I.
Katherine Porter belongs to a generation of women artists who chose to not only work outside of the rigorous limits established by Minimalism, but also to both explore and define a territory that is neither purely abstract nor overtly representational. Contrary to what one might expect, it is a territory fraught with pitfalls. For by being neither abstract nor representational, neither fish nor fowl, many contemporary painters find it easier to justify their equivocations, to be vague rather than specific. To be specific without being representational is an issue Porter constantly faces in her work. The other issue Porter faces has to do with forms. Her forms are not pure, and thus not abstract. Far from it. Given her rejection of these two options, the question becomes: How does one make a painting that is not a picture of something but is a palpable presence? Is it something that can be done?
An uncompromising artist, Porter understands that one way to overcome equivocation is to ground whatever is being painted in the materials themselves. For whether it is oil paint or gouache, viscous matter or opaque liquid, the materials themselves must become generative tools, and their unleashing of possibilities what the artist both registers and tracks. The goal isn´t to fulfill an overall idea, but to discover the elusive identity of things in a state of flux, however impossible such a task might seem to be.
By being attentive to the specifying power of her materials, Porter addresses the challenge embodied in Jackson Pollock´s paintings, which is that the work must be as robust as the world itself. As Pollock makes abundantly evident in his paintings, the work must rival reality. In order to take up the challenge his paintings present, Porter had to address one of the abiding issues his work raises. Can an artist, by giving primacy to the materials, also make metaphors which extend into infinite, constantly changing present? Is it possible to make work which neither ignores nor rejects change and time? And, by implication, can one gaze directly into the eye of the always coming storm?
These are just a few of the questions, at times understood on a cosmological level, and at other times understood on both a political and social level, that Porter has wrestled with for much of her career. The trajectory of her paintings and drawings, one following another, has been in no way predictable. One reason for this is because Porter believes that painting must be capable of embodying the deepest levels and heights of reality, as well as be responsive to the particular world in which it was made. Thus, to be in the world, and to also rival it, a painting must possess the capacity to acknowledge its presence, however threatening and disordering it may be. Admittedly this is a tall order.
Since Porter first began exhibiting in the late 1960s, she has focused her attention on the relationship between change and conflict. It is not that she envisions a world undergoing relentless and unavoidable cataclysms. It is that she recognizes that change and conflict are central features of reality, which otherwise don´t repeat itself. Her paintings are not pictures, but the manifesting and tracing of forces both visible and invisible. They are visionary revelations of the idea that transformation is integral to both presence and reality. And, as everyone knows, destruction, change and rebirth lie at the heart of transformation.
II.
There are many contexts in which one can see an artist, particularly when – and here I am thinking specifically of Porter – that artist is a strong and independent figure. Focusing on these contexts can be useful if one also points out how Porter differentiates herself from others, even as she understand what she shares with them. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1941, Porter´s peers include Louise Fishman (b. 1939), Suzan Frecon (b.1941), Mary Heilmann (b.1940), Elizabeth Murray (b. 1941), and Pat Steir (b. 1941). For a number of these artists, all of whom were struggling to find their own way in the 1960s, the territory many of them directed their attention towards during the late 1960s and early ´70s was one that Eva Hesse (1936 – 1970) had brilliantly opened up during the last five years of her tragically short life.
Hesse´s work defined a realm in which metaphor, ambiguity, and the evocation of symbols prevailed over both literalism and the insistence that paint was just paint. Thus, whatever aspects her work shared with Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, on the level of emotion it occupied the opposite end of the spectrum. In contrast to Carl Andre, say, Hesse´s use of non-art materials such as fiberglass, rubber washers, and polyester resin was both perplexing and provocative in terms of metaphor and meaning. Was the viewer to see her rounded forms as manifestations of science fiction´s influence on imagination, handmade geometry, the outcome of compulsive behavior, or the result of an additive process? How was one to read Hesse´s impure presences? Were they meant to be read as breasts, moons, or architectural elements?
In her uncategorizable work, Hesse made it evident that one didn`t have to become a Minimalist; one could become something else, something unnameable. The difference between Hesse and her Minimalist peers can be summed up in this way. Whereas Frank Stella (b. 1936) said of his painting, “What you see is what you see”, Hesses work invites metaphorical readings, as well as suggested to the viewer that one could make analogies between her work and that of the female body. Porter connects herself to both Hesse and other women artists of her generation by virtue of the fact that her work upholds the belief that analogies are both a desirable and inescapable aspect of seeing. In this regard, Porter shares something with Louise Fishman and Pat Steir, both of whom have made paint, process, and metaphor inextricable.
It is clear that a sea-change in thinking began taking place around the time Hesse was working, as well as after her untimely death, a period which we might remember coincided with the escalation of Americas presence in Vietnam, the proliferation of race riots, and the rise of Feminism. Recognizing that history was largely a patriarchal construction that ignored women, and that progress was an illusion, particularly when considered against the backdrop of race riots, the Vietnam War and Feminism, Porter and other women artists of her generation decided to strike out on their own. Rather than trying to advance Minimalism, and its reductive impulses, what these artists shared was not a style, but an intense desire to define themselves as self- sufficient individuals. In this sense, we should understand that Katherine Porter´s commitment to both painting and drawing has possessed implications since the beginning of her career.
III.
In her early work, Porter incorporated abstract signs, such as large X against and within tonally monochromatic fields. By setting one thing (a mark) against another (a sensuous field of paint), the artist proposed that painting was a site in which the age old conflict between order and disruption could be rediscovered and made fresh. At the same time, Porter´s large X´s conveyed a willful desire to cross out, to make or leave one´s own unmistakeable mark, to intervene. Porter´s drawing in paint anticipates a central aspect of her art, which is her commitment to drawing. However, rather than seeing her commitment to drawing as nostalgic longing for an old idea, it might be more useful to understand it as a decision to make her body present and responsible at every moment of the artmaking process, to celebrate her passage through time.
In the early 1970s, influenced by her study of tantric art, Porter introduced the circle into her vocabulary. It is symbol for both the individual and the cosmos, for both the microscopic and macroscopic levels on which reality operates. Since then, she has added the spiral, arc, and ellipse (all variations of a circle) as well as a rectangle, a right angle (variations on rectilinear geometry) a sun, cross, cityscape, cloudlike shape, and other emblematic forms to her vocabulary. But what recurs most often in her work is the circle or some variation of it.
The circle seems to be the generative force in Porter´s work, the beginning of all else. Its origin, we might remind ourselves, is the dot, the smallest mark one can make. Its unleashing (or expansion, as in concentric circles) gives birth to other marks, other decisions and discoveries. One thing leads to another and another. Thus, Porter´s circles are not fixed symbols; and her use of them neither harkens back to their source in Tantric art, nor appropriates the belief system in which they usually function. Rather Porter has transformed the symbol into something she both draws and discovers, a kinetic presence whose flow of energies she must trace as well as reveal.
Porter extends out of a visionary vein in painting, which stretches from HilmaAfKlint to Richard Pousette-Dart. The impetus is to reveal the forces governing outward appearances, to chart what lies beneath and beyond visible. Her forms are events and possibilities she discovers in the course of making. They are her way of mapping reality´s compexities and contradictions, its terrifying beauty. The identity of each mark or sign is one the artist generates through her materials, and through her registering and testing of their presence. Always, what Porter must recognize is that the painting, its conjunctions of materials and movement (drawing) must be allowed to determine its own emergence, its birth. Consequently, the logic of each composition is something she must discover.
An artist for whom drawing is central, Porter works on both very large canvases and intimately scaled sheets of paper. By shifting so decisively between epic and intimate scale, she compels herself to be hyperware of the movements and pressures of her hand, wrist and arm. Because she is committed to the idea that drawing is a generative mode, a way of discovering something specific, she forces herself to be vigilant in the attention she pays to the way the paper holds the gouache, to what it makes visible.
As a result, the viewer sees passages where the artist seems to have barely touched the paper, as well as large compositions where she has articulated bold arabesques of oil paint in dense and various fields. In each case, what the viewer gazes at is a world (or cosmos) undergoing change; it is forming and reforming itself right before one´s eyes. But the longer one looks, and the more one considers the possible meaning of a work, the more evident the sensual pleasures become. In Porter´s work, we do not surrender to stillness and calm, but to unending change.
IV.
The plenitude of incident one is apt to encounter in Porter´s work can feel overwhelming. It´s as if all the force fields, waves, and elements that constitute reality suddenly made themselves palpable. Forms overlap, intersect, and push against each other. Even in a relatively quiet work such as the gouache Mr. Li´s Story (1993)Porter brings the entire surface to life.
A white open square (or frame) has been superimposed onto a gray ground containing elongated, whirlpool-like shapes painted in dusty blue, dirty yellow, or dark gray. On the right hand side of the square, between the shape and the white vertical bar Porter has painted a vertical yellow rectangle and a blue horizontal one. The obvious layering of the composition causes the viewer to look more closely, and to see that on the area outside the white frame the artist has painted the gray ground over pink underpainting, while inside the frame she has painted the gray ground over blue underpainting.
One senses that each decision, each shape and mark Porter makes opens up the possibilities of what comes next, that her choices are derived from what came before. While the composition isn´t all-over in the sense of Pollock or the Minimalists, no one element in the painting makes more claim on the viewer´s attention than any other. Despite what we might expect, the large yellow rectangle, the brightest area of color in the painting, doesn´t dominate the composition. In fact, the white bar divides the yellow rectangle into a smaller rectangle and an inverted L. This inverted L is echoed by an ascending white-stepped line inside the white frame. Because many forms echo each other, as well as become distinctive, the viewer´s attention shifts and recombines them in various ways. The flow of these recombinations is unimpeded because the painting, despite its incorporation of different sized shapes and unique configurations, is non-hierachical. Because the painting in non-hierachical, as well as suggestive of change, the painting exists in the present, in the now, even as it evokes both a past and a future.
In the gouache Celestial (1998) Porter doesn´t cover the entire paper with drawing, but leaves surface bare in places, smudged in others. The large concentric circle in the upper half of the compositions isn´t placed quite in the center. Vision, this placement suggests, is not the discerning of order, but the recognition of movement and conflict. Above it, a braid of abraded blue, yellow, and red strokes functions as both a barrier and as a distinct element. No matter where our attention settles, the different smudges and faint lines have the same visual presence as the bolder signs and marks. If we are apt to read the work as a picture of something, but we are not sure what, the roughtoothed beige paper thwarts this desire. By making the paper itself as much palpable presence as the composition, Porter concentrates our attention on what we are looking at. It isn´t, however, a depiction of the night sky, as the work´s title suggests. Rather, the work itself, the light emanating from it, is what is alive and celestial. The longer we look at Porter´s work, and they intensely rewarding in this regard, the more our senses become heightened to the fact that nothing is still, that movement and change are constant.
In Temperate Fire In Audacious Night (1999) the concentric circle (it reminds one of a target) abuts against a smaller, dissolving circle, while above both of these circles and extending beyond the compositions´s top edge, the dark circle whose outer border is defined by a yellow band causes our attention to echo the circularity of the forms. We move from seeing the painting to seeing ourselves seeing the painting. As in her other work, no form, arabesque, passage of color is more important than any other. Our attention shifts from large things to small things, from mark to form and back again. Each time we think the concentric circle will dominate the composition, become the focal point around which everything else revolves, something tugs us toward itself, makes us change our focus.
Because the ringed circle extends beyond the composition, one feels that Porter recognizes that she possesses no vantage point from which vision becomes complete. Seeing is always partial and always full to the point of overflowing. We can only strive to take it all in, to register everything we see while moving through time and space, towards chaos and dissolution. This is the eye of the storm in which Porter wants to fix her gaze, look steadfastly at what is unavoidable. The sensuality and exuberance of her work is celebratory; she is rejoicing in the colors, textures, and presences, she can make palpable through art. Her pleasures are not simply hedonistic, however; they are a matter of both mind and body, thinking, seeing, and feeling. Contemplating her spirals, we reenact both expansion and dissolution, both outward and inward movement. The limits of each direction the spiral points to is infinity. Conscious of this and of our bodies, we awaken to ourselves and our brief presence in this world.