(°1952, Chicago, USA)
Doin’ the Do with John Phillips
(0r vice versa)
by Kathryn Hixson
If I were a shopping center
I’d sure be embarrassed,
I know I’d never get a date…
with some cute little building,
like from Paris.
- Jonathan Richman
John Phillips has remarked that if Barnett Newman had owned a lava lamp, it might have looked like one of his own paintings. Indeed, Phillips’s inimical mix of serious-minded abstraction and eye-hugging visual entertainment does seem to borrow equally from these vastly different arenas. Throughout his extensive body of work, there is a certain inevitability in his brilliant fields of color populated by skillfully composed, astutely drawn figures. The seem as "natural" as the shopping mall mentioned above,
but like in Richman’s personification, they aspire to better company than usually expected: they can pass for a more upscale company, more like those pictures from Paris.
Like many in his generation coming of age in the mid-1970s, Phillips was jolted out of aesthetic lassitude by slides of Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon and blood-curdling tales of bourgeois shock at Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal. From the vicissitudes of hippie psychedelia and transcendental Ansel Adams landscapes, in college in Colorado Phillips jumped onto the almighty Grid of Abstraction, absorbing the rules of Mondrian, Albers,
Hans Hoffman. Frank Stella had said of his moment after AbEx, "Painters could do anything, you just had to do it." Phillips had to struggle to find a way past this master, jumping around that holy space of figure and ground already populated by Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, and Al Held.
With Greenbergian fever still hanging heavy in the air, painters were hungry to find that perfect picture plane, though conceptualism and feminism were punching up the problems of the good fight. Phillips had the opportunity to attend the Whitney Independent Program in 1978,
which, if nothing else, managed to saturate his young mind with a glut of art-world dilemmas.
Even in those early days, Phillips would grab onto the rules of the game, while seriously undermining their claims for any transcendental truth.
An early canvas titled Humbert’s Dilemma from 1979 is a case in point.
By this time Phillips was composing abstract painting derived from conceptual rules, using geometry and set theory, to predetermine the aesthetic outcome. This very large painting is populated by overlapping sections of squares and circles marching to the rigor of the grid.
However, on closer inspection, the specificity of each shape - its hue, technique, shape, and placement, -- causes a raucous dance rather than a staid pictorial analysis. By referring to Vladimir Nabakov’s notorious lecher in the title, Phillips sets up a dichotomy which continues to drive his work today: Which is better? To save the myth of purity (the young voluptuous Lolita/ young painting) and the stolidness of moral rules (salvaging her chastity and the honor of the Grid), or to succumb to the rapt pleasure of physical connection (of sex and/or painting), indulging in "the ol’ in and out" of the picture plane? The answer, of course, lies on that picture plane.
As much as Phillips subscribed wholeheartedly to non referential abstraction, the artist was also drawn to the perverse fun of Marcel Duchamp, with his weird sexual innuendoes buried in highly personal symbology. But Phillips didn’t seem to get down with the punster’s rejection of the "retinal." Ditto the hard-core conceptual work of Mel Bochner and Bruce Nauman: Phillips appreciated the gesture, but kept hold of his painterly bag of tricks. So, throughout the early to mid 1990s,
he continued to make abstractions that broke all the rules. But even as he made shaped canvasses, multiple panels pieces, used nostalgic 1950s designs, or choose particularly brutal color schemes, each strategy seemed to reinforce abstraction’s rules by insouciantly ignoring them.
Get down tonight
As Phillips navigated through painting’s treacherous waters,
he simultaneously sunk onto the beer-soaked, noxious depths of rock and roll. If abstraction freed the mind, then punk rock freed the body.
Typically, Phillips dove head first, was fully committed to the music scene then was out of it by 1979, becoming a deejay provocateur and prodigious record collector concentrating exclusively on African American music of the 20th century. It is dangerous to align any artist’s various pursuits, the bad-boy sensuality of early R&B all the way through to late 70’s sleaze-punk can be traced as easily in Phillips’s 5000-odd 45 rpm records as in his painting and drawing from the last 30 years. And beginning in the early 1980s, he began titling his paintings after pop song titles. Once again, Phillips finds the rules succinctly, in order to better break them.
PO-MO
This somewhat tangential reference to music surely helped Phillips as a member of the 80’s generation to get ready for the final Leap off the Grid. While some painters mucked around in 2nd hand expressionism or rejected the brush for clinical graphic design or sunk into lyrical realism,
Phillips joined the likes of Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, and Philip Taafe to reimagine geometric/linear abstraction. Like Brice Marden, Phillips went "looking for his line."
He found it in a decorative art book in the form of a "scroll." Here was a readymade, instantly recognizable, graphic motif that has been around since the Renaissance. It is not really a sign, nor a symbol, but a sort of designation. It confers authority to its contents while placing it in a fictitious representational field. It is true and fake, simultaneously. The scroll is both 2-dimensional and 3-d, similar to but not the public language of geometry, not gendered one way or another. It is gestural in its form, yet calculated in its implementation. It could offer the Word of God, or this week’s grocery-store special. It was, if you will, perfectly Post Modern.
Phillips began experimentation with the scroll figure in 1987-88 in many drawings, and in some paintings developed encaustic techniques to play up its historicism. In others, he adopted even louder colors than usual to hone its ability to be purely Pop. Now Jenny Holzer and Warhol’s Dance Diagrams became the art historical nod, but Stella still kept that glint in the ol’ lecherous eye. Phillips set up a bunch more rules -- the scroll came with its own set -- Post Modern this time, and proceeded to break them.
In the red painting What’s My Line, (yes, its from the TV show), three black scroll shapes ascend a vertical canvas, each growing slightly larger.
Here Phillips uses the conventions of receding perspective, though each figure remains resolutely flat. The visual language never lapses into illustration, maintaining a strong rhetorical case for pure line and color. Phillips began feeding the scroll shapes into his computer, where they morphed and grew, almost to the point of being an unrecognizable line.
But they kept their readymade quality, and with the addition of ellipses and other odd shapes, Phillips continued his figure/ ground investigations within his chosen Postmodern idiom.
Somewhere in the mid 1990s the scroll liberated itself for the last vestiges of its restrictive history (as all good PoMo tropes were bound to do).
Good evidence of this evolution is Do the Do from 1995. Sliced in two by a "horizon" line, the upper section is black hovering over a pale green "ground." Each is populated by ellipses and scroll lines, painted in the color of its neighbor: green on black and vice versa with some subtle variation in hue. An optical is set up - Albers would have been proud - as the juxtaposed figures jump back and forth over their steadfastly noncommittal grounds. This is the core experience of Phillips’s work: he serves up
(or spins out) a host of intense shapes and colors that never coalesce into a single figure/ground relationships, but create a narrative event that plays out in our own eyes. We get to "do the do" with the Man, and, sorry Marcel, its not just in the brain.
Phillips continued to both expand and contract this retinal revue. In a major commission for the city of Chicago’s 9-11 Center, painted in 1997,
he staged an abstract activity over five panels measuring twenty feet long, metaphorically offering visual solace to the psychologically panicked.
In numerous small wax vignettes, Phillips completely succumbs to his mediums ability to carry pure fictitious color.
In some recent paintings, Phillips seems to be steering back toward the cerebral, perhaps to renegotiate the Duchampian dilemma. The rich visual puns Phillip is now using reminds me of one of Duchamp’s lesser known readymades: in 1914 he took a cheesy greeting card of a wooded scene purchased from a drug store. In one of this great trickster’s more minimal moves, he painted two small dots, one green and one red, on the surface of the readymade: "a distortion of the visual idea to execute an intellectual idea." (Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 135) as well as a direct reference to the use of these colors to designate the time honored progression of the druggist since the Middle Ages. Phillips has regulated his compositional figures to ellipses and circles, some flat color, others are atmospheric fades. In these "Bob" paintings ("bob" being a diminutive nickname for his significant other), his classical abstract combo becomes,
all of a sudden, a smiley face. (That jolt of representation also calls to mind Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture in its incessant head banging.) So, Phillips may insist on the primacy of the retinal is his erotics, but his simple punning would endear even the most stalwart conceptualist.
The Moral Dilemma returns in a brand new painting, that easily refers back to the blobs in Barnett Newman’s fictitious lava lamp. The grid is back, as is some hokey nostalgia and an almost musical array along with the ubiquitous optical event. The loud pop palette is punctuated with more respectable shapes and hues. The so-called martini paintings reassert the historically earned power of painting, while pulling out those referential tricks all the while---love those olives! -- generously offering us a cool strong drink, inviting us to join Phillips’s ongoing party.
Look over there! Who’s that cute little building, it looks like she's from Paris! I think that shopping center finally got that date.
Kathryn Hixson is an art critic, adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute, and former editor of New Art Examiner.
2006
Oil on canvas
120 x 115 cm
2006
Oil on canvas
181 x 176 cm
2002
Oil on canvas
173 x 175 cm
2006
Oil on canvas
170 x 171 cm