HUOT'S
DANCE
Robert Huot’s Diaries are a heady mix of visual high
jinks, exquisite painting, and confession. Painting between
1971 and 1975, they are cinematic in their enormity and
utterly unconventional in appearance. It may seem at first
glance that the differences between the rambunctious energy
and emotional searching of the Diaries, and the austere
formalism of Huot’s mid 1960’s paintings of
the intellectuality of his late1960’s conceptual pieces,
are unbridgeable. They aren’t. If Mondrian’s
paintings can be described as harnessed chaos, then Huot’s
liberated, if self-conscious, dance through miles of cotton
duck and paper can be seen as the unharnessing of the reticence,
caution and intellectuality of earlier years.
The
Diaries are painted, drawn and written upon; covered with
glitter, paint, and fabrics. Their rhythm is alternately
fluid and compulsive, sequential and halting. The white
ground, the original tabula rasa, is the constant place
(one might call it the unformed persona) upon which marks,
the materials and emotions were daily committed. The paintings,
are sometimes elegant, sometimes ungainly, simultaneously
sophisticated and childlike. They are alternately easy to
understand and obscure. For example, Diary #48 (February-March,
1975) opens gloomily with: “The Ides of March and
Famoustius. I’ve been feeling very sorry for myself
and somewhat fucked over.” And then gorgeous dancing
numbers, words, and images sprawl over yards of canvas,
simply drawn heads of cows serenely overlap; stars, a red
heart and green glitter tumble after one another; and around
the red Valentine’s Day heart, unexpected and ironical
words announce a show of his work at Colgate University
and the decree of his divorce. The mood switches and we
are off and running down an emotional and painterly runway.
Issues
of both personal and art historical significance coalesce
in these paintings, for their unwieldiness and visual irreverence
bespeak both Huot’s evolution out of his own and other’s
styles, and his disenchantment with contemporary art and
art politics. When Huot made his first Diary films in 1970,
the rhetoric and publicity of the New York vanguard art
was unusually diffuse. No longer did pop, hard edge abstraction
and conceptual art appear insuperable. For one thing, there
was a noticeable revival of painterly abstraction. But more
striking, realists of all variety proliferated (encourages
undoubtedly by 22 Realists show at Whitney in the spring
of 1970); and video art was an ever more lively presence.
Together they seemed to represent an alternative esthetic
to abstraction, one concerned with photographic reality,
narrative and the mundane. Critical acclaim; Johns, Warhol,
Stella, Olitski, Judd, Morris and Smithson won the usual
plaudits. What seemed clear, though, was that in the midst
of an emerging downtown art locale in SoHo and apparently
vigorous activity uptown, the vanguard “art scene”
was going a little bit out of focus.
In
addition to stylistic uncertainties in 1970, artists were
socially and politically uneasy. Women artists were becoming
more vocal in their demands for equal representation. And
through the Art Worker’s Coalition, which Huot helped
found in 1968, artists organized to gain more control over
the treatment of their work in museums, galleries, and magazines.
Huot’s
dissatisfaction with the art scene was not the result of
any lack of success. He had four one-man shows at Stephen
Radich (uptown at 68th and Madison) between 1964 and 1966,
and had appeared in 16 group shows between 1964 and 1969.
He had also been among the first to exhibit in SoHo (at
Paula Cooper; in fact Huot and Lucy Lippard organized her
opening show in ’68 which was a benefit for the anti-war
movement.) And the work he was doing was beautiful –
minimal and then conceptual art of extraordinary quality.
As I see it, however, his simultaneous involvement in 1968
with the Art Workers’ Coalition and the Cooper’s
SoHo gallery indicated a disenchantment with his vanguard
experience, particularly in its more political ramifications.
In
1970 he moved to his farm in upper New York State, turning
his back on New York’s authority and its prevailing
esthetic judgments. In January 1970 he made his first Diary
films and March 1971, his first Diary paintings. They mark,
then, a conscious break with his own art and life style
in New York City, but they also coincide with a contemporary
artistic restlessness with vanguard values and politics.
Huot like the video artists and realists (albeit in very
different ways) was thumbing his nose at vanguardism.
The
sheer size and uncontainable bluster of the Diaries announce
their esthetic independence. Their jarring juxtapositions
of high- and low-culture vocabularies, and artistic and
anti-artistic elements overtly challenge high art values.
In Diary #47 (January 1975), for example, images include
pop brown-and-white cake-icing abstraction (#3), glitter
and baby pink paint with the words “There’s
a new girl_____Milkowshi,” (#20, commemorating the
birth of artists Tony Milkowski’s and Susan Hartung’s
daughter,) bathroom reading hung from a string (#39) as
well as the beautiful, happily colored and witty “Corn
stubble in a red field thru my legs” (#4), the decorative
Matisse-like doodles in “el Marko” (#16), the
elegant but voluptuously curving 6’s (#6). Handwriting
in this Diary often resembles graffiti, and drawings sometimes
look like a child’s scribble. As frequently, however,
paint and other materials are carefully and precisely applied.
An endless dialogue reverberates between “junk”
and art, household familiars and museum objects.
Huot’s
equating of high and low art, as well as his coupling of
apparently disparate activity in general, is an intrinsic
part of his personality and deeply rootly in this past.
In the 1950’s he was as compelled by Ernie Kovacs
as he was by Joe McCarthy. And as a teen-ager, Petty and
Vargas Girl drawings in Esquire and reproductions of Michelangelo
fascinated him equally. He found both erotic. Such experiences
radicalized him, for they unwittingly precluded between
life and art. He just compounded them. Similarly, when he
was an undergraduate (at Wagner College in Staten Island)
he both majored in chemistry and painted in the “art
room.” And when he graduated from college (1957),
he got a job as a chemist and continued painting. In the
army (1958-60) he also painted. He didn’t feel conflicted
during those years, he was just doing different things.
Even
more damning to a vanguard public than his indifference
to cultural separatisms, is Huot’s denial of contemporary
standards of simplicity and emotional unity. “I want
the works to be non-relational,” he says, “i.e.
today’s entry is as uninfluenced by yesterday as possible.”
In fact, the paintings can be convincingly described as
both controlled and spontaneous, cerebral and instinctive.
Or, one could push these traditional polarities further
and call them masculine and feminine. Take Diary #28 (June,
1973), for example. Unpredictable explosions of color, stained
and splattered upon the surface alternate with carefully
drawn, even geometric forms. Rhythms of retention and release
are in tandem, as are vascillating mood tones. This Diary
is both self-consciously art historical (i.e. “cerebral”)
– strains of Kline, De Kooning and Henery Moore are
clear – and terrifically high-pitched emotionally.
Indeed
Huot himself, with this long hair, his obvious awareness
and delight in his body, his emotionalism, (so-called female
qualities, but seen as “failings” when expressed
by men), seems to be looking for the female in himself.
Or, to put it another way, he wants to loosen up the interior
male controls; he wants to feel freer to be many and contradictory
things. Undoubtedly the heightened consciousness that the
women’s movement provided reinforced these inclinations
in him. In1974 he made a somewhat feminist film called The
Beautiful Movie (3 minutes). In technicolor elliptical frames,
a nude woman seated in bed lovingly combs her long hair.
That image dissolves and a big, broad, hairy-chested man
briefly comes into focus. He also sits in bed and combs
his long hair. (If the film is not convincingly feminist
in tone, it is because there is something aggressive about
the man’s gentleness, as if he had to assert it in
order for it to happen at all.)
Huot’s
indifference to the esthetic (and sometimes practical) requirements
of the New York galleries and the market place also betrays
itself in the very format of his Diaries. Their size, discontinuity
and theatricality deter people. For his purposes however,
the format is perfect: the enormous scroll is inherently
mobile (the opposite of the objectified and necessarily
frozen single-painting format), emotionally varied and unpredictable.
They’re movies, murals and daily chronicles rolled
up into one. They are enthusiastic, theatrical and fun.
In fact, theatrically and play are basic elements of Huot’s
personality (and one can see this even in his minimal works.)
Writing about himself in 1974 he remembered that “the
first ‘real’ art event I participated in was
a costume maker, choreographer and performer. Bob Morris
and I did a piece called “War” at Judson Church
in early 1963.” Huot is a man who loves to dance,
who plays the trap drums and who throws five-day parties.
For him, art is life and vice versa, and both are fantastic!
As
Huot reports, rejoices and recoils in the presence of his
daily activity, committing these responses to his Diaries,
he also comments upon his conceptual art. His paintings
are not addressed to 57th street and SoHo audiences, for
they are not insistenly vanguard and elitist. I am reminded
here of Allan Kaprow’s work since the late 1950’s.
More than anything else, the Happening (like a Huot Diary)
is meant to be a shared human experience. One can’t
tell a Happening (although one certainly can be paid to
do one,) and anybody ostensibly can take part in one. For
almost 20 years Kaprow has been saying, “No,”
to the art establishment and its rigors. So now is Huot.
Perhaps
it is appropriate that Huot teaches at Hunter College whose
very building at 68th street and Park Avenue is the polar
opposite of SoHo chic. Like everything else that is public
in New York, it is overused, poorly cared for, and a leveling
experience. At Hunter, Open Admissions has created a new
breed of students who are practical, materialistic, openly
emotional and aggressive. No matter how much they are upwardly
mobile, their curiosity grows from their particular class
sensibility and experience. They are as compelling and intelligent
as any people one would want to meet, but they are also
like screeching subway trains scrawled with graffiti –
like Huot’s Diaries.
Last
summer I gave a number of my artist friends a favorite book
of mine to read – John Berger’s Way of Seeing
(New York, 1973). Eschewing questions of style, Berger asks
instead what is art’s function and how are its contents
related to our daily lives? Unlike most of my friends who
hates the book, undoubtedly feeling that it had robbed thm
of their specialness and power, Huot liked it enormously.
Because he is less attracted to the conventional roles of
the art and artist, he is potentially dangerous to the art
establishment. But he is positively delightful to an unpretentious,
pleasure-seeking audience. His paintings couldn’t
be friendlier, more accessible or human. And they are there
for everyone to enjoy!
Eunice
Lipton
Eunice
Lipton is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Hunter
College with a particular interest in the social and political
context of art in modern times. She has published articles
and reviews in “Artforum, Art in America” and
“The Fox.” |
