Strange Weave — Barry Schwabasky
Walter Benjamin’s famous concept of the “aura” has been much debated and, even within the range of his own writings, the word is used in various ways. I have tried to show elsewhere that, for Benjamin, aura was fundamentally the medium for perception itself.1 In any case, the term’s essential definition, I think, is the one given in his “Little History of Photography” of 1931, in which it is described as “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountain on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.”2 Had Benjamin always hewed more closely to this description, we might have been spared some of the confusion his writing would later sow among hasty interpreters.
The first thing to notice is that—not unlike the notion of beauty in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant—Benjamin’s aura is in the first instance a quality of natural things, or, rather, of our relationship with natural things: a mountain range in the distance, a branch stretching out above one’s head. The term’s application to art, to the creations of culture—unmentioned in this passage—is secondary. Second, the aura depends on the seemingly inextricable spatial and temporal—a “strange weave” surely being one that is difficult or impossible to pick apart. And then, just as strange, within this spatiotemporal web, distance and nearness also fuse or merge: the appearance of a distance, however close. In this context, “distance” must refer equally to time and space—something that might be long ago or far away is also here and now, and vice versa. Finally, there is an aspect of synesthesia at work in the aura, for it is an experience in which visual perception—which is clearly what Benjamin means by the word “appearance” in this context—is felt physically: it is something one does not see so much as breathe in, perhaps like a fragrance; it evokes the physical sensation of filling one’s lungs with the air of a certain place and time that is certainly here and now even if it is, like a distant range of mountains, on the horizon’s edge. For how else could one take it into oneself corporeally, internalizing it, than as a breath?
A weave, strange or otherwise, is the interlacing of threads—the warp and the weft—at right angles to each other; it is, that is to say, a grid. At least since the publication in 1979 of Rosalind Krauss’ famous article “Grids,” the topic has been a mainstay of discussions—academic and otherwise—of modern painting. 3 Although the plurality declared in Krauss’ title should serve as a reminder that not all grids are the same, the temptation has always been to speak of “the grid” as if one could assume in advance that in function or effect it would always be one and the same, so as to accord the interpreter a degree of control over the subject of painting. To speak knowingly of the grid is to assert a discursive expertise. But this impression may be deceptive. Whoever engages visually, intellectually, and affectively with painting is inevitably caught up in the strange weave of an apparitional texture or aura that effectively undermines one’s claim to critical distance; once having breathed this aura, the observer is entangled in its atmosphere and, perhaps more importantly, has internalized it, like a fragrance breathed in. Color is the most apt means for achieving such effects, for, as Benjamin once noted, “color absorbs into itself, by imparting color and surrendering itself.” 4 Absorbing and imparting are two further ways of embodying this dialectic of inwardness and distance.
Grids appear to offer the armature for a rationalization of space, so that (it has been claimed) “the modernist grid in its very structure is an opponent of mental and visual disorientation”, but this impression is dubious, at least in painting. 5 In Renaissance art, the grid of a floor seen in perspective helps locate figures in relation to one another thanks to the illusion of a three-dimensional space enclosed by walls. But in modernist painting, grids are congruent with the literal plane of the painting, almost inevitably displaying the arbitrariness of their own framing. In principle, the grid should extend infinitely in all directions, and so the placement of whatever occurs within it can only be specified in a relative and not an absolute sense—in the pictorial grid, which magnifies that of the canvas itself, marks and colors float as if on the infinite waves of the sea, a dynamic and ever-changing multiplicity that is always open to the contingent, the unforeseen, and in which sameness and difference become indistinguishable, as ltalo Calvino’s character Mr. Palomar learned when he tried to observe a wave, finding that “concentrating the attention on one aspect makes it leap into the foreground and occupy the square, just as with certain drawings, you have only to close your eyes and when you open them the perspective has changed.”& 6 It is not surprising that the experience of observing the sea is here compared to the perception of a work of art; Calvino paid at least enough attention to the art of his time to write a beautiful and too-little-known essay on the work of Giulio Paolini. 7 He knew that the push and pull of perception in art, as in nature, could conjure a strange weave—one that is mercurial and could in fact be disorienting.
That ever-changing perspective is what I found when I came to know the art of Lynne Golob Gelfman. Not every painting of hers overtly employs a grid, but her exhibition at Perez Art Museum Miami is rightly titled Grids—in the plural. In some of her early works, made before her move from New York to Miami in 1972, roughly circular forms are arrayed with slight overlaps, leaving four-pointed shapes—similar to what a mathematician would call astroids—revealing the ground, but (since the elements of the ground can equally be read as distinct shapes against a field defined by the overlapping circles) inducing a perceptual flip-flop by which figure and ground continually exchange roles. Thus in circle blue, painted in 1968, the year Golob Gelfman earned her MFA from Columbia University, the interstices between black circles reveal a ground that is white—but here and there, instead, it is blue. These blue areas, dispersed here in bunches, there as isolated units, appear to be arrayed randomly, without pattern. The paint application is blunt, un-atmospheric, and, as it were, definite, and yet the sense of facticity that is thereby communicated is somehow contradicted by the way the blue forms, so similar tonally to their surrounding black (especially in comparison to the contrasting white), seem so intangible and almost unlocalizable that they almost float freely amid the visual field. The painting’s aura derives from the way it insists on its material specificity yet also uses simple optical effects to weave an ineffable atmosphere that, as Benjamin would have understood, undercuts the distinction between nearness and distance.
Jumping ahead by roughly half a century to the paintings Golob Gelfman made most recently, it is apparent both how much changed in her work and how much remained constant. One quickly senses that she pursued a certain formal intuition, attained early on, through various aspects and implications; in other words, the distinct shifts and deviations in her work as it developed reflect a deepening exploration of the implications of a project that long absorbed her interest. Thus in turning from an early painting such as circle blue to any of the recent works comprising the thru series that occupied her since 2013, we see, first of all, that Golob Gelfman’s facture became very different so that the surface of the canvas is no longer completely invested by the paint; now, the acrylic seems to appear primarily as a kind of stain within the weave of the canvas, often left bare to act as one of the “colors” in the painting—in this regard only, one might think of the use of thinned paint by some artists prominent at the time Golob Gelfman was coming of age as an artist, such as Helen Frankenthaler or Kenneth Noland—only occasionally building up with a little more “body” beyond the stretched textile plane. Just as important, the colors are no longer tough and opaque. Instead, they are translucent, faded, almost nebulous, and sometimes unevenly mixed from hues that can overlap and seep into each other or remain separate. At times one might think of an even more rarified echo of the hypnotic patterns of wallpaper glimpsed in backgrounds of interiors painted by Edouard Vuillard—and yet Golob Gelfman’s thru paintings never evoke a space enclosed by walls and a solid roof; there is nothing of the social claustrophobia of Vuillard’s work about them: one would say that air passes freely through them, that sunlight enters them, dappled, as though through a pergola.
The colors in these paintings can look as if they were put down on the canvas and then bleached away. Actually the bleach or solvent turns out to be the canvas itself, which Golob Gelfman did not employ as a neutral repository for paint, but as a sort of filter. Applying paint to the back of the canvas, she allowed it to seep through to the recto. It’s clear that this indirect process allowed a certain degree of contingency in the result, but Golob Gelfman’s intimacy with her materials meant that the element of chance never predominated. The painter’s hand may have been put at a remove—we don’t see the immediate traces of her activity of painting—but she retained control. And the reticence of these washed-out hues has been determined; she used the canvas to open them up, to make them imply much more than what they show.
Another consistency and difference between a work like circle blue and those in the thru series is that in neither case did Golob Gelfman reiterate the implicit rectangularity of the grid’s units. The overlapping discs of the early work create, as I’ve said, a distinction between the “positive” of the pattern and its interstices; even if this distinction then tends to reverse itself, it never disappears. In the recent works, where the grid is subdivided into equilateral triangles, there is no intermediate space between units; instead, each unit is its own space. And it has directionality, too: each triangle reads as pointing left, right, up, or down, adding a new level of complexity, new opportunities for accord and counterpoint, to the concerted rhythms of the chromatic markings.
The title thru might refer, in the first instance, to the painter’s process, by which she set her colors to work through rather than atop the membrane of the canvas. More broadly, I think it has a metaphorical force, referring to the way light and air seems to move through each painting, through the space between it and the viewer, and finally through the viewer—although that conventional term hardly seems appropriate; it’s better to say, simply, through the person who shares the space and time the paintings conjure, who breathes their aura.
Taking into consideration the more than 50 years of Golob Gelfman’s production, including the many groups of paintings I have not had occasion to cite in this essay—and not forgetting those works in which, rather than canvas, she used the resistance of a rigid panel as a surface, affording the more imposing physicality of the lines series of 2007-08, but also the entrancing fluidity of the dune (2010) and cloud/water/sand series (2007-10) that followed—and reiterating my observation that a single, fundamental formal intuition impelled this multifarious oeuvre through all its vicissitudes, it seems to me that Golob Gelfman’s art has always been an art of aura. That is to say, her art is one that has always been fascinated by nature, by the way that, beyond visual appearance, it “throws its shadow on the observer,” as Benjamin put it. And it is through abstraction that her work apprehends the aura of nature as a “strange weave of space and time” and, through its own weave, encompasses the viewer in turn in the aura of painting.
Notes
1 Barry Schwabsky, “Aura as Medium: Walter Benjamin Reconsidered,”Raritan 36, no. 4 (Spring 2017), 92-105.
2 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931-1934, ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005), 518-19.
3 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979), 50-64.
4 Walter Benjamin, “Aphorisms on Imagination and Color,” Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 48.
5 Margarita Tupitsyn, "The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity," Tate Papers 12 (Autumn 2009), hl1ps,//www.tate.org.uk/research/publica1ions/1ate-papers/12/the-grid-as-a checkpoint-of-modernity.
6 ltalo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 7.
7 See ltalo Calvino, introduction to Giulio Paolini.- Idem (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1975).
