment I thought about buying, but decided no, because it brought back too many memories. 

Hans Hoffman

Plato said that art imitates life and that the reality of life itself is something we can never actually perceive, all we actually experience is something akin to shadows cast by the light of a fire on the walls of a cave. He stated that there existed a world of true perfect forms, and that they lay behind what we experience as everyday reality. A work of art is therefore according to Plato, a copy of a degenerate copy of a perfect form. It is therefore even more of an illusion than ordinary experience.

This stinging rebuke has been problematic for many generations of artists and over the course of time, various artists at different times, have set out to disprove him. Hoffman was one of them.

Hans Hoffman was very influential on the teaching of drawing and painting when I began my own teaching career. The preservation of 'life' in an image was deemed vital to a painting or drawing's success and there were various approaches to this, mostly it seemed at the time to do with 'formal' principles and how they could be used to generate this life force. Hoffman had this to say; "The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature; translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalising this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive." 

A drawing done in one of Hoffman's classes

The key to 'reading' a drawing of this sort was to watch both sides of a line. As you did your eyes/ brain would 'tick-tock', into surrounding space and back into the mass of the form. Mass and space perception being made by the visual events that made up the image. The crime was to shade it all in. 

The 'finishing' of a drawing, as above, was seen as killing it off and making it lifeless. It was in Plato's terms an imitation, and as such could never live up to the reality of the model. You can see the leg and the back are rendered 'realistically', but the experience of the perception of the figure, was lost in the attempt to render the figure as something separate from the experience. Hoffman's teaching was of its time and an essential element in the understanding of how abstract expressionism could be applied to direct perceptual experience. It is 2020 now and not the early 1970s when I first experienced Hoffman's influence on art education, a time when it was already somewhat dated. I don't need to draw in the way Hoffman suggests, but I still carry the lesson in my head, experience is about relationships and how they constantly change, about events, not separate things. 

Over the last few years I've thought a lot about what a big mistake it is to categorise difference. Art is of course part of life, but so are humans part of nature. The old nature / culture divide is in fact an illusion. We can't separate ourselves out from nature because we are nature. We can't separate art out from nature, in exactly the same way we can't separate a bird's song or a bird's nest from nature. The song and the nest are inseparable from the nature of the bird. What is perhaps more interesting is the dialogue the bird is having with bits of stick, old feathers and some dog hairs. This is the bird's reality, and we could spend more time trying to empathise with it. 

Words as nouns associate themselves with things. A dog, a man, a stone, a tree, and because of this we have a tendency to think that there are such things as dogs, men, stones and trees. However what we are really thinking about are sets of categories as set up by words. Going back to Plato, his 'ideal' I would argue was a problem with nouns. He thought there was an ideal 'horse', but this was, I would argue, because words work like that, every noun is in fact an 'ideal'. We learn that the word 'horse' stands for lots of different creatures that can be dappled, black, white, small, aged, wild or domesticated. However they are also events that take place between plants, landscapes and ecological systems; events that can also combine with the events that humans take part in. But nouns separate one thing from another and this makes us think all things are separate from each other. 

I am English, you are Dutch. I am male, you are female. I am white you are black. I am a Remainer, you are a Brexiteer. And so it goes. I am also over 50% bacteria, a living repository for a hosted colony that I need to keep replenished by engaging in a close association with my environment. 

Reality is another word, to search for it suggests that it can be picked out as separate from everything else. If there were no words we would simply live in the now and die in it and be reconstituted in it; one event, morphing into another, into another. 

Think of these words as links not things, as events in chains that join events, that sit alongside all those smells and tastes and sounds and inner body feelings, entering and exiting the event of you today and not as proofs or understandings or worst of all, as any form of 'reality'. 

Between one thing and another

See also:

Object orientated ontology and drawing
A line of disjuncture
Illusion
Mathematics and rightness Includes a reflection on the Jacob Kramer red spot, meant to 'tick-tock' between squareness and circularity. 

A line of disjuncture: the tear

Asger Jorn  1950 drawing on two pieces of paper

I recently came across this drawing by Asger Jorn the COBRA artist. Tearing a drawing in half and juxtaposing it with another one is a method of creating a new image learnt by artists from the early days of collage. Not only could you bring into your work signs of the outside world by pasting into your drawing or painting a page from a newspaper, a torn out advert or some wallpaper, but your own work once released into the world becomes yet another potential collage element, so you could also treat your discarded work in the same way. A line of disjuncture always occurs across the torn edges that butt together, but because the same hand is at work in both areas, a formal or stylistic link will make the two halves sit together as a totality. Jorn was always looking to surprise himself and wanted to keep his expressionist images raw, fresh and energised,  therefore collage was a natural way to find unexpected formal relationships. Jorn inherits the Surrealist tradition of chance encounters. Although working as an Expressionist painter, his search for new imagery is heavily influenced by Surrealist procedures. This type of collaging influenced by the many 'Exquisite Corpse' drawings done throughout the Surrealist years. 

Chapman Brothers

Every process can be highjacked to support other agendas, and the Chapman Brothers turned to 'Exquisite Corpse' structures when they wanted to make a play on what invention and 'expression' meant for a contemporary Post-Modern artist. However for me, the line of disjunction that sits between each section of this etched image, reads more as a formal device to support their idea than a line of true discovery. This is what I would suggest John Berger would term a mannerism. (see previous post on Berger)  

Original Surrealist Exquisite Corpse drawing

In the original Surrealist Exquisite Corpse drawing above, I like the way that Miro's drawing is so clearly his, the awkward 'naffness' of this image chimes with the desire to discover something new and is an interesting comparison with the Chapman Brothers more knowing composition. 

The disjuncture created by pushing one image against another hasn't always been used as a device to create surprise or more 'Surreal' imagery. The artist and educator Hans Hoffman would often tear his students work in half in order to reassemble the image to create a better spatial resolution in response to the 'alive' nature of perception. The Cubist disjunction that comes from seeing something from multiple viewpoints being central to this, rather than the poetry of the coming together of sewing machines, umbrellas and dissecting boards. 

Olga Kitt

The drawing above was done in one of Hoffman's life drawing classes, he  would often tear a student's drawing in half, have them reassemble the image and then reconcile the two halves by re-drawing. Lee Krasner the famous abstract expressionist painter and former wife of Jackson Pollock used to go to Hoffman's classes and hated it when he did this to her drawings. 

What interests me here is that usually Surrealism, Expressionism and Cubism are held up as very different disciplines, however all three have used what I have called a 'line of disjuncture' to generate imagery and to open out expectations as to what constitutes coherent formal invention.  Disjuncture is not passive, and all of these artists have at one point or another had to struggle with what it is to create art about the experience of life. Life is of course rarely predictable and we will only survive if we are able to adapt and work with what life throws our way. The reconciliation of difference is also something that we all need to be able to do if we are to accept and work with other people and cultures, something that I would say is vital to our future survival. 

See also:

Illusion
Surrealism 

The split