The Stillness of Painting: Robert Kingston and His Contemporaries

Robert Kingston, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA., September 2000; Brad Kahlhamer, Deitch Projects, New York, May 2001.

Imagine Rilke looking hard at a piece of paper on the clutter of his desk, writing, "My life is: the stillness of form." What sort of awareness had precipitated those words? As always, we measure our passions as the smith would shoe a large gelding: singularly, yet impacted by the suspicious ease of experience. Essentially, that's how we realize our lives: experience and the perceptions that follow. The discussion here is one of paint, with asides to performance, more specifically the performance of self, as it relates to the singularly intimate process of brush to surface; in particular the isolated musings of one Robert Kingston. Kingston, an oddly gentle soul, resembles at first glance a light heavyweight boxer, hitman, or common thug. Without benefit of a serial body of work, Kingston's efforts revolve in a furious tangle of epiphany and revision, laboring in constant search of new formats and imagery, generally within a jet stream of philosophical angst--the way I imagine one such as Camus would paint if, having not bashed his life away in a car, he gave up the pedantics of psychological fiction and turned to the canvas. Late last year, mere weeks before his triumphant show at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, I was privileged to wade through the mire of inspiration and fatigue that collected in his studio as if a syrupy residue. Kingston is, in short, a schizophrenic creator. From the biomorphic to the austere, the atmospheric to the gestural, Kingston waged a primitive battle with himself, mostly. As ice was replaced by glistened puddles, leather jackets traded in for t-shirts and sandals, we paced about between the columns and tall potted plants of his sun-bleached studio, cluttered with art books and sheet music, going over the status of each work in its torrid incompletion.

Our time is one of certain perforated, vicarious experiences. This ooze that Blaise Cendrars called "slavery" swallows a bit of us each day we follow its silky trail until the best of our possibilities is lost. At times, my own personal recipe for the reclamation of soul has bogged down into rather pathetic extremes of drugs, sex, literature, alcohol, and sport. There are specifics to every vice or pastime, hence our loss of philosophical moorings. Mark Rothko recorded, in a statement of 1945, "I would sooner confer anthropomorphic attributes upon a stone than dehumanize the slightest possibility of consciousness." It is, of course, this simplicity that is being drained from us; the innocence of the first person, the action (Rosenberg aside), discourse, and illumination of true quotidian experience, what Neruda called "the sumptuous appeal of the tactile." Painting, then, is our vehicle back to this age, this cavern of abandoned glory, musty with the soot of a gracious authenticity, fecund with the stalking scent of the real, and of beauty. To my way of thinking, painting needs no explanation or apology. This most religious of artforms belies the pathetic empiricisms of contemporary discussions by those frustrated with its insistence on gracious discovery. It is still said, in some circles, that Pollock's Namuth-captured athleticisms over and into his unprimed canvas served as a precursor to today's performance art tendencies. If that hypothesis holds true, performance art began and ended with this tortured man's motions. This was the realization of fine art as enacted by the scion of a most American dilemma: the artist at odds with the polarities of self; the effete lyricist breaking the skin of knuckles over the jaws of the unenlightened (or, perhaps, the sober), the seeking for an individuality constrained by the intemperate shadows of European icons. All this, combined with the ambitions of a talented photographer.

From these stills and the resulting film, theorems developed that placed the impetus of creation in...