Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art: Susan Swartz, Transcendentalist by Donald Kuspit
Susan Swartz, Nature’s Bouquet 10, 2019, Acrylic on linen, 12 x 12 in.
“Nature is transcendental, exists primarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought for the morrow.”
“ In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through man, in spite of real sorrows…I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration…in the woods is perpetual youth….There I feel that nothing can befall me in life –no disgrace, calamity, (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.”
By DONALD KUSPIT July, 2024
Depicting nature at every season, with exquisitely nuanced brushwork, Susan Swartz came into her own as a transcendental realist, making paintings that seem full of perpetual youth, whatever the season, whatever the time of day. It was a wonderful way to welcome the new millennium—Winter Sun, 1999 was made at the end of the old one, Stand Alone, 2001 was made at the beginning of the new one—and they all showed, indeed, forcefully announced that nature was alive and well, the eternal return of the seasons suggesting it was immortal—no sign of death in it, as in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637-1638. It was also peculiarly timely, considering the fact that nature and women were “disrespected,” to use the trendy term, by the “patriarchy,” as Carolyn Merchant argued in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, 1980. Merchant demonstrates that a “historic shift away from seeing Earth as a living organism, and towards seeing it as a machine, was used to justify the domination of both nature and women.” No longer was nature a “mother,” no longer was Venus “increase giving,” “sole mistress of the nature of things,” as Lucretius wrote in De Rerum Natura, a symbol of the “creative process of nature,” but a sexless instrument to be used, a machine with “muscles of steel and arms of iron,” like the all-American Miss Urania in Huysmans’ A Rebours, “Against Nature.”
Susan Swartz, Aspen Twilight, 2004, Acrylic on linen, 40 x 30 in.
More broadly, writing about “nature in peril” because of climate change--global warming in particular--as well as commercial exploitation—nature as capitalism’s cornucopia--the environmentalist Bill McKibben argued that The End of Nature, 1989 is at hand. Environmental or ecological art took off in the nineties, particularly in the form of earthworks, as though to preserve what was left of nature, to deny that it was at an end. “Nature for centuries remained the preferential theme of creative art,” but with twentieth century art--Cubism, Suprematism, Constructivism—nature lost credibility as a theme. The denaturalization—and dehumanization—of the figure in Cubism and Suprematism, and the belief that art should be impersonal and utilitarian in Constructivism, and thus more in tune with modern industrial society—the new conformism and academicism--led to the discrediting of naturalism, whether matter of factly descriptive of nature, as in John Constable’s realism, or in the “enlightened” experience of nature as a “phenomenon,” as in Monet’s impressionism. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1934 exhibition of “Machine Art” made it conspicuously clear that modern art was “against nature,” and what T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the “culture industry”—“mass produced culture”—made it difficult “to stay true to oneself,” that is, be “authentic,” as Lionel Trilling argued. Haunting the distinction between “High and Low” Art—the title of a 1990 Museum of Modern Art exhibition—is the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s distinction between True Self and False Self. “Living uncreatively as if caught up in the creativity of a machine”—“creative technology,” as Malevich called it--the “creative apperception that makes the individual feel that life is worth living”(1)--seems impossible. Where “compliance” and “adaptation” are demanded—expected—the “creative apperception” of the True Self seems insignificant, not to say irrelevant. Susan Swartz’s art is remarkably true to herself, even when it became non-objective, for it never lost the spontaneous gesture indicative of the True Self and the sense of the sacredness of nature inseparable from Transcendentalism, and with that a refuge from profane society.
Susan Swartz, Season’s Handiwork, 2003, Acrylic on linen, 36 x 48 in.
Objective Nature
In the 19th century there was an extraordinary number of masterpieces depicting transcendental American nature—majestic raw nature for its own grand vigorous self, rather than landscape as a background in history or religious paintings—as a setting for human activity or convictions, rather than as a sublime thing in itself, timelessly new and raw rather than old and refined, ahistorical rather than a setting for human history--a fresh New World nature rather than a tired Old World Nature. According to Kenneth Clark, landscape painting was “the chief artistic creation of the nineteenth century,” but European artists intellectualized landscape, in effect refining it, as though to civilize—domesticate--nature, perhaps in unconscious terror of it, for nature was not always predictable, however much the seasons predictably if sometimes erratically returned. Clark thought that “underlying European ways to convert the complexity of landscape to an idea were four fundamental approaches: the acceptance of descriptive symbols, a curiosity about the facts of nature, the creation of fantasy to allay deep-rooted fears of nature, and the belief in a Golden Age of harmony and order, which might be retrieved.“ Nature aroused a sort of paranoid anxiety, which was defended against by pseudo-scientific interest in its details, and poetic idealization and mythologizing of it. All of this de-transcendentalizes it, from Emerson’s point of view. John Ruskin said that Turner could most “strikingly and truthfully measure the moods of nature,” suggesting that he was projecting himself into nature. But the 19th century American artists who painted landscapes did not tidy nature up by intellectually refining it but regarded its rawness as a sign of New World freshness and vigor, youth and energy. It was not a worn out, used, abused, and stale, moody Old World nature. It was healthy, not sickened by history.
Nature in the Hudson River School of American landscape painting was a grand, more or less uninhabited raw space, seen from a distance as though to encompass its magnitude, as in Thomas Cole’s A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning, 1844. Frederick Edwin Church’s Niagara Falls, 1857 and Albert Bierstadt’s Among The Sierra Nevada, California, 1848 make the natural grandeur of America self-evident. The irrelevance—triviality--of human beings is made clear in Thomas Moran’s Cliffs of Green River, 1874 and George Henry Broughton’s Hudson River Valley from Fort Putnam, West Point, 1855. American nature is not so much inhuman as nonhuman—incomprehensible to human beings, who can, at most, pay contemplative homage and wondrous witness to it. It was a rugged, inhospitable nature, as Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak, 1863 and Valley of the Yosemite, 1864 show, its raw grandeur, intimidating to human beings, dwarfed and awed—trivialized and astonished--by its unfathomable extent. American nature is unapproachable, unmeasurable, indomitable.
Susan Swartz, Golden Aspens, 2003, Acrylic on linen, 60 x 48 in.
That may be a male perspective on nature—the most ambitious 19th century pioneer American landscapists were all tough-minded men, explorers rather than settlers, fascinated by untamed New World nature rather than nostalgic for domesticated Old World nature, which reappeared in the so-called Country Place Era Gardens of wealthy Americans. It seems only a woman artist could get up close and intimate with nature, as Swartz’s early paintings of trees suggest. They have their precedent in Susie M. Barstow’s paintings of trees, among them Landscape in the Woods, 1865, Wooded Interior, ca. 1865, and Early October Near Lake Squam, 1886. But Swartz’s trees are more confrontational and enigmatic, for there seems nothing beyond them, while Barstow’s trees form a gateway into the nature beyond them, rather than force us to focus on them as the exclusive representatives of nature, a sort of phenomenon in themselves, as Swartz’s row—impenetrable façade—of trees do in Aspens and Wildflowers, 1998, Golden Eternity, 1999, Aspen Brilliance, 2000, Evening Serenity, 2000, Crisp Winters Morning, 2002, Nature’s Grace, 2002, Aspens in Fall Color, 2003, Golden Aspens II, 2003, Season’s Handiwork, 2003, Aspen Stand, 2004, Aspen Twilight, 2004, Purple Shadows, 2004, Study in Green 2004, Aspen Serenity, 2005, Blue Sky, 2005, Forest Edge, 2005, Harvest Passion, 2005, Indian Summer, 2005, Colored Splendor, 2006, Colors Awry, 2006, Fall Serenade, 2006, Golden Silence, 2006, Lifelines, 2006. I suggest that the tree, relentlessly, compulsively repeated, as though a phenomenal end in itself, holding its own—maintaining its integrity, not to say autonomy—despite the vicissitudes of the weather and changing seasons—is a symbol of Swartz’s “core self,” bringing with it, as the psychoanalyst Daniel Stern argues, a sense of agency or authorship of one’s actions; a sense of coherence, that is, of being whole and centered; the ability to recognize patterns of emotion; and to feel a sense of continuity of one’s experience(2)—all conveyed by Swartz’s repeated, seemingly obsessional engagement with the tree, which retains its integrity whatever the emotionally seasonable weather.
Susan Swartz, A Stand Alone, 2001, Acrylic on linen, 60 x 48 in.
More broadly, the tree is a “symbol of life,” and “a symbol of the relationship of Heaven and Earth,” and of “cosmic development in death and regeneration”--Swartz shows her trees in the dead of winter and regenerating in spring--but the “tree trunk rising to the skies…is really the phallus,”(3) suggesting that Swartz is a phallic woman, as her identification with trees in every season of life—cold winter and hot summer, warm spring and cool autumn--suggests. A perpetually erect upright tree is a symbol of power—especially one that can survive every season, endure cold and heat, hold its own whatever the weather, maintain integrity whatever forces of nature threaten to topple it--like an erect upright penis, as the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr argues. Criticizing Freud’s concept of penis envy as “pseudo-sexual,” Storr argues that it is “psychosocial,” a metaphor for “power, prowess, assertion, etc.” “The little girl is discontented with being, as all children are, comparatively powerless. In her quest for dominance, she comes across the fact that boys are, as numerous experiments have shown, innately more aggressive than girls. Direct observation of children’s play has shown a sex difference of this kind from as early as two years. Males are therefore conceived, quite correctly, to be potentially more powerful than girls; and the symbol of masculine power is quite obviously the penis.”(4) Women are at a “disadvantage in the dominance hierarchy,” suggesting that Swartz’s “tree envy,” as it can be called, is her way of asserting her power and achieving dominance in the male artworld, implying that her work is aggressively however subliminally feminist, not simply feminine, however much nature has been called the goddess of us all. “Power comes before pleasure” Storr writes, suggesting that the power conveyed by the uprightness of Swartz’s trees—they hold their own whatever the season--makes them profoundly pleasurable. Swartz’s is a libidinous art, whatever the season. She identifies with the tree not only because it is a phallic symbol, but because it never turns into a soft penis, but holds its glorious own.
Color Therapy
“Anyone who has heard of color therapy knows that colored light can have a particular effect upon the entire body. Various attempts to exploit this power of color and apply it to various nervous disorders have again noted that red light has an enlivening and stimulating effect upon the heart, while blue, on the other hand, can lead to temporary paralysis….These facts prove that color contains within itself a little-studied but enormous power, which can influence the entire body as a physical organism.”
More or less midway through her life Swartz became almost fatally sick with Lyme disease and from mercury poisoning. “Her mercury poisoning came from eating fish that had high mercury levels and it’s likely she contracted Lyme’s disease while hiking trails in the Utah mountains.”(5) Ironically, the nature she identifies with and loves sickened her almost unto death. It was a life and art transformative experience. “Creativity has helped me to triumph over adversity,” she wrote in 2021. “Fifteen years ago I was diagnosed with these two environmentally-borne illnesses, and I became seriously ill and debilitated. I never stopped painting, but as I fought to survive, my art began to change dramatically. My work became bolder and more abstract…I constantly explore new techniques and experiment with different mediums and tools to create interesting textures.”(6) She has also said: “While my illness wreaked tremendous havoc on body and spirit, it also shook me out of my comfort level as an artist. The art I am now creating is more impassioned, more profound, more achingly full of desire than anything I have created in the past.”
Susan Swartz, Winter Sun, 1999, Acrylic on linen, 72 x 60 in.
I think Swartz’s painting changed fundamentally. It became completely non-objective, that is, nature was no longer represented but evoked--suggested. Color became the substance of nature and her “real” subject matter—a “spiritual” subject matter, as it was for Kandinsky, apart from, and transcending nature, for color is not physical, at least in the sense in which a tree is. On the way to total non-objectivity she made Monet-like “water-lily pond” art, as Serenade of Lilies, indicates. It was made in the midst of her illness, and clearly required a great deal of creative effort and thought, but perhaps most creatively decisive it showed a turn away from land-bound trees to the water of life, that is, the water in which elemental life generated, the water without which life is impossible. It is a large painting, 72 by 72 inches—signaling the many square paintings she will produce, indicating her new consciousness of avant-garde geometrical art, epitomized by Alber’s Homage to the Square series, the quintessential works of geometrical abstraction. They also epitomize her new consciousness of abstract expressionism. Her therapeutic works—for she made abstract art to cure herself of a realistic threat to her life from nature--ingeniously reconcile the extremes of geometrical and gestural abstraction by epitomizing both. It may be strange to say so, but she used art against nature by making it abstract, even though she used the dregs of nature—flower petals and fruit peels—in some of her paintings. Collaged on their vital expressionistic surface, they are memento mori, even as they suggest that the flowers and fruits from which they came are ripe for resurrection.
Susan Swartz, Aspen Stand, 2004, Acrylic on linen, 30 x 40 in.
I suggest that Swartz’s physical illness coincided with or catalyzed a midlife crisis, not unlike, emotionally speaking, the mid-life crisis that Dante experienced when he stood before the gates of hell and read “Abandon all hope you enter here.” Certainly her nearly fatal illness, which must have felt like the “sickness unto death” that Kierkegaard called depression, made her think of abandoning all hope—and nature, which betrayed her. Her illness must have sapped her will to live, however much her creativity--making art--conveys her love of life. Making art, remaining creative—and innovative—showed that she had hope—hoped not only to live but to flourish and grow, as nature does. A mid-life crisis involves “acceptance of limits, acknowledgement of bodily changes, assimilation of a shift in time perspective, and creation of ego-integrity. Such pressures on the ego can and do lead to some regression,”(7) but Swartz did not regress to a forest of phallic trees but created a kind of abstract hortus conclusus, a subtler, more intimate space of nature, Mother Nature now a sort of container—which is what the square is--in which feelings are aesthetically processed, an alembic in which raw feelings are distilled into refined art, pleasurable to the senses and elevating to the mind, that is, beautiful and sublime at once, as Swartz’s abstract masterpieces are.
The Transcendental Square
Many areas set apart for religious or other special reasons adopt a quadrangular form….Plato regarded the square as being ‘absolutely beautiful in itself.’ Abu Ya’qub said that four, the number of the square, was ‘the most perfect of numbers’ since it was the number of the Intellect and of the letters making up God’s name (Allh). The symbolism of square and number four come together. From the Tetragammaton, the Israelistes composed the utterable name of God (JHVH or YHVH)…In some sense, therefore, the number four is that of Divine Perfection, although more generally speaking it is the number of the complete evolution of manifestation, symbol of the established universe.(8)
The most iconic square paintings are those by Josef Albers. “Born and raised a Catholic and at the end of his life he regularly attended Sunday mass and went to confession.” This suggests that his “homages to the square” are homages to God, the square a symbol of the name of God, its four sides indicative of Divine Perfection, more broadly of the universe God created. To contemplate one of Albers many—ca. 1000—homages to the square is to worship God in symbolic form. Strikingly, after her nearly fatal sickness, Swartz made a great many—almost innumerable—square paintings, each implicitly a homage and prayer to God, as though obliquely acknowledging her religiosity. Acknowledging that her “personal path is motivated and inspired by scripture,” she has said “If God is the creator, all I have to do is interpret, and I do believe that my paintings are an interpretation of the beauty He surrounds us with.” “Being sick caused my faith to deepen,” she has written, suggesting that her sickness was a kind of dark night of the soul, a test of her faith during a difficult, painful period in her life—a near death experience. It challenged her love of nature, even as it led her to apotheosize it in her squares.
“The square = feeling,” Malevich wrote, but the feeling conveyed by the black square placed against the sun in the 1913 scenic designs for the Futurist opera Victory Over The Sun was decidedly nihilistic—aggressively anti-life, considering that it replaced the sun, without which life is impossible. Malevich’s Suprematist square has come to be regarded as a “modernized” religious icon, abstract and figureless, like Alber’s squares. But Malevich wrote that art “divested itself of the ballast of religious and political ideas which had been imposed upon it.” Instead of being religious or quasi-religious, like Albers’ aestheticized squares, Malevich’s anti-aesthetic black square symbolizes the death of God, as Nietzsche said, for “the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable.” Like Nietzsche, Swartz believes in Dionysus and Apollo--the pagan gods—as the passionate energy of her painterliness and the harmoniousness of her compositions suggests. Her worship of trees, evident in her numerous paintings of them, confirms her paganism: trees were worshipped “because they are a product of mother earth,” Gaia. I suggest that Swartz regards, however unconsciously, the beauty of nature, and the beauty—perfection--that Plato saw in the square, as a mirror of her own natural beauty. Swartz’s square functions as a container as well as cornucopia of nature. It is a kind of alembic in which raw nature is distilled into refined art--transcendentalized. I am arguing that Swartz, like all great nature artists—artists who projectively identify with nature, to use a psychoanalytic concept, that is, worship, romanticize, and idealize nature as an aesthetic and expressive end in itself—is pagan rather than Christian. In Christian art nature is secondary--a background setting for religious figures, as in “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” or the “Journey of the Magi,” rather than primary—“the source of all inspiration,” as Hans Hofmann said, “always the source of the artist’s creative impulses.” Swartz’s intimate abstract renderings of—mystical engagements with—nature are the grand climax of transcendental naturalism. Nature does not just inspire Swartz, she consumes it, as the works in which she collages its remains suggests—momenta mori resurrected as aesthetic anomalies.
Susan Swartz, Evolution of Nature 10, 20x20, Acrylic on linen, mixed media, 72 x 72 in.
To confirm my argument, here’s a list of some of Swartz’s many square paintings, with their dimensions—paintings in which the square is a transcendental end in itself, whatever color the square contains. Her obsession with the square is as great as her obsession with nature. Azure Rhythm I and II, 2011, 152 x 152 inches, 60 x 60 inches. Moonlit Moment, 2012, 60 x 60 inches. Peace, 2012, 20 x 20 inches. Creation 4, 2013, 48 x 48 inches. Water Study 005, 2013, 48 x 48 inches. Whisper of Spring II, 2013, 60 x 60 inches. Creation 4, 2013, 48 x 48 inches. Contemplation in Square 2, 3, 4, 2014, all 48 x 48 inches. Contemplation 2, 2014, 20 x 20 inches. Contemplation 22, 2014, 48 x 48 inches. Nature’s Mirage 10, 2014, 20 x 20 inches. Prayers Over Rice Fields, 2014, 20 x 20 inches. Prayers Afloat, 2014, 20 x 20 inches. Contemplation Textured 1, 5, 2015, both 60 x 60 inches. Contemplation Textured 2, 3, 2015, both 48 x 48 inches. Eastern Energy, 2015, 48 x 48 inches. Evolving Visions, 2015, 72 x 72 inches. Green Reverie 1, 2, 3, 4, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Crimson Reverie 1, 2, 3, 4, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Blue Reverie 1, 2, 3, 4, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Purple Reverie 1, 2, 3, 4, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Teal Reverie 1, 2, 3, 4, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Fragmented 1, 2, 3, 4, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Fractured 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, all 2015, all 20 x 20 inches. Cerulean Skies, 2016, 48 x 48 inches. Daybreak, 2016, 48 x 48 inches. NZ Fragmented 3, 4, 5, 6, all 2016, all 20 x 20 inches. NZ Reflections 1, 2, both 2016, 20 x 20 inches. Nature Revisited 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, all 2016, all 12 x 12 inches. Spectrum 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, all 2017, all 12 x 12 inches. Emerging Bouquet 25, 26, 42, all 2020, all 20 x 20 inches. Emerging Bouquet 50, 21, both 2020, both 12 x 12 inches. Mineral Simmer 2020, 20 x 20 inches. Nature’s Bouquet 4, 2019, 20 x 20 inches. Nature’s Bouquet 2, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 23, all 2019, all 12 x 12 inches. Nature’s Bouquet 41, 42, 48, 49, all 2020, all 12 x 12 inches. Evolution of Nature 6, 20, both 2020, both 60 x 60 inches. Evolution of Nature 3, 10, 8, 13, all 2020, all 6 x 6 feet. Evolution of Nature 14, 2021, 48 x 48 inches. Evolution of Nature 1, 2, 16, all 2021, all 6 x 6 feet. Evolution of Nature 20, 2021, 60 x 60 inches. Petals and Pollen 26, 2021, 12 x 12 inches.
Swartz is remarkably fertile, a true goddess of nature, her pagan worship of it evident in this cornucopia works, parthenogenically generated by her creative autonomy.
From Fact To Phenomenon
“Phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there’.”
“There is an experience in which it is possible for us to come to the world with no knowledge or preconceptions in hand; it is the experience of astonishment…in the experience of astonishment, our everyday ‘knowing,’ when compared to the knowing that we experience in astonishment, is shown up as a pale epistemological imposter….”
“Husserl’s insight is that we live our lives in terms of what he calls a “captivation in acceptedness,” that is to say we live our lives in an unquestioning sort of way by being wholly taken up in the unbroken belief-performance of our customary life in the world…The epoche is the name for whatever method we use to free ourselves from the captivity…The most important point to be made in reference to the phenomenological reduction is that it is a meditative technique.”
The phenomenological reduction of reality puts one in touch with what the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden calls “the primitive edge of experience.” “The natural attitude” is evident in Swartz’s early paintings of trees, what one might call “the phenomenological attitude” is evident in her abstractions from nature—liberated from captivity to its accepted appearance, she becomes a “collaborator” with her medium, as Robert Motherwell writes. “The depth and the intimacy of the marriage between the artist and her medium”(9) is greater than the depth and intimacy of the artist’s relationship to nature—to external reality in general. Swartz’s devotion to the medium replaces her devotion to nature. For her, the “artistic medium is the only thing in human existence that has precisely the same range of sensed feeling as people themselves do,” as Motherwell writes. “If a creative person in the arts is a person with an extraordinary capacity for love, who for whatever reason cannot direct his love for another person in full strength, but who nonetheless must love—he directs his love toward the other thing in human existence as rich, sensitive, supple, and complicated as human beings themselves; that is to say toward an artistic medium, which is not an inert object, or a set of rules for composition, but a living collaboration, which not only reflects every nuance of one’s being, but which, in the moments in which one is lost, comes to one’s aid”—more reliably, one might add, than nature, which can hurt as well as heal, as Swartz’s experience of it indicates. “Abstract art is a form of mysticism,” Motherwell adds.(10) No longer “captivated in acceptance” of nature—I suggest her near death experience of it disillusioned her with its greatness, epitomized by the magnificent trees pictured in her early paintings, and led her to reduce it to a phenomenon. She was no longer captivated by its natural appearance, but disengaged from it by making paintings in which “the only judge, guide, and arbitrator should be one’s feelings”(11)—not the facts of external nature, as indifferent to human nature as the seasons that Swartz’s early paintings tracked, but the feelings of all too human inner nature.
Apart from their colors, what is striking about Swartz’s paintings is their animated, manically excited surface. It has been said that mania is a defense against depression, but there is no depression in Swartz’s painting, but a sense of elation, all but ecstatic. One might say they are “ego orgasms,” to use the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s term. In Swartz’s Landscape of Resonances series the surface seems in endless creative flux. In the Contemplation series it seems chaotic. The colors may change, but the momentum never does. It indicates how driven—forceful, expressionistic, if you want—Swartz’s paintings are, but it ignores their haptic character, their touchy surface, more pointedly the raw power and determination in Swartz’s touch. She has given her paintings a resolute skin ego, to use the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s term. As the psychoanalyst Jennifer Evans writes, “The skin, the human body’s largest organ, exists as a physical barrier between the milieu interieur and everything in the outside world. Speaking in terms of material reality, it is literally a container that gives shape to everything internal and holds us in form.” Writing about what he calls the “prototaxic mode of experience”—it “refers to the first kind of experience the infant has,” “vaguely felt or ‘prehended” but not “comprehended,” a “momentary state of the sensitive organism, with special reference to the zones of interaction with ic environment,” the interpersonal psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan gives as an example the sensation of discomfort in his buttocks, apprising him that “this is a chair and I have sat on it about long enough.”(12) This is what the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden calls a “primitive presymbolic, sensory-dominated mode of generating experience.” Ogden calls this “sensory-dominated mode of experience” “the primitive edge of experience.” It is where Swartz is in her abstract paintings, fraught with “sensory surfaces ‘touching’ one another.”(13) To call her paintings gestural is to miss their haptic power—the power of Swartz’s “touch”—the reason they touch one in a fundamental way. Swartz’s art has become more emotionally and aesthetically profound, because it has become more introspective and less descriptive, probably because her sickness forced her back into herself and away from external nature. But the death of nature is never far from Swartz’s mind, as the remnants of it that decorate some of her works suggest.
As the Goncourt Brothers famously wrote “It is when nature is condemned to death, when industry dismembers it, when iron roads plough it, when it is violated from one pole to another, when the city invades the field, when industry pens man in, when, at last, man remakes earth like a bed, that the human spirit hastens towards nature, looks at it as it never has before, sees this eternal mother for the first time, conquers her through study, surprises her, ravishes her, transports her living and flagrante delicto on pages and canvases with an unequaled veracity. Will landscapes become a resurrection, the Easter of the eyes?” Swartz’s early paintings of trees suggest that landscapes will become the Easter of the eyes, resurrect socially exploited, raped, and murdered nature, but the bits and pieces of nature in some of her non-objective paintings suggest that only relics of her remain to be worshipped in the religion of art. Nonetheless Swartz’s paintings complete the reduction of nature to a transcendental phenomenon that began with Monet’s water-lily paintings, climaxing in his enormous Reflections of Clouds on the Water Lily Pond, 1920. An “impression” of nature distills it into a “phenomenon,” so that its elemental sensuousness becomes evident. I suggest that Swartz’s more intimate and abstract paintings are the ancestors of Monet’s grandiose and descriptive paintings, and truer to the modern state of nature that the prescient Goncourt Brothers describe. Swartz’s personal responses to nature are exquisite compensation for its decay and death.
Read the full article on Whitehot here.
Notes
(1)D. W. Winnicott, “Creativity and Its Origins,” Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 65, 67
(2)Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2001), 26
(4)Anthony Storr, Human Destructiveness (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 68
(5)Susan Swartz: Press and New Work (Park City, Utah: 2022), 58
(6)Ibid., 44
(7)Akhtar, 172
(8)Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (London: Penguin, 1996), 912-913
(9)Robert Motherwell, “A Process of Painting,” Collected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 138
(10)Ibid., “What Abstract Art Means To Me,” 86
(11)Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 169
(12)Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1953), 29
(13)Thomas H. Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience (Northvale NJ and London: 1989), 30-31
Unacknowledged quotations are from Wikipedia
DONALD KUSPIT is one of America’s most distinguished art critics. In 1983 he received the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, given by the College Art Association. In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Davidson College, in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 2007 from the New York Academy of Art. In 1997 the National Association of the Schools of Art and Design presented him with a Citation for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts. In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he was the Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow. In 2008 he received the Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations.