Provocations:
Painter Robert Kuszek Responds to Writer Thomas Farber

FULL TEXT from Provocations

Thomas Farber: In October, 1998, I was back in New York to do a reading at Rosenberg + Kaufman Fine Art. One of the pleasures of spending time at the gallery is meeting painters and collectors as they wash through. These encounters are mediated by Stephen and Fran, shaped by their sensibilities and affections--the people they savor, respect, their own strenuous quests, commitments.

One of the artists they represent came in to drop off a new canvas. Stephen and Fran were finishing up something else. I was amused: The artist's silent patience conveyed an enormous-- loud-- self possession; as though he had much to contain but could do it. When he finally unwrapped the painting I was...dazzled by his sky, sea, use of the man-made. I've long pursued my own water narratives, have strong convictions about what's authentic in them. This man's painting-- brooding, private, searching,--disturbed, rang more than true. And, I already believed, was very much him.

Meanwhile, the artist and Stephen were talking. Arguing, disagreeing, about Bonnard. Artist invoking Nietzsche, Wagner, Bizet. All in an accent of Boston from my childhood. Boston. Having left it for California so many years ago. I have a particular, peculiar affection and sympathy for those raised there. Want to locate what town, class, ethicitiy, what response to that place that so shaped me, made me who I am. That forced me to respond.

I've also reflected on the lives of writers, what it takes for a lifetime of writing. Prices paid, survival strategies. Kind of hunger, apprehension, ecstasy, craft, satisfaction. Through this lens, then, I marveled at the painter as voracious autodidact. At his intensity, wit, anger. Began to hear his argument with the world. Wanted to know more about him. His story.

Robert Kuszek: I remember our meeting well. Obviously we have some basic connections. Not necessarily, water related. (I have read your superb Face of the Deep). More fundamentally (and to slaughter Schopenhauer), what I see here is absolute insistence on experience-in-itself, a constant reach for its validations, slavish work towards a new experience in art and the concomitant anxiety of those lurching disappointments in between. Those recoils from false moments. Finally a justification in craftsmanship.

Seems enough. I need writers. My paintings only really interest me when thet have rendered me mute. Your approach would clearly be from another level. Personally, you go through a lot trouble to argue with people across the ocean. So let's see what we might toss back and forth.

The painting I sent you is called Sand Pine at JFK. I sometimes work late hours at the airport with fragile paintings in transit. The cargo areas are laced with pines which can withstand anything. They have extraordinary character at night. I intend to make more of these pines in this gaseous lighting which both amplifies, and undercuts, their presence

You are the person "in" the painting. I have been concentrating on this idea, especially in the horizontal panels that are 11 x 30 inches (mostly entitled Time and Distance). The correspondence is between the Structure and the wall viewed from say 5 feet at eye level, with its visual connection to the subject (you), through the plane defined by the four points of your pupils and temples. This is the area of the visual self and perhaps the seat of the soul. I am primarily interested in the direct experience of the viewer --myself actually-- before the painted structure, not a second hand depiction of experience.

Who, afterall, has ever been convinced by those devices in landscape painting in which little figures putter about and try to relate to us in some contrived or anecdotal way. Merry Peasants, Lost Wanderers, Beleaguered Fishermen, Chinese Scholars, Lovelorn Poets, Enraptured Saints, Malevolent or Benevolent Gods, Honest Farmers, Conquering Royalty, Naked Women. They are always the most poorly made elements in the painting and that physical reality is the first clue to its conceptual weakness. This is the flip side of figure paintings that use inessential landscapes as background. Now, I am begging the logic here; any combination is possible in art, but my strategy allows me to focus by excluding that which is not necessary and reinventing that which is.

Cezanne is perhaps to be cited also. His late landscapes are the most majestic in Western Culture. There are no figures to be found. Cezanne also created stunning portraits of lone figures. There are only flat dead walls behind them. When he did combine figures and landscapes in his series of Bathers, he produced a great and puzzling embarrassment.

How a surface behaves in light. Consider again Sand Pine at JFK, which is on linen, versus my- oak panel paintings. There are functional properties of rough linen which derive from its particularization of light, creating a surface of faceted points in which the eye perceives phenomenon. It is a world of scattered moments. The brain then attempts to translate this data into comprehensive experience. The paintings on wood panel envelop a more complete wave of being, a smoother, more jointed flow of visual phenomenon.

I have days like this, I have days like that. That is the vector as you put it, of what you see. This is the human meaning of surfaces in light. Do the moments of your existence flow together in a continuum (of trust)? Or do they flap apart in units of pure loneliness? I am sure it is always both and I attempt a dialectic with which I try to learn what the hell is going. You will sometimes see combinations of these contrary modes of perception within one work. We may agree on a similar correspondence between the relationships of word sounds, brittle moment opposing flowing span, with the wildcard layer of precise versus evocative meaning superimposed.

My studio is simple. A sheetrock box in a Brooklyn warehouse. I have made it a point of pride that I can work anywhere, anytime. I can overcome the material. Most of my petry is written on the fly, I do not need atmosphere or inspiration to work. I am swimming through a persistent puzzle. I am trying to learn how not to work.

Well, I had intended to" write to the points in play, but I had this week a sudden insight, one that counts: I have begun three new painrings of the human heart. I realize now that many of the. forms that I have been articulating (trees, brnches, roots, cloud forms) derive from similar forms in the human cardiovascular system. I am quite thrown off my mechanism by th!s acknowledgement--one so obvious I suppose, to an outside view. But as you know we are often the last to figure out what we are doing. Anyway, I am likely off point in this writing, reeling a bit. It's work, this work.

The location I am primarily concerned with is, again, the area immediately before the painting. The fact that the work may "take" you out somewhere else is not to be ignored, but, painting cannor be the slave of the literal subjects you keep asking about. Mondrian is a key here. It is of little consequence that his abstracted landscapes derive from Dutch horizontals and verticals, levees and windmills. I mean, who cares when he can organize the visual so powerfully as to change your physical gravity? 0r, take Morandi. with his stupid little bottles. He chose that junk so he could prove he could create a universe through his visual methods alone.

Look, I've made choices of subjects here, I am responsible for and responsive to them. In terms of water, what appeals to me is the precariousness of the space. I think glide of boat correlates with flow of painted line. And there is the sense that the bottom might fall out. The salt or lake smell suggests lurking disaster and companionship of an acute sense of time. So far, I have not needed the direct stimuli of your shark .encounters. But the sites I use do provokea certain clearing of mind; a more focused sense of being, a more concentrated state of seeing in time. Really, I use the idea of moment better than place. Moments are acute, incisive. Places tend toward vagueness I do not like.

Drawing and painting, I never work out of doors. That procedure feels ridiculous to me, It invokes "authenticity." The great Dutch painters of the 17th Century, those we consider closest to nature, recreated in their studios what they called "landscapes of the mind." They acknowledged that art is of the mind's apprehension of nature, and never nature itself. After all, if I wanted an experience of the sea, I could just go to the sea. I do not think art should have a secondary, qualifying, or complementary role. It should be prime in itself. Those Dutch understood that painting refers to a linked yet essentially different realm: the areas of the mind where humans hold and twirl information until it joins the soul, the place where we accept shape, color, sound, meaning.

There are pitfalls of style and idea that I refuse to participate in-- the little categories that artists cling to (abstract, landscape, abstract-landscape, Surrealism, Tachism , etc., -- stupid and dull, leading to the tautology of painting about painting. My argument with art, since you ask, is with this ubiquitous pidgeon-holing and score-keeping. Bach wrote in three main styles; German contrapuntal, French galant and Italian ritornello-concertino, with a multitude of subsets and bastardized combinations. Which is best?

Let me give you more on one location, Plum Island in Massachusetts. You must know this place on the North Shore with its refuge. It has a kind of subtle clarity of structure that suits me. Along with the quiet, persistent energy of pine barrens, it is the only place I have ever seen deer and fox walking on a beach. Plum Island is a small patch of working New England coast with a humming flat marsh behind. Definitely not spectacular like your Point Reyes, so overwhelmingly beautiful to me as to be useless. (Although I do carry a vivid memory of the light in the bay there--an odd dirty silver violet thing.)

The scale of Plum Island is lived in to me, and not just because of its familiarity It is inhabited by signals. Hints at being knowable, then opens onto a greater scale. It confides, but does not force you along. I have epiphanies there most often in winter.

Cezanne looked for similar doors through nature: gardens and woods he grew up in, quarries, a rather common mountain on which he liked to hike. You and I may differ on this, but to me the most spectacular offers very little fuel for art. The scenic is almost anecdotal, controlling. Painting should be lucidly physical, resistant to language and indifferent to its "beauty." The common Norwegian Spruce, alone in its articulation, is staggering enough.

These are very broad question you put here: My argument with the world? Is that all? Evil is the product of limited perception. We are stunted in that we can be aware of only a fraction of the sphere of our existence. This is similar to the fact that we can see only a restricted bandwidth of light rays. We hold onto our small sliver of the sphere too dearly. Consequently, as fearful, damaged agaents, we miscalculate, move about in groping, destructive patterns. Art is the shadow of the glimpse of the greater sphere and it is the balm and the way. How's that? And this? Painting is the device that expands the moment, an invention with which to expand time. I have now two of the heart images in hand, and another with an open pine cone with its clearly related shape.

There came a point in the work I was showing with Stephen Rosenberg and Fran Kaufman where I became dissatisfied with the ground, or place, in which I was locating the symbolic shapes I have developed. This includes the most overtly Gothic work from the mid-nineties. Fine as far as it went, but there was a hierarchy in which the setting, the ether through which these shapes moved, was too secondary. I often think of painting in analogous lieder terms. In this case, my melodies had become to distinct from their accompaniments. The front was too front, the back too back.

Once my decision was made to concentrate more on the ground, the landscape world you have seen developed. Its figures/buildings/symbols grow more clearly out of their placement. Often they are not even required. The first painting you saw, Ocean Phenomena: Marker, was pivotal. The structure near the center is not placed within an existing space. Rather, each feeds upon the other with a more comprehensive unity. This sounds simple, but is difficult to achieve. All the distances, depths and focal points must be precisely calibrated. Then I brought in the breathing trees we have talked about, which obviously flow from the ground in one sense, but also possess an individuality that dynamically balances, as in counterpoint, their often vast settings. They do not seperate out. Their energy flows back in and around-- a dynamic equilibrium (Mondrian). I need these pieces to be ongoing processes, not static pictures, which I hate.

I make no special case for myself. We all base our presence on the frighteningly delicate structures of life, no one can tell us why some molecular structures live and others do not. There is a sense of precariousness and portentous loss in what I make and write, but I think at this point it is just occurring and I do not make so much of a conscious drama of it. It is enoug for me to be involved in Romantic gestures and images like Schumann lieder and Frederich vistas, searching for links with the world around me.

Getting back to Schopenhauer: he describes a sad slipping away of all that we comprehend, within the very act of comprehension. His "better consciousness" induces the loss of any presence it creates for itself. This was the project of Wagner, the ultimate selfish selfless being, the slow fade of Wotan's power, the drained fall of Isolde.

I began playing the piano in my early teens. My father is a good bass player, but I cannot say I paid much attention early on. I was more concerned with the visual arts, drawing and painting on my own. A friend of mine took piano. I saw what that might be and rushed home with a morbid fascination with the Classical and Romantic repertoire. I was an arrogant adolescent wannabe piano virtuoso and it was fun, with tremendous amounts of work involved. Within a year I could pound my way through big pieces by Liszt. (This was rightfully considered odd.) I went on to UMASS Lowell as a performance major where I played by will power and crafty determination (I still do). But I did not have a good early training and that put me in a crisis. My mechanics never became reliable. Ans as in gymnastics, you cannot just go back and get the physicality of it. Believe me, I tried. So in that liberal arts environment, while considering musical composition, I also got involved in the art department. Right away it became apparent that I would not have any technical problems in the visual. My art skills increased without any practice, really forcing me into the decision to concentrate on painting. I remember it being a difficult , calculated choice, gauged on a cold assessment of my abilities. I finished with an art degree, with minors in music performance and history, came to New York to pursue art professionally, met Fran and Stephen, and so on to this point.

I still play piano. Just about everyday. I do not learn pieces to perform them, I learn them to know how they work--as in the diffference between how an actor reads Shakespeare and a writer reads him. Often I am so involved in a piece of music that it floods into what I am working on in the painting studio. In both areas I think compositionally above all else. Living matrices. Unfolding structures. Music reinforces my insistence that a painting should be an active object, that even looking at one is a kind of performance in your mind, and that painting is about time as well as light.

In terms of lieder, my priority is on a musical structure, though I do also spend considerable time with the poetry. The most interesting poets are Muller, Eichendorf, Heine and Morike in Schubert, Schumann and Wolf; Gautier in Berlioz; Ruckert in Mahler. Some of the obscure mystical Christian tracts found in Bush's cantatas are attractive to me as well. Having no tradition of spoken poetry to work with, many of these texts have only become meaningful to me after hearing their musical settings. Their rhythm and color are couched in musical terms. There is a correlation between how words go into music and how images go into painting. The what-is-it about as opposed to the how-is-it-made.
You have to live up to your subjects with your craft.

Luckily, the last time I was in Dusselfdorf to exhibit, Christa Ludwig arrived in Cologne to sing Schubert's Winterreise. This is a work I know intimately and of all performances I have heard, Ludwig's has told me the most. Complete poise. Absolute stillness in motion. The thing about Winterreise is that it mirrors its essence in tis own construction. There is no seperation between subject and object. That profound, fading loss that gradually blankets the dramatic situation is so close to the impossibility of the world, our simultaneously created and lost structures (the music!), our pathetic, limited experience of time (Schopenhauer again).

I program specific music from specific recordings at specific times in the studio. Haydyn moves me toward clarity, Bach toward patience, Berlioz toward broader sweep of expression. I have a library of several thousand recordings and a trunk full of scores. Unlike my poetry, which is currently a plague to me, my music is not a competing interest. It is a useful tool.

I am a person of the working class. I have had some job since I was fourteen. I worked all through school. I have never had a grant or a patron. I have earned what I have in a direct and determined way. I have no complaint about it. I come from immigrant working people. My father's side was driven from southern Poland, my mother's people escaped from Sicily. They were farmers who came to work in the factories of the North East. It was brutal for them. Both of my grandfathers lost limbs in the factories. I should have been the generational layer that moved up into a profession such as law and finance. Disappointment was expressed.

It has often been difficult to communicate what I am about to the people I grew up with. My parents are strong people. They survived the Depression and the War and provided a stability for my brother, my sister, and me. Money was tight. My father was a semiretired watchmaker, who as a working man considered 60-70 work hours per week and complete attention to the family normal. He ran his own business in Boston for decades. Steady. Work was and is for us essential in defining the world. It is completely within my expectation to be writing this, exhausted, having worked a job all week, expecting to paint later on.

Being in New York City is important because of the scale and drama of its ambitions and its terrible physical beauty. Among the downsides of my background was suspicion of intellectual pursuit, resentment of the elitism of the arts (not entirely unfounded here), and pervading bitterness produced by the material struggle. New York simply provides more people who can get past all that, who find better meaning in the struggle. Or, if they crash, do so in a more colorful and interesting way. We learned early on that security is illusory. New York is a reminder of that lesson.

© Thomas Farber and Robert Kuszek, 1999