Mark Tansey - Rifts and Resonances

A painted picture is a vehicle. You can sit in your driveway and take it apart or you can get in it and go somewhere. (Mark Tansey)

Mark Tansey, Pleasure of the Text, 1986

One would have to be like a taxi, a waiting line, a line of flight, a bottleneck, a traffic jam, green and red lights, slight paranoia, difficult relations with the police. Being an abstract and broken line, a zigzag, that slips 'between'. (Deleuze/Parnet, Dialogues)

 Mark Tansey, Doubting Thomas, c. 1985

Mark Tansey was born in San Jose, California in 1949. His parents were both art historians, so he had an early introduction to art. These early childhood experiences had a profound effect on Tansey's painting style from the inception of his career as an artist. From the time he was a young child, Mark Tansey knew that he wanted to continue the family tradition and pursue a future in the art industry. He attended Saturday art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute in his early teen years and made a habit of regularly visiting art museums in the area. Beginning in 1969, Tansey spent three years studying at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. 

Mark Tansey, The Innocent Eye Test, 1981

After graduating, Tansey worked as an assistant at the San Jose State University Gallery. In 1974, Tansey enrolled in the graduate program at Hunter College in New York City. He spent four years studying there. While attending Hunter College, he made a scale reproduction of part of his textbook, The Structure of Art, in acrylic on paper. He also painted a series of ten by ten inch pieces that analyzed methods of representation and illusion through differences in perspective. He filled notebooks with human gestures and made collages of magazine clippings and book pages. These he organized into files centering on specific themes and has covered over 125 themes thus far. When looking for inspiration for new paintings, he references these notebooks and works from them.

Mark Tansey, Take One, 1982

Tansey acquired a two story studio in downtown New York City and works there from late afternoon throughout the night almost every day. The first floor of his studio is reserved for final paintings only, while the second floor is where he creates all of the preparatory sketches and variations that inspire his completed works. He derives his inspiration from photographic reproductions and magazine clippings, and works in stages of small sketches and drawings until he is prepared for the final painting.

Mark Tansey, Judgement of Paris, 1982

Many of Tansey's paintings are monochromatic and seem old-fashioned. Tansey lays down a layer of monochrome pigment on canvas that can be altered easily only before it dries. This leaves him only about a six hour window in which to complete his alterations. As such, he works in a style similar to fresco painters, painting in segments that he can finish in this short time frame. Tansey creates his images by pulling away and wiping pigment, so that various textures and tones are produced on the canvas. He adds pigment to darken certain areas; and when he wipes away pigment, the white of the canvas shows through the thin layer of paint to lighten the area. 

Mark Tansey, Achilles and the tortoise, 1986

Mark Tansey - On rift and resonance: "In my earlier work I was trying to learn how to bring meaning to the image, and was having difficulty activating the figure and image as a whole. Magritte's eight methods of bringing about the crisis of the object isolation, modification, hybridization, scale change, accidental encounters, double image puns, paradox, double viewpoints in one came as a revelation. It made it apparent to me that crises and conflicts were results of oppositions and contradictions and these were what was necessary to activate or motivate a picture. Magritte's work also led me to wonder if crisis could take place on other levels of content, more quietly, internally, more plausibly." (Arthur C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions)

 

Mark Tansey, Action Painting II, 1984

Mark Tansey - On the value of illustration: "If in paintings there have been problems in linking image and idea, one key may be found buried deep in the practice of illustration. Illustration, having been banished from high art as commercial and slavish to an assigned message, nevertheless is where art begins. The only significant difference that I can find at this point between illustration and art is that the former traditionally involves doing someone else's idea rather than one's own." (Arthur C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions)

Mark Tansey, Westface, 2004

Upon closer examination, hidden imagery appears in unexpected places. The snowball in Snowman doubles as Karl Marx's head, turned on its side; Nietzsche's portrait emerges from the mountainside in West Face (above); an anamorphic portrait of James Joyce is contained within the wake of a speeding boat in Wake. In such paintings, figures and landscape are interchangeable as images merge and recede, only to reappear again. 

 Mark Tansey, EC 101, 2009

In EC 101 Tansey traces the lineage of economic theory by inscribing human faces into a creviced mountain, a structural device that recalls his earlier use of landscape to blur the traditional distinction between figure and ground. At the top of the mountain are classical economists such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill while the heterodox economists such as Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and John Maynard Keynes are at the base. In a parallel narrative, Dante and Virgil stand in the lower half of this painting, which is a reversed image of the mountain.

Mark Tansey, Duet, 2004

Tansey has painted his most recent works in ultramarine, a color that combines the depth and complexities of black with the lightness and transparency of blue and which imparts the feel of now-obsolescent blueprint.  Rendered in a single hue, his paintings have a precise photographic quality that is reminiscent of scientific illustration, achieved by applying gesso then washing, brushing and scraping paint into it.

 Mark Tansey, Forward Retreat, 1986

In his painting Forward Retreat (above), Tansey uses red tones that elicit images of blood and danger. It lends a certain urgency to the battle that is not actually depicted in the painting itself. In fact, the scene's composition, which shows the soldiers reflected in a shallow pool, has an air of mild serenity. This juxtaposition of danger and battle with the contradictory serenity of still water heightens the meaning of the red painting. 

Mark Tansey, The Key, 1984

Archangel Michael in the upper left reminded me at Inferno, VII Canto:


Not causeless is this journey to the abyss;
Thus is it willed on high, where Michael wrought
Vengeance upon the proud adultery."

Mark Tansey, Derrida Queries de Man, 1990

 

"What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?" "The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Mark Tansey, Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, 1981 

“La fonction de l'art n'est jamais d'illustrer une vérité, ou même une interrogation. Elles est de mettre au monde des interrogations, qui ne se connaissent pas encore elles-mêmes.” (Alain Robbe-Grillet)

 Mark Tansey, Still Life 

"Life is a matter of description and re-description and it has no meaning, apart from the metaphor you happen to be using at any given time." (Richard Rorty)

 Mark Tansey, A Short History of Modernist Painting, 1982 

"Metaphoric redescription (Richard Rorty's term) is a function that is becoming increasingly interesting in light of the inadequacies of the term "representation," in that pictures don't actually represent anything." (Mark Tansey) 

Mark Tansey, Purity Test, 1982

Indians on houseback gaze down at Robert Smithson's earth sculpture Spiral Jetty.  Smithson had sought to create a pure image. The Indians, unware of the spiral's function as a work of art, attempt to decipher it as a symbol.

Tansey has a process for generating ideas for his paintings. Part of this process involves his “wheels”. The wheel consists of three concentric circles on a center pivot. Each circle is labeled with words in such a way that one can spin the wheels and come up with phrases formed from the combination of the three circles’ words. The most lavish wheel, a large wooden table with a lazy susan-like top, has 180 entries on each of is three rings. From the inside out the words are nouns, participles, and objects, which lead us to phrases such as: “Borgesian cartographers redeploying jouissance” or “stock characters suspending disbelief in unshakable foundations”. The wooden table wheel allows for over 5 million possible phrases. Tansey then takes the created phrases and categorizes them as “motifs”, “oppositions”, “problems”, etc. on a grid creating juxtapositions and further combinations to use as ideas for new or ongoing works.

 Mark Tansey, Triumph of the New York School, 1984

The right side features such NY art figures as Greenberg, Pollack, Rothko, etc., in army uniforms around army vehicles. On the left side, Andre Breton’s back is turned to us (he is signing the treaty of surrender), Picasso is the one in the fur coat, while Duchamp stands rather aloofly, hands in pockets.

Mark Tansey, Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1987

In Mount Sainte-Victoire the soldiers of poststructuralism and deconstruction - Jean Baudrillard, Barthes, and Derrida - disrobe in the shadow of Cézanne's Mount Sainte-Victoire. Shedding their uniforms, they are transformed in their reflections into women. The men on the shore are flanked by the arching trees of Cézanne's 1906 Bathers.

 

Mark Tansey, Triumph Over Mastery

 Mark Tansey, Discarding the frame

Charles Sheeler

In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers—it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression. (Charles Sheeler) 

Charles Sheeler, Steam Turbine, 1939

Charles Sheeler, the son of a steamer-line executive, was born in Philadelphia in 1883. His education included instruction in industrial drawing and the applied arts at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (1900–1903), followed by a traditional training in drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903–6). He visited Europe with his fellow students in 1904–5, and traveled abroad again in 1908–9 with his parents and his friend Morton Schamberg, another young artist. During this second trip, he developed a particular interest in the Italian painters of the late Middle Ages, particularly Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca, and their simple, strong massing of forms. In 1909, he visited the Paris home of Michael and Sarah Stein, early patrons of Picasso and Braque; this experience inspired him to work in a Cubist style for several years.

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Clapboards, 1936

In 1910, Sheeler and Schamberg rented an eighteenth-century stone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; around this time, Sheeler taught himself photography. He worked as a freelance photographer, documenting local buildings for architects; a few years later, he began to photograph the interior of his own house. He shaped its rough-hewn spaces with light and shadow, drawing out their underlying compositions of solids and spaces. He also photographed and drew the local vernacular architecture, particularly barns, whose straightforward design he admired.

Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1940

 

Throughout the 1910s, Sheeler formed lasting professional relationships with several important figures in the New York art world, including Alfred Stieglitz. He supplemented his income by photographing works of art for collectors and galleries. He participated in important group shows, including the International Exhibition of Modern Art (commonly known as the Armory Show, 1913). During this decade, he also began using his own photographs as sources for paintings.

Charles Sheeler, Catastrophe No. 2, 1944

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with the photographer Paul Strand on the short film Manhatta, a short expressive film about New York City based on portions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The six-minute film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River. It has been described as the first avant-garde film made in America. Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York's photographic nature. Manhatta, was filmed to emphasize the dramatic viewpoints and abstract compositions of a rapidly changing cityscape. Sheeler would investigate similar motifs in his photography, painting, and graphic art of the 1920s, turning his eye to the monoliths of New York's modern architecture and the canyons of its avenues. The sharpness and clarity of his vision associated him with the group of artists working in a style termed Precisionist.

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Skyscrapers, 1922 

 

 

Despite the lines from Whitman's poems, Manhatta is not really Whitmanesque in feeling, because it either omits the people of New York or sees them as molecules in a crowd, abstract parts of "one-million-footed Manhattan, unpent". Strand and Sheeler's Manhattan is a hard, clear, abstract place: not always as grim in its alienation as Strand's 1915 photo of businessmen (below) trailing long black chains of morning shadows as they scurry to work past the blank, tomblike windows of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Building, but depopulated enough to act as a series of signs only for itself. 

Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915

In late 1927 and early 1928, Sheeler spent six weeks documenting the Ford Motor Company's automobile plant in River Rouge, Michigan, as part of the promotional campaign for the release of the Model A Ford. Sheeler's thirty-two photographs of the Ford plant depict its acres of gleaming, massive machinery, rather than the human process of labor. They celebrate America's ideals of power and productivity, although there is also a strangely forbidding atmosphere to the unpopulated scenes. 

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927

 

The painting that most succinctly expressed Sheeler's feelings about big industry is American Landscape (below). It holds no nature at all, except for the sky and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and embalmed serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark arms of the loading machinery to the right. 

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

In 1927, Sheeler and his wife Katharine had moved to South Salem, New York, a small town located approximately fifty miles north of Manhattan. While living there, Sheeler expanded his collection of early American furniture and decorative arts. He prized these items for their simplicity, noting, "No embellishment meets the eye. Beauty of line and proportion through excellence of craftsmanship make the absence of ornament in no way an omission." Many of these possessions appeared in Sheeler's photographs and paintings of the 1930s, in complex arrangements of pattern and form. These domestic interiors recall a vanished preindustrial past, while emphasizing the artistic status of local handicrafts. 

 

 

Charles Sheeler, American Interior, 1934

From 1926 through 1931, Sheeler worked as a freelance photographer, shooting celebrity portraits and fashion photography for Vogue and Vanity Fair. As Sheeler attained broader recognition for his precise yet evocative interpretations of utilitarian forms, he continued to attract prestigious commissions. In 1939–40, he traveled across the country on assignment for Fortune magazine, photographing locations for a series of paintings on the theme of "Power." The six finished paintings depicted icons of American industry such as airplanes, locomotives, power plants, and dams. Meanwhile, Sheeler was also the subject of a biography written by the historian and critic Constance Rourke (1938) and a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1939). 

 

 

Charles Sheeler, Suspended Power, 1939

In 1939, Sheeler married his second wife, Musya Sokolova (he had been widowed by Katharine's death in 1933); the couple resided in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing a wide range of works from the collection, including Assyrian reliefs, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, European painting, and Chinese objects. 

 

 

Charles Sheeler, On a Shaker's Theme, 1956

As he entered the 1950s, Sheeler developed a distinctive late style. He still depicted urban architecture and industrial facilities, but he reduced objects to flat planes, rather than volumes, and pared away more detail than ever before. In works such as Golden Gate (below), he also devised complex, multiple-viewpoint compositions by overlapping two or more photographic negatives of the same subject and then transferring the resulting, synthesized image to canvas. 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Golden Gate, 1955

In these later years, Sheeler's art was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions. After he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1959, Sheeler was no longer able to make art; his life was ended by another stroke in 1965. He left behind a body of work that explored the balance between abstraction and representation, photography and painting, an increasingly mechanized present and a more homespun past.

 

 

Charles Sheeler, Rolling-Power, 1939

Wheels and disk driver of a Model J3A Hudson Thoroughbred locomotive (below), one of the ten streamlined versions of the engine designed to pull the legendary Twentieth Century Limited. The train was considered the most beautiful and modern steam locomotive for passenger travel in America. 

 

Model J3A Hudson Thoroughbred Locomotive

 

 Charles Sheeler, Power, 1940

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Water, 1945

  Water depicts one of the power generators built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, when hydroelectric power was being distributed throughout the Tennessee River region of the United States.

 

 

Charles Sheeler, River Rouge Plant, 1932

 

 Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931

 

 Charles Sheeler, Amoskeag Canal, 1948

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, The Artist Looks at Nature, 1943

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, View of New York, 1931

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Cactus, 1931

 

 Charles Sheeler, Americana, 1931

 

New York

Velocity of Money
by Allen Ginsberg (1986)


I’m delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through the windows of Lower East Side
Delighted by skyscrapers rising the old grungy apartments falling on 84th Street
Delighted by inflation that drives me out on the street
After all what good’s the family farm, why eat turkey by thousands every Thanksgiving?
Why not have Star Wars? Why have the same old America?!?
George Washington wasn’t good enough! Tom Paine pain in the neck,
Whitman what a jerk!
I’m delighted by double digit interest rates in the Capitalist world
I always was a communist, now we’ll win
an usury makes the walls thinner, books thicker & dumber
Usury makes my poetry more valuable
my manuscripts worth their weight in useless gold -
Now everybody’s atheist like me, nothing’s sacred
buy and sell your grandmother, eat up old age homes,
Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale on Times Square -
You can shoot heroin, I can sniff cocaine,
macho men can fite on the Nicaraguan border and get paid with paper!
The velocity’s what counts as the National Debt gets higher
Everybody running after the rising dollar
Crowds of joggers down broadway past City Hall on the way to the Fed
Nobody reads Dostoyevsky books so they’ll have to give a passing ear
to my fragmented ravings in between President’s speeches
Nothing’s happening but the collapse of the Economy
so I can go back to sleep till the landlord wins his eviction suit in court. 

Diego Rivera, Frozen Assets, 1931

 Charles Sheeler, View of New York, 1931

Hubert Sattler, New York, 1854

A bulger of a place it is. The number of the ships beat me all hollow, and looked for all the world like a big clearing in the West, with the dead trees all standing. (Davy Crockett, 1835)

 Alfred Stieglitz, Winter - Fifth Avenue, Camera Work XII, 1905

Edward Steichen, Flatiron Building ,1904

 Louis Eilshemius, New York Roof Tops, 1908

 William Louis Sonntag, The Bowery at Night, c. 1895

 John Sloan, Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street, 1928

 Charles L. Goeller, Third Avenue, 1934

 Reginald Marsh, Why Not Use the “L”?, 1930

 Philip Evergood, Nude By The El, 1933

New York is a sucked orange. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

 Leon Kroll, Summer, 1931

 Philip Pearlstein, Two Models in a Window with Cast Iron Toys, 1987

 Carl Gustaf Nelson, Central Park, 1934

Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestion of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go. So I went. (Jack Kerouac)

 

Agnes Tait, Skating in Central Park, 1934 

 

New York Lego

via niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/

 Weegee, The Rich Harassed by the Poor, c. 1940

There are certainly numberless women of fashion who consider it perfectly natural to go miles down Fifth Avenue, or Madison Avenue, yet for whom a voyage of half a dozen blocks to east or west would be an adventure, almost a dangerous impairment of good breeding. (Jules Romains)

 George Gilbert, American Faces, New York, c.1940

 Weegee, Vegetable Dealer, 1946

  Alfred Stieglitz, Untitled, Camera Work, Nos. 49–50, 1917

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many. (Theodore Dreiser)

John R. Grabach, The Fifth Year, 1934

 Raphael Soyer, Bowery Nocturne, 1933

 Lisette Model, Sammy’s, New York, 1940

 Martin Lewis, Late Traveller, c. 1930
 

  Weegee, Gunman Killed by Off-Duty Cop at 344 Broome Street, 1942

Late on the night of Feb. 2, Izzo and accomplices tried to hold up the Spring Arrow Social & Athletic Club, near Bowery. Shot by an off-duty cop, Izzo staggered toward Elizabeth and fell dead on his face, his gun skittering across the sidewalk.

 Dexter Dalwood Room 100, Chelsea Hotel, 1999
Room 100 at New York's Chelsea Hotel is the infamous site of the violent death of Nancy Spungen, allegedly at the hands of her boyfriend Sid Vicious.

 C.R.W. Nevinson, The Soul of the Soulless City (New York - an Abstraction), 1920

When it's three o' clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London - Bette Midler 

 Georgia O'Keeffe, The Radiator Building at Night, 1927

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there ... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. (Ezra Pound)
 

Earle Horter, The Chrysler Building Under Construction, 1931

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. (Albert Camus)

Charles Sheeler, Windows, 1952

Skyscraper national park. (Kurt Vonnegut)

Harold Weston, Building the United Nations, 1950

 Alfred Stieglitz, Looking Northwest from the Shelton, 1932

Crammed on the narrow island the million-windowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid... (John Dos Passos)

 André Kertész, Lost Cloud, New York, 1937

Berenice Abbott, City Arabesque, 1936

And suddenly as I looked back at the skyscrapers of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me quite irresistibly of plied-up packing-cases outside a warehouse. I was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free, high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for the sons of men. (H.G. Wells)

 André Kertesz, World Trade Center, 1972

 Hiroshi Sugimoto, World Trade Center, 1997

 Thomas Hoepker, View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Manhattan, 11th September 2001

 Susan Meiselas, Liberty Plaza, New York, September 11, 2001

 Eberhard Havekost, Contact, 1998

 Ralston Crawford, Whitestone Bridge, 1930s

Over the great bridge, with sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

C. R. W. Nevinson, Looking through the Brooklyn Bridge, c. 1920

Eugene De Salignac,  Brooklyn Bridge Painters, 1914 

Arthur Tress, Flying Dream, Queens, NY, 1971

 Wouter Deruytter, Billboards, NY: 5th Avenue & 56th Street, 2005

I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable. (Albert Camus)

Richard Estes, 42nd Street Crosstown Bus, 2004

 John Sloan, Backyards, Greenwich Village, 1914

 Cecil Chichester, Mid-Hudson Bridge, 1934

 Harry Shokler, Waterfront, Brooklyn, 1934

 George Ault, From Brooklyn Heights, 1925

Louis Guglielmi, Terror in Brooklyn, 1941

 Federal Crowd Control, 1918. Machine guns in front, modified phalanx. Soldiers on sides assigned to upstairs windows. Wilson feared antiwar riots, losing mind to small strokes.

 Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915

 N. Jay Jaffee, Bryant Park, New York, 1953

 Jerome Liebling, Butterfly Boy, New York City, 1949

 Charles Harbutt: Boys Smoking in Car, Reform School, New York, 1963

  Ted Croner: Taxi, New York Night, 1947/48

  Berenice Abbott, 42nd Street, 1938

When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read." (G. K. Chesterton)

Reginald Marsh, Tattoo and Haircut, 1932

Edward Hopper, New York Movie, 1939

 George Bellows , Cliff Dwellers, 1913

 Paul Cadmus, Coney Island, 1935

 André Kertész, Fire Escape, New York, 1949

 Weegee, Simply Add Boiling Water, 1937

 Jindrich Styrsky, The Statue of Liberty, 1934

 Ellen Auerbach, Statue of Liberty, New York 1939