Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible
Hammer Museum
Closed January 5th
Reprinted from ArtSlant
“I can close my eyes in a dark room and if there is no
outside noise and attraction, plus, if there is no conscious effort on my part
– then I can see color, line, patterns, and forms that make up my canvases... I
have always copied these arrangements without elaboration.”
—Forest Bess, 1951
I saw my first Forrest Bess at the Hammer in 2008, in Amy
Sillman's room in curator Gary Garrell's Oranges and Sardines, a group show composed
of artists choosing their favorite artists. Star of David, 1959, was one of
three paintings I remember, the other two being a devastating little Paul Thek
called God is, 1988, and a little hard edge by Juan Melé called Irregular Frame
No. 2, 1946. None of these artists are exactly famous, though they inspired
Sillman enough to include them, but all of these works had the quality of
taking on everything else in their rooms and then holding their own, these
artists’ few tenacious inches simply outmaneuvering and outworking the feet and
yards of everyone else.
Thek is obscure due to seemingly being slightly askew from
the official narratives of New York art in the 60s and 70s (an artist's
artist). Melé is obscure due to our general ignorance in United States of the
work of South American modernists (especially those artists who are not
Brazilian). Forrest Bess is something different entirely. He was an outsider,
not due to circumstance or due to unwillingness or ignorance of dominant
theories of art, but an outsider in his own life, a deeply troubled person
whose visions extended from traumas that fundamentally split him from polite
society.
Bess had his first vision at the age of four, and the
visions would then emerge again in the 1940s. Living in a place outside of Bay
City, Texas only accessible by boat, Bess copied his visions, fished during the
day, and then worked on his little canvases at night, works remarkable for
their restraint and confidence. He seemingly started out knowing what he wanted
to paint, laid that picture down, and then it was finished. No revisions
needed. No returning to see it the work could be improved. His paintings have
the immediacy of quickly jotted notes.
The Hammer Museum has arranged these visions by Bess in
three small galleries adjacent to their permanent collection which includes
mainstream hits from Rembrandt to Grotjahn. Together Bess’ paintings come
across differently than that first piece I saw in Sillman's room in 2008, which
read as a strange intrusion into a recognizable world. Collectively now at the
Hammer, the painting is less immediate, more the portrait of an unusual life.
Unfortunately, a confession has been beaten out of Bess. Curator Robert Gober
goes through great effort to give us not only the paintings but documents,
quotes, all sorts of collateral into the mind and work of the artist. The
central story is an odd one: Bess believed that he could achieve immortality
through becoming a hermaphrodite and actually tried, making incisions in his
scrotum to open himself up for entrance.
“Bess' painting are his experiences,” Wayne Koestenbaum
wrote of them (in one of the best essays on painting in recent memory), and it
is hard to understand what this means. Koestenbaum’s emphasizes the “are”
because it is unusual. Art is often the record of experiences, the artist’s or
others, real or imagined. Styles of installation can seek to guide or shape the
viewer’s experience, but rarely (perhaps only in the realm of religion or the
insane) are artworks literally the artist’s experiences.
One way to looks at it is the belief that the subjects of
icons are contained within icons. That is not a picture of the Virgin Mary, it
is the Virgin Mary. With Bess, those are not images of landscapes, those are
landscapes, his mind, his vision, the place where he dwells. Those orifices, to
us runes and symbols, are orifices to Bess; they are a program and step towards
immortality in the same way, in ordinary life, an application to college is a
step towards admittance to college. This is the weirdness of Bess, the belief
of Bess.
It was also the arrogance of Bess, the romance of Bess.
While there is no doubt that his eccentricities isolated him, he was, in a
sense, part of the game. He had six solo exhibitions with Betty Parsons—the
gallerist of Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.
When in a letter Bess writes, “I try to tell myself that only by breaking
completely away from society can I arrive at a reasonable existence,” it is
important to remember the letter was to the art historian Meyer Shapiro. Bess
wanted to be part of the official artworld, took steps to be so, and had many
famous collectors acquire his work. People knew his paintings were strange and
important, and in many ways, his statement “My painting is tomorrow's painting.
Watch and see,” feels delightfully modernist. Actually that’s exactly how
modernists sound; they always felt under-appreciated.
But, that said, why is this little Bess show worth seeing,
worth taking in? I like again what Koestenbaum wrote: “For all the power and
capital that has coalesced around abstract art in the last sixty years, I don't
think that we've given it enough credit as a method for the mind and body to
excavate its own temperatures, climaxes, opacities, and valleys.” That Bess
looks so fresh, so much like contemporary painting today (willfully eccentric,
unable to be fit into any convincing narrative), makes his “watch and see” and
his paintings poignant, as though the work to be done is not in the narrative
but in the internal mystery of each painter's relationship to their art and
themselves.
Eventually
all hype and all fame will collapse into the long toll of time and all the
whining over the under-recognized and all of the heavy breathing over those
that are now proud will come down to simply what continues to hold our
interest. If we are careful and keep our eyes open, our Besses and Theks and
Melés will continue to come scratching forth from obscurity to rival the argued
and studied treasures of their generations, simply through the force of their
weird vitality, by their strange resistance to death.