Coping with Paradise

There is that whole shallow, indulgent, Republic-of-Trivia aspect to [Southern California] which reminds us here in New York that not since the invention of bronze casting has anything of consequence happened in that climate … Also, the prospect of hip young dropout types hanging out in Venice, California, making fancy baubles for the rich, amuses us.

joseph masheck , Artforum, 1971

the plight of artists in the American republic has never been easy. It is no easier today. We talk a better game, but our institutional aesthetics still owe as much to John Calvin as they do to Raphael. Our public exhibition spaces still eschew Mediterranean glamour to emulate the blazing white boxes of Congregationalist chapels and Bauhaus refectories. Our Methodists and Marxists still agree on the primacy of the Word over the Flesh and the evanescence of earthly desire. So, if you’re easygoing, devoid of grudges, and happen to have been popular in high school, you’re in trouble. The artists from Los Angeles whose works concern me now are generally my contemporaries. They lack angst and alienation. They have grown up and spent their working lives on the continental antipode of the puritan republic—in the tropical sunshine of Southern California. So how does an artist cope with paradise when the prevailing cultural assumption is that we live in an abject world where artists are either puritan-intellectual fixeruppers or slavish decorators?

How does an artist function in a paradise that steals the promise of paradise? These artists have discovered a way. Very few others, before or since, have had the modesty and equanimity to achieve this act of accommodation. Puritan intellectuals, plopped down in the perfect garden, ignore it. Slavish decorators leave no lily ungilded. Both trivialize the mysteries of the sensible world. They presume that when one fails in paradise, paradise is the problem, and it is. Traditional America is a bad-weather culture, dedicated to that brighter-day tomorrow. American Protestantism, above all else, is a bad-weather religion, directing our souls to a better “world elsewhere.”

Our souls in the here and now, amid this vale of tears, are presumed to be as uncomfortable in our bodies as our bodies are in a blizzard. Perfect weather and visual equanimity steal the substance of this metaphor. They deny us visible correlatives for our historical and spiritual discomfort. They mandate a brand of art that cannot be seen or felt, that, in truth, cannot be made, only taught. Neither abject strategy or the Wizard of Oz option addresses the social consequences of living in a tropically enhanced mercantile democracy hedged in by the desert on one side and by a gargantuan body of salt water on the other. The ocean and the desert are always there: their atmospheres assure us that we live in the shimmering midst of a “full world.”

The easy Euclidean distinctions that constitute the very stuff of American artistic identity dissolve. Life blurs between our bodies and our minds, our bodies and the world, between sight and touch, earth and sky, land and sea, large and small, near and far. Existing on a daily basis in a comfortable, breezy relationship with the natural climate and feeling oneself “at one” with the world, the traditional Northern European distinction between the spaces that we call negative and those we call positive evaporates—this occludes the glamour of that “world elsewhere”; it dims the past and dissolves the future in the bright mystery of the here and now.

This paradise steals our puritan souls, our hope, and our history. It leaves us in flux with no clear position from which to see, or work, or even think. We are cast adri in a symphony of nuance, shi ing emphasis, and ranging focus, and there are two straws at which to grasp: we can save our souls by ruining the garden, denying the full world, and reinstating our puritan dichotomies. Or we can be changed by that world, make it mobile, and hope that others are changed, as well. We can give up our puritan autonomy and gain the full world by riding the translucent waves of its sensual logic, by allowing ourselves to blur out at the edges like palm fronds in the morning fog, by devoting our most profound attention to the so , glistening metamorphic edge of things, where straight lines curve, solids turn liquid, and liquids dissolve into atmosphere, where we can always feel the air as it moves around us off the ocean.

In this full world, there is no nothing. Nor is there any hope, history, or pretense to autonomy. Modesty, courage, and industry must suffice, and if we were to look for “internal, ongoing logic” in the work of these artists, we would find instead a flowing stream of passions and proclivities—a fluid microchronicle of the artistas-citizen, coping with paradise with a sequence of tactile, visual solutions to specific visible occasions at the blurred interface of the artist and the world. This is what artists do in paradise: they reincarnate its domain; they make it manifest, perpetual, and mobile in its intrinsic fluidity; they try to tease its unity and complexity into some kind of eloquent, social equivalent.

The works of these artists were my first toys as a young critic, and they remain talismans of the mystery for me. In the shorthand