HUOT'S
SEARCHING IMAGINATION
The diary paintings unfurl like a torrential jazz riff of
experience, darting and leaping from point to point but
rushing forward in a broad gush of life and energy. They
are a giant record of quotidian and art historical events
plucked and placed within a broad time and space structure
under game rules that evolved from the earliest of what
might be termed scale exercises to the most recent lyrical
explorations.
The
size of these huge canvases ranges from sixty to ninety
feet and provides almost a landscape of painterly design.
They are intended to be displayed in a variety of ways,
as wrap around horizontal environments, or mammoth banners
to be red vertically or floor pieces to be paced off like
an esthetic fairway. In only one case has the scroll design
been abandoned in favor of “leaves” and that
is Number 47, where its twenty-six elements reveal an alphabet
of concerns, touching upon figure drawing, politics, sex
and encyclopedia fascination of a mail order catalogue.
One has the sense of impatience and perhaps even anger as
operating concerns driving the formation of the “pages’
of this particular journal of experience, as Huot comments
upon events. But to appreciate its diversity one should
consider some of the earliest paintings.
One
of the first diaries, Number 3, is a record of paint manipulation
in starker terms. The palette is restricted to black, white,
gold, and dull yellow and the space allotted to each day’s
exploration is ruled strictly with a carpenter’s chalk
line. There are seventeen panels and seventeen encounters,
the last a simple dating. Jars of left over paint stand
at the foot of the canvas like the exhausted tools they
are. The first day is a giant splatter and drip of yellow,
a gesture of heedless necessity. Something had to be done
to get started. Subsequent days find black pigment being
stroked, smeared, spotted and brushed on in a variety of
patterns like a musical rhythm witHuot an accompanying melody.
Toward the end of the first week, a pristine path of gold
is rolled up the canvas with diminishing intensity. On the
seventh, a whimsical impulse finds the artist affixing his
billed cap to the surface whose color links us referentially
to the first day and its devil-make-care scattering of paint.
On until the end though, there is a feeling of necessary
probing, a self-assumed task to greet and work on a certain
expanse of canvas within determined limits. Exploration
predominates rather than resolution, means rather than ends,
a feeling of finger strengthening exercises more than a
freely swinging and open ended development of themes.
The
diaries began in May of 1971 with some canvas rolls that
remained after Huot abandoned stretcher and canvas in 1968
to engage in what he considered “egoless” art.
The works produced in those years were of the most transitory
kind and consisted, to a great extent, of artistic acts
made in public or private spaces that were celebrations
of the particular area. Many of these organizing and illustrative
pieces are no longer in existence and can be experienced
only in documentary photographs. They were commentaries
on the properties of rooms emphasizing characteristic features
with a bit of paint, a row of nails, some phosphorescent
tape or at times judiciously places lights which showed
surface texture through shadow patterns. In all cases they
were not transportable or transaction prone, thus existing
outside of the world of commerce and immediately became
the property of others who lived in or owned the host areas.
They
demonstrated a subservience to the givens of a particular
space, accepting its idiosyncrasies of construction and
attempting to illuminate its character with a great eonomy
of means. The space was to be enhanced and not to be dominated,
to be cherished for what it was and not what one could make
it over into. It reflected an attitude of cultivated passivity
and showed a desire for chance enrichment that dominated
the artist’s thinking during the two and a half years
in which he devoted much energy to film making and the practical
politics of art and artist’s place in the world of
possession and display that uneasily links galleries, museums,
artists and the public.
During
this time the prototype of the diaries began to emerge as
he exposed a hundred feet of film each week, freely taking
those things that caught his attention. The accumulation
of this footage was a pictorial journal that developed within
the strict format of a set amount of film shot during each
seven day period. Again Huot refrained from imposing any
special order on his experience forcing it into any sequence
other than its own suitable time structure. As he had done
with space in the location pieces, taking the given ground
for what it was, where it was; he now did with time, accepting
experience as it transpired and simply recording it. Like
a period of meditation, it refreshed his approach to the
more traditional painterly means.
Looking
at the earlier diaries, Number 10 is the first to show all
of the elements which would be orchestrated in the series.
For the first time there were combined writing, dating,
splashing and sprinkling of glitter dust on the surface.
The writing which at times conforms to elaborate spirals
or loop formations is frequently difficult to read but always
records something of the artist’s concerns whether
painterly or personal. At other times it is as straight-forward
as a copybook exercise. The addition of glitter dust has
a kind of funky glamour, almost in a theatrical sense of
performance costuming.
Emerging
from the series of paintings however there is an overriding
concern with the craft of painting and restless quoting
from various contemporary styles. A female nude at one time
has a picassoid look and at another moment is rendered to
remind us of de Kooning’s motor drive. Clyfford Still’s
flickering brush is suggested as is the precision of a Mondrain
grid in other places. ThrougHuot his career, Huot has evolved
from one mode of expression to another driven by a dissatisfaction
with set solutions and forcing himself to seek new resolutions
regarding the problems of structure and improvisation.
In
Number 41 there is a giant countdown of numbers leading
to a blast off image of a rocket about to lift from its
pad. On the way down one notices the “9” woven
out of a line that is reminiscent of Pollock and later on
the “5” carries a witty observation to the Jackson
Five, a rock group to be sure, but also Pollock’s
first name. The use of the cartoon as a simplified and exaggerated
drawing tool reveals an essay at lively draughtmanship in
a way divorced from lyrical color and its judicious use,
though one is made aware of a steadily brightening palette.
The
diaries are a record of speed dominated by time and a searching
imagination probing daily events, personal concerns and
art history for pictorial sense. The present works stand
as milestones of a continual concern with formal structure
and spontaneous gesture. In the past the field has often
functioned as a passive object onto which was cast the rapid
action of very brushy energy. Then again the field has been
a broad dominant entity upon which keenly plotted and hard
edged form has made a discreet but bold imprint. The play
of the gesture and structure has been the esthetic tug-of-war
that was at one time resolved by the creation of huge grid
founded paintings and at another earlier time by the speedy
slashing of expressionist color with less formal underpinning.
A
selection of earlier work, all of an infinitely smaller
scale, provides a survey of past solutions. Starting with
an early college, there is a concern with texture, in this
case burlap, newspaper, paper with a unifying gesture of
black ink that has developed into the use of the surface
in a sculptured fashion. In one later, notable example the
painterly blue field exists as a background for a built
up wooden cross rising from the surface in ascending steps
like determined miniature staircases. At times the energy
of the gesture has been stilled into hard edged forms which
exert a bulky grace and overall there is a feeling of large
scale. Humorous touches appear as subtly different colors
or shapes confront one another and toy with the viewer’s
perception. But these are abstract witticisms compared to
the lusty laughter one derives from the diaries where personality
is allowed its raw sway. The activity of human encounter
has burst from its cool confinement.
It
was inevitable, given the format of the works that one,
Number 48, would include the inscription “Dear diary
I’ve got a confession to make..” It is also
ironically enough an entry which is penned at the conclusion
of the series rather than at the beginning. Under the original
rules, the entries were made for a specified time period
and in this one there is a feeling of a New Year’s
party toasting the end of one time and the beginning of
another. The colors are bright, the shapes are whimsical
and the explosiveness of celebration bursts out of the canvas.
The work continues the resume of styles that is one of the
features of the collection but also points to the joining
of drawing and painting again which is one of the deep motifs
of the series.
Subsequent
paintings use the large format but are not a record of daily
experience and the first of the new begins with loosely
interpreted anatomical drawings selected from a medical
text but rendered in black line. Luscious areas of paint
are applied touching on or supporting the drawings and the
synthesis of color and line begins again. The structure
and the painterly gesture edge up independently to one another’s
borders, each having declared its independence and now will
continue their discourse on the expanded plain of these
great scrolls. Like those giant banners that decorated medieval
halls announcing the rank and pedigree of the bearer, these
mammoth strips attest to the risk, the accomplishment and
the history of their evolving.
Don
McDonagh
Don
McDonagh wrote an art chronicle to the “Financial
Times” of London for five year. He is currently dance
critic for the New York Times.
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