The events of September 11, 2001 shook New York to its core, profoundly disrupting all aspects of life, but never paralyzing it. For all its overt brusqueness, New York is a city of accommodations : We negotiate - make deals - because commerce, the exchange of goods and information, has been the lifeblood of our city since its foundation by the Dutch in 1624.
Since September 11, New Yorkers have been negotiating with themselves, trying to find the deal 'we can live with' that will enable us to place those events in our past, so the past will not eclipse the present. Nancy Haynes's negotiates through their paintings. Like the rest of us, she finds herself in the paradoxical situation - seemingly static but actually dynamic - described by Samuel Beckett's narrator in Texts for Nothing:
Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on. Someone said, You can't stay here.
I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on.
Her work, then, constitutes a bridge from before to tomorrow. In this suite of paintings created between 2000 and 2002, Haynes includes a brilliant orange composition : after September 11. The ambiguity of that title - the 'after' may refer to time, but it just as easily could suggest 'in the manner of' - reflects the ambigious status of September 11 in our collective imagination. The painting itself is no document, no testimony , but at some deep level it is both of these things as well as a reflection of the negotiation process : We cannot comprehend what happened, but we must get used to living with this enigma because living is our only option.
Haynes accomplishes this simultaneous act of expression and accommodation by focusing exclusively on visual experience, definitively liberating painting from anecdote and representation. So these canvases constitute a world unto themselves. In purely formal terms, we move from zones of pure color - where opacity from time to time yields to transparency, where deep, perhaps repressed elements, invade the surface - to bound spaces, where the swaths of color at the edges constitutes a framing device.
In both these modes, we see Nancy Haynes deliberately enunciating two concepts of 'personal' though non - representational art : Her pure colour paintings seem to invite a psychological interpretation, While her framed paintings tantalize our visual skills with false and real perspectives. She captures us in the dialectic of colour and geometry, the source of both the power and the tension of her work. But, as usual, there is ' more here than meets the eye.'
Haynes's paintings do reflect our historic disquiet, but her disquiet is the life-long burden of the abstract painter. The start of the new millennium is probably an opportune moment to consider abstraction's reason for being and reconsider Wilhelm Worringer's 1908 essay Abstraction and Empathy. In that long-overlooked text, Worringer tries to explain the difference between representation (which he calls empathy) and abstraction and why they constitute the two poles of artistic expression :
Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world; in a religous respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. When Tibullus says : primum in mundo fecit deus timor, this same sensation of fear may also be assumed as the root of artistic cration. (Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock, p.15)
Worringer's idea of a kind of spiritual agoraphobia, a variation on horror vacui, is a useful hermeneutic device for comprehending Nancy Haynes's concept of abstraction. Understood this way, her paintings become metaphors for her existencially necessary will-to-power : Either she controls space or space will control her.
Two very different paintings illustrate her attitude : Field Notes IV and Red Orange Scaffold.The idea of the 'field notes' series derives from out-of-studio experience, forays into nature and society recalled in memory, but, at the same time, these smaller format canvases constitute fields Haynes has appropriated to herself, not 'notes about what I've seen in the field,' but 'notes on a field.' That is, the world becomes the canvas because Haynes inscribes herself onto it, though here we sense the turmoil of chaos brought under artistic control. Red Orange Scaffold reverses that idea : A scaffold is a temporary structure used either to build or repair a construction. What Haynes shows us here is a project, a work-in-progress whose 'unfinished' corners reminds us that the artist's control of alien space is only metaphoric, always incomplete.
This pendular swing between precarious structure - paintings whose right and left margins are boundaries, columns of color, like Ornithology and Field Notes III - and flirtations with chaos - Mute, an omnious painting from 1991, Field Notes I or the delicately modulated Monochrome I and Monochrome II - are the thesis and antithesisof Nancy Haynes's artistic dialectic. Either she is acknowledging the presence of dreadful space, or she is imposing an order on it : awareness and utopia.
The strengh of these works discloses itself slowly. Which is why the viewer must, following the sage advice of Richard Wollheim in Painting as an Art, pause - siste viator - and carefully observe these paintings both from a distance and at close range. Only by consciously studying the different spatial negotiations each contains can we see the struggle to control a meaningless universe that is taking place on their several levels. These paintings are Nancy Haynes's philosophic autobiography, but they are, of course, our own as well.
(Alfred MacAdam is a writer and translator who teaches at Barnard College - Columbia University.)