Against The Postwar

Sketches, writes Vasari, "are in artists' language a sort of first drawing made to find out the manner of the pose, and the first composition of the work." They are unfinished and insufficient. They are parts only, their value residing in an intimation of the whole. The sketch is the record of a portentous moment. "Out of the artist's impetuous mood they are hastily thrown off," writes Vasari, "only to test the spirit of that which occurs to him, and for this reason we call them sketches."

A bare sketch is only a proposal, an invitation without realization, scabbard empty of sword, musculature without veins, viscous ink and dusty charcoal awaiting the incarnation of blood in oil. Diderot says as much in the course of relating a lively anecdote about a plenipotentiary whom a French whore admires without pants. Her madame clucks at her naÔvetÈ (as she is French), and asks, "Very nice, but does he have the ass to pump it?" Thus also with the sketch, says Diderot. The sketch identifies the idea, but we must await the canvas for the consummation.

Today, we have few sketches left. Ours is a cockless age, in which, though it be not apparent to the busied women of our art history departments, few asses still genuinely pump. With the destruction of bourgeois culture in two world wars, painting is a shambles, the transmission of technique vanished. Whether or not it is to be desired, no woman or man living could paint like Titian redivivus. Even adequate copyists are scarce. The technician-philosophers are extinct. In their place live on only pranksters: our satyrs-makers-of-vitrines; our videotapers-of-genitalia; our latter-day Duchampians, junk assemblers and junkies, venal productionalists and Antichrists. In the sixteenth century, a curio like Jeff Koons would be fit only to lend his buttocks to the pleasures of Cosimo the Magnificent. Today, he is studied in art schools. The hard, gemlike flame burns no more.

An exception could be proposed, in that it might be said a fine technician survives in the person of Gerhard Richter. But the exception is a false one. With his East German formalism, Richter is more rÈpÈtiteur than painter, a man with a Nikon F65 atop the bridge of his nose. Of the critical conspiracy making possible his recent retrospective at the Modern, the less said the better -- though with no disrespect to our Professor Buchloh, whose portrait hangs in the exhibit he has celebrated so eloquently. Richter can hardly be said to have ever attempted sketches in the manner of Vasari, in the testing of a spirit. It is doubtful that this camera/man has even executed sketches that promise the anticipation of a Diderovian "ass to pump it." The one technician to have survived the empty decades since the death of Mondrian is an arid oasis in the wilderness of painting. He is that rare German without Geist, consumed with a mania for form alone.

My contention will be, first, that self-reflexivity in representation has been exhausted, and, second, that there are young people working now who may flourish into a generation for the revival of representational and narrative art. To demonstrate as much, I screened a fresh remastering of the 1988 classic, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (Anchor Bay Entertainment, DVD, $14.98; VHS, $9.99), for several contemporary artists in a bedroom in Charlottesville, Virginia. The feature itself is executed in the manner of a sketch: Spider-Man's Stan Lee and the recently deceased great John Buscema, who lives on forever with Conan the Barbarian, outline their subject in a necessarily perfunctory hour of form, meaning, and execution. But however telegrammatic, the content was freighted with guidance for the audience. The melodramatic curvature of the human body explained in Lee and Buscema's "Marvel way" is nothing more or less than a return to the notion of istoria in Alberti. Likewise the parallel to Alberti with the allegorical battles, metaphysical and physical, in which Marvel characters are embroiled: the visual arts should seek, through narrative and iconography, to illuminate philosophy.

My audience began sketching immediately, and two studies stand out. First, Willie Hoffman's "1 Million Perspectives! Holy Shit" (2002, 9:05 pm - 9:07 pm, ballpoint on used envelope). On the left, the crudely articulated car: the single side mirror is a sign to the 1950s, a sort of nouveau primitivism, but the referent is the nineteenth-century obsession with kinematic representation. On the right, the eponymous million perspectives, the foreshortening ironically invisible; thence the fascination of the Renaissance. In this and the oeuvre of Picasso lie all the painterly self-explication that a world of cultures will ever need.

In the "ZAMMO!" of Dick Davis (2002, 9:05 pm - 9:12 pm, Pilot Precise V5 on Andre Torres 8W paper bag) is a dream for the restoration of narrative painting: the neanderthal's maw of the American football star, the seven of Christian numerological salvation across his incongruous chipmunk chest; in the wheelchair, the plight of the intellectual in American life, handicapped, his distance from the polity signified in spectacles, his impotence manifested, in the literal sense of in the hand, with the ray gun recalling the space allegories of the battle for conformism and against Communism in the Eisenhower years. The all-American football dream is as false as the intellectual's reformist fancy; both suffer a vertical inversion. All that remains is the towering Marvel figure of political and sexual revolution: the robotic titan, stout hatchet hung powerfully from his inner thigh, whose square vertices, like his upturned fist, agitate against convention.

The poverty of contemporary art is a poverty of ideas, the vacuity as patent in Damien Hirst as it was in Bouguereau. The crucial difference is that the latter could paint, and rather well: in those sea-salt clouds, honeyed skin tones, twee poses and dead-eyed cherubs, almost so well as Gerhard Richter. Drawing us back not only to painting but further to painting that narrates story and idea is How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, a manifesto that speaks truth to tenured power. And in Willie Hoffman and Dick Davis are two of our most promising foot soldiers in the struggle for change towards a new intellection. They may well have the ass to pump it.