Nihil: Fratres

Rage & Chaco II | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico

“Fratres” is the title I’ve given to a suite of three paintings, though I don’t think of them as a single piece as in a triptych. Neither do they all come from drawings or experiences that are similar or in similar areas of New Mexico. And yet, as I worked on the three on my studio wall, they seemed somehow to belong to the same story, which I suppose is the song “Fratres” composed by Arvo Part.

Rage | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico

The first completed was “Rage,” a gray painting made on old advertisements dating back to perhaps the 1960’s, found in the abandoned post office in the ghost town of Yeso, New Mexico. As with all works made on and with found materials, the work was guided by a set of rules for a process rather than by imagery. Paintings such as “Book of Hours” and “My Heart’s in the Highlands…” are examples of work made this way. Part’s “Fratres” played in my headphones often in the process. In the spirit of tintinnabuli, the gray (M-voice) emerged from the accumulated mixture of variations on three colors (T-Voice). The palette itself was determined by the main colors appearing in the advertisements, so that a green, for example, is not a vibrant green, but pale, to match the fading of color in the ads. A painting like this in reproduction can only ever appear gray, and rather flatly so. Seen in life, a subtle range of color comes through; grades not yet dry underneath are pulled up by what we see as gray. As it happens, a pale lavender comes up to the surface in a rather bold and obvious way when looking closely at the surface. The paper tore and shredded in the process of scraping areas out, which disturbed a surface otherwise too sedate.

Part’s “Fratres,” meaning brothers, refers, as far as I can tell, to the biblical characters Cain and Abel, the first two humans by natural birth. The piece is composed in three parts that I choose to interpret as the personality of Cain on one side and that of Abel on the other, separated by the earth itself, which Genesis describes as crying out with the blood of Abel (having been murdered by Cain in his brother’s jealous rage). Beneath the music throughout is, to me, the sensation of trembling. This trembling seems an expression of the flow of time itself as the music progresses, suggesting, at first, the fear and anticipation of what hasn’t yet happened, and then the tragedy and “crying out” of what eventually does. It’s as if the latter is carried implicitly in the former suggesting both an inevitable fate for Abel and a cyclical fate for the world itself. The murder, we could say, is foundational to the human world, a part of its hidden order, though no less regrettable for its inevitability. I am aware of some theological and philosophical tradition around this story, and among my favorites is the idea of mimetic desire and rivalry, or mimetic theory in general, made famous by philosopher Rene Girard who died in 2014. His book “Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World” comes to mind as something which would have informed my thinking on the music as well as the myth of Cain and Abel. Girard, incidentally, has been an explicit influence on my thinking for years.

Because of my own religious background and love of Part’s music, it’s predictable that I should interpret something this way, but I did not set out to repeat the story of Cain and Abel in painting. It wouldn’t have interested me and, anyway, it violates the Nihil rules against premeditated meaning. Nevertheless, the intermittent fear, trembling, longing, stalking, silence, regret, and inner revelation that occurs in this one piece of music was something I wanted to approximate in painting. That I called it "Rage,” among all those other words, was a choice I suppose is personal to me. I felt I could recognize my own rage in the painting, which is to say the kind which never fully expresses itself, but trembles just beneath the surface, almost unnoticed, but somehow living its subterranean life with no certain pathway out. This entombed angst within the painting, in areas, seems almost to be clawing its way out from the other side, and to that end, the more severe marks were made by scratching with my fingers. Of the Tenets of Nihil, perhaps Touch is most important, and I’ve written much about intention toward the other side of the surface, the inner self, the sacred other.

Chaco II | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico

I continued to listen to the same music while working on the yellow/green paintings “Chaco I and II.” I never did come to see the two paintings as working within a triptych with “Rage” nor do I even see them as working as a diptych with each other. It’s tenuous to discuss these three works under one title, and I suppose I don’t have any art historical convention (at least that I’m aware of) to lean on. Yet I have an instinct to group them somehow.

The Chaco paintings grew out of a day spent in Chaco Canyon, here in New Mexico, an ancient ruin inhabited by ancestral Puebloans from around 850 to 1250. Not enough is known about the culture, as there exists no written record. But it seems obvious it was a religious center (among its other purposes) with eighty-some kivas constructed and built upon in the area over time. The great houses and kivas in the area were just one piece of a vast network of ancient Chacoan communities. Evidence exists of groups arriving from as far as South America. Among the many features that makes it strange is that it’s an arid plateau, requiring highly organized networks to transport water and other resources. Whatever the reasons for inhabiting Chaco Canyon, they were not pragmatic.

This was the limit of my knowledge before arriving there one brisk and sunny winter day in January. My experience there was strange. Almost as soon as I parked and got out of the car, approaching the largest area of ruins called Pueblo Bonito, I felt pulled toward it in a confused state. There’s almost nothing else I can manage to describe it. I felt a strange kind of surge, almost as in a panic. The closest experience I can compare it to is when I visited the grave of my brother for the first time in 20 years or so. I had never visited without my parents, and I couldn’t remember where it was in the cemetery. I was becoming discouraged when I crossed a foot bridge onto the other side of a pond that’s there. As soon as I crossed the bridge, it was as if my legs tried to run forward while also being pulled to the ground. I had no conscious memory of where gravestone was, but my body seemed to take over. In another moment, I was on my hands and knees in front of his marker sobbing. A similar thing occurred at Chaco, only I never had any previous emotional connection to the site.

Chaco I | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico

From there, I explored the rooms. It’s my experience in dreams that passing from room to room in a building is very different than moving into different rooms in life. Real floorplans have a logic typically, one main room to which most lesser rooms are connected, and if not rooms, then hallways from which different rooms can be accessed. In dreams, at least in mine, one simply passes from one room to another, never knowing what’s beyond the next threshold. One passes through five rooms, say, before arriving to whatever is to be revealed there. Passing between rooms at Chaco felt very much like those in dreams. The combination of these experiences produced in me a strange kind of skepticism toward the permanence and stability of my physical reality. The veil, you could say, seemed thin. I write this self-consciously, as I’m now aware of some of the lore around Chaco. I hate to be cliche.

Like all places I visit, I made sketches and snapped photos. There is no way to know by looking at the two paintings, but, in fact, I made both while looking at photos of these doorways, layering one doorway painting over another. The utter loss of imagery and seeming minimalism of the surface betrays the almost brutal adding and subtracting of paint, pushing so hard against the surface that the imprint of the crossbars can be perceived in “Chaco I.” I made ample use of the various electric drill attachments to scrape into the paint and batter the surface. There was so much inversion of positive and negative space within each doorway painting, and indecision, frankly, about what should come forward or recede, that everything flattened out in the process. It was in thinking of sunlight bleaching the mud brick walls that I used so much yellow. Yet with all the layers of paint beneath, enough blue paint must have still been wet that it mixed enough to produce an overall green tinge. Listening, again and again, to “Fratres” while making “Chaco II,” the sensation I encountered there actually returned toward the end of the painting. The fingerprints dragged through the center of the painting, happened during this experience, and I made them impulsively, the same mark I make on the ground each time I sit outside for meditation. In reality, what I call “Chaco II” was finished first, and “Chaco I” required that I find a calm centeredness in which to slowly proceed. I only numbered them this way because I instinctively want to see “Chaco I” on the left and “Chaco II” on the right.

In the studio, hung the three together and played “Fratres” once again. I recognized everything I experienced at Chaco Canyon in the paintings and in their perceived, if unconscious, connection to the music. What could Chaco possibly have to do with Part’s music, with its biblical subject, with the kind of painting I might make at this late stage of western art history? There’s no good answer here; I can only shrug my shoulders and make the work anyway, defend nothing, let it fail if that’s its fate.

It was in the strange back room of the school that I hung these three. It once could have been accessed through a hallway, but the exterior southern wall collapsed long ago so that the northern wall of the hallway is what is now exposed to conditions. The entrance into the strange room now opens to the exterior. In that way, it seems very separate from the rest of the tiny school. The floor contains many large gaping holes exposing a mysterious dark ground some feet below. I always become nervous about snakes in these scenarios in which the floor seems vulnerable to collapsing in other new areas. Wearing snake gaiters around my calves I’ve developed the habit of testing an entire floor with my weight to see what paths are better to take, what areas to steer clear of. I throw objects into the holes and gaps in the floors and listen for rattlers. How much of this is good practice and how much superstition, I probably will never know, but in the few encounters I’ve had with rattlesnakes in the past, I take the situation seriously.

Though it can’t be appreciated in photos, to be present with these works, in this room, in these conditions is a wonderful metaphysical drama miming everything that went into making them. For every hazardous hole in the floor, there is one in the ceiling, through which stripes and shards of light fall upon the walls and floor, and across the surfaces of the works. On the west wall, where I hang “Rage,” layers upon layers of rust-colored mud have accumulated and slithered down in strata over time. The other two walls, the northern and eastern, are far along in their decay, white, stained, pealing. Light falls across these two because of the southwestern sun.

One of the tenets of Nihil is that, in these spaces, I cannot set up and control my own lighting. The install cannot exist for the sake of the photos. When light coruscates along the surface of the painting, it calls attention to its mere objectness, it’s opaque, impenetrable surface. It is, after all, simply another object among objects in the room. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, it also suggests an aboutness to the work that extends beyond the object, beyond its frame, and puts it back into the ether that gave birth to it. Its life as both concrete object and abstract artwork seem interdependent with the shapes taken in the fluctuations of light and acoustics giving sensation to space.

Perhaps I go too far here to suggest that this dynamic of light, acoustics, space, time, what is known tested against what is unknown, is all that we have to distinguish between what is true or untrue about the world, its narratives and myths, which is to say, our so-called identities; that what constitutes knowledge is nothing more than the accumulation of such shapes and patterns which can be bracketed within abstract containers eventually developing into concepts, theories, moral codification, order. Thinking of Martin Buber again: “The ordered world is not the world order.” And poet W.S. Merwin: “I do not believe in knowledge as we know it.” What is conscripted into politics is lost to nature. We can never know where we are, yet the anonymity of space asserts itself, which is also us, unidentifiable in public language, but available privately, and at every moment.

The Tenets of Nihil

Nihil: Archaic Brother

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