Lest We Vanish into Meaning (Philip Guston and the politics of trash)

Abstract

This is a 2 page comic about my reading of Guston's work.Here is its script:According to Paul Valery a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning. A bad performance is one that can be assimilated immediately. A bad comic would try to be art. A bad painting is one that provokes instant recognition.Philip Guston's paintings and drawings often create a kind of gasp, though, of instant laughter. Yet it does feel like hard fought for laughter, laughter made possible from staring at life ruins for a long period of time.Philip Guston was a painter of things long forgotten, of trash and leftovers, of stuff. Art historical stuff, book stuff, painting's stuff, accumulated, amalgamated stuff.Philip Guston, in a sense, managed to outwit Duchamp with human obviousness. He knew about painting's impossibilities yet kept at it, for dozens of years, until he gave up on wanting to be right.When Guston gave up on wanting to be right he found a desert and the desert found him. Visions tumbled down on top of him, he became a vessel, a kind of bemused observer of his own crises.Guston's verdicts on modernism's self-imposed limitations are the best possible insights into why it is that we are confused. Modernism needs too much sympathy. Painting that comes from painting needs the insider's blessing, and the insider always has his back turned to you. You are the stumblebum.Guston did not want transcendence, he did not want to play the organ or be involved in New York's male priesthood of modernism. Guston would rather scavenge trash and mock all priestly clothes, Ku Klux Klan outfits, painter's tools, mock his own propensity for brooding Russian morbid depression.Guston, paraphrasing Kierkegaard on Abraham, got no further than painting. Myopic, always painting close to the canvas, Guston freed himself from the duty to be pure. Krazy Kat and Kierkegaard become interchangeable.