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Philip Guston. a Day's Work. 1970. All Guston Works © the Estate of Philip

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Philip Guston. a Day's Work. 1970. All Guston Works © the Estate of Philip Philip Guston. A Day’s Work. 1970. All Guston works © The Estate of Philip Guston. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 Recognizing Guston (in four slips)* HARRY COOPER A thing is recognized only as it comes into existence. —Philip Guston, 1964 Guston, as always, tells a good story. He is giving a slide lecture at the University of Minnesota in March 1978, and he has just reached his infamous Marlborough Gallery show of 1970, when the Klansmen rode into Manhattan to announce the artist’s return to figuration: The paintings have very simple titles—as Harold Rosenberg called them, laconic titles. This is called A Day’s Work. Before they were shown at Marlborough, Tom Hess, who was then editor of Art News, heard something was up, so we went over to the warehouse to see them. He looked at this painting here, one with a piece of lumber with nails sticking out, and he said, “What’s that, a typewriter?” I said, “For Christ’s sakes, Tom, if this were 11 feet of one color, with one band running down on the end, you wouldn’t ask me what it was.” I said, “Don’t you know a two by four with red nails?”1 The message seems simple enough: just look at what’s in front of you, Tom. The image is just as clearly a piece of wood with red nails sticking out of it as a painting by Barnett Newman (about whom Hess had just written the first of two books)2 is an eleven-foot monochrome swath of canvas with a “zip” at one end. Trust your instinct for what’s what, if you still have it after all those years of New York School nonsense.3 But look again. Guston must be enjoying the fact that his picture has * This essay first appeared in somewhat longer form in Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, exh. cat. (Yale University Art Gallery, 2000). My thanks to Joanna Weber for securing permission to republish it here. 1. “Philip Guston Talking,” lecture transcript, ed. Renée McKee, in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969–1980, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), p. 53. 2. Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Co., 1969). 3. Compare the exchange in Emile Zola’s Masterpiece (1885): “‘What’s she doing, bathing?’ Sandoz asked. ‘Bathing! Of course she isn’t. She’s a Bacchante . will be when she gets her vine leaves’” (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 68. OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 97–129. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 98 OCTOBER gotten Hess to project. Why else would he relish the story, which only casts doubt on his own representational abilities? Hess, the art-world wordsmith, has seen a typewriter, his own symbol of “a day’s work,” and Guston upbraids him for it. But if the referent is so obvious, why in the same breath that Guston proclaims its self- evidence does he commit his own parapraxis? Why does he say the nails are red when in the painting they are clearly black? Either Guston made the mistake in 1970, looking at the picture in the warehouse, perhaps a little dark, or in 1978, looking at the slide screen, perhaps sideways. Or maybe he planted the mistake, for his question—“Don’t you know a two by four with red nails?”—sounds a lot like a schoolyard trick one kid uses to make another feel dumb. (The ensuing dialogue goes, “Yeah, sure I do”—“Well, there’s no such thing!”) But intentional or not, the red nails are the opposite of red herrings. They are clues that we should not take Guston at his word when, a moment earlier in the lecture, explaining his return to imagery in the Marlborough show, he says, “I want to see what it [the motif] looks like. They call it art afterwards, you know.”4 Or, as Robert Storr has put it, “Guston was not toying with codes of representation. On the contrary, he painted as if speaking directly in the language of ‘things.’”5 The red nails are there to say that the language of things is still a language (as Storr’s “as if” perhaps underscores), subject to all the indirectness and slippage that language introduces into things. To put it another way, what the pried-up nails fail to secure—what much of Guston’s art, even at its putative plainest, frustrates as well as stimulates—is recognition. All of this makes me feel better about my inability to recognize what I came across two years ago on a storage screen in the Fogg Art Museum. It was one of the many small Masonite panels on which Guston built his new language between 1968 and 1970. But what was it: a fortification with gunports, a toaster seen from above with too many slots, a building, a book, the tablets of the Law, a bread box? (At eighteen by twenty inches, it was about the size of a bread box.) It was the undecidability itself that intrigued me. Here was a picture that wanted to represent something (for it strongly rendered texture, volume, and weight) and something familiar at that (for the shape of the thing and the handling of the paint breathed ordinariness) and yet that thing seemed unknowable. The picture was neither abstract ( judging from its intention) nor representational ( judging from its effect). And now, as I read over what I have just written, the word “UNCANNY” suddenly appears to me in huge letters. How could I have missed it before? Or is that the way the uncanny always occurs? In 1919, Freud described the uncanny as “that in which one does not know where one is, as it were,”6 which is precisely where Guston’s picture had left me. This was not Freud’s own view, however, but that of a leading scholar who, wrote 4. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 53. 5. Robert Storr, Philip Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 66. 6. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919), in Freud, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, p. 370. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 Recognizing Guston (in four slips) 99 Freud, “ascribe[d] the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanni- ness to intellectual uncertainty. .” Freud discarded that analysis as being both too inclusive and too cerebral, proposing instead that the uncanny resulted from a return-of-the-repressed. Was I feeling something of the Freudian uncanny as well? I will put the question on hold, for my sense of the uncanny was soon dispelled. A glance at Guston’s subsequent work revealed that the image was a book. In the 1969 drawing The Law, for example, a Klansman props the thing on his knee and reads it with his finger.7 Then there were Guston’s own statements: “I read, so I painted books, lots of books. I must have painted almost one hundred paintings of books. It’s such a simple object you know—a book. An open book, a couple of books, one book on top of another book.”8 And there was Guston himself in Michael Blackwood’s short film from 1972 with this very painting and some 7. Magdalena Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), repr. p. 114. 8. “Conversations: Philip Guston and Harold Rosenberg: Guston’s Recent Paintings,” Boston University Journal (fall 1974), p. 56. Guston. Untitled. 1968. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 100 OCTOBER others: “I wanted to give the feeling of an old . crumpled book that had been in existence for thousands of years.”9 But just as I was feeling like Hess under Guston’s reproach (“Don’t you know a book with stone pages?”) I came across this report of one of Guston’s lectures: “He showed a slide of a semi-abstraction of an open book lying on the table with downward strokes on it for the writing and at once it occurred to me that it could also be a contemporary building, a thought that was borne out by Guston saying a book could become heavy, like a stone or a building.”10 Guston’s books and buildings and bricks and boards are all lumpy rectangles scored by a grid of vertical strokes. Those polymorphous marks (or polysemous morphemes) marched right through the Marlborough show, lending themselves in their neutrality to endless figurative reuse. It was as if the antiheroes of the exhibition, the Klansmen or “hoods” as Guston liked to call them, had left tracks, as if their nonchalant mayhem extended from the boards and legs and shoes littering the landscape to the language of representation itself. The downward stroke is their mark, and indeed the Klansmen are all distinguished by a pair of downward strokes for their eye holes. (There will be more to say about eyes later.) Was this pair of strokes the genesis of Guston’s scored grid, just as phonemic doublings were for Roman Jakobson the root of speech?11 No. According to Dore Ashton, “in the beginning, they were identifiably books” (and Guston confirms it).12 It makes sense that an artist who “always talked about ‘reading’ a painting, and the ‘language of paint,’” would make the book itself the marker of a momentous departure in his work.13 In the beginning was the word.
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