essay

The Source of the Nile
(The Politics of Thomas Nozkowski)

Thomas Nozkowski has been one of the most quietly influential painters on the New York scene over the past two decades. Some people may find that statement surprising. After all, where are the tokens of blue-chip status that would attest to this position of influence-the retrospectives in major museums, the glossy hardbound coffee table monographs, the auction block records and so on?

Well, I did say quietly influential, after all. Undoubtedly to the detriment of his worldly career, though always in the service of the one career that counts, namely the progress of discovery and invention that occurs in the studio, Nozkowski has set his face against everything that signifies "importance" in the contemporary artworld: for instance, he has eschewed the large scale that has been de rigueur since the time of the abstract expressionists, who would nonetheless be shocked at the present situation in which artists tailor their work to the overweening propertions of museums that have been built to impress and dominate rather than to create intimacy. And he has avoided, as well, the systematic working methods that on the one hand are valued as signs of aesthetic rigor and on the other are so convenient for establishing the stylistic consistency and signature "look" essential to establishing a trusted brand name, in art as much as in any other retail field.

Beyond that, if Nozkowski is as influential as I say he is, then why is there no école de Nozkowski, a group of painters working in an idiom more or less directly derived from his? To answer that question, again, is to go to the heart of the political stance that underlies Nozkowski's work, his determination not to identify himself with a recurrent cluster of motifs, techniques, or stylistic tics that would at once call attention to a work as Nozkowski's. Such ciphers of identity, paradoxically, offer easy handles for imitators. As I've written elsewhere, the only obviously consistent factor among Nozkowski's paintings, aside from their abstraction, is their modesty-not just the modesty of scale I've already mentioned, but what might be called rhetorical modesty: Nozkowski opts for understatement, for nuance over High Concept. A lack of overt consistency, which nonetheless never becomes eclecticism (let alone anything like a postmodernist pastiche of a multiplicity of styles), in itself constitutes a consistently held value throughout Nozkowski's work: the value of ceaseless inventiveness within the limits of a given practice. One cannot simply decide to be an inventive painter the way one might decide to paint nothing but stripes, so it would be hard to ascribe another painter's inventiveness to Nozkowski's influence. But for a great many in New York and probably elsewhere, his work has offered a profound sense of permission; it has confirmed the possibility and value of a form of abstract painting that allows for and cultivates subjective decision-making, instead of the apparent objectivity of systematic approaches, yet without reviving the heroic individualism of the abstract expressionists (which re-emerged in an unintentionally self-parodic form in the art of certain neo-expressionists of the early '80s).

A painter who avoids any signature style, whose abstract imagery finds its sources in things seen in everyday life (one of his exhibitions was titled "An Autobiography") but which the painter does not discuss, and whose works are all untitled because he doesn't want to foreclose the viewer's interpretive liberty (or responsibility, depending on how you look at it)-at a time when so many artists have discovered that you can never be too blatant, can't one like Nozkowski be accused of being simply evasive? The answer is in the work itself, in the feeling of rightness and certainty that it so often communicates, the sense that everything in it has just clicked into place and has found the perfect balance between whimsy and rigor. Evasive? No, decisive at a higher order of decision-making than most artists ever reach. Another answer might be found in the poetry and poetics of Wallace Stevens, the American master who achieved a rare synthesis between Symbolist indirection and Modernist clarity ("candor," he called it) and who made of "evasion" a surprisingly positive trope, as when he wrote (in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction") of poetry as "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind" and (in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven") that "the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, / As it is, in the intricate evasions of as."

I was particularly intrigued when I heard that Nozkowski would be having a retrospective of works on paper-all the more so when I realized that would be the largest of three different shows of works on paper the artist would be having in the course of year, because I while I'd known the artist's paintings for some fifteen years, I'd caught sight of very few works on paper during that time, and perhaps not a single drawing in the strict sense. I was curious to see some, and even more curious about why I hadn't before. If Nozkowski's practice privileges painting over drawing, and (within the category of works on paper) privileges what are essentially paintings on paper over drawings in the strict sense, it may have something to do with the specific sense of temporality his work embodies and which can perhaps be said to be its subject. (It should be said that this particularly exhibition, in the artist's view, somewhat downplays the preponderance in his oeuvre of works in oil on paper as opposed to those in more traditional drawing media, despite their constituting around a quarter of the show.) To put it baldly, Nozkowski's paintings are not of "objects" or "figures" (in however abstract a sense; as an example, a stripe in a work by Daniel Buren remains a discrete object, though it absolutely does not represent anything but itself) but of movements, relationships, changes, processes. They are not concerned with being so much as with emerging and receding aspects. I once described a painting of Nozkowski's as looking as though it had been painted by "Chardin, but on a serious hallucinogen and trying to paint the soap bubble from the inside out": the idea is of a painter working overtime to keep pace with a process in movement that is inherently unstable and hard to track.

These concerns, as Nozkowski himself would point, are not alien to the systemic and process-oriented art which he has always meant to contest-but that art could only reveal its concern with temporal change through the medium of the series, not through the individual work, which remains static. Think of Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross as a model for this, Sol LeWitt's open cubes as its fulfillment. Only a rare few of Nozkowski's works on paper give us glimpses of such fixed moments in the flux. If my curiosity about seeing Nozkowski's drawings had something to do with what might be called an aesthetically prurient interest in seeing his sources uncovered, I'll admit that interest has been frustrated-happily so, as it turns out. Nozkowski speaks freely of the fact that his subjects come from his daily life (including other art, a big part of any painter's daily life) but also of how important it is that these sources not be named so that viewers don't reduce the work to its sources. The more I look at the work, the more I realize I really don't want to know the source. I'm sure I would be disappointed. I wonder how it felt to discover the source of the Nile in some insignificant trickle of water up in a mountain somewhere? It might be instructive, but hardly impressive to see and would fail to explain the significance of its consequence. These works on paper further moments in the flux that is Nozkowski's art, not its origins.










		(printer-friendly version) The Source of the Nile (The Politics of Thomas Nozkowski) Thomas Nozkowski has been one of the most quietly influential painters on the New York scene over the past two decades. Some people may find that statement surprising. After all, where are the tokens of blue-chip status that would attest to this position of influence-the retrospectives in major museums, the glossy hardbound coffee table monographs, the auction block records and so on? Well, I did say quietly influential, after all. Undoubtedly to the detriment of his worldly career, though always in the service of the one career that counts, namely the progress of discovery and invention that occurs in the studio, Nozkowski has set his face against everything that signifies "importance" in the contemporary artworld: for instance, he has eschewed the large scale that has been de rigueur since the time of the abstract expressionists, who would nonetheless be shocked at the present situation in which artists tailor their work to the overweening propertions of museums that have been built to impress and dominate rather than to create intimacy. And he has avoided, as well, the systematic working methods that on the one hand are valued as signs of aesthetic rigor and on the other are so convenient for establishing the stylistic consistency and signature "look" essential to establishing a trusted brand name, in art as much as in any other retail field. Beyond that, if Nozkowski is as influential as I say he is, then why is there no école de Nozkowski, a group of painters working in an idiom more or less directly derived from his? To answer that question, again, is to go to the heart of the political stance that underlies Nozkowski's work, his determination not to identify himself with a recurrent cluster of motifs, techniques, or stylistic tics that would at once call attention to a work as Nozkowski's. Such ciphers of identity, paradoxically, offer easy handles for imitators. As I've written elsewhere, the only obviously consistent factor among Nozkowski's paintings, aside from their abstraction, is their modesty-not just the modesty of scale I've already mentioned, but what might be called rhetorical modesty: Nozkowski opts for understatement, for nuance over High Concept. A lack of overt consistency, which nonetheless never becomes eclecticism (let alone anything like a postmodernist pastiche of a multiplicity of styles), in itself constitutes a consistently held value throughout Nozkowski's work: the value of ceaseless inventiveness within the limits of a given practice. One cannot simply decide to be an inventive painter the way one might decide to paint nothing but stripes, so it would be hard to ascribe another painter's inventiveness to Nozkowski's influence. But for a great many in New York and probably elsewhere, his work has offered a profound sense of permission; it has confirmed the possibility and value of a form of abstract painting that allows for and cultivates subjective decision-making, instead of the apparent objectivity of systematic approaches, yet without reviving the heroic individualism of the abstract expressionists (which re-emerged in an unintentionally self-parodic form in the art of certain neo-expressionists of the early '80s). A painter who avoids any signature style, whose abstract imagery finds its sources in things seen in everyday life (one of his exhibitions was titled "An Autobiography") but which the painter does not discuss, and whose works are all untitled because he doesn't want to foreclose the viewer's interpretive liberty (or responsibility, depending on how you look at it)-at a time when so many artists have discovered that you can never be too blatant, can't one like Nozkowski be accused of being simply evasive? The answer is in the work itself, in the feeling of rightness and certainty that it so often communicates, the sense that everything in it has just clicked into place and has found the perfect balance between whimsy and rigor. Evasive? No, decisive at a higher order of decision-making than most artists ever reach. Another answer might be found in the poetry and poetics of Wallace Stevens, the American master who achieved a rare synthesis between Symbolist indirection and Modernist clarity ("candor," he called it) and who made of "evasion" a surprisingly positive trope, as when he wrote (in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction") of poetry as "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind" and (in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven") that "the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, / As it is, in the intricate evasions of as." I was particularly intrigued when I heard that Nozkowski would be having a retrospective of works on paper-all the more so when I realized that would be the largest of three different shows of works on paper the artist would be having in the course of year, because I while I'd known the artist's paintings for some fifteen years, I'd caught sight of very few works on paper during that time, and perhaps not a single drawing in the strict sense. I was curious to see some, and even more curious about why I hadn't before. If Nozkowski's practice privileges painting over drawing, and (within the category of works on paper) privileges what are essentially paintings on paper over drawings in the strict sense, it may have something to do with the specific sense of temporality his work embodies and which can perhaps be said to be its subject. (It should be said that this particularly exhibition, in the artist's view, somewhat downplays the preponderance in his oeuvre of works in oil on paper as opposed to those in more traditional drawing media, despite their constituting around a quarter of the show.) To put it baldly, Nozkowski's paintings are not of "objects" or "figures" (in however abstract a sense; as an example, a stripe in a work by Daniel Buren remains a discrete object, though it absolutely does not represent anything but itself) but of movements, relationships, changes, processes. They are not concerned with being so much as with emerging and receding aspects. I once described a painting of Nozkowski's as looking as though it had been painted by "Chardin, but on a serious hallucinogen and trying to paint the soap bubble from the inside out": the idea is of a painter working overtime to keep pace with a process in movement that is inherently unstable and hard to track. These concerns, as Nozkowski himself would point, are not alien to the systemic and process-oriented art which he has always meant to contest-but that art could only reveal its concern with temporal change through the medium of the series, not through the individual work, which remains static. Think of Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross as a model for this, Sol LeWitt's open cubes as its fulfillment. Only a rare few of Nozkowski's works on paper give us glimpses of such fixed moments in the flux. If my curiosity about seeing Nozkowski's drawings had something to do with what might be called an aesthetically prurient interest in seeing his sources uncovered, I'll admit that interest has been frustrated-happily so, as it turns out. Nozkowski speaks freely of the fact that his subjects come from his daily life (including other art, a big part of any painter's daily life) but also of how important it is that these sources not be named so that viewers don't reduce the work to its sources. The more I look at the work, the more I realize I really don't want to know the source. I'm sure I would be disappointed. I wonder how it felt to discover the source of the Nile in some insignificant trickle of water up in a mountain somewhere? It might be instructive, but hardly impressive to see and would fail to explain the significance of its consequence. These works on paper further moments in the flux that is Nozkowski's art, not its origins.