Donald Kuspit, Ph.D.
New York Art Critic
Coldness and want of passion in a picture, are not signs of the accuracy, but of
the paucity, of its statements; true vigor and brilliancy are not signs of
audacity, but of knowledge.John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1)How the universe is like a bellows!
Empty, yet it gives a supply that never fails;
The more it is worked, the more it brings forth.Laotse (2)
The first thing one experiences in Marlene Yu’s paintings of nature is their remarkable vigor and scope, and yet, at the same time, their uncanny accuracy. It is as though Yu has taken a detail of nature and expanded it until it is a cosmos in its own right. Like William Blake, she sees heaven in a grain of sand, as it were, without sacrificing the grain of sand to heaven – without dissolving it in some wish-fulfilling fantasy. And yet the fantasy of the infinite remains intact, except that it is the infinite found in the finite.
Thus, Forest Moss, 1998, seems a very precise observation of moss, with all the intricacies of its changing detail, and at the same time immerses us in an iridescent cosmos of green moss, clearly extending beyond the limits of the canvas, which is already a small cosmos in itself by reason of its great size. Similarly, in Molten Lava, 1996, we seem to be brought up close to the raw flow of lava, indeed, all but crushed – claustrophobically enclosed – by it. Space seems to shut down, just as it opens into the beyond – or does it drop into an
abyss? – in Forest Moss. Yu records every detail, with a kind of detached intensity, and yet at the same time rhapsodically dissolves us in the unpredictable flow of the lava. Avalanche and Undercurrent, both 1998, have the same sense of clear-eyed observation of a nature in process – there is a you-are-there urgency to the detail, a sense of rapt immediacy – and of being ecstatically lost in the process, beyond any awareness of its detail. (Both also convey the split between closed and open space – and their dialectical reconciliation – that is central to Yu’s art.)Did Yu ever see an avalanche up close – she clearly would not have survived had she, for the turbulent flow of snow and stone and moss is overwhelming – or swim in the depths, lured by its current, which looks strong enough to be inescapable? Of course not. But she has fantasized the experience, in all its immediacy and intensity, even as she stands apart from it, using all her painterly wits to register its impact, which creates the illusion of witnessing it. If, as Gilbert Rose has argued, art is a necessary illusion, involving the interplay of resonance and attunement, (3) then Yu is profoundly attuned to an illusion of nature, whose imagined details resonate with her own intense nature. It is this doubleness of point of view that makes Yu’s paintings so intriguing: she finds her identity in the flow of an illusory nature, even as the illusion becomes real because of the detachment with which she renders it.
I have dealt with some of Yu’s large paintings – truly enormous works, kaleidoscopic environments in themselves, befitting Yu’s ecological interest: she wants to do nothing less than suggest the redemption of nature, by art no less. Where nature once saved art from itself – Caspar David Friedrich insisted that the artist must “study nature after nature and not after paintings” and John Constable declared that the artist must seek “perfection at its primitive source, nature” (4) – art can now try to save nature from human predation. The vitality and jouissance of Yu’s art can restore the vitality and jouissance of nature. How? By mythologizing it, which secures its place in our emotions. Destroying it, we destroy them – destroy ourselves. If myth involves a process in which “inner psychical reality is brought into correspondence with the encoded elements of external reality,” as Didier Anzieu says, (5) then Yu has mythologized nature by idealistically abstracting it into dramatic planes and correlating them with her id. Her idealism encodes the grandeur of external nature, and her id
makes it seem intimate, and even more intense and fluid than it is in reality, so that it represents a process of perpetual change, internal and external, with no fixed goal – no final state of subjective or objective being. Sheer becoming, Yu’s external/internal nature constantly surprises us, all the more so because it seems to be formless, however much certain forms – familiar natural growths, crystalline as well as organic, with their diversity of textures – seem to recur. But this stability is an illusion, for no shape or surface is ever self-same in Yu’s pictures. It is always caught in the act of changing into its opposite, however much there are no clear poles of opposition in Yu’s nature.This constant transformative process – perpetual metamorphosis – is best studied in Yu’s smaller works, which concentrate what is in effect an “oceanic feeling” for nature – Sigmund Freud connected it with a state of “limitless narcissism,” but Erich Fromm, noting that it is “the essence of religious experience and specifically mystical experience,” associates it with the “experience of oneness and union” that comes from consummate love (6) – in a limited pictorial space, making it all the more intense and personal. Where the large pictures are environmental tour de forces – whole complex worlds unto themselves – the smaller ones seem to lift a detail from the larger environmental works and bring it into sharp focus, as though looking at it under a microscope, and enlarging it until it seems to crystallize into an essence. A singular tissue of nature becomes its totality: the macrocosm is found in the microcosm, the timeless whole in the transient detail.
Yu paints the skin of nature, which, like wood grain, reflects the pressures and energy that give it form, and finds in that erratically shaped skin the depth which gave birth to it. The skin is suffused with color, which is “very closely bound up with the feelings,” as Marion Milner says, so that it seems “to irradiate [with] the sense of life” (7) – inseparable from id – and at the same time seems to be formed by physical – dare one also say psychical? – forces beyond control, which, nonetheless, produce very particular organic looking forms. It is as though Yu was illustrating D’Arcy Thompson’s thesis that the “outward phenomena of organic growth and structure or form” exemplify complex abstract laws, (8) giving what seems unmeasurable and eccentric a certain inevitability.
It is in the works of such series as Amber Glow and Cave Garden, both 1994, and Crystal Reef Park and Molten Lava Park, both 1998, that the fractal process of chaos that informs nature becomes self-evident. One element explodes into another, the entire process studied, with relentless curiosity, in picture after picture, the whole series forming a kind of scientific record of an experiment with raw natural
matter as well as a seismographic tracing of a profound emotional experience. Yu’s idiosyncratic natural forms are like shifting tectonic plates of thought floating on an invisible sea of emotional magma. All of nature is grist for Yu’s artistic mill, to the extent that organic and inorganic nature fuse and confuse – green grass looks as crystal as white snow, which looks like a strange new mutant growth, which in turn looks like discolored lava, petrified in its tracks, and the lava looks like freshly turned earth – adding to the sense of surging plenitude that floods the pictorial space, which seems both sky and ocean, that is, completely elemental.
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Marlene Yu is clearly a visionary, and her vision of nature has its roots in both Western romantic and Eastern mystical ideas of nature, just as her style has its roots in Western avant-garde and traditional Eastern ideas of painting. There is no single, outstanding source, but an ingenious amalgamation of all modes. Thus Yu blends the Abstract Expressionist idea of amorphousness as a vehicle for highly personal unconscious feeling – the idea has its roots in the studies of the subtle mix of luminosity and shadow in clouds that many romantic painters made, in search of an understanding of their own moods as well as of the complexities of atmosphere – with the Ch’an Zen imagist or mystical art of China and Japan, “in which the theme is either landscape or plant or animal life,” conceived impersonally, indeed, transcendentally. (9)Abstract Expressionist painting seems undisciplined, or at best subliminally – inadvertently? – disciplined, in that there are certain recurrent gestural rhythms (however broken and unresolved). In contrast, Ch’an Zen art involves order as well as activity – emotional discipline as well as chance and spontaneity, and a respect for the inevitabilities of nature as well as the individuality of its appearances – however much the order is flexible and organic, as it always is in Yu’s painting, even when it deals with inorganic nature. For her nature is a single grand being, pulsing with inextinguishable life. The aim of Ch’an Zen is not self-expression, or rather expression of the unconscious self, as it is in Abstract Expressionism, but rather to see the “spiritual essence in the world of Nature external to [the] self.” (10) Ch’an Zen idealism is not unlike that of Jan van Eyck, who found the sign of God in every object, including the most humble objects of nature. Just as Ch’an Zen declares that “every flower exhibits the image of Buddha,” and that art’s task is to make this self-evident, so van Eyck, a “realist mystic,” as it were, showed the radiant divinity of lilies and roses.
My point is that Yu is simultaneously transcendental and expressionistic – a mystic and an unconscious self discharging its drive and feelings. For Yu’s paintings are indeed fabulously driven, showing a vibrancy and excitement that are at once erotic and aggressive, fused in orgasmic release. But they are also spontaneously transcendental, in that they seem to distill the essence of the natural details in the act of rendering them, thus elevating what seem like arbitrary phenomena into sacred signs. Yu’s remarkable ability to articulate the inner luminosity of nature – perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in her Amber Glow and Galaxy and Milky Way series, where the abstract inner glow of natural material becomes a substance in itself - confirms her Ch’an Zen sense of purpose, for its goal is to afford “illumination by immediate experience,” as Coomaraswamy says. He asserts that such illumination “has been more nearly perfectly attained in Ch’an Zen art than anywhere else.” Yu keeps alive the tradition of such immediate illumination – transcendence through immediacy – and is more than equal to it. In fact, she has given it a new intensity by fusing it with emotional expression – its apparent opposite, psychologically speaking.
In articulating the moment of illumination on the grand mural scale of Abstract Expressionist painting, and imbuing the Abstract Expressionist plunge into the unconscious depths with transcendental purpose, she renews both. Bringing together ideas of art that are at cross purposes, Yu invents a new art of passionate sublimity. “The truths of nature are one eternal change – one infinite variety,” as Ruskin wrote, (11) but there is “an intrinsic principle in the created things [of nature] that is not expressed,” Chuangtse wrote. (12) It is this that gives nature its silent beauty. “Abundantly it multiplies; eternally it stands by itself.” Yu’s works convey this doubleness of nature – many physical parts with one spiritual root – with exquisite precision. Her nature is both a spiritual paradise and raw restless power – a transcendental epiphany and an unconscious expression, all but indistinguishable from one another.
But most of all Yu is a nature mystic. For her nature is God, and, as Meister Eckhart says of God, his/her “idiosyncrasy is being.” (13) Such divine idiosyncrasy is apparent in Yu’s ultra-fluid forms, which are never self-same however recurrent. Yu’s “accidents” of form – the seemingly chance expressionistic character of her forms – demonstrate the pyrotechnical idiosyncrasy of God-given matter.
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Yu’s transcendental naturalism or mystical expressionism – her vision of an ideal nature in a perpetual process of self-transformation – is a major alternative to the prevailing negativism and irony – not to say smug cynicism and pseudo criticality – of much contemporary art. Hers is an art of love – love finding its mystical embodiment in infinite nature – rather than of entertaining parody, full of barely disguised contempt. Yu’s expressive nature is more hallucinatory than descriptive, but it nonetheless affords a much needed positive transformational experience. The unembarrassed lush beauty – aesthetic forthrightness and sensuous excitement – of her paintings affords one. Christopher Bollas remarks that “the artist both remembers for us and provides us with occasions for the experience of ego memories of transformation.” (14) Yu’s works, which use the process of painting to show nature and self in a process of transformation – they seamlessly integrate painterly, natural, and subjective processes to exhibit transformation as such – restores this lost sense of primordial artistic purpose.
The first aesthetic experience, Bollas asserts, is the infant’s experience of the mother, who “function[s] as a region or source of transformation” of the “internal and external world” by reason of the infant’s “deep subjective rapport” with her. Yu clearly has a deep subjective rapport with Mother Nature – let us not forget that the transformations and moods of nature model those of the self – which she transmits to us in her holistic vision of it. Yu’s oceanic landscapes recreate the experience of the mother as an undifferentiated whole – or rather a whole in an incomplete process of differentiation – with which we are merged and in which we are submerged. Indeed, in Yu’s landscapes the sense of being submerged in a limitless nature wins out over the sense of viewing its details from an abstract distance. Her landscapes immerse us in the infinite, which is no vaporous beyond, as in so much art of the abstract sublime, but a freshly concrete, intricately dynamic sublime.
Yu in fact recreates both the dynamic and mathematical sublime, as Immanuel Kant called them, eloquently synthesizing them. For Kant the mathematical sublime was a response to infinite space and the dynamic sublime a response to infinite power. It is essentially the space and power of cosmic nature, which is always experienced as infinite in contrast to our finitude. For Kant, such absolute space and power threaten to overwhelm us, annihilating our sense of self and reducing us to impotence. But Yu, trusting the infinite, fearlessly introjects it, indeed, finds it in herself, where it becomes a kind of numinous, peak experience of selfhood. This is projected back into nature, which becomes abstract as a result. The self thus becomes as limitless, powerful, and protean as nature, if on a smaller human scale. For Yu, nature’s sublimity, however awesome, is not an impingement on the self, but an invitation to awareness of its inner processes. In this Yu’s nature is like Wordsworth’s. He experienced nature as “ the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul,” and as “deeply interfused” with “a motion and a spirit, that impels…and rolls through all things.”
Yu’s limitless landscapes also have great importance in the history of American landscape painting and romantic landscape painting in general. They take us far beyond traditional Arcadian and romantic landscapes, which were premised on a view from the outside rather than a feeling on the inside, however much that was there. Thus Yu’s landscapes are neither picturesque nor moral landscapes in the old sense. In Yu’s paintings nature is inner as well as outer space, unlike those of Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Church, who show us the grandeur of external space. Similarly, Yu’s light belongs to the moment of gnostic illumination, in the midst of the darkness of demiurgic matter, rather than to the everyday sun or moon, as in the Hudson River landscapes. Thus, for all the factual giveness of Yu’s nature, it is a spiritual emanation that can disappear at a moment’s notice, leaving us emotionally stranded. In this it is like Turner’s luminous nature, however different in appearance, which also is no secure safety net.
Yu in fact revives the American transcendentalist idea of nature, with a new sense of its spiritual resonance and physical particularity. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, she achieves “an original relation to the universe.” (15) She becomes “a transparent eyeball… uplifted into infinite space… the currents of the Universal Being circulate” through her imagery. She sees the harmony in its intensity. “The lover of nature is [s]he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of [adult]hood.” This certainly describes Yu, whose brilliant paintings give Transcendentalism a new lease on life. In her work a mystical sense of nature and beauty, enriched by a modernist sensibility, have at last returned to art. It is high time.
Notes(1) John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Boston: Dana Estes, 1902), vol. 1, p. 126.
(2) Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse (New York: Modern Library, 1948), p. 63.
(3) Gilbert J. Rose, Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1996), pp. 80-81 argues that “the structure of art and the emotions are homologous,” noting that they both involve “directed tensions.”
(4) Quoted in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 63.
(5) Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 47.
(6) Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Fawcett, 1955), p. 176.
(7) Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (London and New York: Tavistock, 1987), p. 225.
(8) D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 9.
(9) Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 39.
(10) Ibid., p. 41.
(11) Ruskin, p. 134.
(12) Yutang, p. 68.
(13) Coomaraswamy, p. 86.
(14) Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 28-29.
(15) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 21.