ARTISTS’ SKETCHBOOKS
IN THEORY, AN ARTIST’S SKETCHBOOK is no more than what its name suggests—a ground for preliminary attempts at rendering ideas that may in time be discarded or may grow persistently into masterful works. As such, it is probably more private than public, a record of failures and rudimentary successes that are of little interest to anyone but the artist responsible for them, except when we can link them to major accomplishments. Of course, the value of making such links has been widely felt for some time. It is common, whether or not a certain sketchbook drawing actually leads to a famous work, to find in sketchbooks a broad and nuanced sense of an artist’s character and the patterning of his mind, and to feed these into our understanding of his whole body of work. Nevertheless, sketches and notations occupy a middle ground between unexpressed, unrecorded thought and finished public art. They are not beholden to the imperatives that major art is—one needn’t try to perfect one’s sketchbook any more than the prose in one’s diary. We say that such creations are not really meant for the audience, and thus we free ourselves to be whimsical, hyperbolic, recherché, morose, imitative and even inarticulate when we would never permit ourselves this license onstage.
Presumably, audience interest in sketchbooks was originally scholarly. We would examine the smaller versions and false starts of major paintings simply to find out what was going on in the wings while Rembrandt’s great portraits, for instance, were being wheeled out to teach us what genius is. We soon moved from noncommittal interest, however, to a kind of pleasant compulsion to investigate what genius did in its spare time, perhaps so that we might compare ourselves with it, and finally so that we could bridge the gap between daily life (our daily lives) and its lofty operations. We hoped that under the innocuous guise of scholarship we might participate vicariously in genius, tracing our way back from the high monuments of art to the random, half-formed thoughts that populate all our minds hour by hour. There was an ulterior, selfish, perhaps opportunist motive in all this as well, for we secretly meant to find the masters’ mistakes and blunders, excuse our own, and then more credibly match ourselves with greatness.
One of the interesting things about Janet Kardon’s “Artists’ Sketchbooks” show at the Philadelphia College of Art was how much some of its participants planned their books to fit, in a certain way, the situation I have been sketching. However ostensibly private the books were, many were made with an eye to the audience and to posterity, though I do not know whether this is characteristic of artists who keep notebooks or if it just represents Kardon’s editorial tendency. Take Ad Reinhardt’s moralistic verses and aphorisms, whose origin, though we know them best through their recent publication, is in just those notebooks Kardon displayed: I suspect that one is as hortatory as Reinhardt only when one knows he will have listeners. Otherwise the sermon turns back on itself and embarrasses the author with the howl of his own voice preaching in a void. Reinhardt’s attacks on the hypocrisy and vice of his colleagues and competitors only have meaning when addressed to these people. One might expect Reinhardt to express anger, disgust and disappointment in personal terms when writing in a notebook, but the deliberate rhetoric with which he assaults his contemporaries is wasted on paper destined for a closet or filing cabinet. Such rhetoric must be voiced and heard—it must strike a target to have meaning, for its target and context define it. Thus the crafted attacks that appear in the notebooks mark out their context around themselves, and, as if dressed for an occasion, anticipate the arrival of the company and the onset of the debate.
For Reinhardt, Dorothea Rockburne and Joe Brainard, among others, the sketchbook thus, becomes a medium in its own right. Where it loses in grandeur and ceremoniousness, it gains the license to be informal and personal. The kind of sketchbook I am speaking of is hardly a secretive, private endeavor, but, intended for the public, makes its content the contrived persona of the artist. In it, an artist can speak of him or herself much more literally than is possible in formal works. True enough, the artist’s persona shows through even in the most calculated public productions, but here it may become the object of the piece. Indeed, perhaps these sketchbooks are a kind of visual artists’ counterpart to the contemporary confessional poem. Like writing to one’s friends with more than a little hope that the letters will wind up in a collected edition, using this medium implies no small hubris.
By no means all of the artists the show represented offered these public works that pretended to be private, personal ones. The most interesting pieces, simply, were those which made use of an ironic relation between public and private, formal and informal, or between such personal content as sketchbooks are suited to and each artist’s best-known style, in which the self is more often than not reclusive. Tom Wesselman, for instance, contributed a heavily bound ledger in which he records his experiences and discoveries on a Catskills farm he bought six years ago. The account book is a meticulous continual description of the animals, flora and seasons that surround him, interspersed with small drawings of events and scenery, and with snapshots and dried leaves and flowers. While it is outwardly a naturalist’s journal, free of confessional nostalgia and philosophical reflection, it is specifically the record of a first encounter with nature, the attempt of an urban man to acclimate himself to and understand the esoteric subtleties of a non-human world. Wesselman’s journal reveals this in its very meticulousness. It is as if a person whose instincts and knowledge are social goes to nature for shelter and succor and disciplines himself to a kind of social politeness, keeping himself from interpreting too much and straining his eyes to grasp every detail, lest nature find him intrusive and close him out.
Contrasted with Wesselman’s highly sophisticated, highly social “Great American Nudes,” his journal almost seems contrite—a rapprochement with nature in which he agrees not to recast it for any purpose of his own, but rather to treat it as gently and diffidently as a guest. I do not know whether Wesselman conceived of his journal as entirely personal and practical, a lab-book to aid him in studying nature, but if sketchbooks are in some sense time-capsules, works that an artist knows or hopes will someday be examined, Wesselman’s speaks for a quiet, hermetic, apologetic side of himself that does not appear in his paintings. The exhibition of the journal thus sets up a counterpoint between one part of the artist and another, and underpins his paintings with additional layers of irony and complexity. Though we know that an artist’s major works are as provisional as anything else, the painter of a large opus is under pressure to make it seem absolute and beyond self-doubt. The sketchbook, which is a smaller work, becomes a kind of commentary on its grander counterparts, and expresses all the ambivalence they must conceal.
Several other artists conspicuously let down their hair in Kardon’s show. Dorothea Rockburne submitted a tiny, bound book filled with small postcard and magazine photographs, but no words of explanation. Many of the photographs, or cropped fragments of pictures, showed Greek and Italian architectural monuments backlit by flaming sunsets, while others were of swimmers on the beach and passersby. The book was more than a collection of postcards because of its editing. Altogether the pictures, and the railway tickets and postage stamps that occasionally appeared among them, formed a moderately sequential log of a real or imagined trip through Southern Europe. What was interesting about the book, a minor work by any standards, was the interplay between the idea of a journey as a real, tangible experience, and the travel agent’s pictures Rockburne used to describe the trip. Also prominent, of course, was the disparity between such representational pictures, however doctored they were, and Rockburne’s own paintings, rigorous, dispassionate and cerebral.
The two discrepancies may amount to a single one: for to speak of a journey in the processed, public language of brochure photography is to interpose a veil between one’s experience of the trip and one’s rendering of it. Rockburne drops a similar curtain between herself and the audience when she produces systematized, mathematically ordered paintings that she deems to be no more personal than equations one handles on paper, at a safe distance from the body. If some kind of distancing mechanism is unavoidable in Rockburne’s work, however, there is a significant difference between the type she uses in general and that which she turns to in the sketchbook.
In her large works, she separates herself from us with what is supposed to appear a kind of rarefied, esoteric, privileged knowledge. More than that, a certain dignity, a judicious intellectual restraint, resides in the myth of such knowledge. There is no dignity (excepting that kind which modern artists mysteriously derive from communing with the vulgar) inherent in using brochure pictures, only the quality of being camp. Rockburne closes us out in the notebook by requiring us to be seduced by her sunsets if we are to enter, and more importantly, by counting on our refusal to be seduced by them. We are left only dimly sensing the real, experiencing person behind the work, and we only get this far because Rockburne’s formal devices (her editing, cropping and sequencing) are prominent; I might add that intuitive, non-systematized form is, when it surfaces, the largest human element in her major work.
The paradox is, then, as follows: The self Rockburne and Wesselman present in their sketchbooks is public in the sense that it is a carefully contrived, artificial self, one that takes on a deliberate meaning when seen in contrast with the artists’ major works; at the same time, because it opposes the major works, the sketchbook personality is a secondary, normally hidden, more “personal” aspect of the artist. Dan Flavin, too, opposes his famous pieces in the book he lent Kardon. A small, spiral-bound sketchbook filled with pencil drawings of boats at Bridgehampton beach on Long Island, the relation it bears to Flavin’s fluorescent tubes is antithetical. The drawings are minute, whereas Flavin’s sculptures are fairly large; they represent whole landscapes whereas the major works are interior pieces, however big; they are representational though the sculptures are not; and where the sculptures are hard, solid works, highly detailed because the tubes and fixtures that compose them are covered with factory marks, the drawings are vague, nearly abstract, atmospheric scenes, redolent of Japanese ink-paintings. From the opposition between the drawings and the fluorescent-tube works, we can again begin to interpret the differences between the persona Flavin will present publicly and that character he reserves for the supposed privacy of a sketchbook.
In addition to those artists in the show whose sketchbooks were conventional—books filled with anticipatory drawings for larger works or minor observations quickly pencilled in—there were a number who filled their books with formal and emotional reflections on their work and with philosophical musings on the choice to make art. Most of these written passages have a cute vagueness to them that one associates with amateur poetry. Don Nice, for instance, wrote, “The objective world could for me be divided up between those objects I wish to paint and those I don’t, I wonder if the clouds have ever spelled a word in Arabic.” Some such passages are positively dripping—pleas for the artist’s value and his sensitivity, i.e. (Richard Pousette-Dart):
Marks of the human hand
how beautiful they are
do not erase them
build on them
creatively, avoid all machines
put them aside
for everything but the human hand
tends to cover over in an empty gloss
and hide us from ourselves
the loving caring touch of the human hand
while others are nothing but obfuscation:
A fragment of information
from a greater system of slip space
totally progressive and logical
turned in on
and completing its (fragment) self
cutting the extended life
to existing within plausibility
—Will Insley
Joe Brainard, however, presented a book filled with writing, drawings and nonsense, and the written parts—small verses, puns, jokes and aphorisms—take fully and good-naturedly into account that verbal language is not the artist’s major medium, but is nevertheless something he is entitled to enjoy. One “poem,” which I think is hilarious, states without embarrassment the painful and persistent inauthenticity of the artist’s life:
Got a nice new big loft.
Working a lot.
Tons of terrific friends.
And a new “good sex” lover.
Health: fine,
As far as I know And I never have to take subways!
(Counting my blessings.)
And so all is well.
All is well,
But nothing is wonderful.
(Damn it!)
This January of 1975
Something is missing, of course, from Brainard’s life, but whether it is that his good-sex lover doesn’t give him all the affection he wants or simply that a loft and a cab ride do not persuade one that one has finally made great art, we are not told. A home, good sex, luxury, intellectual excitement would seem to make up a pretty attractive life, but depth of feeling is absent, even though a private notebook ought to be the place to find it expressed.
What Brainard’s book says, indirectly perhaps, is that even a sketchbook, a repository of secrets and anti- or unsocial feelings, is filled with posturing. In this Brainard speaks for all the other artists in the show, whether they would accept it or not: the very act of expressing one’s beliefs, feelings, desires, one’s self, forces one to take on the shape of another person. That person may be an original fiction or a composite of people one has admired, and with luck it will be an agreeable character to its author, but it is inevitably a personality cut to form; whether the form is a spiral-bound pad of 4 by 6 inches or a canvas of 6 by 12 feet is of secondary importance. (In a way, Brainard’s passage stares back grinning at the viewer who would snoop through notebooks to find genius’s slip-ups; it says we cannot find an easier route to the central personality of the artist, only another stylized figure.)
Ad Reinhardt makes a similar comment, though it is more difficult to see, in a small drawing which encapsulates the history of architecture from the 16th century ^^B.C.^^ to the 1700s, digressing here and there. Ten monumental public buildings are arranged, with little regard for their relative scale, in chronological order. The formal movement from one to the next is ideal—each in turn seems to be a variation on the last, as if we were flipping through a stack of flash cards and watching the image metamorphose. The sheet looks a little like a relic in a class notebook left over from a survey of architectural history, but Reinhardt’s drawing defies history. The Egyptian temple which begins the series cannot, in fact, have led directly to the Parthenon, nor the Taj Mahal to High Gothic, nor Less Invalides to the White House.
Thus the hard-headed public moralist of art insists, in private, that the rules of art are arbitrary and flexible. He may reveal moreover that the weighty past, and his own oratorical posturing as well, are subject to personal choices which in Reinhardt’s case are more than a little frivolous.
Leo Rubinfien is a photographer who lives in New York City.
