10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #8 Wayne Koestenbaum's "The Inner Life of the Palette Knife"

Forrest Bess, Untitled (The Crown) (1949)

This is the third post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant “The Inner Life of the Palette Knife,” which originally appeared in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “My painting is tomorrow’s painting. Watch and see”: Forrest Bess (Christie’s, 2012), and is included in Koestenbaum’s great 2013 collection My 1980s & Other Essays. It’s Koestenbaum’s attempt to describe and comprehend Bess’s strange abstractions. 

Koestenbaum begins by suggesting that we should not so much read Bess’s paintings, as experience them. To do that, he recommends close looking. He writes,

The light in this room – where I’m looking at his paintings, one by one – shines irregularly on his black paint. Sometimes the black, arrested by light, seems matte; at other instants, light causes the black paint to glisten. These modest oscillations – matte one moment, glistening the next – are not the size of Texas. You need to stand very close to the painting to see these incremental changes, nuances so minor that it seems a culpable exaggeration to call attention to them, even if these delicate effects of light and texture are Bess’s major contribution to the philosophy of transgendered affect, to American abstract art, to the erotics of fear.

He says that to really appreciate Bess’s paintings, we must be willing to “waste time” looking at them, “without the certainty that it will reward you with ecstasy, knowledge, or satisfaction.” He goes on, 

In one of my favorite Bess paintings (untitled, like most of them), composed of oil and painted foil on canvas, I lose myself – I waste time – looking at a blue foil triangle’s nearness to a brown-black dot. That dot’s placement has no clear or verbalizable meaning; I can’t explain why the dot is near the triangle, though not too near. The dot belongs in the triangle’s vicinity, but the two entities – dot, triangle – have no fixed relationship. In that same painting, the background is composed of black swirls or blobs. The black blobs – gesso-like? – are separate from one another but also sometimes joined or interacting. Their edges – to the extent that the blobs cluster together in a community – are at once stable and unstable; the edges ululate, but don’t sing a clear melody.

To pay attention to these black blobs, or to pay attention to the blue foil triangle’s nearness to a specific dot, I must pledge allegiance to abstract art’s Bill of Rights, which contains, unlike the United States’, only one provision: the right to look, for unstructured amounts of time, at migrant and unspecific forms, and at the relation between them, without demanding that the forms have a single meaning, and without demanding that whatever significance I ascribe to these forms be defensible, explicable, or based on any evidence but my own sensations.... I have the right to find supreme significance in Bess’s blobs and lines, and to spend as long as I wish in a state of torpid yet ecstatic surrender to them.

That formulation of “abstract art’s Bill of Rights” is inspired!

Koestenbaum responds intensely to Bess’s palette-knife marks. In one of my favorite passages, he writes,

These experiences of transport, keyed to painterly moments almost too small to mention, I call jabs of intensification – microscopic illuminations, inner shudders, tiny spurts of “oh my God!”, as if a joy-bringing bubble were suddenly to open up a new hallway in my brain, or as if suddenly I were to become Keats reading Homer for the first time and standing proud on a silent peak to view the wild Pacific. But in Bess’s case, the wild Pacific is merely an edge mark made by a palette knife, where yellow gets divided into adjacent, parallel mini-panels of companionate yellows.

He says of Bess’s Mandala (1967), “The black paint surrounding the mandala has gorgeous gouge marks that awaken in me (the urge never went to sleep) a desire to make texture my god.” Koestenbaum’s expression of his love of texture makes me smile. It’s my love, too.

Koestenbaum’s main theme is the need to pay close attention. In his closing paragraph, he writes,

Bess’s hieroglyphic semiabstractions suggest not only that he was a remarkable artist but that abstract – or near-abstract – art, hovering on the edges of codes we’ll never comprehend, teaches us to pay fine-grained, undogmatic attention to the blobs and lines and curves we encounter in everyday life. Pay attention to scratches. Pay attention to the textured, importuning marks of a silent palette knife. Use Bess’s paintings to understand the difficult art of human attentiveness. In a would always willing to truncate the possibilities for closely noticing what occurs, allow attentiveness to flower, however private and inscrutable its flowering, however seemingly impractical, minor, puzzling, and antisocial its procedures of self-nourishment. 

Sage advice for these distracted times.