Quodlibetica

A Wild State of Mind

Written By: Christina Schmid Constellation 04 9.23.09

Reflections on paintings by Barbara Kreft and Jil Evans

By Christina Schmid
As night falls, a blue flame emerges from the canvas, dancing in the fading light. Composed almost entirely of small squares that range from pale to deep blue, Nightshades glows in the growing darkness with a ghostly, refracted light, as if Barbara Kreft had somehow captured a glint of aurora borealis in oil. Sitting in her studio one April night, the artist explains the curious discipline of dots that, along with the luscious colors, characterizes her most recent body of paintings. The paintings, evocatively titled Dancing Deer or Agate (The Fire Within), were on view last spring at circa gallery in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District. There, impeccably lit and hung on clean white walls, the paintings became creatures of an entirely different sort, glorious, professional, but less alive than that night in the studio. Lost was the tangible edge of the mysterious, the movement of reflected light on glazed oil, that made Nightshades come alive at nightfall.

Liminal times, spaces, and experiences have long provoked fascination and anxiety. Artist Jan Fabre has described dawn and dusk as the blue hour, a poetic name for the liminal, the threshold, precious precisely because of its ephemeral nature. In between, boundaries that at all other times seem absolute and beyond question, begin to shiftProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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nd blur, raising the specter of an uncertainty so profound that we happily return to the unequivocal darkness of night, the brightness of day. We take shelter from the uncanny disturbance of the liminal in fragile certainties, where we do our best to ignore the dangerous edge of certainty where wilderness begins. Or, if such a return has become impossible, we linger, displaced and brimming with questions that we may have no words for, in that liminal space/time, that interstitial state of mind when paintings seem to come alive.

Rather than think of wilderness in its conventional opposition to civilization, I propose considering “wilderness” as a space in between, as an elusive and ephemeral interstice. This conception of wilderness steers clear of the attraction to “the wild” that artists – from the “wild beasts” of Fauvism in early 20th-century France to the 21st-century Austrian Jungen Wilden – have embraced. Instead, I am curious about exploring wilderness as a particular state of mind, a subtle irreverence, a mode of perception that refuses to abide by the infamously common-sensical. The abstract paintings of Barbara Kreft and Jil Evans, two Minneapolis-based painters, inspired these reflections.

Both artists have, over the last few years, sought out wild places—“wild” in the sense of being geographically remote, historically turbulent, and at present politically balanced. In 2006, Jil Evans visited the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, following in the more than century-old footsteps of Charles Darwin, whose sojourn on the islands contributed to his groundbreaking treatise On the Origin of Species. In May 2009, Evans showed the resulting work, a series of paintings and studies entitled Galapagos Cactus Wars, at form + content gallery in Minneapolis. In 2008, Barbara Kreft traveled into even more isolated terrain when spending two weeks on Easter Island, before showing new work at circa gallery last spring.

Upon first learning about these travels, they simply struck me as a compelling coincidence; but when conversations and studio visits with both artists revealed not only a shared predilection for large oil-on-canvas paintings, a fascination with color and light, and a curiosity about how we structure our perception of the world, the coincidences gradually crystallized into the idea of wilderness as a state of mind, a point of view, a mode of perception.

Wilderness, in its conventional incarnation, stands for nature red in tooth and claw, a violent, unruly, dangerous sort of place. The title of Evans’ show, Galapagos Cactus Wars, alluded to this violence, the life-or-death struggle that Darwin’s laconic phrase, “the survival of the fittest,” entails. But it would be a mistake to assume that this fight for evolutionary advantage lacks any rules: predator or prey, parasite or host—the relationships are no less precisely calibrated for lacking a codex of man-made law. The challenge lies in recognizing the intricate patterns and inter-relationships, symbioses and mutual dependencies. Still, the wild can hardly be called an unpredictable place: if you fail to adapt, you die.

Ironically, this symbol-laden space outside the safety and shelter of the village has traditionally served a civilizing mission, especially in the early days of sedentary civilization: Young people were routinely expected to face the dangers of the lawless outside to prove their survival skills before they were admitted back into the village community, who only now embraced them as mature members. This dangerous initiation presented them with a choice: either to return to the safety of community and submit to the law of men, or to stay away. (The basic plotline of a shelter left behind, a wilderness braced in order to survive, followed by an enlightened return, held particular resonance in the frontier mythology of 18th-century European-America: Frederick Jackson Turner attributed the unique character of the young nation to European “germs” facing the New World “savagery” before uniting the best of both worlds in the American, the ultimate self-made man. And even today, a soon-to-be blockbuster movie, Where the Wild Things Are, offers scant deviation from this story and the choice between staying in the wild and returning home.)

The civilizing propensities of the wild have been compared, more than once, to the benefits of the aesthetic contemplation of fine art. Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Iris Murdoch, from Simone Weil to Elaine Scarry, have exhorted the beauty of both art and nature, and its impact on ego-obsessed onlookers ad nauseam: the experience of sheer beauty, they tell us, has the power to de-center our habitual tendencies and, if only momentarily, suspend the urge to privilege human experience above all other species’. The results of this exercise in de-centering may range from moral and imaginative improvement to increased empathy, from an ecological rather than individualistic imagination to a more just world. Whether we venture into the wild or fall into art, the ultimate purpose still lies in making a choice: to abandon the wilderness and to return as a better, wiser person.

But there are those who refuse to make that choice.

In Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, Hans Peter Duerr describes the figure of the hagazussa as the product of an initiation gone awry. She perches on the fence, on the fortified margin of the civilized mind, between village and wilderness, refusing to choose either and laughing in the face of those whose rules she disrupts and whose authority she undermines.

Not only the refusal to choose made the hagazussa so demonic: the real threat lay in the suggestion that the choice between village and wilderness was not all there was. The kind of wild she insinuated served no ulterior purpose, unless the undermining of putative certainties can be considered a purpose, long before the days of deconstructivism. Instead, what she threatened was a radical re-ordering of the world: a refusal to see the world in prefabricated categories and ready-made structures, an insistence on dwelling in possibility, an embrace of marginality as marvelous.

Thus the hagazussa shares with art both the preoccupation with perception and the emphatic lack of purpose: by drawing attention to how we break up the world into manageable pieces to grasp and grapple with, she turns perception itself into the ‘object’ of inquiry. She invites us to look askew at those tokens of common sense that divide the world into village and wilderness, with no room to spare, the fence a mere tool to keep the beasts at bay. In this new, liminal wild, meaning does not progress straightforwardly, and certainties are suspended. Nothing is quite what it seems, once we join the hagazussa on the fence.

Barbara Kreft’s paintings run the risk of being mistaken for purely decorative work. But mistaking the small dots or squares for pure ornamentation misses their point altogether: freehanded with uncanny precision, these simplest units of visual perception allow the artist’s pictorial language to escape, as Kreft puts it, from representation and expression. The repetition involved in her creations is not merely mechanical but functions as a quotidian ritual. Similarly, the suggested symmetries of the paintings are deceptive, giving way to unexpected depths, where swarms of dots float whimsically above rich layers of color, reminiscent of the sheen of semi-precious stone, in turn superimposed on rhomboid structures gleaned from Turkish prayer rugs – as in Agate (The Fire Within).

The paintings resemble labyrinthine mosaics that glow with what Kreft calls a veiled luminosity. Patterns align and shift kaleidoscopically, their elusive geometry always seemingly ephemeral, just out of reach. Byzantine mosaics and Mid-eastern prayer rugs meet shadows cast by plants; airport floor plans give way to Midwestern agricultural landscapes photographed from high altitudes; impressions from traveling to India, where women adorn their foreheads with bindis, small dots or jewelry, surface in the paintings, along with the pale relief of Braille; Moorish architecture and Baroque ornamentation blend into crystalline structures and the growth habits of roots; fractals and fairy tales (as in Beauty and Beast), dragons, deer, insects, and lotuses join this unlikely, intimate pas-de-deux between painter and canvas. The artist’s agency to impose order gives way to the painting’s perceived demands for structure and unity. The paintings seem to take on an agency of their own and allow the artist to bask in a strange interconnectedness: each painting contains a kind of cosmology, an order of things that slowly and gradually reveals an underlying pattern.

Visually, the small luminous shapes on Kreft’s canvases share a family resemblance with glass beads, which bring to mind another German creation: Hermann Hesse’s novel Das Glasperlenspiel, named for the impossibly complicated glass bead game, that takes its master, the magister ludi Josef Knecht, most of his life to learn. Kreft’s perennially dissatisfied curiosity to uncover structural and visual relationships is related, too, to the elusive purpose of the game. Although never fully explained by Hesse, the game’s progress depends on spinning an ever-expanding web of synchronicities and cross-cultural harmonies, to uncover and relate patterns and structures from chess to I-Ching, music to mathematics. Mystical and philosophical, the glass bead game is a study of perception, an exercise in re-ordering how we perceive the world.

Ironically, in The Glass Bead Game, this web of interconnections is spun in exile from the world. Josef K.’s masterful game takes place in a secluded province called Castalia, dedicated solely to intellectual pursuits. When Knecht leaves Castalia, eager to fulfill his new ambition to make a difference in the real world, Hesse has him die quickly. The master intellectual misjudges his physical abilities and drowns in a mountain lake.

Hesse began the novel in 1931, the heyday of Europe’s historical avant-garde: no longer was art supposed to exist in an autonomous, separate sphere. Instead, art and life were supposed to be re-united and fully integrated. If Castalia and the glass bead game represent the domain and practice of art, the novel’s abrupt end after Knecht’s death suggests that Hesse did not allow for a compromise between the two, let alone a space in between the Castalian life of the mind and the unfettered worldliness outside. As if anticipating Peter Buerger’s famous (albeit disputed) diagnosis of the failure of the avant-garde to achieve its goal, Hesse does not even allow for a successful transition from a life devoted to art in a self-imposed exile to a more worldly existence.

But does art need exile to truly thrive? Kreft sees her desire to find interconnecting patterns and create visual symmetries as in part driven by what she experiences as a painful state of exile that human beings, as a species, have imposed on themselves: our evolutionary success has alienated and isolated us from the intricate balance that used to make up the wild of old; a romantic stance, perhaps, but not entirely wrong when considered in light of the destructive consequences of our progress for innumerable other species. But while art equals exile in The Glass Bead Game, in Kreft’s practice art becomes the bridge, the transversal that cuts across seemingly incompatible lines of thought and modes of perception.

This preoccupation with the seemingly incompatible also marks Jil Evans’ Galapagos Cactus Wars. She describes her process as a struggle to bring the paintings to the verge, to a moment between chaos and resolution, order and anarchy. The artist both wields control and yields to the internal armature—Evans’ evocative term for the structuring framework—of the painting. The discipline of practice meets the unpredictability of paint with its ever-changing chemistry, as if the paintings themselves were creatures, subject to senescence and all the mutations and metamorphoses of evolution.

Touch seems fraught with danger in these paintings, whose flesh-colored shapes interact in a compelling illusion of motion. Breathless intensity alternates with momentary reprieves. Humanoid elements—a glimpse of barely articulated facial features, a soldier’s helmeted head—blend into humorous animal parts—a duck head here, a disappearing rabbit there—before becoming viscerally botanical.  A distant blue contrasts sharply with bold brush strokes up-close. Depth competes with surface, while vibrant colors woo the senses. Playfulness gives way to violent struggle, which in turn cedes to tentative acts of intimacy. Sweeping gestures caught in an elusive, raging present test the divide between figuration and abstraction.

The cacti endemic to the islands epitomize, symbolically and literally, the war for survival in such an inhospitable environment: on these wind-whipped, drought-ridden islands, the cacti’s ability to store water enables them to survive. Their spiny armature protects them. Yet what first and foremost attracted her to them, says Evans, were their oddly anthropomorphic shapes, especially those of the Candelabra Cactus (Jasminocereus Thouarsii). In her paintings, the cacti’s tube-shaped pads become the limbs of creatures incompletely formed, emerging from the canvas in states ranging from ecstasy to agony. Evolutionary struggle becomes a whirling dance here, a dance of existence, a danse macabre.

Where then is the wilderness in these bodies of work? It lurks in the spaces between Barbara Kreft’s intricate associations, where perceptions are irreverently re-ordered. It is constantly forged by an adventurous imagination not oblivious to risk but unrestrained by timidity. It thrives in the liminal, plays across Jil Evans’ taut canvases that offer us glimpses of rare moments right on the verge. It claims the fence between the here and there, not afraid to encounter contradictions or to dance a few steps. Wilderness is a state of mind.

Today, when too often wilderness has become synonymous with “managed wilderness,” when “nature” has morphed into one more tourist attraction, romanticized, marketed, and sold, when our clichés of the wild inspire some to seek out expensive adventure tours to feel raw survival instincts, is there still room for wilderness as civilization’s Other? Or is it time to re-think the wild as that un-definable space in between that shirks the uncomplicated convenience of contraries?

I would like to thank both Barbara Kreft and Jil Evans for opening their studios to me, for patiently listening to my questions and generously answering them all. I am grateful, too, for Collier White’s carefully considered feedback to this essay.

References

Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime. Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. Translated by Felicitas Goodman. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Emily Dickinson. “I dwell in possibility” (#657)

Elaine Scarry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Iris Murdoch. The Sovereignty of Good. London, New York: Routledge, 2001.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

Peter Buerger. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Alfred Lord Tennyson. “In memoriam A.H.H.” Completed in 1849.

Frederick Jackson Turner. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962.

Images

1)    Barbara Kreft, Nightshades. Oil on canvas. 60 x 55.
2)    Barbara Kreft, Nightshades, detail.
3)    Jil Evans, Galapagos Cactus Wars 16. Oil on canvas. 72 x 60.
4)    Barbara Kreft. Agate (the Fire Within). Oil on canvas. 68 x 48.
5)    Jil Evans. Galapagos Cactus Wars 18. Oil on canvas. 72 x 60.
6)    Jil Evans. Galapagos Cactus Wars 17. Oil on canvas. 80 x 60.
7)    Barbara Kreft. Dancing Deer. Oil on canvas. 64 x 59.
8)    Barbara Kreft. Dancing Deer. Detail.
9)    Jil Evans.  Galapagos Cactus Wars 1. Oil on canvas. 30 x 24.
10)    Jil Evans. Galapagos Cactus Wars 8. Oil on canvas. 30 x 24.
11)    Barbara Kreft. Floralis. Oil on canvas. 64 x 59.