The Art of Charles Clough
Carter Ratcliff
Catalog Essay from the exhibition: Charles Clough at the Roland Gibson
Gallery, Potsdam College
of the State of New York (by the author’s permission)
1 March—14 April 1991
(Carter Ratcliff writes art criticism for Art in America and many other
journals as well as having written many monographs on artists.)
In the paintings of Charles Clough, colors sometimes form puddles. Sometimes
they thin out. Feathering themselves to atmospheric thinness, they let
other colors show through. Clough’s paintings are dramatic. Each
has the atmosphere of an occasion where much has happened, or is happening
now, as if one’s looking had the power to animate what one sees.
A streak of hot orange or dark, smoldering maroonish brown rushes over
the surface. Red turns on itself, luxuriantly. A bright green patch glows.
Nearby, colors are not so easily named, for they have met in slippery
collision and intermingled. Clough is a painterly painter. He has lived
and worked and shown his work in New York since the late 1970s. So he
counts as a descendent of the action painters who sent tides of agitated
paint through Manhattan galleries during the 1950s—Willem de Kooning,
Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell and many more. In these revivalist times, it
is necessary to point out that Clough offers no nostalgic homage to his
forbears. He has reinvented action painting twice, once in the late 1970s
and again in 1985. The second reinvention produced all but the earliest
work in this show. His art is careening forward, yet Clough has not lost
his stylistic origins. The eye that finds action paintings legible knows
how to read the works on view here. During the 1950s, paint agitated by
the action painter’s gesture was read as an index to feelings. Viewers
recognized this seismography of the emotions as a fiction. They understood
that, as de Kooning slashed at the canvas with his brush, he was as deliberate
in his way as a compulsively neat geometer like Piet Mondrian. Action
painting’s audience had a flair for the irony of pictorial abandon
carefully regulated. The style puts liberty and order in a tense relationship.
Clough’s images give of the same tension. This is invigorating but
doesn’t feel entirely familiar. One can, if one likes, find in each
of his paintings a solid pictorial architecture. Yet there is a slipping,
sliding, contingent quality to to the structures that enforce order in
Clough’s images. By contrast, signs of his spontaneity have a quirky
orderliness, an impersonality. When the job is to convey the painter’s
idiosyncratic sensibility, a brush is the standard tool. Clough doesn’t
use one. He paints with an instrument he has dubbed the big finger. There
are several of these fingers, small ones for small works, large ones for
large. Even the smallest count as big, because it is larger than the artist’s
own. Clough makes these devices by fastening a disk to the end of a stick
or a long pole. Padded, the disk is gently convex—like a finger
tip. Clough has written that “the last time I earnestly used a brush
for making paintings was in high school.” In recent conversation
he praised “the mops and squeegees and other alternatives to brushes
that painters found during the 1960s. I see the big finger as continuing
that kind of experimentation.” Now and then, Clough gets ideas for
other painting tools. “The big finger is my basic instrument—my
equivalent to the violin—so naturally I think of equivalents to
the other instruments in the orchestra,” he says. “But I haven’t
invented them yet. I am too involved in using the instruments I already
have.” One understands this involvement. Clough’s painterly
performances are virtuosic. From the eye’s pleasure in swimming
through the textures of his paintings one learns how much pleasure, how
much unalloyed fun, Clough must have as he works. Every time this painting
instrument touches the surface, he must be prepared for a shock of delight—or
of disappointment, though that is not an especially troubling possibility.
A promising but unrealized effect can often be set right with another
touch of the big finger. “The tools are the rules,” he says,
meaning that the fingers, big and not so big, define the working procedures.
As Clough points out, “The shapes that can be made with the tools
are the shapes that get made. My instruments generate a grammar of usage,
all the various smears and airy effects you see in my work. I play with
the tools and keep the results I like.” Sometimes a piece that appeared
to be finished receives more paint months or years later. This is not
reworking. It is more like the resumption of interrupted play. Paintings
completed after an interval look as unlabored as the ones he finished
in a single session. Clough’s paintings all look fresh, uncannily
so. He can rely on a spontaneity of touch, because his instrument’s
limitations render it innocent of those doubts that can make a painter’s
brush turn awkward. His work gives him the look of something he could
not possibly be: a painterly painter utterly without performance anxieties.
At their most archly mannered, ‘50s action paintings still offered
themselves as personal testaments. When European neo-expressionism invaded
the Manhattan galleries in the early 1980s, New Yorkers saw its anguished
images of the human figure as surrogates for the artists who had painted
them. Messy paint signals intense self-regard. Not, however, in Clough’s
case. He uses messy paint to slip free of individuality’s grip.
The touch that shapes his imagery is characteristically Cloughian, but
it doesn’t assert his presence, or not insistently, because literally
speaking that touch is not his. It is the touch of the big finger. With
his painting tools, Clough puts a measurable distance between himself
and his works. Metaphorically, he opens a gap between his intentions and
his imagery. Through this
opening, a universe of meanings enters his art. Clough’s paintings
suggest landscapes and skyscapes, clouds and turbulent mist. They suggest
leaves of leaf meal, foliage fallen and mulched by rough weather—see
in particular, Neutrino (1989). Elsewhere, he gives his color the placid,
tender brilliance of spring. A striated smudge with the luster of a translucent
mineral might, with another glance, glow like a petal. June Eighteenth
(1987-89) evokes a volcano at night, March Eighth (1986-88) a foaming
cataract—effects too orgasmic to be stable. Forms erupting with
phallic energy also can seem penetrable, engulfing, vaginal. In Will (1989)
clustered swirls of color present a face with two eyes and a baboonish
nose. Having sailed into isolation, a swirl like this looks galactic—see
Osculent (1989-90). Yet one can still see a face here. Clough’s
imagery encourages the eye to be inventive, not cautiously but recklessly,
even willfully. As allusions proliferate, they stir up memories of earlier
styles. Color flows through Fan the Sickle (1990) in arcs and billows
as theatrical as in any Baroque paintings on 17th-century ceilings. June
Seventh (1985-89) glows like the clouds, drenched with Venetian sunlight,
where Tiepolo set afloat his allegorical subjects. When Clough’s
paints get thick and his colors turn dense, one remembers European expressionists,
especially the painters of Die Brucke, with their penchant for lurid purples
and reds. Reminders of Joan Mitchell, Alfred Leslie, and other action
painters flicker through Clough’s canvases. So do recollections,
probably unintended, to painterly painters of the late 1960s and early
‘70s known as Lyrical Abstractionists. Pictorial incident as lush
as Clough’s makes it impossible to say precisely what the artists
intends. This is not a difficulty. The artist invites the imagination
to wheel freely through these images, finding whatever it can find, making
the image its own.
Nearly everything to be glimpsed in Clough’s paintings—from
hints of feathers of space dust to what may be oblique references to the
action painter Norman Bluhm—looks flat. Meanings shift insistently,
and at times Clough’s color looks like sheer paint—matter
unburdened by image, though vulnerable to the imagination. One can choose
to see Clough’s paintings as pure (but never simple) abstractions.
After all, he never pictures anything except, on occasion, space and light,
the premises of everything else that is visible. A word like “cloud”
or “eye” migrates freely through Clough’s oeuvre, easily
attracted to flurries of color, which just as easily let the word go.
Meaning has this instability at the beginning of life, when all is new.
* * *
To be born and become conscious of the world is not merely to learn a
skill. It is to grasp meanings. To make sense of things—at least,
is to make them what they are for oneself. I don’t deny the biological
givens, the social and cultural patterns, that shape our experience. An
infant doesn’t invoke meaning from the void, like god in Genesis—though,
according to painters like Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, that is
what the right sort of artist does. If we set aside their hyperbole, we
should also dismiss the equally hyperbolic notion that factors beyond
our control shape our experience completely. The imagination is not god-like,
nor is it helpless, To grasp a meaning is to give a meaning, to endow
something with significance. This is exciting. When one is young the experience
of even the most ordinary thing—say, a material like sand or mud—is
sometimes amazingly vivid. One seems to make it up as one goes along.
The immediacies of Clough’s art recall the primordial time when
it seemed as if the self and the world were one’s own to make. Dabbing
and smearing with his “crayon-box” colors, as he calls them,
Clough places his images on the border between articulation and chaos.
His art is determinedly indeterminate. This is the quality that he disliked
in Abstract Expressionist paintings when he first saw them, as a school
child, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, where he
spent his youth. “I was suspicious of abstract painting when I first
saw it,” says Clough. “It seemed easy, something I could do
without trying. On the other hand, the museum surroundings announced that
these paintings were important. I didn’t get it.” He liked
illustrations of people doing things. These images were interesting and
they showed evidence of a comprehensible skill. He liked even better the
minerals, the flora and fauna, guns and other mechanisms on display at
Buffalo’s history and science museums. It is easy for me to imagine
Clough as a super-bright kid on field trips to those places, fascinated
by technology and information about the past. To master all that would
be to arrive at maturity. He was eager to growup.
When he did and it was time to put away childish things, he hesitated,
or so I believe. He must have remembered the world’s power to entrance.
With recollections like these came primordial qualities of feeling the
now seemed regressive. Yet Clough was reluctant to abandon them. Detained
by the past, he took none of the usual paths to the future. He became
an artist. After school at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and Toronto’s
Ontario College of Art, Clough returned to Buffalo. During the mid 1970s,
he founded an alternative space in the city called Hallwalls. Among the
artists that coalesced around Hallwalls were Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman.
Their shared obsession was the aura of untouchability that photographs,
movies and television impose on their subjects. Giving this effect of
removal the name of “distance,” they dedicated their art to
mimicking it in what they hoped was a revelatory way. From experiments
with distance came Sherman’s photos of herself in B-movie roles—make
believe film stills, which argue that public identity is exterior to the
self, an artifice produced by image manipulation. Comandeering iconic
impulses and large scale from the first post-war generation of American
painters, Longo put these heroic devices to work in gorgeous and emotionally
withdrawn paintings, sculptures and performance pieces. Barnett Newman
had said, in 1948, “The sublime is now.” Three decades latter,
Longo sought the sublime in the vast, uninhabitable zones of artificial
temporality, of non-time, generated by the media. It was the Hallwalls
ambition to reveal the mechanisms that fill our culture with estranged
imagery. Or, as Clough has said, “figuring out how an image works
seemed like something fun to do.” During these years, he made art
by mixing photography and painting. Understanding each medium as a challenge
to the other’s premises, Clough looked for ways to reconcile their
differences. He played abstraction off against recognizable images, usually
of eyes, genitals, fingers, toes—body parts that make highly charged
contact with the world and with other bodies. By the early 1980s Clough
had settled in New York and been spotted as a lively presence in a lively
time. Tearing color reproductions of paintings from books and magazines,
he painted them with his fingers until the image disappeared beneath elegantly
smeared pigment. This was his first reinvention
of action painting. “I bring the image up close and touch it,”
Clough explained in 1982. “Then I
photograph it, so it becomes untouchable, it goes back into the distance.
Next, I touch it again, paint over it. And if the work gets reproduced,
it of course has to be photographed all over again. So I see myself as
showing the touch and denying the touch. This idea of cover and recover.
It ends up with the skinniness of the photograph. I like that.”
Then, suddenly, he didn’t like it. Having become media-wise, he
was playing with replication and displacement and other tactics that force
images into the distance, as the Hallwalls scenario had demanded. He was
illuminating the fear that, by mediating our experience, the media numb
us. Criticism of Clough’s critique were favorable. Still, I believe,
he felt that he had estanged himself from the impulses that led him to
become an artist. Though finger painting kept these primordial impulses
alive, his analytical maneuvers entangled them in irony. He had distanced
them. He wanted to bring them close and keep them there. If impersonality
is an artist’s problem, an absolutely personal style is the obvious
solution—obvious but not available. In even the most personal style,
much is conventional. Much is culturally conditioned. Only in a daze induced
by an ideal of pure subjectivity can an artist hope to make thoroughly
personal art. This was clear to Clough, a Hallwalls veteran who had come
to terms with Pop Art while still at school. He had long known that the
choice is not between personal and impersonal art, but between kinds and
degrees of impersonality. Though fingerpainting was satisfyingly uninhibited,
he had contained its energies in tight patterns of production and reproduction.
He had regulated the image by analyzing it. Then, in early 1985, he invented
the big finger and reinvented action painting a second time. His art was
no longer cool and detached. Clough had found a hot, immediate kind of
impersonality. By displacing touch from his fingers to the tip of his
new instrument, he put the painting process at a distance. Yet the big
finger also kept him in immediate, sensual contact with the painted surface.
This tool pointed the way past Clough’s media-critiques in the early
‘80s manner, past ironies about expressionist sincerity, past the
traditional face-off between self and world. It led him to that region
of memory where self and world are in flux. Meanings are provisional.
Behavior is uninhibited.
Many have noted that messing about with paint is in some ways an infantile
activity. It recalls the days when one’s excretions were as fascinating
as anything in the world. As adults discourage fascinations like these,
the child’s attention begins to take approved paths. Acquiring a
language, one learns to give things their usual names and to understand
them in ways the world has already made familiar. Meanings stabilize and
one forgets that learning about the world and language—and images—once
felt like inventing these things for oneself. Clough’s brilliantly
unstable images revive the excitement of that time, when the self is not
yet entirely formed. Thus his revamped action painting, though recognizably
Cloughian, has a peculiarly selfless quality. Borrowing a phrase from
D.W. Winnicott, Clough calls the painting a transitional object—a
seemingly magical presence standing at the border between the early self
and the exterior world, mediating their relations. I don’t mean
that Clough appeals to magic. No alumnus of Hallwalls would do that. He
understands that any return to the past is symbolic, and that symbols
must employ conventions if they are to be legible. Yet he insists that
legibility not be confining, for image or viewer. Provocative and elusive,
Clough’s images remind us of the way it was, early on, to have fluid
boundaries, a sense that reality is a work in progress, and no idea of
the distinctions between work and play. Feeling that the sovereignty of
their imaginations is boundless, young children are grandiose and often
aggressive—traits that we neither outgrow nor willingly recognize
in ourselves. Clough gives them the run of his art. His paintings seethe
with infantile violence. Because it discharges itself through the play
of symbols, this violence cannot be hurtful. Its energies transformed
by art, it becomes an extravagant pleasure. This transformation prompts
Clough to wonder if painting is able, as he puts it, to “save the
world.” In his most optimistic moods, he concludes that it can,
or at least the experience of art could “subvert aggression.”
These hopes assign his art a purpose: to transpose into an esthetic mode
the grandiose acts of imagination that, in childhood and too often in
our adult lives, are at best indifferent and at worst cruel to others.
I suspect that Clough reflects on the large purposes of art only when
his feelings have withdrawn a bit from the act of painting. As those pleasures
ebb, he feels the need to give his playfulness a point in the adult world.
Yet, when Clough returns to painting, his interest in finding a rationale
for art must give way to his delight in wielding the big finger. Then
it is not his analytical sobriety that redeems play, but his play that
redeems the adult mind we all possess—the grown-up mentality built
from patterns of thought and feeling to rigid for anything but work. Henry
David Thoreau wrote in his journal for 1851 that a day’s work turned
his “very brain into a mere tool.” Technological innovation
requires complaints like this to be updated regularly. The Hallwalls artists
understood that, in our era, images generated by the mechanisms of the
media can deplete self as effectively as traditional machinery once did
and still does. Early in his career, Clough had reason to be suspicious
of mediums and tools. With analytical finesse, he played painting off
against photography. The invention of the big finger signaled the sudden
end of his suspicions, his realization that, with the right sort of tool,
work becomes play. A tool’s effect need not be oppressive. It can
liberate, and so can its products, especially if they are works of art.
Notes. The artist’s comments on the work of the early 1980s, which employs fingerpainting and photography, are from an interview with the author, which was published in Art in America, December 1982. The artist’s comments on his recent work and his childhood were made in conversations with the author, which were held in January and February 1991, and in a letter to the author, written on January 24, 1991.
