Nihil: Stabat Mater

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

Stabat Mater receives its title from the eponymous Arvo Pärt musical composition, connoting a theme dating back to the thirteenth century of Mary’s suffering at the crucifixion. The final image, or top layer of my painting, has seemingly little to do with it, except that one figure meets another who lies in a hospital bed. Nothing specific about either figure can be made out clearly.

All of the original imagery from which my studies derive was discovered in the hundreds of pages of religious tracts and educational workbooks I found strewn about the abandoned bible school near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. They were published in the 1970’s and 80’s. I called my small works “Study for Private Language I-IV,” and the imagery ranged from missionary doctors treating patients in hospitals to cartoon animals in a swimming pool.

Although I began the Nihil project with the aim of avoiding the construction of meaning, I am struck by how frequently I notice certain patterns and tendencies regarding the spaces themselves as well as my own responses to them. I can’t seem to avoid certain repeated coincidences (perhaps non-coincidentally) such as encountering the same kind of religious material I frequently responded to in my early work almost twenty years ago now. I have, more than once, for example, made paintings of missionaries interacting with children, patients, refugees, and congregations from all over the world.

In those days, there was an intention to critique the institutions and structures behind missionary work, Christianity, and the history and politics of religion in general. It would lead to an almost fifteen-year career in making work that was intended to function politically by focusing on ideas of colonialism, whiteness, and western hegemony of all kinds. And yet, over the course of those years, almost none of what I made succeeded in functioning that way, if for no other reason than my understanding of what constitutes the art world was flawed. My desire to speak about one system by delivering the news into another was not yet a problem I fully understood or appreciated. Over the years, the symmetries between “church world” and “art world” became stunningly more apparent until eventually it no longer made sense to make work intended to function as criticism.

In those days, even when or if the paintings worked as paintings, the messaging was painfully or comically misunderstood or flat-out ignored. To say that I spent fifteen years making work about colonialism and whiteness, in my case, is the same as saying I made work about nothing at all. The work implicitly carried with it a kind of self-consciousness that is difficult to avoid accumulating in the culture of the art world, in which one wants to imagine oneself or one’s own work signaling a shift or relevant moment in the chain or web of art history. In my case, I wanted, as a white male artist, to make work that signaled a shift in consciousness, as a descendent of colonists, at this moment in history (the early 2000’s, post-9/11 Bush years). This I was to do before an audience I never really could conceptualize or understand, if indeed it did exist, amid the cultural and historical baggage of the kind made utterly explicit in the contemporary art world from around that time until now. And yet, perhaps, it’s especially the white male artist who would be surprised that, actually, no one cares what he thinks about whiteness.

Many problems grew out of the irreconcilable fact that I both wanted to embody this shift in consciousness and to be applauded for it; there was something implicitly transactional, even self-entitled, about my approach that I was, ironically, unconscious of at the time. One of the truly embarrassing pitfalls that awaits the average artist is to think ourselves sincere about what we engage with, but to be unconscious of the ways in which the framework of our thinking hasn’t been tested often or roughly enough that we become capable of sufficient honesty with ourselves.

It's too simple to say that this is how I ended up pursuing the Nihil project, so many years later, but it nevertheless rests in the background of how I lost faith in the very idea of political messaging in art, moved to rural New Mexico, began a committed meditation practice, and, with my wife, brought a child into the world. All these factors together helped in clarifying my motives and methods resulting in deepened intuitions about such things as touch, image, object, and time as they pertain to painting. In turn, these intuitions deepened my overall experience with the immediate tangible world, from which I seemed to acquire a greater sense of confidence and purpose in making and thinking about art.

Stabat Mater | Mixed Media on Canvas | 60 x 48 in. | 2022

From this slow, long-term transformation that backgrounds a piece like “Stabat Mater” emerges a curious question about what it means to avoid intentional meaning-making in painting only to paint something, which on the surface, appears to address the same subject matter as when I first began all those years ago. I cannot see my own work objectively and so I don’t know if or how an ethic resides in the surface aesthetic of the piece, which is different from the early work. This coincidence calls me to ask new questions about old concerns and, ultimately, to understand even those old motivations very differently now.

It is useful to me to look to what I’m doing consciously now for clues into what I was doing unconsciously then. One immediate difference between a picture of missionaries then, and such a picture now, is the process of how I arrived there within the single work. In those days, it was all I could do to make a picture work as picture, with what materials and experience I had at that time. These days, the approach, in a sense, is far more casual; I’ve already proven, time and again, I can make any kind of painting. It no longer matters to me whether I articulate every finger on a hand or even denote the figure’s gender, age, or even archetypal purpose within the picture. In short, it’s not the verisimilitude or fidelity of the image that makes the image matter, it’s the intention toward the very real human being that the image, at least at one time, portrayed. In the case of “Stabat Mater,” I do not know the doctor or patient in the photograph, but I am moved by both. I wonder, will the man in the bed survive whatever has put him here, if, indeed, his condition is serious? Or: Are either of these men alive now? The photograph was taken in the 70’s, and both men appear to be in their 30’s or 40’s at the time of the photo. I don’t even know which country the photograph comes from, but I begin to wonder about things like war, starvation, natural disaster, etc. Two human beings very much like them are facing each other as I write this, in any part of the world for any set of reasons. I have been the one looking down onto the one in bed (my father’s recent battle with cancer) and though I have never been the one in bed for any serious reason, I very likely will be, and soon. None of my old criticism is here. How can I critique what I don’t know anything about? This question is one I never thought to ask when I was younger. Always I believed I knew more than I did.

The image we see in “Stabat Mater” is one of three images that exist under all that paint. Incidentally, it is also the image I began with, so, on this one canvas, I painted the same image twice, and with a similar palette. Between the first layer and last, I painted two other images: one of the cartoon elephant and monkey, each facing the other in the inflatable swimming pool (derived from children’s workbooks), and one of a man helping to steady an elderly woman in front of a church entryway. Each of these depict two figures engaging in what I call “private language,” perhaps verbal or not, as distinguished from public language or what I sometimes call “language of consensus.” There is a value asserted here in private language over consensus, or of the individual identity over the group. I can believe in one but not the other.

As with all the work in the Nihil project, I take my cues from the music of Arvo Pärt, and, specifically, from his Tintinnabuli structure. The M-voice, or single note, comes from the T-voice, or chord comprised of three. In my visual translation, I am picking out the hospital bed scene as a single voice from among the triad of three images and layering it into the same composition. The reason for its rough appearance is that in each layer I’ve scratched, peeled, and hacked away at the surface, sometimes revealing what’s beneath, sometimes demolishing even the earliest layers, until I’m all the way back down to the tooth of the canvas. These traces, I tend to feel, invoke a kind of heartbrokenness, which seems a necessary precondition for an inner surrender, making “private language” possible, to find in our deepest existential crises, not answers, but hard-earned beauty, enough to sustain us through the experience of outgrowing the crisis as we age here on Earth.

I am weary, though, of sentimentality in the yearning for authenticity. If everything I’ve written so far is true to my way of thinking, it is also important to note that the picture itself is not especially comforting, nor, in my opinion, should it necessarily be. I do not want to pretend that death is not what looms over the picture, or that, in dying, our lives are resolved. All things are left unfinished, abandoned, lost. Even if a book is published posthumously by an “important” author, the book is eventually forgotten, and anything it might have resolved for the writer can never be resolved in humankind. What the author might have discovered has to be eternally rediscovered. Perhaps the greatest paradox of the absurd and the sacred is that we must forget our soul in order that we might remember it.

Pärt, I think, might believe there is a way out of the profane world, but I don’t. I love his music because it opens space in my own soul for experiencing the sacred within the absurd, which gives me a sense of “seeing deeply” into the world. But I do not believe in an art, or in anything or anyone, that can lift me out of it. There is no need to escape as there is no need for the ego to survive the broader consciousness from which it struggles to differentiate itself. Let the ego be grown over, or as Merwin wrote in his poem “December Night”:

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon

The water flows through its

Own fingers without end

Tonight once more

I find a single prayer and it is not for men

What attracts me to the abandoned spaces where I install the work is that they tell the truth. Whatever activity they once held was momentary, as all activity in all spaces is. The longer the structure remains in use, the more the culture believes itself immortal, which can never be. What meaning we invest in them is always momentary, and eventually meaning is subsumed by reality. I keep this in mind even as I find meaning in my own painting, though I’d prefer to avoid it. What I now find in the image is a transfiguration--of two humans into one, of ego into consciousness, of pleading into surrender—so that, understood in another way, each is a projection of the other. What in the ego is driven to maintain control is now lost to the experience of deeper consciousness, which, in turn, cannot distinguish between living and dying. It has no prejudice. The scene itself is a mirror to the process implied in the quality of the tangible object.

I did not possess this language when I began making my anti-church (revenge-against-my-father) paintings in the early 2000’s. I understood the ideological problems of the church to be unique to it, but in the intervening years, I find the same problems everywhere and among everyone. All ideologies use the same tools for leverage, and I’ve found, in my own life, shame to be a favorite choice. In all groups, those who leverage shame best seem to gain the greatest advantage over those who have less confidence. “The need to dominate,” a friend once suggested to me, “is just a warped way of seeking to belong.” I have often called my experiences in church world and art world the “shame sandwich.” Conformity of thought is all the rage everywhere one turns. This is how I’ve come to believe that the only way to make art freely is in exile. If you hope to matter, you become a useful tool.

If Stabat Mater has long been a song of mourning, my painting only mourns the loss of an image of the self which has simply outlived its usefulness. If my original intention toward the image was also epistolary in its intention toward the two human beings I never knew, it dissolved in the painting itself, in the same way my more youthful intentions dissolved in the long-term experience of painting. There is a way to read the story of the crucifixion as a rite, as a death of the ego for the repatriation of the soul to its source, as part of a larger procession and transformation of consciousness generally.

In the abandoned bible school, the painting hangs over a pealing wall, holes from bolts which once fastened one thing to another. Beneath it are rows of desert encrusted folding chairs, once attached to retractable desks. In them once were children, perhaps men’s or women’s bible study groups, perhaps missionaries in training. Some might still be living. If they’ve come back to visit since 2005, I can find no evidence. It’s on private property, but I’ve never seen a soul on all that land in the many times I’ve visited. Perhaps one car drives by every hour. I always half-expect the floor the fall in or the roof to finish the job of collapsing, possibly on my own head. The loudest sound is the wind, and just under it, the cawing of crows, who sway on the tallest branches of the cottonwoods. Once, I encountered barn owls here, but even they seem to have moved on.

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Image | Object | Space | Word | Time | Contact