Michael Becher - TURKISH DELIGHTS DRAWINGS AND GOUACHES
Galerie Gordon Pym & Fils, Paris - April 19-May 1, 2007
Expressed in two other ways, the Triple A of the aesthetic act (Art abhors the arbitrary.) affirms that (1) Art presupposes an author's intention, and (2) that every constituent of a work of art must transcend its mere presence.
But is it rational to speak of a distinction between conscious and unconscious intention? Or for that matter, is it truly possible intentionally to represent the unconscious? To what extent is it legtimate to speak of a work's intentionality when the resulting image appears to contradict its original intention, or, mysteriously to ignore it?
Abstract Expressionists (in their heyday when Michael Becher was born) were especially concerned to cultivate the role of accident in their work, and contrived to ensure a degree of accident entirely through technical means, in the manner of their application of pigment. Pollock relinquished any direct contact between brush and canvas; De Kooning a applied pigment directly from the tube, and spread it with unmodified strokes of a putty knife so that the actual application was obscured from his own view; Frankenthaler would 'bleed' extremely thinned pigment into unprimed canvas.
But despite the surrender of minute control in favor of accident in the service of gesture, the over all 'strategic' image scheme remained contingent, and very much within the author's plan.
Michael Becher's aesthetic of accident has nothing to do with this method: he rigorously controls the application of pigment. His technique or tactic is most deliberate. It is his strategy that is accidental in its progressive, instantaneous, and successive transmission of mental association.
His varieties of association are unrestricted and, by definition, subjective. They can be entirely psychological, conventional, hermetic, formal, or even literary. Neither should they exclude the logical--whether or not their logic is communicable to the viewer without external elucidation. As such, their conceptual dimension has less to do with any overtly representational aspect than with the unfettered manner of their execution.
Describing the genesis of the seminal Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Bacon said that he set about to paint a picture of a bird alighting on a field. But in the painting, there is no bird; and there is no field.
Bacon, who, like his New York contemporaries, technically induced accident by using a cloth to smudge the pigment he applied, ventured further into accident by developing each work as a synthesis between an original intention, and an unplanned impulse that would subsume any such intention.
In Becher, there is no smudging or any such technical flourish that occurs ex post facto. Since his work method concentrates so many accidental associations, the artist abstains to impose further accident of formal means. For Becher, the application of pigment is to make the image scheme more explicit, rather than to distort that which is already there.
The stated purpose of Bacon's distortions were to enable the viewer to return the image to reality with greater force. Becher does not distort, in part, because he has no intention of having the viewer return the image to reality. Instead, the viewer remains with the image as it is, suspended between the deliberate and the arbitrary.
To be sure, Becher's drawings use a concrete, representational language, but they practically never represent what they depict. Neither do they symbolize in the sense that they posit a rational link between signifier and signified.
They do not illustrate dream content. Although their most central tension resides between contingent and accident, they never fail to recall an impulse in drawing that most orginallly would subordinate conventionally mature aesthetic aims: the impulse to play. Arbitrary in strategy rather than in tactic, they trascend the Triple A by defying intention rather than indulging it.
--Drew Hammond, Paris, 2007
