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Now
sooner or later we are going to be faced with the issue of validity; specifically,
to what extent can the identity of the artist be com-prehended by an examination
of his visual expression alone, without reference to his life? Certainly
this is one of the basic questions raised by Kanovitz's evolution as a
fig-urative artist, and I believe that the answer to it will become gradually
apparent as we look closely at the specific works. The very first thing
that strikes us, then, is the image of the artist himself, and the differing
ways in which Kanovitz represents himself. As for an underlying principle,
we can only say that it concerns the placement of the artist within the
composition, that is, the location of his point of view, the location
from which he makes contact with others, the location from which he may
best launch himself off into the world at large.
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| Icarus
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The fact
is, in the genre of the biographical, personal identity has always depended,
to a large degree, upon a sense of place: In common with the literary
artist, the painter has traditionally relied upon landscape to suggest
the soil from which his subject has received his formative sustenance,
the setting which most accurately represents his field of activity, the
climate which most sensitively symbolizes his emotional precipitation.
What is significant about Kanovitz's figures, though, is that they take
their places in a dramatic void. The biographical figures or objects have
been wrenched from a landscape natural or appropriate to them (whether
that landscape derives from a "found" photographic source or from the
artist's "stage-managed" arrangement of forms in the studio) so that they
are located nowhere, they "belong" nowhere -except within the painted
surface. Kanovitz's images are perfectly self-involved, yet there is no
sense of them ever having been in control. The reason for this, assuredly,
is that although recognizably engaged in humanity,
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they do not
really "belong." Like a dreamer's surrogates, they enact roles. They are
perpetual immigrants, strangers in a strange land, poised between two
realities. Before passing on to the four paintings mentioned above, I
would like to draw attention to a passage written by Professor Meyer Schapiro
on the subject of the still life, a passage that strikes me as being perfectly
relevant to the figurative work of Howard Kanovitz: "Without a fixed place
in nature and submitted to arbitrary and often accidental manipulation,
the still life on the table is an objective example of the formed but
constantly rearranged, the freely disposable in reality and therefore
connate with an idea of artistic liberty.
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| The End Of All That |
The still
life picture to a greater degree than the landscape or historical painting,
owes its composition to the painter, yet more than these seems to represent
a piece of everyday reality." In quoting Schapiro there, what I mean to
suggest is that Kanovitz's intention will best be comprehended if his
work is considered in the genre of the still life. The tension in such
a situation is inherent, deriving from the juxtaposition between autobiography
and art. And it is precisely this quality of juxtaposition and the division
between that provoked Adorno's stricture: "The division which makes everything
into an object must, instead of guiding thought, become an object of thought."
It is, I suggest, in the "constantly re-arranged, the freely disposable"
composition of his work that Kanovitz pursues his search for individual
identity.
"In the dark night of the soul," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "it is always
four o'clock in the morning," and in Kanovitz's 1956 oil "Four A.M. Eastern
Standard Time," the depiction of a jam session, one is instantly struck
by the musicians' isolation. They are "jamming" together, but it is in
their isolation that they achieve unity. In his response to this work,
the poet
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