He paints Gustons

Philip Guston, Untitled (Roma), 1971. Oil on paper mounted on panel, 55.3 x 73.7 cm / 21 3/4 x 29 in. Photo: Thomas Barratt. Courtesy Hauser and Wirth.

D.K. Sole reviews Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles.

Morandi didn’t paint bottles, he painted Morandis. Guston, in this show, paints feet and trees and walls, but really he paints Gustons. The walls are glowing with his characteristic beefbone pink. You could spend hours watching him manipulate this colour. It’s delicate, it’s flabby, it’s mistlike, it’s gross. There are some of the well-known Klan paintings, but not a ton. The best thing about the framing of Resiliance – a grab-bag of interesting things circa 1971, promises the subtitle – is that it takes the pressure off the exhibition’s curator, Musa Mayer, to knock together a greatest hits show out of hooded heads and lazing self portraits and lets her loose on what might otherwise be positioned as a lot of incidental stuff, like multiple depictions of ornamental trees in Italian gardens. Mayer shows us a Guston who is enraptured by form.

A brick! Look, a brick! What is this brick? It is next to a wall! What is a wall? What is a rectangle?

The artist was in Italy that year, from January through to March. In one room they’re screening footage of him talking to a friend, a poet named Clark Coolidge, about the work he made there. You have the joy of watching him pull a painting up from the crowded mass in the studio and chat about it – this is a good one, he says – knowing that you can, if you want, direct your eyes across to a nearby wall and see the same painting hanging nicely in proper gallery isolation, calm, quiet, commercially spaced from its neighbors. The man in the movie pops it down again, finished, choosing something else. He feels his pockets for his next cigarette. 

Coolidge says something. Guston responds. The painting has existed in these two locations. The way attention and time are directed at it is different in both of them. You look at the painting in your own time again. The hand of the artist is now clinging to it, for you, forever. Somewhere he is always picking it up, glancing at it to make it special, then dropping it – no longer special. On this wall it is always special without ever being singled out from the others. They are all equally special in their row. There they are, a set of disembodied feet. The gallery has put them in a democracy of specialness.

Guston’s satirical Nixon drawings in the next room are different (pen on paper, no pink paint) but still both delicate and gross, the lines friable as they deliniate the president’s jowls, his arc of little grinning teeth stuck unanatomically between two testicular cheeks like a glued-on banana. The Poor Richard drawings are lined up in order, from the man’s childhood into his adulthood, into the presidency. They illustrate moments in the Nixon life story without telling a narrative, exactly. They choose incidents of hubris, tension, worry, and pleasure. Nixon’s accomplishments revolt Guston. Doing something ordinary – standing in the sea in a bathing suit – the president is repulsive. Will you look at this fucker, the drawing seems to say. Feast your eyes on this son of a bitch just perched there like a motherfucking pelican. 

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971. Ink on paper, 26.7 x 35.2 cm / 10 1/2 x 13 7/8 in. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy Hauser and Wirth.

The idea of badness being inherent seems interesting. Nixon is like Guston’s Klansmen. All he has to do is sit on a chair and his creator will call him evil. “The idea of evil fascinated me,” Guston said about the Klan. 

Why did he refer to the Klan paintings as “self-portraits”? I think it comes back to the notion of inherentness. Nothing is more inherently something, to you, than yourself. If you are arguing that a person is inherently something then it is reasonable for them to be you. We are not required to put on some eye-catching performance of selfness to be ourselves, any more than his Klansmen need to perform evil acts to be evil. But is this what evil is? Can your material self be evil? Is this what he is arguing? Or is it more of a question: “What are we when we’re just standing there?” Not just evil people – they help to focus the enquiry -- but all of us. Are we as fundamental as a brick?  

Now we look at ourselves. What is the nature of our inherentness? We have a body. Now we notice that when he paints something made of small parts, like the leaves of those Italian trees, he discovers it is actually a coherent lump, like a being of flesh with shading and an outline. Or maybe the object tests its solidness -- its edge is a set of dashes. (I’m thinking in particular of one tree wedged between its neighbours in one of the Untitleds.) If everything is inherently itself then it is reasonable for it to be flesh, a body, himself, a self-portrait.

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971. Oil on paper mounted on panel, 73.7 x 101.6 cm / 29 x 40 in. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy Hauser and Wirth.

But is the world really like this? Are we solid? Over his lifetime as an artist Guston went from abstraction to cartoon, two representational methods that can acknowledge and evade solid objects simultaneously. Are we inherently anything? The edges of the trees propose a question.

In the final room of the show he is at home, later, back from Italy and Nixonlandia, laying out familiar objects and offering us a chance to identify them. They are like apples and bananas on the page of an alphabet book for children: here is the A-thing, here is the B-thing, though the correspondances of the Guston-alphabet are personal and hidden. The lamp, the shoe, and the cigarette are so familiar they swell into grossness, filling the eye. 

Cartoon and abstraction cohere. Should I read that smudge as an object, does it have some correlation? You’ll never know. The brushmarks that would make the smudge definitively a thing belong to him (gone now, dead), they are his and no one else’s, owned by him, far away, in his possession.

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971
14 September, 2019 – 5 January, 2020
Hauser & Wirth, 901-909 E 3rd St, Los Angeles, CA 

Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Posted by Wendy Kveck November 27, 2019