Chance & Choice
Charles Clough
1988

I affirm the Aristotelian view of art as catharsis: that art provides a symbolic screen for psychological
projection. Art is simultaneously “purposeless” and socially useful through its emancipation of the
imagination and its transformation of cruelty into symbol. Art offers the utopian moment—a sublime
location for our terrific will.
***
My subject is a web of metaphysical categories including:
1. Unity: wholeness, integrity, fragmentation, connectedness and cosmic parameters.
2. Identity: similarities and differences, sums of distinguishing characteristics,units of consciousness
and processes of projection, introjection and transference.
3. Freedom: the fixed limits of nature, the shifting limits of society, the free exchange of ideas and the
boundless imagination.
4. Creation: the process of nature as a metaphor for thought and action and the correlation of form and
content to establish the symbolic realm.
5. Truth: the limits of nature, the nature of belief and the interpretation of the ambiguous.
6. Utopia: progress or a timeless ideal, perfect moments or a state of grace.
7. Nothingness: death, oblivion, the absolute, the infinite and/or the unimaginable.
***
Painting is my behavior of choice in accordance with my belief that my gift of talent corresponds to
that particular division of labor. I’m concerned with my impulses and how they coincide with
moments in history. I’m not interested in the zeitgeist, believing that it is the artist, rather than the
times, that leads. I make the paintings because they don’t exist and so again won’t I.
“What moves the genius, or rather, what inspires the work is not new ideas, but their obsession with
the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” —Eugene Delacroix, Journal.
“The painting symbolizes an individual who realizes freedom and deep engagement of the self within
his work. It is addressed to others who will cherish it, if it gives them joy, and who will recognize in
it an irreplaceable quality and will be attentive to every mark of the maker’s imagination and feeling.”
—Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th + 20th Century Selected Papers.
“Illusion: a word lost to us through obfuscation. Illudere, Latin: ‘to play against’, it is the play against
the immediate quality of ‘real’ experience which is the painter’s strength. To form a
many-dimensioned experience is his pride. By initial paradox he plays a personal game against the
commonplace and establishes his domain—the domain of the imagination, or the metaphysical
domain.” —Dore Ashton, A Reading of Modern Art.
“With painting we enter the sphere of the romantic. For, while in painting it is still external shape that
must manifest the inner life of the spirit, what is manifested is indeed the particular subjectivity of
mind returning into itself out of its corporeal existence. The medium in painting, as we saw, ceased to
be heavy matter treated as such; it became matter reduced to a coating of color which offers us only a
pure appearance of material objectivity. When painting’s mastery of color is complete, objectivity
vanishes into thin air, so to speak.
“...it is color alone that brings to view the more ideal content that painting is capable of expressing.
“...it is the art of coloring that makes the painter a painter.” —Hegel: On the Arts, Selections from
G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics or the Philosophy of Fine Art, Compiled and edited from lectures
delivered 1823-29, by Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1835-38). Translated by Henry Paolucci, 1979.
***
My “anxiety of influence” accrues to diaphanous Orientals and visceral Italians and most especially to
the gravitational pull of the Abstract Expressionist paintings collected by the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery in Buffalo, my home institution. I’m an art lover and my litany of infatuations is one thick
book. I am biased toward the intuitive, the painterly and the sublime.
Of Huang Hsiu-fu’s Tenth Century classification of painters, the first and most difficult is the
spontaneous i style: “Those who follow it are unskilled in the use of compasses and squares...they
scorn refinement and minuteness in the coloring and make forms in an abridged manner. They grasp
the self-existant, which cannot be imitated, and give the unexpected.” Osvald Siren, The Chinese on
the Art of Painting. 1963.
Leonardo “quickened the spirit of invention” through the contemplation of confused shapes in the
clouds, muddy water and stained walls. Alberti located the imitation of nature in the accidental and
pleasurable realization of the resemblance in one element of nature to the image of another.
Sprezzatura was Castiglione’s Sixteenth Century doctrine: “the true artist will work with ease...the
nonchalance which marks the perfect artist...one single unlabored line, a single brushstroke, drawn
with ease so that it seems that the hand moved without any effort or skill and reached its end by
itself”. Rorschach stressed that there is only “a difference of degree between ordinary perception—the
filing of impressions in our minds, and interpretations due to projection.” —Ernst Gombrich, Art and
Illusion, 1956
***
Representation is function of intention. Resemblance, however, may be purely accidental. The
moment of appearance associationally configuring into image is the threshold at which direct
experience mediates into myriad symbolic planes. The flash of familiarity is the spark of
consciousness. Conflicting or multiple associations present a flickering shimmer of resonating
meaning. The illusion of perfectly natural chance rests upon the act of exquisitely cultural choice.
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn on Alexander Cozens’ New Method (1785): “a blot is a hint or a crude
resemblance of the whole effect of a picture. To blot, is to make varied spots and shapes...producing
accidental forms without lines, from which ideas are presented to the mind. This is conformable to
nature: for in nature, forms are not distinguished by lines, but by shade and color. To sketch is to
delineate ideas; blotting suggests them...from the rudeness and uncertainty of shapes made in
blotting, one artificial blot will suggest different ideas to different persons; on which account it has the
strongest tendency to enlarge the powers of invention, being more effectual to that purpose than the
study of nature alone.
“The blot is a system of differences, this differentiates it from drawing defined as related qualities
brought together...in contrast to associational imagery in nature the blot is artificial. The artist
deliberately mimes the action of chance...Chance presupposes an absence of intent; it does not set its
sights on anything, least of all the production of chance...Should it happen that a blot is so rude or
unfit, that no good composition can be made from it a remedy is always at hand, by substituting
another...the true blot is suspended between pure chance and excessive strength of intent.”
“(Vittorio Imbriani:)...the blot is a concordance (in a musical sense) indispensable to any pictorial work
even on as vast a scale as Michelangelo’s Judgment: for the blot represents the very first glance cast
on event. The blot is a concordance of effect able to revive an emotion and exalt the imagination to the
point of making it create. The blot is the sine qua non of painting; the essence of the pictorial idea.”
“In a sense the best imitation is an imperfect one. We could even say that the difference separating
imitation from object will determine the imitation’s degree of excellence...confused, uncertain images
have a greater power on the imagination to form the grander passions. The obscure, the uncompleted,
in short, the sublime are linked to terror, i.e. to the fear of death. But the sublime is a source of what
Burke calls delight and Kant, a negative pleasure—the sublime is a pleasure produced by the feeling
of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a stronger outflow of them—like orgasm (la petite
mort)—where death and jouissance are made to interpenetrate. A pleasure rooted in the sublime is a
brief simulacrum of death. A reading of a theory of the blot is itself formless, indefinite, sublime,
mortal. Its vocation is the uncorrect and the fantastic...the blot violently imposes a pleasure found in
lack.” In Black and White, from Calligram;Essays in New Art History, Norman Bryson Editor,
1988.
***
A symbolic freedom is manifest in the range of painterly effect. The qualities of used paint are
metaphors for the variety of experience. And a key to the mechanism of metaphor is resemblance.
“Philip Wheelright distinguished between metaphors whose primary function is to express (epiphors)
and metaphors whose primary function is to suggest (diaphors)...Diaphors suggest new possible
meanings by emphasizing the dissimilarities between the referents rather than expressing the
similarities. No pure diaphors exist, for if there were no analogy between the parts of the metaphor,
we could not understand it as intelligible...The purest diaphor is doubtless to be found in
non-imitative music and in the most abstract painting; for whenever any imitative or mimetic factor is
present, whether an imitation of nature or of previous art or a mimesis of some recognizable idea,
there is an element of epiphor.”
“Not only does the recognition of similarities not seen before produce new insights or new meanings,
but especially the identification of dissimilarities allows for the possibility of transformation of these
dissimilarities into previously unthought of similarities, thereby ensuring the creation of new
meaning.” —Earl R. Mac Cormac, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, 1985.
“A vast pun, a free play, with unlimited substitutions. A symbol is never a symbol but always
polysymbolic, overdetermined polymorphous. Freedom is fertility, a proliferation of images, in
excess. The seed must be sown extravagantly, too much, or not enough, overdetermination is
determination made into chance; chance and determination reconciled. Too much meaning is meaning
and absurdity reconciled.” —Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 1966.
“In every work of art something appears that does not exist.” —Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,
1970.
“It is the illusion of vitality that sustains painting. This is the illusion without which painting cannot
live.” —Frank Stella, Working Space, 1986.
The truth of illusion is the power of resemblance to generate meaning.
***
Within my paintings of the past ten years, a relative dialectic exists between a vista configuration and a
vortex configuration. The former relates more closely to Euclidean space articulated by sacadic gesture
and is more readily comparable to the landscape tradition. The latter is radially or axially oriented and
is concentrated into a less athletic but more replete mark. The vortex paintings simultaneously, if
ambiguously, hold the genres of the portrait, the still-life and the landscape on a single
ground—portrait as cartoon caricature, still-life as floral display and landscape as celestial bodies in
cosmic space or sub-atomic scenarios. The logo-gestalt operates like facial characteristics as a ratio of
infinite variations on a predictable theme, thus engendering the synthesis of a Pop-like mechanistic
familiarity with an Abstract Expressionistic spontaneous mystery.
Ezra Pound’s Vorticist doctrine appropriately articulates my desire: “The actual aims of Vorticism are
hard to define. The word was meant to suggest suction, whirlpool, maelstrom, a state of exultation,
spiritual daring, aggressive intellectual action.
“...one attempts to find a perceptual gestalt which will introduce order into the initially chaotic
confusion of line, form and disembodied color areas. The attempt is likely to be inadequate, if not
actively thwarted, and on subsequent viewings of the same of the same painting one will probably
trace different perceptual structures. The result is an unresolved interplay of of alternative structuring
operations, which the perceiver holds in a satisfying imaginative tension.
“...the image as an intellectual and emotional complex presented ‘instantaneously to produce that
sense of sudden liberation, that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the
greatest works of art.’
“I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent,
art as the expression and sole means of transmitting, of passing on that ecstasy to others.” Ezra Pound
quoted by Alan Robinson, Symbol to Vortex, Poetry, Painting and Ideas, 1885-1914, 1985.
***
To put the color: to pour, to touch the color: to blot, to blend the color: to smear—color-shape is
manifold, an all of everything. Occasionally the touchy, chancy chaos yields arabesques of chromatic
articulation worth the will to keep, and a congruency of making, viewing and imagination is achieved
in the pursuit of jouissance to a flash of satori. The magic moment of evanescent inspiration lies in the
auspicious accident of the inflection of color.
“...that state of condensation of sensations which constitute a picture.” Henri Matisse, Notes of a
Painter, 1908.
“The ludic metamorphosis leads us to regard language (symbol) as body and body as language
(symbol). All plenitude turns out to be inscribed upon a ‘void’ which is simply what remains when
the overabundance of meaning, desire, violence, and anguish is drained by means of language
(symbol).” Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, 1987