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According to Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz, who describes Thomas Nozkowski Drawings at the Studio School as "a superb survey", Nozkowski is, in terms of reputation, a "late bloomer" who came in under the radar of institutional endorsement. Perhaps precisely for this reason, Nozkowski is held in particular esteem by younger artists. This discussion between James Hyde and Alexander Ross represents an exchange of ideas between two artists at the cutting edge of the reinvention of abstract art. It will be posted over a two week period. To join the debate with your own questions or comments to Hyde or Ross, click here. Please write "discussion" in the subject heading.

READERS' COMMENTS

I have really been looking forward to this show--I always look forward to Tom's exhibitions. More than simply being an opportunity to evaluate how the work looks, Tom's shows-within each individual piece and through the range of works--always provide visual education. I am amazed and delighted to see how he is able to compress, elaborate and render so many motifs, styles, color palates and viscosities of paint into his smaller than two by three foot painting--and make it all seem natural and coherent. In short Tom is a master of that essential and too often underrated quality in art--visual invention. This show of twenty-five years of drawings promised an in depth look at the mechanics of Tom's invention and as well a chance to glimpse the education of the educator.

My first reaction on entering the gallery was that the range was even rangier than his painting shows-not surprising given the many possible tools to draw with and the many years of work represented. Included were oil on paper works as distractingly lush as any "full-fledged" painting and such spare works as Q-22, a drawing of a curvilinear shape filled in with orange ball point pen, and S-69, a brushed ink work of a stack of three rectilinear shapes. A piece from 1980 caught my eye and I realized that it was part of the series that were the first examples of Tom's works I saw. A gray and brownish, Guston-ish oil on paper (S 66) that looks a bit like a lump shaped package or more absurdly a stone with a starched white collar. I recalled that the works from that series all portrayed things teetering on the edge of recognition-maybe a book, maybe a shoe, maybe a cup. It somehow seems important to express the phenomenon of these works as teetering on the edge of recognition rather than on the edge of abstraction because, to me at least, they seem to be more like constructions of possible things than distillations of recognizable things.

I hope we will be able to further discuss this distinction, because I think it is essential all of Tom's work and to abstraction in general, but also because it is somewhat at odds to how Tom speaks about his work. As a painter of possible things Tom's work can be many things to many people, but the thing I was stuck by seeing this show is that Tom is not a field painter or an all-over painter, Tom is a painter of things.

It is a known secret that Tom began his art career as a sculptor rather than a painter. Looking at this drawing show it seemed he has always been, in a sense, portraying sculptures-impossible sculptures--in drawings. I think this is true with his paintings as well though it's harder to see because so much of what you follow in the paintings are the traces of the history behind what becomes the final picture.

As a painter of possible things-or impossible sculptures-Tom's drawings (and paintings) lack conventional pictorial space. Looking through the drawing show you see Tom's objects floating on a background. Usually there's one thing in the picture, but sometimes there are several. Often there are several shapes-more of Tom's possible things-within the central figure. This is even more common in the paintings. There is however, with insistent regularity, the thing and the background. The background can set a mood or give a little taste of gravity, but it is almost always the inert partner in Tom's figure/ground system--I would like to emphasize "almost always" because with Tom's restless imagination exception is a rule.

As much as that series from '81 is stylistically related to Guston the pictorial space is radically different. This is even easier to see in his more crisply enunciated works. Following the lines and perimeters of Tom's things animates the thing-its constituent parts fold and turn, transform and bounce as the eye follows their imaginative implications. It is the basic inertness of the background and the lack conventional pictorial space that allows an imaginative mental space to inhabit the central figure of Tom's drawings or paintings. For me this is the quality that makes looking at Tom's work an act of educational adventure.

The mentalism of Tom's picture making links Tom's artistic program to the way the implications of Alfred Jensen's diagrams interact with their concrete visuality. And although Tom is adept at painterly ambiguity-which becomes for him a sort of structuralist chiaroscuro-Tom's sense of space in his paintings and drawings-the space of his possible things/impossible sculptures--looks to me to be more related to Ricci Albenda's fourth dimension constructions or Robert Lazzarini's anamorphic object sculptures than to similar appearing abstract painting.

James has touched upon so many essential points here. Let's just say that I am very much in agreement with these observations and eager to elaborate upon them.

One interesting line of thought opened up is the notion of fourth dimensional constructions and Tom's depiction of impossible sculpture. There is indeed a strong sense of object/background often found in Tom's work. so what is it exactly that makes the figures so enigmatic? I've noticed that in his paintings, figures are often fused with their background, or have arisen out of it, or in some way reference, stylistically or shape-wise, the surrounding sea. Then, within the figure or grouping, there might be additional visual discrepancies where boarders are shared or areas overlap. A pleasant sense of confusion sets in as the viewer is denied normal perceptual cohesion. So even though they seem object-like, they're also anti-objects, or visual/spatial conundrums. Tom has said that he initially set out to make anti-formalist works, which means they are about more than just what we see as shapes. What, then, is the content? When confronted with a Nozkowski, I sometimes feel like I've encountered a very advanced physics diagram attempting impossibly to explain time's cousinhood to gravity within the limits set by a two dimensional chalk board. There's some monstrous formula, just out of reach, that keeps me postulating, looking more, and demanding increased attention.

Now, with this handsomely installed drawing survey, we have the opportunity to see these figure/grounds in their more elemental nakedness. There is a much clearer distinction between shape and backdrop, if any. A few of the drawings from 1986 are simply sets of silhouettes, (an unknown dingbat font?) a few later ones have been re-worked a little, but most are simpler, faster takes on what we're accustomed to in the paintings. Perhaps this is what Tom's oils look like when he first strikes them in, on the very first pass. My hunch is that he is gleaning from lessons learned in the paintings when he draws. The immediacy in the drawings really alerted me to the extent of Tom's mastery of visual invention (as James aptly put it) which becomes somehow more fossilized in the paintings. I always assumed that Tom was capitalizing on the accidental in his work, that it was in large part a process of discovery. Seeing the drawings has forced me to completely revise that assumption. Here are such intentional designs done in a fresh hand, in one take. The so-called objects now seem even more enigmatic to me, the mystery of their origin even more confounding. Ok, there's a die in one. But it's not a die because the dots don't work. A leaf in another, a twig, a tent, a fish --this is not the point, is it? Just as they become something, they escape. There's a Zen of decision-making at work here that I yearn to grasp, but cannot. To what extent does the artist think about what he is depicting, and to what extent does he just get out of the way?

So we are faced with this unfettered inventiveness. The smallish, same-size format, and the (mostly) untitledness of his output serves to release him (and us) from all outside concerns, and focus attention on the purest form of poetic, visual play. It is within this self-imposed set of boundaries that seemingly anything can happen. But, really, there's a lot of editing going on, a lot that is not allowed to happen, too. He has stretched the bounds of what can happen within a given artistic language. I think that is key, that Tom has created a very large but still cohesive gameboard.

It is interesting how this discussion is shaping up. I can see that Alex is as involved in the mechanics of Tom's work as I am. I think that's why artists are such fans. If you value the specifics and mechanics painting it's easy to get drawn in. But I think it's also why Tom's work can be invisible to some people. I have a curator friend who is intelligent and imaginative and spent a fair amount of time at one of Tom's shows, but could only see clunky little paintings. His interest is in conceptual and social art practices-he simply didn't have the language or the interest to crack into Tom's paintings. It's really from the specifics of Tom's work that you get the poetry.

Tom's drawings perhaps even more than his paintings are marked by a clarity of form, but also by a keen interest in creating lines of questions through the quality of enigma, (to pull you into that gameboard you describe) and the structure of ambiguity, (to keep you at the game). As Leo Steinberg has discussed in his brilliant study of Leonardo's Last Supper ambiguity can be a powerful engine for meaning. Questioning is essential for understanding Tom's work and for understanding how Tom's work is abstract. I think it's important to frame the question "how is a painting abstract" (another perspective could be "what does it represent") because this gets to what a painting is by the way of how it functions. To ask whether a painting is abstract or representational is a question of style.

Alex eloquently describes how Tom's works open up by generating a series of questions. Tom primarily structures his paintings and drawings in the form of questions rather than statements (works that represent in a denotive way function as statements). I think this is a vital way to conceive abstract painting-as painting in the form of a question or questions. It's a model for abstraction that is central to my own working processes and I suspect to Alex's as well.

Yes, it is indeed central to my approach. This "questioning" is first and foremost directed from the artist to his/herself, don't you think? The artist, faced with, say, a blank sheet of paper, might ask "If I were to do x and y to it, will that be a drawing? And what kind of drawing will that be?" One needs to make it in order to find out. In this sense, each work is a foray, and does not necessarily have a conclusion. So in a drawing exhibition such as Tom's, each piece could be thought of as the tip of a new, exploratory rootlet, all of them branching and wandering out of an aggressively curious taproot. Within such a system, an artist might set up opposing jump points or question nodes between which he/she oscillates.

Tom, for example, allows antagonisms to form between the antique and the contemporary in his various stylings; the antique --his rubbed-out, distressed, layered, burnished surfaces, etc., and the contemporary --his clean, crisp forms, machined edges, masked, striped, etc. On top of this he sets up another axis between the representational and the nonrepresentational, and then another between the harmonious and the discordant --all within a single picture! It's no wonder we're glued to them.

Here's a possibility I would like to put forward. That in his method, Tom has systematized the intentional confounding of his own expectations, that his goal is always to move against the known so as to become a spectator of invention, in addition to being the instigator. The prize for Tom, as I imagine him working, is the mistake that looks good. He's on a hunt for wrong moves that delight. Another way of coming at this is to ask, "Is there such a thing as a mistake in a work by Tom Nozkowski? Are there any wrong moves, ever?" I think it was Peter Schjeldahl who said something like the more one tries to find fault with a Nozkowski picture, the more it will defy you to really find a fault with it. He does wrong so well it's scary. One of my favorite drawings in the show (and as an example of what I am getting at) is The Dressed House (S-76), 1986. In a way, it is almost an anti-drawing with its blunt, crazy posture, defying every convention, and yet it is beautiful. In the end, the best artists have an eye for balance and just-rightness, no matter how far off the map they may wander.

It's interesting Alex mentions flawed Nozkowskis-I've seen a pile of them. Seven or eight years ago I was visiting Tom in his studio upstate when I came across a stack of paintings off to the side of his easel. As I was flipping through them thinking that they weren't some of Tom's best work he interrupted my reverie saying, "Oh don't look at those, they're the problem ones-I'm still painting them." Some of them, he explained he'd been working on for several years. It was interesting that they really weren't good--at least not yet. I'm not quite sure what makes a Nozkowski just-right, but it was it was impressive to see that they could fail and even more impressive to see that Tom had the critical faculty to discern the difference. It's quite possible that it's the happy accident makes the painting right, but after this experience I realized that the just-rightness of Tom's paintings, is no accident.
I want to revisit the idea of question because as well as being central to his artistic process it is fundamental to Tom's mode of address. Another way of putting this is that while Tom is engaged with concepts, his work is abstract painting rather than conceptualism--significantly so because the paintings and drawings communicate through the form of questions rather than statements.

Representational artwork proceeds from a series of statements-images that denote recognizable objects. It's odd Tom maintains his works are representations of places, things and memories. With the drawings you can kind of see it, but by the time the already ambiguous images have gone through the chop and blend of Tom's painting process the referent-if Tom's not pulling our collective leg and there really was one-is lost. In a book Tom did with Alex's gallery mate Judy Linn titled "Autobiography" Tom made a series of paintings based on personally significant places around his High Falls and NYC homes and Judy photographed the spots. When Tom described the project I thought, "Aha, now we'll see what all those sources are". When I saw the book there were Tom's same enigmatic and ambiguous paintings next to Judy's recognizable, but equally idiosyncratic photographs. There were some fragments of connections but perhaps even those were contingent. To my annoyance nothing was revealed. Annoyance subsided as I ping-ponged back and forth between resonant painting to resonant photograph. Although short on specific correlation between photograph and painting the book makes an impression of two intellectual artists in adventurous dialogue.

But the annoyance remains. Tom's representation does not deliver communication-the thing we've come to expect and demand from representational images. Alex has proposed Tom's method of painting as structuring open sets of oppositions, (what I refer to as Tom's process of chop and blend) prepared and ready to pounce on the happy accident. This seems about right to me, but I'd like to frame it a bit differently. I see Tom as forging his representations, knowing full well they don't communicate as representations. It is only through Tom's characteristic chop and blend that his solipsistic representations become meaningful-that they communicate, but not as representation.

Since Tom's representations fail to communicate--what is it that Tom's paintings represent? The quick and dirty answer is-the failure of representation, perhaps the failure of all representations to convey meaning. Tom's important lesson is the insistence that representation does not equal meaning. This is a fairly radical stuff in the present art-land where for photographic and conceptual practices meaningful communication through representation is the sovereign currency. Another way to look at this question would be to ask what is it that Tom's work communicates? Haltingly and incompletely Tom shows us his model for constructing meaning. But it's less the model than the processes of condensing and geometricizing his representations through the medium of memory and the material techniques of artmaking that are significant. But understanding Tom's chop and blend processes gets one no closer to the meanings of Tom's work than understanding the origins of his enigmatic representations would. Rather it's in the pleasure and interrogation of the painting or drawing in front of you that Tom's meaning insinuates its possibilities.

Very interesting territory we've wandered into! Certainly with my own work, representation and meaning are key elements. Is it possible that certain artists at this present stage have so fully accepted the failure of representation, that a new level of meta-tinkering is being practiced, signaling a shift towards a questioning of the real? True, many current photo-based projects embrace the real in all of its immaculate detail, so much so that we seem to be experiencing a sort of renaissance of the picture window. At the same moment, however, there are, say, the three of us, each reinvestigating in very different ways the whole broken notion of representation as it has been handed down to us. In James' work, there is the radical wrangling with a painting's physicality, the probing in and out and through the stuff, the making it physically real again. In Tom's, a cutting up of the signifiers; in my own, layers of unknowable illusionism. I wonder if we are actually knocking at the same thing from utterly unique angles? Or is it that we are diverging away from each other, like branches way out from the original tree trunk?

One thing that none of us gets away from is the suggestion in the abstraction. It seems important to continue hinting at the known in order to keep driving at a point. I think that on some higher plane we really want, metaphorically speaking, to draw attention to the projection booth behind us and find the hidden film projector that makes reality so deep and textured, our experiences so deceptively convincing.

To join the debate or post your own comment on the exhibition, please e-mail dcohen@nyss.org. Please write "nozkowski discussion" in the subject line.