What is the Color of Hope?

Reflections on the Art History of Narcissism

These are a series of free associations between my experience of artmaking and how policy could change to protect the Earth. My focus is on the working landscape I see of how our world works in ways that end in ecocide. What particularly prompted these reflections has been trying to understand relationships between personal behaviors and public repercussions in the face of ecological disaster.

For several years, I argued with the "hope-ists," writers who extolled this, that or the other new solution to mitigate climate change. I argued that most people conflate sentimental nostalgia for an illusory past with a way forward that will "solve it all". I often wrote that we had to move forward from the wreckage of our past by accepting the devastation of our present. I thought we had not advanced beyond Malthus' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism bleak projection, that humankind is too short-sighted to invent a better solution than war to reduce population and over-consumption. The world I saw materializing for our future was a universe of dead forests and hungry waves.

Recently, I am reconsidering. Perhaps there is another way to consider the problem. Research just means to search and search again. I am searching for a solution that looks forward to more sophisticated mitigations. As an artist, research for my work ranges far and deep. It includes the social sciences.

Researchers from many fields have speculated that human nature is the essential cause of environmental problems. Seeing the world as a pernicious patriarchal system is a political perception I have written about in the past. Patriarchal systems are one place to cast blame because they reify gender-based physical control and power. But if I look deeper, arguably, patriarchies are upheld by appearances of control and power that are independent of gender. That is where patriarchy may merge with the psychology of narcissism. I have looked towards psychology for answers that aren't just Pollyanna hopefulness and sentimentality. I see narcissism, as an over-developed ego and self-centered entitlement not only with other people but in greedy demands of all of nature. That attitude stands astride our ecological disaster. I blame narcissists and narcissistic values for our circumstances even more than patriarchy. A narcissistic and patriarchal system would rationalize unlimited, extractions to maintain power. It reifies individual needs over a community. Populations have not only failed to curb greed but have also failed to deter rapacious tyrants who are driven by narcissism.

Reductively, I see that failure as an unsophisticated response to complexity. So are these evil, intellectually lazy people? Some perhaps. This essay argues that the entire culture is narcissistic and therefore enables and even demands that behavior in individuals.

I think a case could also be made for narcissism as a desperate survival strategy to adapt to a culture ill-equipped to cope with complexity. Numerous studies have described a relationship between early abuse in an over-stimulating environment and narcissistic disorders. Once established, researchers believe it is very hard to break those patterns. But what if social values could change? If the society made different demands on individuals, if there were ways to cope with complexity and over-stimulation that aren't reductive or simplistic, might there be less need for individuals to compensate for psychologically desperate circumstances with narcissism?

I argue that environmental disaster is the bed we have made for ourselves as a consequence of over-simplification and narcissistic thinking. Ecocide is the bed we must become accustomed to sleeping in it or change the bedding.

In my last post, "Is There a Cure?" I began to speculate that if recent research is correct, that narcissism is a desperate response to over-stimulation and learned helplessness, art might be a template to cope with over-stimulation. Further and also, that the power of human touch could be a healing medication for desperate over- stimulation.

My trigger point theory proposed several rules to analyze any model of change. The most important of those rules was that "there will always be a small point to intervene in chaos." If I follow my own thinking and go back to art's formal tools, my intuition is that besides the visual drama of black and white on a 2-D surface, color is the most powerful way into experiential chaos.

Consider Jackson Pollock, one of the best-known abstract expressionists of mid last century. Arguably, he created a world that reflected some form of chaos.  In 1950, Hans Namuth wrote of Pollock's practice, " Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational..."

At a time when the world was changing, Pollock has been credited with a vision for seeing a different kind of object landscape. He is routinely reified as the individual hero. But success is never that simple and individual heros don't spring like Gods from the head of Zeus.

Despite the surface of post-war prosperity in America, a great deal of trouble was swept under the carpet, from racial tensions to misogyny. Fascism was alive and well, covert but nourished by Civil War grievances that went back generations, only waiting for a flag-bearer to arise and coax them out from under their rocks. People of color were routinely marginalized and exploited.

In Pollock's representation, the eye is guided by single colors to find a path through the dripped choreography he threw his whole body into creating. Pollock, like Elvis Presley, was exercizing hos whole being, but specifically his body, into channeling what he had learned from cultures more grounded in ephemerality and instinct, like Indigenous and black culture, rather than rigid European aesthetics, disassociated from body experience. But the path of influence was more circuitous for Pollock than Presley because the audience for art is smaller and more elite than the audience for entertainment.

In the case of Pollock, he was prompted by the influence of the Surrealist painter, Wolgang Paalen. The writer Gustav Regler wrote in 1946, of Paalen's work that, "He has the same hope as Pygmalion, to fall in love with his creation and to be outgrown by it." Paalen set the stage for Pollock to engage his whole body in artmaking., making his full body into a living trigger point as he discarded traditional tools like the tip of a brush or a palette knife at the end of an otherwise disengaged body.

Moving to Mexico, Paalen became deeply involved in MesoAmerican culture. His work eventually influenced Feminist arts such as Leonora Carrington. This was a time when cross-influences in the artworld were occurring fast and furiously but inconsistently credited. In the end, we recall Pollock, not Paalen, let alone the connection to Mesoamerican culture and Presley more than the black artists, such as Rosetta Tharpe who influenced his music, albeit, Lil Richard, who influenced his spectacles has held his historical own.

In his eulogy for Pollock, the artist Allan Kaprow, who started as a painter but became known as the Father of Happenings and was my mentor for many years before he passed away, exhorted his audience to move beyond painting entirely. To Kaprow, the frame was the trigger point and a disposable hindrance. Discarding that "small detail," which confined content, Kaprow freed the work to move beyond the narrow confines of traditional art and catapulted it into real life. Kaprow later codified some Rules for a Happening.

1. “The situations for a happening should come from what you see in the real world, from real places and people rather than from the head.“

2. “Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally uses.”

3. “Break up your time and let it be real-time. Real-time is found when things are going on in real places.”

4. “Arrange all your events in the happening in the same practical way. Not in an arty way.“

5. “Since you’re in the world now and not in art, play the game by real rules. Make up your mind when and where a happening is appropriate.“

6. “Work with the power around you, not against it.”

7. “When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it unnatural because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, art.”

8. “Perform the happening once only. Repeating it makes it stale, reminds you of theatre, and does the same thing as rehearsing.“

These were very different concepts about artmaking and its role in human culture than the later images of whole life experiences from Andy Warhol’s glossy world of fashion and celebrity culture in The Factory community, which reified surface beauty. Unlike Paalen and Pollock, who embraced the mundane, Warhol was significantly grounded in a ruthlessly narcissistic world of appearances. He recognized the powerful palette of glamour. Glamour was the sound and color of Warhol's trigger point.

My take aways are that approaching artmaking from the POV of how art interacts with an audience can trigger new views of life.  That is how I foresee that we might solve the problem of where to intervene in a narcissistic culture. All formalism of any art teases out that connection between materials and affect.

Outside of artmaking, how are these reflections relevant to the narcissists' over-stimulated experience of the world, to finding an Ariadne's thread out of dangerous dangers? 

Color is one way art creates perceptual coherence and resurrects missing links. These are strategies that make over-stimulation legible experiences, whether with Paalen's smoke or flinging bodies into artmaking, as did Yves Klein.

I have often taken deep dives into color. Recently, I have been obsessing over variations on French Cerulean blue with a preference for Williamsburg Oil Colors for a series of small works on canvas. I can't recall his name, but one of the founders of that company used to work for Dave Davis, who ran an art supply store that was a wonderland of tools and materials. I first discovered his store as a young art student. I would wander from aisle-to-aisle fingering brushes and the textures of paper and canvas and listening to his tutelage.

Today, I regard ecocide and narcissism, searching for a small way to intervene in chaos. I will wonder about that as I work in my studio today. I will be staring at the water just beyond where I sti, to make sense of what I see. I am already speculating, is there a way for Cerulean blue to glaze Ultramarine blue, both transparent colors, as I portray the crest of a wave, contained in a small square canvas, that might capture the dynamics of change? Could that tiny color detail convey a world where the chaos of reality might be internalized at a manageable experiential scale? If all of life's changes were seen as equally humble in the face of history, might there also be humble answers to the narcissism that begets ecocide?