Ralph Humphrey, Great Jones, 1989. Casein on canvas, wood, 42×52”. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

Ralph Humphrey asked me about 10 times what I thought of his last show. I said something different each time he asked. My characterization of the paintings as Protestant Philip Gustons amused him the most. I think I was referring, in a short-hand fashion, to a combination of the blunt and poetic in the same painting which Guston and Humphrey’s work share. The Protestant relates to the plain American, almost Hopperesque mise-en-scène situation. But rather than the sense of something which has already happened, as in the Guston KKK paintings, or the sense that something may occur, as in Hopper, Humphrey’s paintings themselves are virtual.

I met Ralph Humphrey when I was 19, and I knew him until his death in 1990. From the beginning, Ralph’s work was individualistic. It did not adhere to the reigning dogmas but reflected his particular way of seeing. It withstood separately at a time (the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—Minimalism, Greenbergian formalism) when the pressure to forge a consensus exerted enormous power in the art world. His paintings, often outward-projecting and object-like, operated in a complex way—the more they shared (invaded) the viewer’s space, the greater was the role of their illusionism. Ralph’s art never eliminated the tentative, emotive or idiosyncratic. He followed his own natural poieses: he felt his way through.

The paintings in his show in March 1990 were his last completed works. The shapes in the paintings, painted, cut and pasted on have personas, are individual, have constrained poignancy. Often in the isolation of each shape a restive bleakness is apparent.

These shapes are not figural to me yet I identify with them. Apprehending them and their fugitive movements enables me to sense my connection to a living organism which is not I, to that part of the world and perhaps even the universe which is isolated yet related to the rest, as I am. All the paintings but one from this show take their titles from SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels on the upper west side where Ralph had lived in the 1960s and are also, except for that one, the same titles he used for a group of his paintings in the ‘60s. Great Jones, after Bill Jones, is the exception. Those hotels had long been demolished by the time Ralph titled his paintings for his 1990 show. Bill Jones was dead.

What is left of one’s past when it’s physically gone? Had all those people who had lived on the edge (of society) disappeared? Is shelter impossible? Was the significance of these transient shelters dual in that they performed a temporary task and then disappeared?

I think the paintings are about the transience of the physical world, even when it is their own substance: their object-like quality diminishes as one looks at them. More than most paintings they change as one looks at them. What had appeared as visually static and absorbent begins to oscillate; a pulsating flicker caused by a slight chromatic transposition occurs where the shapes meet the ground. As the dynamic aspect of the painting affects one’s perception, the shapes seem to dissolve. In a constant alternating interplay, seeming certainty is relinquished by the most concrete elements as the rest becomes activated, the paintings take on depth. Through color—glowing color, saturated yet crepuscular color—these paintings assert their vitality.

Through color the paintings operate simultaneously as illusionistic and inverse illusion, moving towards the viewer and returning to their own boundaries. As followed by our gaze, color acts as the amplification of our motor being. During the long gaze the material nature of these acutely scaled paintings fades almost completely as the penumbral color activates a response to depth and its limits. Not to that of the space around one but to the limits of depth within oneself through one’s body. From the painting to the eye we know it must be but it feels like it touches the inside of the body first.

When Ralph died I became conscious of everything I might have asked him and hadn’t. I had taken for granted that the ideas behind the work of the people I knew would reveal themselves over time, without my directly inquiring; there is no substitute for an understanding gained during the course of seeing work and the subsequent spontaneous attenuated exchanges which have no purpose outside of themselves. But after Ralph’s death it began to seem possible that the thoughts of the artists I knew, what those artists regarded as their motivating forces, might remain unknown to me if I didn’t ask about them specifically even though direct examination risks changing the thing examined. I am now more inclined toward the notion that an artist’s verbal communication may bring the outsider closer to the meaning of that artist’s work. Connected to this is my belief (which forms the basis for some of my questioning) that how people live—their politics, how they have accepted or rejected their own backgrounds—has an effect on the art they make.

My natural inclination is toward apprehending work sensually; toward art which is optically complex; toward art which is generous, inclusive, not worked over toward a signature style, towards artists who have more ideas than they know what to do with; towards vision, not the adjustments thereof; and an art which goes all over the place, sometimes literally.

I have resisted the Modernist authoritarian canon, which is essentially a stylistic approach requiring a compositional a priori, and its tacit insistence on oneness. I am interested in heterogeneity rather than formal unity; in allowing a painting distinctive and particular parts, permitting the varying operations of those differing parts to retain individual character and qualities. There isn’t a hierarchy within the painting. The mode of apprehension which follows is one in which the viewer puts the painting together herself. There is no agreed on “ideal” interpretation. Hierarchies in other areas have seemed equally misguided to me.

The artists I’ve questioned here are at different levels of development and exposure. During the past year and a half I have learned and borrowed from all of them. Although they communicate with varying degrees of fluidity, acuity, and success, all have a steadfast resistance to being cast into systems of speaking about their work, to jargon.

All speak about their work in ways which are reflective of their work, using words as ways of communicating about what they believe they’ve made. The realm of ideas isn’t utilized as conspicuous display, nor are concepts advanced for the sake of invidious comparison.

Though these people were familiar to me, the underlying ideas behind their work and their motivating forces for making work were frequently surprising.

Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Leonard Bullock from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Craig Fisher from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Louise Fishman from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Dona Nelson from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Carl Ostendarp from this issue. Click here to read Cora Cohen’s interview with Saul Ostrow from this issue.

 

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John Zinsser I was looking at a lot of painting in college and then I decided to make paintings.

Cora Cohen What about those people? I mean, your interest in Larry Poons, Jules Olitski?

JZ I was aware of the Poons dots, and not much else; my training was art historical. I wanted to know where paintings came from culturally. From the paintings, I became aware of the painters, and I became interested in Poons’ story biographically. For my own work, the models I held up for myself were Jonathan Lasker, David Reed, and Ross Bleckner—resolutely abstract painters (c. 1987). I have no agenda for looking at a particular group, (as Philip Taaffe has). Stylistic affinity is beside the point. I had been taught art history as a series of repudiation movements: Pop was a repudiation of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism had its place as a repudiation movement, Poons and Olitski were taught as a bizarre cul-de-sac.

I gained direction from Gail Fitzgerald to whom I felt close in attitude and Carl Ostendarp, whose work I felt was an interesting counterpart to mine.

Having developed rules—to make all-over fields, or grounds where the ground works as a thing in itself, not a figure on the top of the ground—I embraced materials and process as a way of finding a specific personal imagery.

I wanted it readable to the eye—having the making of the painting somehow describe the content of the painting.

 

John Zinsser, Fear of Black Butterflies, 1991. Oil on canvas, 60×84”. Photo: Ken Showell. Courtesy Julian Pretto Gallery.

CC What about the content?

JZ I gave myself a vehicle I could work with for a number of years without any one painting being the single statement—that way I can have a velocity and freedom without having to overtly describe what it is in each painting. I want to have the literal matter of the painting also be the subject matter of the painting.

CC Aren’t the titles a bit cute: Hot Cockles, Spot the Winner?

JZ I see titles as a way for the viewer to get into the painting. I want a little bit of spin, something goofy. A lot of times the titles already exist in the popular culture realm; I hope abstract painting does not have to be excluded from that. I would enjoy titling no matter what endeavor I was involved in.