to drown everything, risen in a massive wave and curling over a lonely door (missing its building) on the pale sands. To the right is the chess board floor again, but now a sad fragment of its fuller self.
What is the point of this chess board floor whose persistence seems futile without players or pieces? The pictures would be bottomless without it. Moreover, there is a noble pathos in what the floor remembers - one of those beautiful parquetry platforms of Renaissance painting, created for beautiful creatures, as in Giovanni Bellini's ‘The Earthly Paradise’. We are moved by the absence of such creatures, by the sense of desertion implied, but also, and not least, by the courage of human art keeping order in the face of desintegration. And perhaps what is worse, in the face of the rips that show art itself to be merely an eloquent representation, or misrepresentation, of something beyond the forms of art.
Are we saddened by this failure, by what seems to be an infinite regress in which there is no rest for the eye or mind? I think not. If art is unable to provide an unshakable platform, a sure resting point, neither does the chaos with which it struggles. The triumph in this art does not belong to chaos. If there is a triumph, it is paradoxically in the dynamics of apparent fixity or finality. This dynamic, while it reveals the failures of the past, argues also for possibility of the future, even if that possibility is only in the artful seeing that permanence implies its own ruin. For this is a liberating, if scary, knowledge.
Our response to these visions is partly controlled by the wit of the artist, who loves verbal as well as visual puns. She refuses us sentimentality in her titles, for example, ‘The Cruci-Fiction’, and in images of a bleeding apple on the lithograph stone, itself on a cross. There is severe comedy in this. The apple, man's first taste of sin, now replaces Christ as savior. But of course, this apple is an artifact, and art saves nothing, as we see from the broken lithograph stone, which is the very ground of artistic endeavor. The voice of the artist in her titles warns us not to mourn too quickly, not to enter her pictures unarmed with irony.
There is even comedy in the sometimes sinister-seeming black bubbles. For these, in their roundness (like marbles?), seem absurdly inappropriate in a world of squares and rectangles. Moreover, they apparently have the fragility of eggs. A few of them lie broken and hollow on the chess board floors. Are they eggs? What sort of creature have they hatched and where has it flown? And even if they are eggs, they are, so to speak, laid by a human hand, the artist's.
But the drawing called ‘Train of Thought’ warns us where such meditations can lead. Here is the chess board floor, and on it to the right is what looks at first glance to be a transparant belt, but is, in fact, a tiny engine running on a tiny track which circles back on itself and right out of the picture.
I spoke of the classical quality of Spahr's work. That quality is often summed up in terms of balance. And balance is precisely what characterizes this art, for it is driven by a passion for order, but a passion that refuses to exclude the disorder that keeps order from dead immobility. Wallace Stevens puts it so much better in the opening lines of his ‘Connoisseur of Chaos’:
a. A violent order is disorder; and
b. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations).
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