F
O R E W O R D:
THE
ART OF AMERICAN VALUES
by
Craig Scott*
Raymond
Waters’ first solo show – the “Values ” exhibition
at Craig Scott Gallery (January 19 – February 29, 2008) –
engages with the values and symbols of American life and of the United
States’ presence in the world.1 Each work
simultaneously affirms and queries those values and symbols by making
art from raw materials of American cultural identity. In “Values
,” Waters transforms vintage film reels, flag fabric, US currency,
and tabloid newsprint into remarkably balanced works – powerful
both conceptually and aesthetically. “Values ” focuses
on notions of allegiance and belonging, on the secular sacred and
desecration, on the communication and defence of cultural (including
political) values, on the struggle between the reflective and the
hollow in public discourse, and on the interaction of American worldviews
with universal experience.
The majority of the pieces in the “Values ” exhibition
– eleven in all – are created by Waters from the interaction
of film and light. In a process of controlled spontaneity, Waters
generates works that resonate with the spirit of Jackson Pollock’s
‘drip’ works, both in result and process.2
As Jackson Pollock so famously did and as did the Navajo sand painters
who inspired Pollock, Waters works by standing over and moving around
his canvas as he lays down his image.3 For the
film works in which the light is from LED bulbs, Waters carefully
prepares his canvas: first stretching it, then priming it, and finally
painting it with either white oil paint or 12 karat gold leaf. He
then engages in random, while still intuitively guided, drilling of
holes for LED lights to be inserted from behind the canvas. The LED
lights (for example, 70 lights in The Skeleton Dance [1929] and 535
lights in King Kong [1933]) are inserted, the canvas is then laid
flat on the floor face up, and the lights are turned on. At this point,
Waters lets the film roll off its reel and spool onto the canvas while
he moves freely – again, both randomly and intuitively –
around the canvas. At times he allows the weight of the reel to direct
his movement and at times directs the reel in response to the evolving
shape of the work as it gradually builds up on the horizontal canvas
– like a dancer, alternately guiding and being guided by his
dance partner.4 When the reel has fully played
out, Waters affixes the film in a variety of places, carefully retaining
the film intact where it has fallen on the canvas. Waters then seals
the canvas inside a Plexiglas case to produce the final work.5
The precise interaction between the aesthetic and a conceptual planes
of Waters’ film works depends in each work on a range of factors
from the physical properties (colour, gauge, length) of the film used,
to the subject-matter and cultural referents of the film, to the source,
intensity, and density of lighting selected for the particular work.
Following on from the opening observations, each work also embodies
a tension at the level of social commentary about values (especially
about American or Americanized values), a constant tension between
homage and critique. In conversation with the works around them (notably
Waters’ flag works, discussed below), various film works interrogate
the relationship between film and foundational values like freedom,
democracy, equality and, now, security in American narratives. However,
of at least equal significance is a reading of the works that emphasizes
a difference between the film works and the other works in the show,
albeit within an overarching thematic project concerning the relationship
between objects (especially as commodities or as commodified) and
value. Such an understanding arises from an interrogation of the value
placed on the particular film media that Waters has chosen for these
works (8mm and 16mm films, as well as one 35mm trailer). The essay
in this catalogue by film scholar Michael Zryd, Associate Professor
of Fine Arts at York University, explores this dimension in some depth.6
If Waters’
film works draw life from their open-ended meaning(s), Waters’
flag works – three in total (New Orleans August 2005; You Are
Either With Us or Against Us; and White Flag)7
– are positively redolent
with ambiguity. The flag works involve reconstituted American flags
undulating against a backdrop of pure white gold painted on canvas.
“Reconstituted” refers to the fact that the flags have
first been shredded by Waters into strips before being put back together
as new – and, paradoxically enough, renewed – objects.
Respect embedded in critique, reverence alongside irreverence, the
sacred faced with sacrilege, the emotive with the reflective, preservation
within destruction, each work oscillates between these various poles
and, as such, embodies the debates about values alluded to in the
titles of the pieces.
The normative stakes signaled by Waters’ flag works encompass
both the symbolic significance of the American flag and a host of
questions for which the flag8 as both image and physical object serves
as a sort of stand-in: patriotism, inclusion, loyalty, constitutionalism,
freedom (including the freedom to transgress), hope, and so on, as
well as connected themes such as militarism, imperialism, and social
stratification. At one further remove, the subject of Waters’
works can also be understood as being not (only) the American flag
but (also) the American flag in art – that is, the Stars and
Stripes as already appropriated by contemporary art as well as contemporary
art of the flag as already appropriated in popular imagery. For one
cannot but draw a straight line through history that links Waters’
works with Jasper Johns’ 1950s flag works. It is also this icon
and not simply the flag ‘itself’ as icon that is addressed
by Waters.9 And we can expect that perceptual clashes over the meaning
of Waters’ work will parallel (while never replicating) the
debates over what the Johns flag works meant, should be taken as having
meant, now mean, or should be taken as now meaning.10
In the same way that medium categorically distinguishes what Waters
has created with celluloid and light sources from what Pollock created
with paint and enamel, the use of actual flags as medium (layered
on top of gold, with all of its own symbolic and metaphoric meanings)
categorically distinguishes Waters’ flag creations from those
of Johns. There are also, of course, contextual features beyond medium
that render Waters’ works distinct (such as that the works in
“Values ” are produced in a different era with distinct
societal and geopolitical backdrops framing both their creation and
reception, that Waters leans even more toward the conceptual by choosing
titles that serve as textual interlocutors with the works, that the
works are produced not by an American but by a Canadian, and the fact
that Johns and Pollock created what they created). One effort to take
this interplay of concept and context seriously is the inclusion in
the catalogue of an essay by a leading American law professor and
civil liberties advocate, Professor Norman Dorsen of New York University,
on the contemporary discourses of protected values that surround the
issue of desecration of the American flag.11
The connection of the “Values ” exhibition to Pollock
and Johns is not only a substantive one. The show also represents
what might be called a planned happenstance. It was originally planned
to take place some time in late 2007 but then ultimately scheduled
for January 2008 in order to pay a more obvious kind of arthistory
tribute to the work of these two great American artists for whom 2008
marks a significant anniversary. The vernissage of “Values ”
is precisely on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the opening of
“Jasper Johns – Paintings” (January 20, 1958, Leo
Castelli Gallery, New York), which was Johns’ first solo show
(and a show in which several of his iconic flag works were exhibited).12
This year – 2008 – is also the 60th anniversary of the
year that is generally recognized as the single most important year
in the development of Pollock’s signature ‘drip’
paintings including Number 1A, 1948 (1948), which was the first Pollock
painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (in 1950).13 As well,
that year – 1948 – was the year of Pollock’s first
solo show of works produced since he had evolved his path-breaking
techniques.14
Thus it is that the probing of values in Raymond Waters’ inaugural
solo show takes on added significance in view of the connection to
two central exponents of post-war American art and to a legacy that
both announced and contributed to new understandings of contemporary
values, in and through art. Nor should we ignore that the work of
Johns and Pollock helped accelerate debates about the value of art
itself, leading eventually, through Warhol and others, to an era of
simultaneously ironic and mutually subversive relationships between
art and commodity (a long moment in which we still find ourselves).
By including the non-flag and non-film work Five Hundred Dollars in
the show (as well as by calling on the seductive beauty and power
of white gold in the flag works, and in some of the film works), Raymond
Waters reminds us that works of art about values can never avoid turning
their gaze back on themselves.
Craig Scott*
Notes
on Foreword
* Director, Craig Scott Gallery, Toronto; Professor of Law, Osgoode
Hall Law School of York University, Toronto
1 Born in 1965, Raymond Waters is a graduate of the Ontario College
of Art (now OCAD), and a student of media, communications, and the
history of contemporary art. Until now, he has chosen to be a below-the-radar
artist. His work – including pioneer work in New York involving
bar codes as themes of his paintings – has been acquired by
a select circle of collectors (primarily in the US, Canada, and Russia).
2 When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) writes about Pollock’s
‘drip’ work that “the image as a whole is dense
and lush — yet its details have a lacelike filigree, a delicacy,
a lyricism,” they could also be describing Waters’ film
works, such as The Gold Rush (1925) Charlie Chaplin, or The General
(1927) Buster Keaton, or Martin Luther King Jr., From Montgomery to
Memphis (1972). The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights 194 (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published
1999). In terms of the phrase just employed to describe Waters’
film works – “controlled spontaneity” – this
could also apply to Pollock, who bristled at the notion that his drippings
and pourings were entirely accidental (or, worse, produced while inebriated).
Apart from the fact that “Pollock never touched alcohol when
he was in his studio” (Ines Janet Engelmann, Jackson Pollock
and Lee Krasner 54 (Munich – Berlin – London – New
York: Prestel Verlag, 2007), Pollock is recorded as saying that “I
can control the flow of paint; there is no accident…”
Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock 152, 172, fn. t 258 (London, 1989)
quoted in Engelmann, ibid., 54.
3 In Pollock’s own words: “…I prefer to tack the
unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor….On the floor
I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since
this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally
be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand
painters of the West….” Kirk Varnedoe, “Comet: Jackson
Pollock’s Life and Work” in Jackson Pollock (exhibition
cat., Museum of Modern Art, 1.11.1998-2.02.1999), New York, 1985,
53, as quoted in Engelmann, ibid., 54.
4 Compare: [A]lthough “[Pollock’s] works …have neither
a single point of focus nor any obvious repetition or pattern, they
sustain a sense of underlying order. This and the physicality of Pollock’s
method have led to comparisons of his process with choreography, as
if the works were the traces of a dance.” The Museum of Modern
Art, MoMA Highlights 194 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised
2004, originally published 1999).
5 For the works with light boxes, canvas is replaced by a Plexiglas
sheet and no holes are drilled. Otherwise the process is the same.
6 Michael Zryd, “Raymond Waters”, infra.
7 White Flag will appear in the exhibition but has not been completed
at the time of going to press. Thus, no image of White Flag is reproduced
in the catalogue. A fourth flag work, New Orleans No.2, will not be
exhibited, but is available to view on request.
8 And, indeed, for so many Americans, metaphorical meanings that have
ossified into the literal in a way not dissimilar to fundamentalist
readings of scripture.
9 A half-century after the first flag works by Johns (in 1954-55),
a journalist speaks of “the iconic status of [Johns’]
Flag, one of his earliest works, an equivalent in American college
bedrooms to the place occupied in British ones by Matisse’s
Blue Nude:” Emma Brockes, “Master of few words”
(Interview: Jasper Johns),” The Guardian, July 26, 2004.
10 Johns himself recently offered some insights, along with journalist
Brockes, into both contested meanings and the evolutions in meaning
over time with respect to the ‘same’ object: “Johns’
most important work with signs is Flag [1955]. It is a collage of
the Stars and Stripes made out of encaustic, …which Johns dropped
scraps of newspaper into and allowed to set. Flag’s challenge
to the notion that symbols of state are fixed and inviolable –
that they are not, under any circumstance, open to interpretation
– was received at the time as blasphemous. The bits of newspaper
symbolised the conflicting fictions upon which nations are built and
the encaustic, an unstable material, was perceived by critics
