Vanguard Cover Summer 1984
image: Myopic Allegory 1983 acrylic on paper on masonite, 64"x46"

Still Life II 1983, acrylic on canvas, 45"x45"

Installation view, and/or April, 1976

Save the Last Trance for Me 1976 acrylic on cardboard 14"x14"

Kidnap 1978 housepaint on paper 22"x30"

Romantic Triangle 1978, acrylic on cardboard puzzle,12"x18",Collection of South King County Art Museum

Man Overboard 1979, Acrylic on paper, 22"x30"

Fashion Decision 1977, ink on paper, 14"x11"

Autochthon 1983, acrylic on masinite, 45"x45"

SIGN AND PSYCHE

The development of Seattle painter Andrew Keating over the last decade has not been without problems. His recent work¹ reveals a fundamental shift in the character of his visual language, a shift having ramifications beyond the development of a regional style.

I see two themes in the new work: an ontological meditation on Genesis. the coming into being of Being and an epistemological meditation on the Birth of Consciousness, or Being becoming aware of its being. Operating as an underlying unity they provide an intellectually loaded structure through which more concrete and unconsciously charged archetypal motifs may be woven. Over the past decade Keating has struggled through the Typical and Stereotypical to his present Archetypal synthesis. Metaphorical expansion of mundane situations, i.e., a man choosing his shirt and tie, and stereotyped social relations between men and women have given way to images of more universal scope.

The paintings of 1982/83 provide a transition. Displaced “heads” on tables float in a dark, often pitch black, landscape. It is work touching bottom in the psyche, opaque and, at first, appearing impenetrable to any coherent reading. Seattle critic, Matthew Kangas, has pointed out that relatively straightforward readings of their imagery do exist and are often metaphorically related to the act of painting itself. To quote at length from his Vanguard review of April, 1983:

“In Still Life II (1983) ... the “brain” or “cloud” is under the table, though bulging out. With this picture, Keating skirts the old Surrealist conceit of disjunctive imagery but turns the art historical similarity on its head. The result is not enigmatic as with a Tanguy or Dali but symbolic: Man (the arm) is suppressing Thought (the brain); or Figuration (the arm) is literally coming out on top of Formalism (the brain); or the central element of a painting, its picture plane (the table) is separating both figuration and abstraction (arm and head). This last separation - or unity within one painting - in my opinion, has been the underlying theme or struggle in the art of Andrew Keating. ... Andrew Keating has become an artist of the 1980’s confronting the two major styles of the age, expressionistic figuration and modernist abstraction.”²

Like Faust’s descent into the “Mother’s” deepest darkness in part two of Goethe’s unsurpassed epic, these “black field” paintings designate a point from which Keating will resurface, returning to work from deeper impulses. After mid-1983, myths and red table and a hovering lower torso runs through its blue-black background. Indicating a different degree of wakefulness, facial features are more fully defined than in most of the recent works, many of which have entirely blank faces. The interest in Genesis includes a reflexive commentary on the creation of art, though it usually is presented in terms referring to a much broader reading, one including the nature of an “ultimate” creating or “making” as in the explicit reference in the 1984 wall construction, Maker. This is not to say that the motif involves a meditation upon deity, rather, it ties the theme more intimately to a sense of life force and its generating powers. We see a preponderance of references to a tree of life, a fecund earth, and natural growth as in L’Arbre and New Growth, both 1984, or Autochthon (Red Landscape), 1983, where a faceless pink head emerges out of a red landscape of semicircular hills.

It is my feeling that Keating was moving toward a visual crisis culminating in 1983 and precipitated by the inherent tension between his consummately ideational content and his relatively concrete figurative formal means. A more fundamental change in Keating’s approach became necessary. His most recent show bears this thesis out, unveiling insights not wholly precedented or contained within earlier work. As I have said elsewhere, Keating’s paintings of the last few years seem to he in search of a deeper, more fundamental simplicity in both structure and content. At their best they work through a complex evocation of moods. But they have not always reached the visual richness some of his best work of 1978-80 suggests is at his disposal.³

When Keating’s first solo exhibition at and/or opened in 1976⁴ , and/or was an “alternative space” with a secure reputation for showing international calibre “New Music”, Performance, video, and conceptually oriented art. Into this environment Keating entered with an exhibition of relatively straightforward paintings. At the time it seemed to many a strange context for the work. In retrospect it is easier to see Keating’s conceptualist influences rather than the Midwestern Grotesque and Western “Funk” roots many people wished to, erroneously, associate him with at the time. In the next year, for example, and/or sponsored George Macunias’ FLUXfest ‘77, an event in which Keating nominally took part. Already suffering from the ailment that was to claim his life within the year, it was the only FLUXfest event Macunias was to personally conduct outside New York. And/or fare had included early work by Joan Jonas, Laurie Anderson, Constance de Jong, and Meredith Monk. Two-dimensional art was not shown in any quantity until the end of Rolon Bert Garner’s stay at and/or, climaxing in Gamer’s “Some Seattle Drawings” show of 1978, also including Keating.⁵

Didactic Art, (1978) and a small construction, Value Structure: Law (1983) pay homage to conceptual art. Presenting themselves as “ideas of objects” rather than full “objects in-and-of-themselves” Keating’s three-dimensional forms retain a vigorous two-dimensional character, either as pieces mounted on the wall or fabrication from fIat sheet-like materials or both.

Early work filters Keating’s emotional underground through specific devices: word play in titles, an uneasy centrifugal sense of composition, amputating people and objects at the painting’s edge, discomforting chromatic combinations, unrelieved bright colours, sharp edges, jagged forms, severe physiological contortions, and an interest in the more harrowing aspects of the pursuit of eros in modern urban America. An overriding sense of claustrophobia pervades everything. It is a relentless mentality shaded by an ambivalent humour, both light and black.

In Minor Artist as Frustrated Athlete Struggling with a Drawing of Great Personal Import , (1975) a miniature artist pole-vaults his way through a scratchy line drawing hanging on to a pencil. Drawing paper, cigarette, straight-edge, and eraser are all there on the desk-top dwarfing the artist. Self-parody is expanded to a jab at art-making in general. Party Shot, (1975), Save the Last Trance for Me, (1975-76), and No Avail, (1976), reveal-convoluted sexual manoeuvers, informed with quirky, satirical (satyrical?) horror. In Save the Last Trance for Me a man throws a knife into another mesmerized man’s back, a red haired siren shoots psychic lightning from her fingertips, and champagne pours into a glass from a bottle “off-camera”. All three paintings possess figures truncated by the frame and partly covered windows incapable of admitting any air. Every detail is carefully controlled to create an airless, inescapable room. On the left wall of No Avail a mirror reflects only the most abbreviated and fragmented image of a man standing at the opposite, all too close, wall. Insipid yellow walls and dead green floor complete the unavoidable feeling of entrapment, dislocation and claustrophobia. Keating’s formal interests cannot be separated from his psychological signification even as early as 1975. Already it is an oeuvre of formal signs carrying a precise and explicitly psychological texture.

After the and/or show Keating sought more effective forms that would not preclude the work’s affective force. Caught between the content of his figuration and the impotency of his inherited abstract formal means, the project did not always succeed.

During 1978 Keating commenced, then exhausted, a series of experiments with colour xerox, finally exhibiting a large wall piece, nearly black and white, blown up via the xerox 6500 colour copier from scratched raw slide emulsions, at the first and only Northwest colour xerox invitational in 1978.⁶ Earlier colour xerox work had been exhibited at the Evergreen State College in Olympia. Visiting Keating in his studio to compare technical notes on colour xerox, I was not prepared to find what I would see there.

Dominating the large studio, was an extended series of paintings on the same or close to the same size paper. All were entirely black and white, no grays. Up to this time Keating's colour relied primarily upon hue, intensity, and complimentary contrasts with little or no emphasis on value differentiation. What had played a vastly subservient or non-existent role before now became the entire optic modus operandi. Without intermediate tones Keating began using a variety of patterns to clarify surface and spatial structure. The receding walls of his hermetically sealed rooms gave way to an aggressively flat arena of swirling pattern.

By the end of 1978 paintings such as Cool Jerk, Phantom Hat, and Phantom Appears in the City display increasingly ornamental richness. Cool Jerk is a hilariously grotesque rock and roll star with “electrified” cheek and a face resembling a mosaic of shrapnel. The black and white paintings forced Keating to the development of a more coherent structural language of extreme value contrast capable of holding his intense colour combinations together. White Youth, (1978) is a dense recombination of this value structure with bright colour. Deep red automobile and lips, blue building in the right background and clashing orange, red and blue detail enhance the raw, urban violence crawling under the painting’s surface. The small Janus-like face with a knife thrusting up its Centre axis on a black and white field functions as an emblem, apart from its directly emotional reading, reminding us that this painting is to he read, that it is a painting of something other than its surface. It is a surface struggling, no, exploding, with the pressure of its interiority.

Kidnap, (1978) retains key elements of pre-1977 work, uniting centrifugal composition and claustrophobic space with the more jagged physiological distortions and patterns of the black and white studies of the same year. A summary of several fundamentally discordant directions in Keating’s style, it exhibits a control and reduction to its elemental and necessary forms. As White Youth served to synthesize stylistic developments achieved in the black and white acrylics with an ongoing, but often separate, concern for intense colour, Kidnap pulls together the different approaches to graphic marks (line, shape, patterning) used before 1980. Inconclusive, this style does not fully address the deeper anxiety lurking underneath its surface. That Keating senses an insufficiency is indicated by other syncretic work at this time, including several constructions and even a jigsaw puzzle piece, Romantic Triangle, (1978).

In 1979 there is a momentary loosening of pictorial space. Several brightly coloured paintings of a man either drowning or being abandoned by a ship at sea appear. Man Overboard is an exterior scene, giving greater illusion of depth. Its provisionary illusionism is accompanied by softer, slightly pastel colour. Open space and diluted colour aid the motifs sense of abandonment, increasing emotional disjunction and discomfort. Few painters let sweet pastels and candy colours seem so traumatic. Through 1980 and 1981 the work becomes more aggressively patterned, using jagged, crammed compositions of bright but severely limited hues. Whole paintings are filled by a single face, vestiges of a room peaking in along the borders. Stylistic developments from 1979 up to the beginning of 1983 have been extensively documented by others, most notably by Ron Glowen in Vanguard⁷ , and through a series of reviews by Matthew Kangas.⁸

THE CRISIS OF INTERIORITY

Heralding, and in part destroyed by the more assertively patterned work of the next four years, the windowed walls of Fashion Decision (1977), a pen and ink drawing, clearly describe a three dimensional space. The array of shirts to the left emphasize a point: as the focus of the man’s attention and imminent decision these shirts exist in a “psychological space”, an arena of decision in the man’s mind. And Keating treats them as such, contradicting the illusion of three dimensional space inherent in the handling of the rest of the room. In a sense the shirts constitute an immanent, or more fundamentally interior, reality, rather than the “emanant” reality of the earlier rooms. Instead of an affectively aggressive reality flowing out of, emanating, from the enclosed claustrophobia of illusory depth, the treatment of the shirts in Fashion Decision points to a more comprehensively subjective, or immanent, locus for Keating’s content. The room’s interior has been replaced by a more radically interior realm of the mind. Fashion Decision is one of the first overt hints that Keating is moving toward an increasingly extreme concept of interiority.

There is a certain irony to this pursuit of interiority: as the reading of formal signs moves to a greater, or deeper, interior of the mind, the formal language of the painting moves to a flatter treatment of space, emphasizing the painting’s surface. This is not a problem in more thoroughly non-objective work, even if it preserves a direct psychological content such as that in Pollock or Rothko, for the all-over immersion into pure form and colour veils any contradictory assertion of surface. If the image depends upon strict readings of figural and object discriminations, as in Keating’s work, we are left with the problematic instigation of cognitive depth only through the more vehement declaration of pictorial surface. This is the crisis of the black and white paintings. It is the crisis of all expressionistic modernism, indeed of all modem figuration. It is the crisis of a bankrupt sign trying to fulfill an overabundant signification.

PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

Autochthon’s blazing orange and oversaturated red sky is strangely exhilarating. It could be accompanied by Strauss’s Prometheus overture. Maker, an arm-shaped wall construction holding a small cube in its hand, a faceless homunculus on its tricep, gives a certain sense of prefigured power. Here creation is a bringing forth, its potency grounded within its interiority; unleashing this interiority is the power of birth, of becoming.

Prometheus, unbound, seeks for the birth of our consciousness, the fire of our soul. The Fire Thief brought us the “sin” of enlightenment (or Lucifer: “bringer of light”). We are offered inner light instead of enclosing darkness. In The Fall, (1984), a jangled proto-human tumbles through a violet-black sky, her/his shadow failing on the sky itself. Below, an eerily green terrain of Keating’s trademark circular hills recedes to a horizon where a mysterious white mist/smoke/light rises up from the left. The deep space of these landscapes eases the tension between psychological depth and pictorial surface.

Obliterating a third of the image, Keating’s anthropomorph gazes with us at the pink highrise in Pink Highrise (1983). This artificial habitat born of our engineering, our “ingenuing”, bathes in the white light seen before and after thunder showers. It is the home of the technological Prometheus, the synthetic maker, the modern Prometheus (remember the other title of Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus), and this home sits in an amphibiously luminous landscape.

Myopic Allegory (1983). An ambiguously gendered figure with male genitalia and bright red high heels runs toward a cliff, staring myopically at a small cube under its noseless face. Is it our rationality that is too small or blinding? Is it our vision that is fundamentally impaired by its inability to focus on any but the most easily comprehended forms? Is the death or sin of our enlightenment our naked obsession with partial and fragmented understanding, our inability to see the whole terrain? Or is it our impulsive rush, our bounding unbound, unclothed into the future?

The landscape is modeled after Domenico Veneziano’s fifteenth century panel of St. John in the Desert.⁹ In the original St. John drops his red cloak, taking the hair shirt to his shoulders. As the cloak falls from his hands it creates the illusion of a deep red fire consuming his white undergarments, and past life. He was a herald and sought his vision, his enlightenment, in the desert, What is the nature of our own desert? How many steps do we have till the cliff? Will we realize our becoming, or perish with the sin of our fall? Or is this allegory set before time, just prior to some primordial fall, a fall we are destined, as in Mircea Eliade’s and Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, to repeat interminably? Like the figure in Keating’s allegory, Camus’ Sysiphus and Ovid’s Titans, we cannot see broadly enough to unravel the tangle of our own fate. Perhaps Nietzsche is right, and what we call consciousness is a rather fantastic commentary upon not only the unknown, but the unknowable.

Yet Nietzsche, in both Dawn of Day and Zarathustra, insisted that the unknowable could still be felt. The anthropoid in New Growth, though eyeless, appears to be looking at the giant green sprout before it. The tree of Life survives and replenishes the crisis of our inescapable interiority. It is a clear moonlit night. We can see the dark, hidden moon and its white silver crescent, traditional symbol for new growth. The fields of luminous blueblack are the most luscious of all Keating’s semicircular hills. Earth, moon, sprouting plant/tree, and the sexual ambiguity of figures have always been strongly connected with birth, rebirth, and the fecundity of matriarchy.

It is a quest of renewal ending only inside the Self, at its deepest core of feeling. The search for such interior meaning is a journey possessed by the impossible desire to realize in paint Karl Jaspar’s call: “Philosophy means to dare penetrate the inaccessible ground of human self awareness.”¹⁰

The most recent painting in the Linda Farris show, New Growth leaves us a new simplicity of structure, and clearer, deeper, content. Surface distraction has been stripped away leaving a thereness worthy of visions, and an elegant balance between mystery and overwhelming clarity.

FOOTNOTES
1. Linda Farris Gallery, Seattle, March, 1984
2. Reel, “Linda Farris” Black on White, 5, November 1983
3. R.M. Campbell, “Compelling Paintings by Andrew Keating”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 18 November 1976, H6
4. David Berger, “Xerox Art at and/or: Original or Just a Copy”, Seattle Sun, 18 November 1979, 13. Exhibition at and/or curated by Ries Niemi, included author’s work as well. Catalogue with statements by Niemi, Berger, and Reel, seattle, 1978
5. As in Macunias’ FLUXfest ‘77 above both Keating and author were represented.
7. Ron Glowen, “Andrew Keating”, Vanguard, April 1981, 25.
8. Matthew Kangas: “Encouraging New Directions”, The Weekly, Seattle, 23 May 1979. “Andrew Keating at Traver”, Art in America, January, 1980, 114-5. “Keating Paintings Embody Meaning and Decoration”, Everett Herald, 26 February 1981. “Is Green a Primary Color?” Seattle Voice, April 1982, 34-5.
9. c.1445, samuel H. Kress collection, 1943, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
10. Philosophy, 1931, forward.