The highest task…is to seize the mastery of one’s transcendental Self – to be at the same time the Self of one’s Self. NOVALIS

I

Alfred DeCredico has titled his new body of abstractions – they are paintings, but their material means tend to be varied: drawing and fur as well as paint give them their rich surface – "Voices." I suggest that the voice involved is the inner voice – not that of conscience, nor of intellectual intuition, such as prompted Socrates, nor the proverbial voice madmen blindly obey – although it uses all three as its masks. Rather, it is the voice of Novalis’s "transcendental Self" – the innermost Self of the self, the authentic Self within the inauthentic self.

In D.W. Winnicott’s distinction, it is the voice of the True Self within the False Self. "Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real," whereas "a False Self results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility." Where the True Self involves "the spontaneous gesture and the personal idea" – the core of the individual’s "experience of aliveness." – the False Self is socially compliant, involving" the whole organization of the polite and mannered social attitude(1)." The task of the artist in modern times has been to voice the authenticity of the transcendental Self, becoming authentic in himself - to uphold the reality of the profoundly interior transcendental Self in a world in which it has come to seem unreal. It has been overobjectified – a subtle way of repressing it, indeed, reading it away – by a world obsessively objective. In defiance of this objectivity – in the last analysis it is an illusion, or at best a half – truth – the authenticity – obsessed artist bespeaks, in George Steiner’s words, the "mystery" and "metaphysical experience," of the transcendental Self through "the enigma of [artistic] creation." He creates works of art, which are "real preferences," that is, art in which "a wager on transcendence" – on authenticity – has been won(2).

Such works are not simply emblems of the transcendental Self, but seem to embody it. If one wishes, they are metaphors for it, but, as Morse Peckham says, a metaphor is "the presentation…of a phenomenon for which there is no category and therefore are no attributes, or for which…the conventional category and attributes for that phenomenon are inadequate or …unusable." There is, in effect, "no language…for talking about the phenomenon," or the languages that exist are constantly breaking down – end up demonstrating, in use, their inadequacy more than their adequacy(3). The truly authentic artist experiences the inadequacy of all artistic language to convey the mysterious phenomenon of the transcendental Self and its eschatological sense of existence – a phenomenon which by definition is mysteriously out of reach, always manifesting itself in tentative, protean form making passing sense, having transient intelligibility – but creates, no doubt in Sisyphean frustration, a new artistic metaphor for it.

DeCredico is an authentic artist – I think that has to be said, because there seem to be more artists around on the side of inauthenticity, socially compliant for all their witty manipulation of media modes of social compliance, than on the side of authenticity. There are more artists around who have given up on the transcendental Self – one wonders if they ever had a sense of the interiority and trueness to self it implies – than who take up the challenge it poses. And there is a greater need than ever for the alternative of authenticity – for some sense of authentic subjectivity – in view of the "repressive desublimation" of interiority by mass mediation (to use Herbert Marcuse’s term). Such media desublimation goes two ways: it involves the repression of introspection, closing off the avenue to self-awareness and self-change and thus creating self-alienation on the deepest, subtlest level of the self; and it involves the repression of empathic attunement to the other, the sense of the other as a "Thou" rather than an "It," in Martin Buber’s distinction.

Now DeCredico makes "Thou abstractions," returning abstract art to the defiant purpose repressed by its objectification into a standard means of artistic practice: the purpose of introspecting and maintaining intimate contact with the transcendental Self in a detranscendentalizing world – indeed, maintaining the sense of sacredness of the self in a secular world. His abstractions are real transcendental presences in an irreal media-objectified world of consciousness. They articulate, in Mircea Eliade’s words, "the primary experience of sacred space"(4) – sacred inner space – in a profane world of media-made secondary experience, which amounts to the profaning of the process of experience as such.

Elaine King "remains skeptical about the ‘new spiritual’," as it has been called, and she is reluctant to call DeCredico’s abstractions "spiritual," but she does acknowledge the "strength" of his art, which "affords no easy answers." She describes it as a "spatial theater of abstract and calligraphic shapes," an "idiosyncratic poetry, pervaded by melodrama and a sense of the grotesque"(5) – all of which bespeaks its spirituality, that is, the uncanny sense of transcendence it affords. Rather than use the overworked word "spiritual," perhaps it is better to say that DeCredico’s abstractions convey a sense of mystery, as authentic as that of pioneering abstraction. I have elsewhere argued that the generation of the sense of enigmatic unintelligibility is the major task of modern art, putting it in heroic opposition to world of pseudo-intelligibility(6). DeCredico’s abstraction has the same high level of heroic intention as the originary modern enigmaticists. His works are not simply "difficult," but have that "density of being" – they are a "display of enigmatic being" (7) – that is the sign of authenticity. One might say that awareness of the enigma of being is possible only from the perspective of the transcendental Self, and bespeaks its sense of its own mysteriousness. Thus, DeCredico’s abstractions are new metaphors for mysteriousness and transcendence: they give the elusive transcendental Self real presence.

II

The transcendental Self conveys a peculiar sense of plenitude by reason of its immersion in the Styx of primary process. Being fraught with irreducible tension, it cannot help but be self-dramatizing. DeCredico’s abstractions are compounds of dramatic contrasts, and of contrasts within contrasts – a full–bodied dialectic with no resolution. Thus, the two panels of Rheingold (all works mentioned are from 1991) are not simply dark and light, but gray dark and soft brown light. The primitive figures and primordial shapes also subtly differ; those of the gray side seem more aggressive and firm than those of the brown side. Above all, both sides convey a sense of erasure – of palimpsest – like layering, implying inner atmosphere as well as making for overt obscurity, unreadability.

The allusion to Wagner’s opera – it recurs in Lohengrin: Spiral, Jump, and Glide, in which there is a similar sense of foreboding gloom and dramatic incoherence, involving more or less clear (sometimes geometrically clear) fragments of form, unanchored in space – is no accident. What King calls DeCredico’s "pastiche of styles, influences, and poetic symbolism" is in fact not so much a pastiche as a loose "structure" of visual light motifs. (DeCredico in fact often "pulls" his work together through the use of wire enframements.) The spatial ambiguities and expressive ambivalences generated by their interplay imply what Anton Ehrenzwieg has called "hidden order." It is "global, syncretistic, and abstract" – pre-analytic, that is, prior to the sense of object-gestalts. It implies the instability of "reality constancy"(8), and implies unverbalizable perception and pre-verbal articulation – the use of body language to convey the holistic sensation. Each of DeCredico’s visual leitmotifs, like the musical leitmotifs of Wagner, seems like a whole unto itself, but also functions to trigger an abstract sense of wholeness. Thus, what one always experiences in a DeCredico work, for all the apparent incommensurateness of the panels – and the more subtle incommensurateness of the parts within each panel – is an instantaneous sense of unfathomable, unnamable wholeness, the special integrity which is the sign of the transcendental Self.

Other works by DeCredico allude to particular operas, sometimes in playful irony, more often in a kind of psychomimetic interpretation of their over-all expressive tenor. For example, Norma: Expedition, Pelléas and Mélisande, As Tosca: Taking Scalps, Butterfly: Ice and Skins, Aida: Soldiers, Elephants, and Giraffes, As Rigoletto: Parts, Faust: Rising Pink Air. Abstraction has been profoundly connected to music since its inception – from Kandinsky on, it has been standard to conceive of abstraction as visual music, subtly logical and profoundly expressive simultaneously – but DeCredico seems alone and unusual in thinking of the music as specifically operatic. (Bach and jazz have been among the more conventional connections artists have made.) This implies that his works are subliminally narrative, with the narrative ordered, as it were, in terms of personalities. Indeed, we can think of DeCredico’s panels as distinct operatic personages – or rather the arias of such personages. Each uncannily harmonizes through its juxtaposition. The same holds for the surfaces themselves, which usually have one factor – often tonal – which suggests their underlying unity, despite their very obvious differences. Thus, the pervasive grayness of As Turiddu: Dark Diver brings the three parts, with their conspicuous "design" differences, together. Similarly, Mimi, which even involves a geomorphic format in the center panel, holds together not only by reason of the muted tones common to each panel, but by reason of the disguised echoes of the central cruciform in the side panels.

Indeed, so subtle are the tonal and formal relationships that I would argue the bravado of the grand operatic format is a cover for the delicacy of a chamber music sensibility. These abstractions sing more softly and shrewdly than with stentorian pomp and circumstance. We begin to recognize a consistent vocabulary of calligraphic forms and color tonalities – from muted gray or brown to grimly, even gruesomely dark brown (in As Rigoletto: Parts, the brown part is an actual animal pelt: DeCredico frequently and blatantly uses collage elements.) – orchestrated into different "movements," each with its own expressive intimacy and symbolic import, in concrete counterpoint with the others by unifying on a "transcendental" level. For example, As Rigoletto: Parts is a brilliantly dialectical interaction between equally axiomatic instinct and eternity (grossly projecting animal pelt and gently receding geometrical forms). The extremes meet in a turbulent center whose strange instinctive gestures bespeak the dense drivenness of the former and the magisterial staidness of the latter. The over-all effect is of some higher and deeper unity of purpose in each section.

DeCredico’s abstractions often convey their religious sense of purpose by taking triptych form. Indeed, I think they are very much part of that revival of religiosity without doctrinaire religion that is basic to the new spiritualism. It involves, as Daniel Bell says, a psychoexistential conflict between the awareness of death and "the fantasy of omnipotence" that is "the fundamental defense" against it. "They cannot occupy the same psychic space at the same time. And so there is a duel – to the death of submission"(9). I submit that DeCredico’s abstractions articulate the conflict between the "two omnipotences," as Bell calls them – the reality of death and the magical belief in immortality, which reflects wishful, illusory transcendence of it as a process of convergence. Omnipotence is conveyed in the operatic grandeur of the work, and its operatic division in visual arias. (Indeed, each abstract form – even the obviously figural ones – can be read as a kind of musical note.) Many of the gestures and calligraphic swirls have a kind of driven potency, as though furiously articulating the will to omnipotence. At the same time, there is an aura of decay about them – of fading out or, more violently, self-flagellation. They seem as much disintegrative as integrative. The ambiguity of the reading creates an atmosphere of mournfulness, a generalized pathos in which both the reality of death and the possibility of immortality are implicated, as though the reality and the possibility were secretly one.

DeCredico’s new abstractions follow upon his 1990 Requiem works, and utilize many of the same visual leitmotifs. In Requiem: The Absence of Gravity and Requiem: The Diamond Cutter, the triptych shows its religious character explicitly, by reason of the larger size of the central panel, making it stand out in comparison to the side panels. In the new works, the central emphasis – in which, traditionally, a major religious event or figure would appear, leading one to introspective conversion, as it were – is more a matter of perceptual than quantitative differentiation of the central from the side panels. Thus, in Pelléas and Mélisande the spiral and hyperactivity of the central panel clearly differentiate it from the side panels, which seem minor, less dramatic "scenes" in comparison. In As Turiddu: Dark Diver – one has the sense that this work verges on an abstract self-portrait; that is, a portrait of DeCredico’s sense of the transcendental Self – the heroically dark central panel sets it off from the lighter, gray side panels. (It also doubles their size.) In As Rigoletto: Parts the center and left panels compete in vigor, but the central panel is finally more dynamic and complicated, indeed, seems self-complicating. In Mimi the abstract cruciform center clearly separates it from the more calligraphic-gestural shapes of the side panels, even though echoes of these shapes are inscribed in the atmosphere of the central panel. In As Lohengrin: Spiral, Jump, and Glide – DeCredico and Lohengrin (or Rigoletto or Aida, etc.)? – the peculiarly boney, grim geomorphic forms of the gray central panel set it apart from the "lovelier" shapes, and coloration, of the side panels.

The atmosphere in all these works is that of a requiem, but the solemnity is broken by the intense, impacted, peculiarly hermetic abstract iconography of calligraphy / gestures / shapes. A requiem involves not only mourning for a death but also the promise of a resurrection. I suggest DeCredico’s strange forms bespeak both. They are somewhere between both – bespeak both old death and new life. But the agitated, anxiously animated and involuted character of the forms and their congested togetherness imply uncertainty as to whether the new life is eternal: does grotesque death have to be experienced yet again, en masse? Are we immortal because we go through the cycle of death and rebirth – both physical and psychic – endlessly?

DeCredico’s abstractions problematize absolutes, and in general raise more questions than they answer, which may be what the new spirituality is about, the old spirituality having had all the answers before the questions were asked. Similarly, on an aesthetic level, DeCredico has transmuted the old "decorative abstraction," as Gauguin called it, into a new one, in which the decorative is problematized, making it a vehicle for a new sense of the significance of abstraction.

Donald Kuspit


Notes:
(1) D.W. Winnicott, "Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self," The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York, International Universities Press, 1965), pp. 149, 143.
(2) George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp.6, 4.
(3) Morse Peckham, "Metaphor: A Little Plain Speaking on a Weary Subject," The Triumph of Romanticism (Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1970), p. 416.
(4) Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York, Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1961), p. 58.
(5) Elaine King, "A Poetic, Elusive Diary," Alfred DeCredico (Boston, Levinson Kane Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 1990), n.p.
(6) Donald Kuspit, "The Will to Unintelligibility in Modern Art," New Art Examiner, 16 (May 1989): 26-29.
(7) Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body, Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 26.
(8) John E. Gedo, Portraits of the Artist (New York, Guildford Press, 1983), pp. 30-31.
(9) Daniel Bell, "The Return of the Sacred?," The Winding Path (New York, Basic Books, 1980), p.337.


<Back

<Back