Peter Sacks: Repair, 2019 by Marlborough Gallery

Peter Sacks Repair

Marlborough

Peter Sacks Repair

Marlborough

THE ABSTRACT TURN BY LEORA MALTZ-LECA Peter Sacks’s powerful paintings don’t really want to be abstract. They are embedded in history and shaped by myth. They flirt with narrative and court figuration, inviting scraps of textile to stretch into figures, out of vegetation, or rise up into aerial landscapes. Stuff transforms into other stuff, and abstraction turns fleshy and material. The paintings, grappling with the stakes of abstract painting from the lowly mounds of the material – from the ant’s eye view of the bottom of the world – deploy intense color, syncopated pattern and rhyming form to repeat, mesmerizingly, the smallest echo, recalibration, twist or turn. The playful rhythm of the turn structures Sacks’s work at multiple levels. It casts serpentine thunderbolts curving across a monumental triptych like Report from the Besieged City 3. Or it organizes form by scattering it: tossing about the grids it quotes, dipping a line into a wave, or stirring into a vortex of color the printed textiles that Sacks paints with. Turning can imply a central axis – like a wheel spinning– and that kind of sensibility underpins works like Township 16, but more often (as in the recent Quickening series), multiple axes disperse form and color into a kaleidoscope of protean energy and infinite variety. So, even as a dark floral “thunderbolt” writhes cross Report with baroque torsion, alongside it crimson tails and azure blue wisps float past, buoyant and serene. Whatever their gait, whatever their weight, the twists and turns of fabric create an optics of swirling agency that affirms the sovereignty of Sacks’s materials no less than the intense physicality of his processes. But more than that, the dynamic formal infrastructure of the paintings implies a world restless with constant change. In this sense, the dominant motif of the turn – the flip of cloth to its verso, the liquid serpentine sweep of fabric – performs the visual equivalent of the trope. The trope, from the Greek tropos meaning “turn,” names the flight away from the careful inching of analytic logic, to embrace the more acrobatic possibilities of thinking: the leaps of metaphor, association, the deep dives down the rabbit holes of memory. Tropes turn because they alter course from the path of habitual usage. They open up to allusion. A textile curls into a rearing horse…or is it a plant? A line bends into a mountain, or perhaps not? Meaning is shaky, emotional, readily reversible. And when everything oscillates with such dramatic fluidity, we know that we are not only in the realm of Heraclitean flux, but also in the domain of metaphor. Things don’t just quiver; they actively turn into and out of other things. Hayden White has called this place where tropes flourish “the tropical.”1 And just as tropes come alive by patterns of

1. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985).

repetition and refrain, so too in Sacks’s paintings, we find the textiles calling to each other from various corners of the canvas, shapes mirroring, pigments reverberating, and echoes of form rippling wildly across a field or burrowing through a whole triptych. Both of the large triptychs, Origins (of Totalitarianism) and Report from the Besieged City 3 are dominated by riverine shapes, fiercely patterned with black and white stripes, lozenges, flowers, which flow dark against pale pinstriped muslins and corrugated cardboard—the scalloped edge of a handkerchief, the ghostly silhouette of a Normandy lace shirt. Even as these triptychs incorporate poetry, political philosophy, refugee accounts and prisoner testimonies – their titles and partially buried texts summoning Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Herbert, as well as testimonies from Assad’s Saydnaya Prison– the very folding of poetry into politics, and vice-versa, signals a mode of confronting the contemporary: we are walking through these paintings with Atlas, barked at by a prison and border guard as much as by Cerberus, in an outpost of some forgotten empire. But far from getting ensnared in handwringing and didacticism, Sacks’s painting rests on a mode of oblique political allegory, subtle, incantatory. Words here; titles there; scattered quotes unloose themselves from their origin to stand as gnomic touchstones, conjurers of things, people, or concepts, whether totalitarianism and censorship, violence or refuge. If contemporary events are sized up historically in Sacks’s work, it may be because ethical failures and states of siege repeat themselves across time and place with horrifying sameness. Hence Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism sold out in the U.S. in 2017, as Trump rose to power; hence the sad familiarity of Herbert’s poem, Report from the Besieged City, written after the institution of martial law in Poland in 1981, but lodged in the suspended temporality of waiting that South Africans know well from the long years of apartheid (and Americans are growing acquainted with): “I don’t know when the invasion began,” Herbert writes, “two hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn/ everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time.” As Herbert’s poem leaps between yesterday and two centuries ago, so too Peter Sacks’s paintings plunge in scale from huge to tiny, drawing the viewer in close to read and disentangle, to follow and lose, before releasing her to step backwards, and look from afar. We are being asked to linger in the edges, at the extremes of vision, as well as to navigate multiple registers of experience. The back and forth of thinking, the approach and retreat of walking, all prompt “things to turn upon themselves,” Sacks notes, so that burlap and buried lengths of wood read as pattern from afar, only to reveal themselves as

texture close up.2 The shifts in scale emphasize larger currents of transformation. Things alter beneath our walking gaze. They abandon their former identity. They travel towards something else. Such traversals take time. They collude with the paintings’ wall-sized span and inordinate complexity to mount a resistance: to photography (the camera flattens and simplifies them) and even to a viewer in the gallery, thwarting immediate capture, demanding more drawn-out viewing, a fraction of the weeks and months – often over a year – spent in their making. Moreover, even as the paintings draw the viewer’s body in, so too the swirls of fabric are trails of bodily gesture “like a very, very slow Pollock,” Sacks says.3 This slowness, like a drawl or delay, puts the “traction into abstraction,” inscribing a counter-history of abstraction that declines illusions of instantaneous mastery for the slow thickening of doubt and the nearsighted wonder of the “ant-eye view” from the bottom of the world.4 If the ant-view calls us to scale, alerting us to our inflated sense of gigantism, and the myths of superiority and domination of nature such visions fueled, the sobering facts of climate change tend to shrink us right back again. In the Kyoto Protocol Pages series, the title and embedded texts pivot us towards the 1989 Kyoto climate change summit document, to the ecopolitics of turning points and points of no return. As a central black zigzag tosses from front to verso and back, reiterated across several paintings, its arcs and curves evoke flows of air or water—whether the lightness of the ripple or the force of the undertow. Here we especially sense the forces of nature and history collide: we are all now in the besieged city of the Anthropocene, following not a current but a growing tidal wave; a road, a course, a future, in which we are always moving, or being moved, usually unaware of the pressures propelling us. Sacks muses about things carried in a flood “we each have a current but are caught within greater currents.”5 Such a comment returns us to the problem of scale: to how we are caught by things too big or too small to see, especially because these scalar extremes often mandate a loss of our own edge. With the enormous we are enmeshed within the very currents that pull us; with the tiny (like the bacterial or viral) they become lodged in us, a fusion that equally dissolves the fragile border separating us from the world beyond. The central form of the Kyoto series, and especially the black textiles that spill from one panel to the next in the triptychs Origins, Report and Odyssey, carefully articulate the

2. Interview with the artist, August 21, 2018. 3. Ibid. 4. Interview with the artist, August 22, 2018 5. Interview with the artist, August 21, 2018. 6. Email from the artist, January 6, 2019. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid.

fluid membrane of the edge, flowing in from off the frame then out again.

Amidst such flux the origins of things, whether of totalitarianism or climate change, become elusive, unstable, chimeric. Sacks nonetheless plumbs origins to speak of “shapes arriving from or departing beyond the frame, or yet again emerging as from within the womb of the painting and its ‘matrix.’”6 Gestation and growth, the formal and conceptual gathering and transformation of energy that underpins all of Sacks’s recent work, comes to the fore in the Quickening series, where things turn from liquid to gas, from cells into a human. “The dynamic movement into being of elements, life forms, currents, associated with accelerating transformation,” Sacks explains, is central to this work.7 Like the concept of change itself, acceleration can swing from exhilaration to terror, with the series’ title summoning these emotional extremes. The term Quickening announces the first sensation of fetal movement, a foot kicking from the inside, transmitting to a mother “outside” the miracle that turns a cell into a small human. It conjures too the terror of large-scale escalating transformation, returning us to what the artist calls the “‘tipping points’ of climate change, social or cultural revolution, perhaps uncontainable energies.”8 Pressures like the foot kicking from inside to outside render the two-dimensional realm of “surface” an unstable edge. They present surface as depth; the “outside” as the border of a vast, hidden interior. When mysterious forces rise up through the body of the painting, stretching it taut from below—as in the upper left panel of Origins—they suggest what lies beneath: up to nine or ten buried layers of Sacks’s process of accretion. These bumps and ridges sculpt a topography of folds, even as they point us underneath, to a peeling back of time. For the Quickenings may be a womb but they are also a burial ground of reincarnated muslins, rescued needlepoint, reused burlap, and recycled cardboard. Pressures rumble up from this underworld, creasing the brow of the visible surface even as Sacks further agitates the support from above. Sacks’s studio processes can read like a list of medieval tortures, that include scorching, rending, gluing. Early on, he seared his canvases with a blowtorch; now he ruffles it more gently by cutting, ripping and layering glue-soaked textiles until they fuse into a bandage, a carapace over a wound. Ideas, along with materials, must be rolled through his fingers. And even texts arrive by tiny type-hammers struck letter by letter by the artist

THE ABSTRACT TURN

BY LEORA MALTZ-LECA

Kyoto Protocol Pages 1 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Origins 2017-18 Mixed media 96 x 226 inches

Quickening 28 2019 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

onto bleached cotton, so they striate and dig into their pale ground like miniscule furrows. Sacks’s paintings, worked through and tunneled across, churned and bandaged, are emotional surfaces. They writhe and coil, or float and exhale, and do not resist such passions with the cool irony of disdain. They are hot surfaces. Perhaps that’s one reason why Sacks’s early work had him doublefisting blowtorch and paint brush, swiping and searing, in a back and forth of creation and destruction. This heating of the surface, more refined now, defines the paintings as trope-ic, or tropical. They play with the formal structure of the turn to elicit shifts of meaning, or loops into the past, not merely as a form of aesthetic pleasure, but in order to displace meaning, to scatter it south, towards the tropics. The painter’s deep and abiding investment in Africa, especially in the landscape of his youth, Durban, the subtropical port on the Indian Ocean, and its mountainous interior, the Drakensberg, prompts the question: might the “tropical” formal and conceptual swivel offer ways of approaching the world from the southern tip of Africa, or with a certain distance from a set of prescribed (Euro-American) painterly conventions of abstraction? What is “tropical” painting, if not perhaps a set of “hot” resistances to the coolness and distance of the “uncontaminated” white square of modernism? In this way, the turn is always a return, or a cascading series of revisitings: to Sacks’s origins in South Africa; to the legacy of abstract painting in America; and to the worlds between them. The textiles Sacks chooses – highly patterned, jewel-like in color, largely Indian in origin, some especially Rajasthani in their bold black, red and white palettes, others perhaps made for the African export market – bind Africa and India together through their long histories of Indian Ocean trade. Even as these scraps of printed cotton may offer a proximate familiarity to Sacks, who grew up in Durban, the Indian Ocean port city that has one of the largest communities of Indian immigrants in Africa, so too they materialize the movement of images and ideas, and the centuries-long primacy of Indian textiles in the world market. Certainly Sacks remembers the hessian sacks hoisted by cranes from the massive container ships in Durban harbor, and these material affinities spill onto the canvas in the large stretches of burlap we find in Township 18 (and elsewhere), sitting alongside a patch of a West African indigo dye resist textile and a fragment of Kuba cloth.9 But personal recollections serve as a portal to public histories, pointing to the subterranean pasts of the stuff

9. Scraps of burlap and indigo are found throughout the paintings. In Origins, for instance, the indigo cloth looks Mossi (from Burkina Faso) and sits above a large field of denim. 10. Jean-Pierre Chaline “The Cotton Manufacturer in Normandy and England During the Nineteenth Century” Textile History 17:1 (19-26): 1986. Pg 1 11. Email from the artist, January 8, 2019.

we all wear and eat – cotton, coffee, chocolate – all of which is carefully cleansed of blood and sweat by the time it reaches its port of destination. Just as cotton canvas has a checkered past, so too burlap, cowrie shells and indigo dye bear histories of trade, past and present. If the cowries are an icon of pre-capitalist commerce, indigo is equally so: the coveted hue peddled in pots of spiritual transcendence ended up sparking a denim industry now worth $16 billion annually. Then, as now, textiles are central to the global economy, and in Sacks’s paintings, where they sink from surface into hidden depths, obviating the ancient, yet enduring opposition between form and matter, these textiles reveal Sacks’s interest in putting the “traction into abstraction,” partly through making his materials “sticky” with history, highlighting the friction of their extraction, rather than smoothing out or erasing their processes of production. Sacks had just finished reading Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) when we met in August 2018 in his studio, a detailed history of the material that grounds it in the “war capitalism” that enabled the industrial revolution. It details, by way of the Americas, land appropriation and slavery, the brutal tale of an ascendant Euro-American industrialization and economic supremacy powered by cotton. Cotton, the stuff of canvas, and almost all the fabrics Sacks uses, is the core commodity of global modernity—patterns over which wars were waged, humans sold into slavery, revolutions fought. Sacks’s use of the Indian cottons is more recent. In previous decades he worked with lace from Normandy. Though seemingly a world away, Normandy, too, was the center of cotton production in nineteenth-century France in terms of both workers and output, making Rouen “the Manchester of France,” and a key node on a global cotton circuit that connected the world as never before.10 Despite the variant histories of French lace, Indian cottons, or Mossi indigo, what remains constant about the textiles Sacks employs, is that they are never presented as innocent or pure materials, but as objects with a past, histories which they bring to the canvas, amplifying it as “a field of forces, natural, archaeological, historical, rather than a blank inert surface without pressures of its own.11” There is no question that these textiles are palpably stained with the past. Yet the question of how much of these histories they carry over, or rather, how much of their transmission can be heard, is a crucial one. On the one hand they, the textiles are “pregnant” with history, suggestive, charged, fraught; on the other, they are dumb and occasionally recalcitrant. By refusing to dominate his material, Sacks nurtures this autonomy, allowing the

THE ABSTRACT TURN

BY LEORA MALTZ-LECA

textiles their stubbornness. These fabrics, flamboyantly expressive yet ultimately reticent, thus invite us to consider the limits of fragments to tell stories, and even the limits of the metaphoric turn, which may rotate us towards something, but relies on the viewer to complete the transformation. The textiles, then, perform much like the text in the paintings do, as passages of verse are set loose from their origin, and bear shadows of it, but now stand open and ready to pivot towards the viewer. Indeed, how much the materials of painting have “turned against themselves,” as Sacks puts it, how integrated the past is with the present, provides a structuring tension to this deeply arresting and original work.12 Because so much about these frayed pieces of cloth is lost and unknowable, they ultimately attest less to broad truths about the richness and violence of crosscultural exchange than to the frustratingly specific inaccessibility of individual objects or people. When faced with the demand to perform as signs of distant times and places, Sacks’s paintings mount a material resistance of another sort: they decline the abstraction of particularity into universal history. Here they collude with a range of other refusals of abstraction’s authoritarian leanings. Just as the precipitous plunges in scale in Sacks’s work demand that a viewer be far and close, requesting a nearly impossible duality, a splitting of self that might alert us to the limitations of our own perspective—as well as to the unfeasibility of inhabiting others—so too the particularity of Sacks’s materials, and their silent, trapped origin stories, gesture to the palpable limits of capturing the experiences of others, especially of trauma and loss. The textiles refuse the principle of abstraction in the name of irretrievable specificity. Perhaps theirs is a complaint against the violence of rationalism; perhaps it’s even a protest against laws of generalizability as a standard for truth. Maybe it’s another tropical resistance to discourses of development and promises of progress.

abstract painters (Mondrian, Malevich), and their American midcentury successors (Pollock, Newman, Rothko), for whom paint carried with it the possibility of translating the world into a set of abstract systems.13 Abstraction, for them, was not only about transcending form – a release from representation – but it was also about transcending medium. It was bound to the dream of pure materiality: the faith that paint could serve as a neutral agent, free of meaning or association, such that it could transform anything into anything: to elevate it through the mental and alchemical operation of abstraction.

That assumption is firmly refused here. Even as transformation is central to Sacks’s work, it is a mode of alteration in which the past seeps through to the present. Despite his formal inventiveness, this transparency, this opening onto history, defines Sacks’s artistic commitment, and his distance from, his material resistance to, certain norms of abstraction. He turns on it. For him medium becomes less a path out of history, than a return route into it—less a smooth release than a stubborn wrapping that, time and again, gets between, offering friction, making trouble. This is painting, tropically. Leora Maltz-Leca teaches and writes about contemporary art, and is particularly interested in how artists from the postcolonies and the global south are reshaping late modernism by refusing its most cherished assumptions, hierarchies and dogmas. She has written—especially on contemporary African art—for publications such as Artforum, Frieze, African Arts, Art South Africa, ArteEast as well as Art Bulletin, where she is a member of the journal’s editorial board. Her most recent book is “William Kentridge, Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises (University of California Press, 2018)”.

These works, laden with the history of the global south, materialize the transnational circuits, hidden labor and repressed violence that formed the foundation of Euro-American modernity. In doing so they reveal the crucial meaning in Sacks’s notion of putting the “traction into abstraction”. It is through the extraction, or at least, denotation of the earlier lives of the fabrics, lives that preceded their transformation by the hands of the artist— even as we feel their extraordinary rebirth into works of great beauty—that Sacks insists we feel their full residue of lost story, and forces us to intuit the limit of what can ever be known about an other. These stakes, an investment in what he calls the “dignity of stuff…and embedded lives” fundamentally separates Sacks’s mode of abstraction from the early European

12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

THE ABSTRACT TURN

BY LEORA MALTZ-LECA

Quickening 21 2017 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Quickening 22 2017 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Quickening 18 2017 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 5 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 16 2018 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Odyssey 2018 Mixed media 76.75 x 155.5 inches

Kyoto Protocol 3 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 21 2017-18 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 6 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 10 2017-2018 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Codex 59 2016-2017 Mixed media 22 x 18 inches

Quickening 6 2017 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 11 2019 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 20 2017-18 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Codex 58 2016-2017 Mixed media 22 x 18 inches

Quickening 7 2017 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Amnesty 2017 Mixed media 96 x 228 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 8 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 19 2017-18 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 10 2019 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 12 2017 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Codex 57 2016-2017 Mixed media 22 x 18 inches

Quickening 30 2019 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 13 2019 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 18 2018 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Codex 61 2016-2017 Mixed media 22 x 18 inches

Quickening 29 2019 Mixed media 36 x 36 inches

Report From The Besieged City 3 2017-2018 Mixed media 76.75 x 155.5 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 7 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Township 17 2018 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

Kyoto Protocol Pages 2 2018 Mixed media 20 x 20 inches

Exit East 2017 Mixed media 84 x 84 inches

PETER SACKS - REPAIR 2019 Marlborough 40 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019 Telephone: 212.541.4900 Fax: 212.541.4948 www.marlboroughgallery.com mny@marlboroughgallery.com

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