If you admire Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain paintings, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Peter Schjeldahl’s “Of Nature,” in this week’s issue, in which he reviews a new exhibition, “Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain Studies,” opening June 9 at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck, New York. Schjeldahl writes,
The drawings vary restlessly. Some array glyphic marks in typically Chinese, parallel vertical columns, with blank spaces between them. In others, the marks skitter sideways, entangling the columns with one another. Then, there are hyperactive webs of line that sacrifice any graphic order to another kind: the allover force fields of New York School abstraction, with spiky decisiveness in each mark—as if the instrument in Marden’s hand had ideas of its own, in a rushing sequence of Zen contradictions. The pictures never suggest design. They are phenomena. Nor are they quite expressive. Rather, they are like transits of impulse from somewhere beyond the artist to somewhere beyond the viewer. A formal discipline of picture-making presides, as prosodic sophistication does in Han Shan—governing a flow that recalls Jackson Pollock’s response when a visitor remarked that he didn’t work from nature. He said, “I am nature.”
I relish that “spiky decisiveness in each mark”; it catches the subtle deliberateness of Marden’s sublime improvisation.
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| Brice Marden, Cold Mountain Study (20) (1988-91) |
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