IMMEDIACY REDIVIVUS: MICHAEL DAVID’S PAINTINGS by Donald Kuspit

 

December 6, 2002

 

The best abstract painting seems “nothing short of miraculous,” the French poet and critic Yves Bonnefoy remarks, for it satisfies “the desire for the immediate”(1)—for pure sensation, uncorrupted by consciousness of meaning. Bonnefoy thinks that the experience of immediacy—of pure presence, directly given, with no need for language to shape it into comprehension (and mute its impact)--is an illusion. It is a private myth—magical thinking--that has been given social credibility, ironically by the need to escape social pressure. The “conventional readings of the world” are not so much defeated as complicated by the mirage of immediacy, he argues. They need a codicil explaining why the belief in immediacy must be abandoned, however reluctantly. Bonnefoy doesn’t want to wait for the feeling of immediacy to fade away, as it will inevitably do because it is inherently transient, but discredits it as a subjective indulgence. Looking at it from the disillusioning point of view of everyday reality, he implies that we must distrust the spontaneity with which it appears, thus undermining it before we can savor it, and reap its emotional benefits. He has no interest in the way it enriches the feeling for life, reminding us that there is life beyond everyday life. Bonnefoy never imagines that the experience of immediacy cannot be conventionalized—that it is not meant to be “read,” and in fact cannot be read in worldly terms. He seems to think that we should have intellectual guilt every time we experience an abstract painting as sheer immediacy—eternally present, as it were, and as such suspended beyond time. We should “qualify” this “mystical” experience—peculiarly “metaphysical” for all its physicality—by analyzing it away, that is, use our minds to purge it as a lie and hallucination. 

Michael David’s abstract paintings renew immediacy, indeed, reconstitute, strengthen, and even apotheosize it. They raise it to a feverishly fresh intensity with their remarkable touch, indicating they are among the very best painterly abstractions made. To me they make it transparently clear that immediacy may be an illusion to the intellect but it is not one for the senses—for touch and sight, mingled together inextricably in ecstatic perception. For them, painterly immediacy is ultimate reality: pure sensuous intensity transcendent of ordinary, habitual understanding of the world, which is mediated by socially sanctioned language and banal meanings that force sense experience into their procrustean bed. 

David may be the most innovative master of immediate surface since the Abstract Expressionists. He has acknowledged his debt to Abstract Expressionism, but he has transformed it. Where the Abstract Expressionist paintings of the forties and fifties seem like modern cave paintings, as their crude, unfocused, often meandering, turbulent painterliness suggests, and as such to reinstate prehistory, David seems to turn the cave into a temple, as his more considered, concentrated, indeed, dense, contemplative painterliness indicates, so that his paintings have the aura of post history. The sublime is gained with no loss of force—no sacrifice of painterly dynamics. Indeed, there is a gain in the sense of bodiliness: each of his works has a certain “body”—density of presence—so that it seems to embody the sublime, not simply evoke it. His paintings make the abstract sublime vividly concrete, as though it could be grasped rather than existed as some numinous beyond. 

The challenge of gestural abstract painting is to break through the barrier of reflection—we put it up to keep ourselves at a certain mental distance from the world, so that our immediate impressions of it do not overwhelm us, and to sort them out and organize them into coherent and practical patterns—by developing a dramatic immediacy of surface. When the breakthrough occurs, as in David’s abstractions, it restores the lability of sensuous appetite natural to the human body, but that the human mind has repressed for the sake of worldly functioning. David’s powerful, deeply felt, boldly visceral gesturalism embodies this appetite in the act of arousing it: his painterly immediacy has prereflective sensuous appeal, which is why it seems preternaturally fresh--uniquely vital, however at times, morbid. The blackness of Refuge (all works 2000) certainly seems morbid, however many traces of bright color--mostly orange, but also bits of red and yellow, as though the orange was disintegrating into its components—erratically break through the dark surface, which seems generally disintegrated. David tells me that he sometimes uses as many as ten “rounds” of paint—the word is telling, suggesting that for him painting is a kind of boxing, that is, in Harold Rosenberg’s famous words, the canvas has become an arena of self-confrontation, indicating the amount of combative energy he puts into it—to build up his surface. For all its solidity, it has a fragile, fragmented look, in part because of the beading of the wax emulsion with which he paints. But, if Rosenberg is right, it also tells us something about David’s sense of self. Building up that looks like tearing down—construction that looks like destruction—is in fact the emotional as well as physical substance of David’s painting. Plane of canvas is placed upon plane of canvas, creating a three-tiered pyramidal architecture that has a family resemblance to an Aztec temple—but an abandoned and ruined one, as its stripped and above all blackened appearance suggests. Nonetheless—and this is the essential paradox of David’s paintings—this fundamental, melancholy structure is kept alive by the immediacy and vigor of the paint that at the same time signals the decay and death which mark it.

 

The tension between the physical immediacy of the paint and its geometrical underpinning—between gesture and structure, interpenetrating, so that structure seems less fixed, as though in insecure process, and texture more fixed, as though absolutized in amber—keeps the work dialectically alive. And embedded in this immediacy, like an ironical beacon, is a black cross, its arms lengthened until they blur into the painterly ground. It arises like an epiphany from the mire of agitated blackness—a dark epiphany, as it were, confirming the darkness of the paint. The projection of the geometry—the painting is a relief, even as the relief is a pure painting--thrusts the flat cross forward, so that it confronts us, but it remains an abstract vision—our ambiguous vision. David’s painting is a kind of negative icon, composed of crushed gestures. I cannot help thinking of George Steiner’s remark that “our aesthetic forms explore the void, the blank freedom which come of the retraction (Deus absconditus) of the messianic and divine.”(2) He argues that where art, in its “kinship...with the calling on mystery in the matter of the world and of man”—the mystery in matter itself, one might add—once “enact[ed] the epiphany of a real presence,” it now reveals the “encounter with a ‘real absence’.” Steiner thinks that this is what we see in Malevich and Ad Reinhardt. We must add David to the list of these great abstractionists, for he has shown us that real [material] presence can also be real [spiritual] absence. Immediacy can be made to serve the purposes of absence and loss as well as presence and givenness.