Ed Clark: Body and Mind
The late paintings of a singular artist
Ed Clark, who died a year ago next month, was an artist who created resonant and rapturous paintings using a unique method. Clark made his paintings using brooms to manipulate thick, fluid paint across raw canvas laid on the floor.
One of Clark’s late exhibitions, entitled “Big Bang,” was at Tilton Gallery in 2014, and I was fortunate enough to spend some time with it on a crisp and sunny Saturday afternoon that February. What is immediately impressed upon a viewer is that Clark’s paintings are infused with a dynamism that invokes the momentum of their making and the body in fresh and powerful ways.
Consideration of the role of the body in making and interpreting art is nothing new—and Clark himself is often referred to as a second generation abstract expressionist—but as discoveries in neuroscience deepen our understanding of how we perceive and think, Clark’s late work provides an opportunity to reconsider the relationships between art, body and mind. No one I’ve read describes these more succinctly than Siri Hustvedt in her appreciation of the work of choreographer Pina Bausch. Reviewing Wim Wender’s 3-D documentary of Bausch and her company, Hustvedt says:
In their 2007 paper “Motion, Emotion, and Empathy in Aesthetic Experience,” David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese discuss the neurobiology of looking at art as “embodied simulation.” Simply put, when we watch dancers or look at a painting or read a novel, we activate mirror systems in our brains. Although this activation remains below our awareness, it nevertheless allows us to participate in the aesthetic, emotive action of what we are looking at. As Freedberg and Gallese articulate it: “Spectators precognitively grasp emotions that are either explicitly shown or implicitly suggested by works of art.” In her acceptance speech when she won the Kyoto Prize in 2007, Bausch said, “For I always know exactly what I am looking for, but I know it with my intuition and not with my head.” Indeed, many artists work this way, even artists whose medium is words. There is always a preverbal, physiological, rhythmic, motoric ground that precedes language and informs it.
Because of her interest in neuroscience, Hustvedt has collaborated with the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio (author of Descartes’ Error), who has been doing groundbreaking work that is dramatically expanding our knowledge of the immensely complex human brain. Part of Damasio’s work demonstrates how the body participates in thought, via the constant and vital electrical and chemical feedback loops between nerves, organs, glands and the brain. The body doesn’t add an adjunct function, it is a component of mind.
The volumes of information the body provides — how gravity impacts every movement, what it will feel like to lift that dictionary, likely sensations of an impending collision — are no less integrated into thought than brain-centric notions of philosophy or doctrine. The intellect is both visceral and cerebral. A painter (or viewer) can either recognize or ignore that.
Clark’s paintings, sometimes sinuous, sometimes explosive, are rich with take-no-prisoners color and physical empathy. They are generous, they are catalysts. Like the best abstract works, they put you in touch with something specific, non-didactic and unsayable by other means, and then empty you into a delta of thought and feeling. After that you’re on your own.
This is a revision of an article originally published on quirkblog.net in 2014.
