Philip Guston

FIONA CONNOR : Continuous Sidewalk

ChateauShatto – August-November 2023

Photo Peter Kirby

621 Ruberta Ave. #3 Glendale CA 91201

On Tuesday November 28 the art piece Continuous Sidewalk was still there, completely covering the floor of Fiona’s studio.   A DISPLACED DUPLICATE, that’s what it is.  It’s gone, demolished three days later, gone with the end of the artist’s residence in that studio, fallen victim to the real estate logistics. Was it the artist’s last grateful thanking to the place? A solid, physical goodbye? The Continuous Sidewalk just happened to disappear, like everything else in life. I walk all around, crossing the puzzle made with reproduced sidewalks in fragments, my eyes dropping vertically on cracks and lines, holes, arrows, colors, grids and marks of every kind. At first tricked by the images I am trodding on, somehow hesitant, than feeling safe: they are invulnerable. My feet are grateful. ( A smile comes from them.) The puzzle slides into my brain: the 4 inches thick concrete blanket leaves the floor, floats in the air like a magic carpet moving away from the soil, and the tapestry of damages embedded in it looks defiant at the sun from many faces.

The Continuous Sidewalk  was conceived to exist and stay. It will stay for sure inside the visitors who felt the strength of the compact, unified and continuous flat surface made by the artist. As if they were walking on a solidified Burri, watching and touching the joints along with the multiple scars caused by humans and nature on the sidewalk’s skin.

Fiona Connor has replicated steps, walls, museum benches, fountains, bulletin boards, bricks. The reverse engineering of the objects -that are very accurately remade- makes it hard to distinguish them from the original. The originals would be surprised facing the archival translation of their body. 

PHYSICALITY –  The sculpture is a solid carpet of concrete poured and shaped by a professional company. The artist placed on the not yet hardened mixture of gravel, stone, sand and cement, the single islands of sidewalk she had prepared separately, giving form to a continuous collage of sculpted parts, exactly the same size and look of those she had found in downtown Los Angeles, in a limited area around her gallery. It would be misleading to compare this collage to a painting, or to a sort of corrugated tapestry lying on the floor. I thought about it, the visual composition is intriguing, but surface is not the only point. Besides, the replica of many pieces of sidewalk in one, displaced in an interior space with roof and door, is technically perfect. An absurd marvel.

The Continuous Sidewalk is a body, a body that reveals nonsense and meaningful messages, that brings together marks left by people we don’t know with the moments Fiona Connor spent observing them and picking up their image despite, or rather because of their fleeting, unstable, incoherent quality. These undervalued qualities are the veins of all her art pieces. She has even duplicated small pieces of floor in the shape of ceramic plates. So in the end, the hidden sidewalk is also her self-portrait. A written one in the way she prefers: free from the verbal. Art protected in her studio, as she had been for a few years.

Fiona is not a reader of marks on paper, my husband Peter’s favorite expression. I observed her for many years putting her full body at work when she makes a new piece. She explored Los Angeles by foot, or on the bus, to find places and printers willing to comply her request: “Would you please print for me 100 pages with your name and address?” The final work was a book, hand made with some volunteers at the Red Cat, 100 copies. She reads the world around her. At times, she calls for small communities of friends to stick around her cocoon. She is moved by a power that opens up her dialogue with people, objects, signs, forms not at all for what they are in their isolated existence: they tell her human stories and gestures in their constant mutation. Like Philip Guston, she rewrites her own sensations through the moment and place she is in: where she feels her existing. 

The first time I met her, it was after a performance by Simone Forti at the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery. Fiona had picked up a bunch of shredded newspaper tossed around by Simone. Her attention to the floor always alert. Walking behind Fiona I realized she had lost one of those papers. I picked it up and returned it to her. Our first face to face. “I’m a friend of Simone” – I added. “Good” she replied, “Simone is coming to my house for dinner, join us please, also your husband.” She wrote the address on that same piece of paper, gave it back to me. New Zealand, her country, is a beloved place for us. We had a solid ground in common, something on which it was worth building friendship.  

My effort here, half lost in the middle of innumerable stories, is to reduce as much as I can the distance between my words and what I am writing about.  Forgive me please, it’s my attempt at friendly ugliness.  RA

Interior photos: RA

PHILIP GUSTON’s touch on MY BLINDNESS

Something happened in New York City, May 21

By Rosanna Albertini

This is a piece on the physical status of painting and the dominant illusion that intelligence is not physical: rather an immaterial spark of infinity that makes humans different from monkeys… If such a deceiving idea has a comfortable room in your mind, listen to the story. Maybe you will stop recalling theoretical or historical stereotypes when you look at a painting. You might feel like a bird, perched on the artist’s shoulder, rolling your eyes into the display of wet colors.

PHILIP GUSTON, Untitled, 1967 Brush ans ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 23 1/8 inches @ The Estate of Philip Guston - Courtesy Hauser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, Untitled, 1967 Brush and ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 23 1/8 inches
@ The Estate of Philip Guston – Courtesy Hauser and Wirth

For most of my life as an art writer I have not been able to respond to Guston’s paintings. It was like having a locked door in front of me. There was no reason why. His paintings, those with figures, were flooding me with sadness, a fog in my brain. Reading essays and books did not rift my clouds. I couldn’t understand what was really going on, if it was me or Guston’s manner of operation, raising a barrier.

“It is writing of course it is the human mind and there is no relation between human nature and the human mind no no of course not. … oh yes the flatter the land the more yes the more it has may have to do with the human mind.” Gertrude Stein

Also Gertrude’s ‘of course’ was to me a matter of doubt. But her writing and thinking have something  of the painting’s flatness, they do not do not climb geometrical logics. On May 21, in New York City, my stubborn brain had to give up: I had to admit she was completely right: Guston’s paintings as probably any other great paintings for that matter don’t have much to share with human mind. I realized it after my head, on May 21, was seriously knocked down by a biker who hit my body like a balloon. I was crossing the street. For weeks each step has been painful, I’m still not my usual walking self. The day before the accident, I had seen Philip Guston’s exhibition of abstract paintings and drawings (1957-1967)  at Hauser and Wirth.

PHILIP GUSTON, Accord i, 1962 Oil on canvas 68 1/8 x 78 1/2 inches @ The Estate of Philip Guston - Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, Accord I 1962,  Oil on canvas 68 1/8 x 78 1/2 inches
@ The Estate of Philip Guston – Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

Prisoner of a bed for hours, days, I started to revisit his paintings, those that are called abstractions, with new sympathy. They were inside my body along with bruises and changing colors around my left eye; they kept me in a state of questioning, about the human sites Guston had laid down carefully, layer by layer, but he didn’t clean them, nor idealized them; they are painted as messy  as they are: until a state of painted harmony is reached between strokes and colors.

PHILIP GUSTON, Untitled 1958 Oil on canvas 64 1/8 x 75 1/4 inches @ The Estate of Phiip Guston - Courtesy of Houser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, Untitled 1958,  Oil on canvas 64 1/8 x 75 1/4 inches
@ The Estate of Phiip Guston – Courtesy of Houser and Wirth

As still lives do, these paintings block in a configuration that is not allowed to change the most undefinable nuances of a daily conversation: bodies and sounds and gushes of wind in their invisible, constant mutations. Guston could feel them, he paints his own sensations through the moment and place he is in. His feeling of existence.

He wrote in 1960: “I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean him and his environment, in this total situation.”

Give a look to The Year, 1964: it has two empty pupils, black. Each of them is beginning and ending. Hadn’t the tormented fury of time crossed their holes already, they wouldn’t be  looking at us announcing a quiet end of the day after all; actions or changes continue not to be compatible, and yet The Year keeps all the chopped stories together, floating in the same gray light. White and pink still peep out gently, they are not foreground.

“I don’t know why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern paintings and poetry at its heart.”

PHILIP GUSTON, Group II 1964, Oil on canvas 65 1/8 x 79 1/8 inches @ The Estate of Philip Guston - Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, Group II 1964, Oil on canvas 65 1/8 x 79 1/8 inches
@ The Estate of Philip Guston – Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, The Year 1964, Oil on canvas 78 x 107 1/2 inches @ The Estate of Philip Guston - Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, The Year 1964, Oil on canvas  78 x 107 1/2 inches
@ The Estate of Philip Guston – Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

At work in his studio, Philip Guston looks like a fisherman. Aquatic density in his compositions, floating of perceptions maintaining their chaotic and movable quality. Never twice the same. Never rigid, either. Known images and symbols are gone. What remains, then? The physical status of painting.

Finally, now that my body has been wounded, and my mind absorbed by pain, I see how great is Philip Guston’s art. I needed the loss of faith in the image of myself I had met most of my life: positive, invulnerable, independent. I became one of the many anonymous black holes Guston repeated  and repeated inside the bundle of matter, the formless nest of our daily situation. His paintings of the sixties are not images of anything one recognizes, nor portraits of ideas. He looks down. The narcissus he sees is a black spot on the asphalt where I bumped my head.

He does nothing to fill the blackness, his own or others’. And if sameness is everybody’s destiny what can he do? Paintings will carry it; vertical objects lifting an horizontal scene, so the angle is changed. There are not forms, not hierarchies, only a common ground.

PHILIP GUSTON, Painter III 1963 Oil on canvas 66 x 79 inches @ The Estate of Philip Guston - Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

PHILIP GUSTON, Painter III 1963,  Oil on canvas  66 x 79 inches
@ The Estate of Philip Guston – Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

The extremely simple drawings assembled on the same wall brought tears to my eyes: the line is not Paul Klee’s vein reproducing nature’s growing energy, memory and identity are not in these marks on paper.   Each sign says ‘I’m here, now. I am unique, not sure what I’m doing here, and yet don’t be mistaken: I am the language the Guston artist practices to tell himself he is alive, the marks of his human nature, looking hesitant as well as strong.’ Existential beauty, no need to explain.

Philip Guston in his studio, New York, 1957 Photo: Arthur Swoger @ The Estate of Philip Guston - Courtesy Hauser and Wirth

Philip Guston in his studio, New York, 1957
Photo: Arthur Swoger
@ The Estate of Philip Guston – Courtesy Hauser and Wirth