THE ANATOMY OF A STROKE: RECENT PAINTINGS BY JOAN SNYDER Joan Snyder in Artforum

By Marcia Tucker

Originally published in May 1971

Modern painting, like modern thought generally, obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless truth.

—Merleau-Ponty, Signs

SEEING JOAN SNYDER’S PAINTINGS for the first time is like looking into a partially demolished building filled with the remnants and debris of its occupants’ lives; the initial experience is that of surprise, disorientation, curiosity. It is the paradox of an intimacy aggressively exposed. There is almost too much to look at at once”, a shocking sense of disorder in the context of what were once structured, habitable spaces.

Many reductive or “Minimal” paintings seem to have closed up their surfaces over the sensate world of susceptibility, gesture, violence or spontaneity that characterized Abstract Expressionism. They present to the eye an objecthood, an “isness,” a non-symbolic totality in which the work does not signify anything outside itself. As the predominant pictorial mode, they have altered our vision and our expectations.

In sculpture, on the other hand, a move away from the making of objects has become increasingly apparent. It is as though the object is being dissected, and process, material, site, concept and temporality as the component parts of traditional sculpture have now become the subject or the object of the sculpture itself. This has not been true for painting, which by its nature is contained within the shape of the canvas, and can go no further out. It can, however, go further in, since the potential for optical space in a painting is virtually limitless. The illusion of depth has consequently been of concern to painters from the early Renaissance on.

We perceive a Renaissance painting as though it were a window looking out onto another world of visible reality. Modern painters have focused instead on the shape, limitations and nature of the window itself. Painting has been concerned, then, with the world, and with its own essence. But it deals as well with the nature of being, since the visible world is grasped or understood through physical analogies echoed internally in the body. “Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us,” says Merleau-Ponty, “are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.”¹ The world is perceived, experienced, understood and extended in us first through our physical knowledge of it. It is for this reason that painting “gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a ‘muscular sense’ in order to possess the voluminosity of the world.”² It is through our bodies that we first understand the nature of “horizontal” and “vertical”; and it is through our bodies that we first discover the emotional corollaries of our visual experience.

Among Joan Snyder’s earlier paintings, done in 1967, are dissections of human anatomy; not in the traditional sense, but in their expression of flesh, membranes, musculature and cells as pigment, color and surface, rather than as symbolic images. Over the years, she has continued to examine the already dissected parts, to analyze the strokes, gestures, drips and markings of the painting itself.

As a child, I remember trying to understand the physical enormity of the world by a comprehension of my own body situated in a room, which was in turn situated in a house, which was in turn situated on a street in a town; the town was in a city, in a state, in a country, in the world; the world physically located in space,in the solar system, in a galaxy. Snyder’s paintings reverse this dimension, moving relentlessly inward, rather than outward, into the nature of things seen and depicted, and into the methods and physical realities of that depiction. It is as though the artist’s being were a microcosm of the world, a starting point from which the search for reality turns inward. The painting itself seems to serve as a pivot between the world outside the body and the world inside it.

Theoretically, her work has much in common with the concerns of recent sculpture; physically, it has everything to do with the nature of painting itself, both as a process and as a visual language. Snyder’s markings (brushstrokes, daubs, restless lines, patches of improbable, vividly changing color and texture)are splayed out across the surface of the canvas as though scattered by the hand of an excited child. Each mark occupies its own territory, none more important than the next. The large marks, thick strokes often 5 or 6 inches wide, occupy only a small amount of space, whereas tiny daubs of paint are arrayed within a relatively large area. The eye is constantly making choices between elements that are vastly different, yet require equivalent attention. Underlying the markings in each painting are unobtrusive pencilled lines or grids, which seem unrelated to the elements situated on them. Every painting has a different scaffolding. In some cases the lines move across the surface in a widening geometrical progression; in others, a grid is composed of large squares, rectangles or oblique geometries.

Because no one part of the painting is less complex than any other, the visual confusion that results forces one to “read” the painting stroke by stroke, and precludes being able to apprehend it as a whole. The grid, although it is a fixed system on which the elements of the painting thrash about, fails to offer visual stabilization. It offers visual direction instead, an indication of where to start, literally, “reading” the work. It is, according to Snyder, like a writing pad on which to place the letters, words or sentences that constitute a pictorial language.

The nature of spoken language, as well as its written form, is analagous to the visual structures used by Snyder. Language is perceived and comprehended in process. A sound, a word, or even a sentence does not have “meaning” in and of itself. Even a specific language has no comprehensible meaning outside the context of the culture which employs it. Signs are, rather, allusive. Their meaning is grasped in the silences, the intervals, the spaces between them. “This meaning arising at the edge of signs, this immanence of the whole in the parts,” says Merleau-Ponty, “is found throughout the history of culture . . . It is a lateral or oblique meaning which runs between words. It is another way of shaking the linguistic or narrative apparatus in order to tear a new sound from it.”³ “Let us begin,” he says, “by understanding that there is a tacit language and that painting speaks in this way.”⁴

Just as a child, learning to speak, first uses a sound to stand for an entire thought, and then apprehends that there is “a lateral liaison of sign to sign as the foundation of an ultimate relation of sign to meaning,”⁵ so the markings in Snyder’s works relate to each other as the components of a language of visual equivalences which have pictorial “meaning.” The information given in a single canvas cannot be understood in a specifically symbolic manner, since the language of painting is not based on the same culturally accepted meanings that most words have for us. There is no hieroglyphic system in contemporary Western art which allows us to equate a certain shape with an equivalent definition that will be understood by almost everyone. There are only personal meanings, individual evocations of physical and emotional experience that a depicted shape or painterly gesture can arouse in us.

The painter’s experience, out of which such images are born, is communicated in terms of the experiences evoked in us when we see these images. To what extent are the painter’s experiences and our own congruent? It depends upon the voice of the painting. Its pivotal function, its ability to speak to us, is not only contingent upon those aspects of visual language common to both artist and viewer. It is also a question of style, that is, of how and what we have learned to look at, and to what extent we are able to recognize and relate to a cultural context for painting as well as to the more personal context of individual style.

For example, Big Green, a complex, ambiguous, contradictory picture, is a lexicon of images found scattered throughout Snyder’s other earlier works. The markings consist of strokes, repeated and thinned until they are almost invisible. Each stroke is, then, a slice or layer of its original. In another area, a heavily impastoed green and white shape is deliberately cracked, revealing the actual layers of pigment of which it is composed. There is a huge sludge of coppery gold paint in the upper right, variations and echoes of which can be seen in other paintings. There are thick arabesques of transparent gel, ghosts of their brilliantly-hued, full-fleshed images elsewhere in the canvas. The drips and wakes of a wet stroke imply that stroke’s potential for movement, change, process, diffusion. Its character, like ours, consists of myriad possible alternatives.

In one area of Symphony, in the upper right, there is an agglomeration of marks; the smallest ones are dense and highly colored, while the largest ones, reaching out into frontal space, are pale and watery. Visual perspective is reversed, and each stroke’s past and present are of equal, visible importance. This seemingly infinite pictorial lexicon becomes familiar the longer one looks, yet its meaning remains elusive as therecognizable images are altered in each new context, within each painting as well as within the body of the work. Some notes made on a recent drawing indicate clearly the relationship between the structure of a painting and the structure of human experience: “We at least know there is a beginning and an end.the middle can be very difficult, especially below the surface into the layers of past of painting of myself.”

Because no one image takes precedence over another, and because there are so many images in a single canvas, there is no gestalt, no holistic aspect to these paintings. For some artists, there is a desire to amalgamate the multiplicity of one’s experience into a single image, to comprehend it and give it order. Snyder presents that multiplicity as it is experienced.