First, from the accompanying essay by Geoffrey Bensusan:

“Hella Basu’s calligraphy shows itself apt, varied and assured; its fitness for purpose unquestionable, its deployment as one might say most inventive, the execution impeccable; it has a lineage clearly honorable but not trad and while accessible, as communication should be, it remains exciting.”

Also (speaking well before the computer typography boom):

“It is the prized consistency of machine-made lettering that generates the demand for contrasting forms, inventions not provided for on transfer sheets. For in the hands of the skilled designer-lettering-artist-calligrapher the alphabet is almost as flexible and expressive a medium as illustration itself in evoking a mood, creating a feeling, reinforcing a fact.”

Aside from her birth date and place (Germany) the only other info I found was a single quote purported to be from Hella:

“In making any object, the philosophy behind its creation is ‘art,’ the planning is ‘design,’ and its execution is ‘craft.’”

Hope you enjoyed.

Language is at once both a banal standardized system which requires work to master and a numinous corpus saturated with abstruse power. Though it lives in our mouths, coils like a parasite in our minds, and though we use it nearly as often as our own lungs, nothing about it seems to encourage intimacy. Scholarship? Sure. Respect? Yes. But a simple and warm familiarity? It wouldn’t seem so. To some degree this makes sense in that its roots are so deeply buried in our past that it might as well be a force of nature ⊕. And yet, be this all as it may, each and every mind is an incubator of language and each household a nursery. In these private places, cut-off from the ears of society, we giddily break the rules and bend language to our whims, compulsively coining new words, and naming things as though it were the first day of creation.

It seems to me that every household has its own private lexicon, filled with obtuse usages, alternate grammars, and esoteric slang. Am I mistaken in this? I know that in my household language is constantly morphing with new words being invented or co-opted, becoming prominent or falling out of use. It’s as if language was a kinky sex act, our enjoyment and particular proclivities something to be kept private and out of general ear-shot. I’ve occasionally found myself using a word or phrase from my private lexicon only to stop myself short or else be met with blank faces. It’s embarrassing somehow when one slips out.

It would appear a quite complex strata actually. There are the notions which float around in the primordial ooze of our consciousness never quite coalescing into words. There are the words so peculiar and intimate that they never actually reach our mouths but which none the less enjoy regular usage in our minds. ⊕ Then there is the language which is shared between lovers, private words, often whispered like incantations, which define in some way the intimacy of a bedroom but hold no power beyond those walls or moments. Then there is the language of family or the language of a household. This is simultaneously shared and private, displaying in its microcosm the same ability to evolve and proliferate as language at large, but which remains cut-off like a Galapagos of wild syllables.

I think great catalysts in household languages are pets. It seems as though every pet owner calls his beloved little friend by a myriad of names, any name, in fact, but the one they initially chose. ⊕ For example my cat’s are named Newton and Henry. What do my girlfriend and I actually call them?

Newton: Newtie, The Newts, The Belly, Lemon, Little Bull, Dew Beard, Dewbie, Ankle-Head, Nappy Dread, The Dust Brother, Chunk, Stankly, The Stink, etc, etc.

Henry: Fluffkin, Fuzzlet, Fuzzy-Pants, Manatee, The Griz, Gristle(e), Gristle-bee, Grozells, Grizbane, Hiney, Heinz, Heinrich, Doodie, The Doods, Martha Washington, etc, etc.

These of course do not in and of themselves constitute anything approaching a secret language, I only share them as an aside, there being a whole shorthand used in place of common nouns, verbs, and concepts used in my household. I’ll share just a couple of minor examples to illustrate-

Stoony

This is a word which is related to the pet names above but is altogether more versatile. It sums up in two syllables any delighted surprise at seeing (usually on the television) some furry creature of interest. So rather than saying, for instance, “look honey! A very cute / strange / noteworthy member of the animal kingdom has made an unexpected appearance on the television, stop picking your nose and take a look for yourself.” Either of us can simply call out, “Stoony!” and the other will know instantly that our attention is required, front and center. Likewise the word can be used in plural form to note the appearance of a whole herd / pride / cete / litter / troup / etc. Dropping the “y” and adding an “s” at the end denotes familiarity as when it’s used for one of our own pets, or on occasion, one another, e.g. “Hey Stoons.” Lastly this word forms the root of further mutations such as the ever popular “Stoonhauser.”

We have a whole gamut of words which can substitute for saying “I love you.” We’ve co-opted three from Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall ⊕. These are–

Lurf
Loove
Lurve

I use all three fairly often. Other substitutions are–

Elephant
Olives

Both of which are shortened versions of longer phrases since “elephant shoes” and “olive juice” are famously observed to so closely mimic the lip movements of saying “I love you.” After 8 years of expressing that sentiment the words can feel almost meaningless, so this little bit of differentiation (both from the norm, and from other instances of its use) adds something. When leaving the apartment in the morning I might say “Elephant” and be treated, in kind, to the response of “Olives.” No more need be said. Our household shorthand accomplishing in two words what would otherwise take 7, and with added value to boot thanks to its exclusivity.

As I said these are only a couple examples. It would seem that in my household at least the language which has emerged was guided by two main evolutionary factors: economy and amusement. If a word makes expressing ourselves simpler it sticks ⊕ or alternately if something makes us laugh it sticks. What the factors are in other households I have no idea.

I have to imagine every home, everywhere, has its own strain of language subtly different from the norm, guided by its own principles. I imagine that when a word or peculiar usage actually makes the leap from a person’s mind into this testing ground of the home that perhaps .05% might make it out into the world and language at large as slang. That leaves a lot of playful and weird wordage which we keep behind closed doors away from the ears of our neighbors. It boggles the mind. If we marched out into the day using these mutated versions of our mother-tongues we’d all look at one another as if we were speaking nonsense, but it wouldn’t be true. Any word which has an intended meaning, agreed upon and understood by even two people, can’t be properly called nonsense can it? What we’d be speaking would be a billion subtly different dialects.

Admittedly I may be imagining all of this. Perhaps every household is not like mine. Perhaps other people put their energy into finding the most precise and perfect existing words to express themselves ⊕ rather than just coining their own willy-nilly. But as monolithic and as much like work as language can feel when we are first introduced to it, as careful and polite as we are taught to be with our words in public, I can’t help but assume that, at home, people are as naughty and playful and weird with their words as they are with everything else.

Am I mistaken? You tell me.

Though he’s produced a huge amount of work, much of it landscapes from his wide travels, in general David’s previously exhibited pieces have dealt with a kind of aesthetic subversion, playing with the balance between each picture’s pleasant surface and its darker underbelly. Most of the paintings which immediately precede the group I’m showing here are very colorful and layered. On first glance they might be thought of as “pretty” containing as they do birds, elements of landscape, etc. But a closer inspection will readily yield symbols of a political system gone awry and what David refers to as “religious warfare.” If I remember correctly, from our brief conversation, some of the pieces go so far as to subvert their own content over time, with reactive surfaces that eventually have those “pretty” birds falling out of the sky.

As you all know by now I’m most interested in a pictures aesthetic payload, much more so, in the final reckoning, than the underlying concept. So “subversion” and “tension” aside let me say much of the work was in quite nice. The new work though, for me, is something else all together. Less obviously beautiful but more compelling. He’s a young artist, only having graduated Parsons in 2001, but this new group, created as it was both under emotional difficulty as well as material limitations, seems to me a step toward something much better.

As David put’s it:

“These particular paintings differ greatly from the work I have done in the past. I began them when my mother broke her neck at c5 and c6 earlier this year and I moved back to Minnesota from New York to help take care of her. Leaving much of my materials and studio behind me I did not expect to make much work, let alone head-off in an entirely new direction. Art making itself seemed to have fallen a bit flat for me, the particular forms and images I had been previously engaged with seeming to have little or no relevance suddenly.

This work represents a bit of a departure for me especially in terms of materials. Much of my past work is very technique-heavy, utilizing a wide range of materials. These new pieces are much more pared-down using just a few types of ink and some black and white paint. They developed in a very organic way as well, with much less planning than most of the pictures I have made in the past.

For me they are meditative, composed with meticulous gestures leading to unstable and dangerous looking structures. There is a feeling here of something tumultuous happening, or about to happen, though they maintain a kind of almost static distance as well, with the space often flattened completely. From my point of view they are a stark depiction of the frailty and fragility of life both on a personal as well as in a larger sense. There are, of course, many different ways that one could interpret them.”

One last note as to scale: The dimensions of these particular paintings range from forty inches to over six feet.

Hope you enjoyed, and hope to see more from David in the future.

The Artist’s Dilemma

By Mark Rothko (probably written between 1940-41)

What is the popular conception of the artist? Gather a thousand descriptions, and the resulting composite is the portrait of a moron: he is held to be childish, irresponsible, and ignorant or stupid in everyday affairs.

The picture does not necessarily involve censure or unkindness. These deficiencies are attributed to the intensity of the artist’s preoccupation with his particular kind of fantasy and to the unworldly nature of the fantastic itself. The bantering tolerance granted to the absentminded professor is extended to the artist. Biographers contrast the artlessness of his judgments with the high attainment of his art, and while his naivete or rascality are gossiped about, they are viewed as signs of Simplicity and Inspiration, which are the Handmaidens of Art. And if the artist is inarticulate and lacking in the usual repositories of fact and information, how fortunate, it is said, that nature has contrived to divert from him all worldly distractions so he may be single-minded in regards to his special office.

This myth, like all myths, has many reasonable foundations. First, it attests to the common belief in the laws of compensation: that one sense will gain in sensitivity by the deficiency in another. Homer was blind, and Beethoven deaf. Too bad for them, but fortunate for us in the increased vividness of their art. But more importantly it attests to the persistent belief in the irrational quality of inspiration, finding between the innocence of childhood and the derangements of madness that true insight which is not accorded to normal man. When thinking of the artist, the world still adheres to Plato’s view, expressed in Ion in reference to the poet: “There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.” Although science, with scales and yardstick, daily threatens to rend mystery from the imagination, the persistence of this myth is the inadvertent homage which man pays to the penetration of his inner being as it is differentiated from his reasonable experience.

Strange, but the artist has never made a fuss about being denied those estimable virtues other men would not do without: intellectuality, good judgment, a knowledge of the world, and rational conduct. It may be charged that he has even fostered the myth. In his intimate journals Vollard tells us that Degas feigned deafness to escape disputations and harangues concerning things he considered false and distasteful. If the speaker or subject changed, his hearing immediately improved. We must marvel at his wisdom since he must have only surmised what we know definitely today: that the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth. It is understandable, then, how the artist might actually cultivate this moronic appearance, this deafness, this inarticulateness, in an effort to evade the million irrelevancies which daily accumulate concerning his work. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

Let us not delude ourselves with visions of a golden age freed of this cacophony. This gilding is an artistic falsehood. We deal in fantasy ourselves and know how alive dreams can seem. And an age like ours, which demands so clear a facing of realities, will not allow us the pleasure of narcoticism. With the knowledge that man’s tribulations, at least, are always with him, we can safely say that the artist of the past had good reason, too, to play the mad fool—so as to salvage those moments of peace when the demands of the demons could be quieted and art pursued. And if nature, in fact, contrived to give him the appearance of a fool, so much the better. For dissimulation is an exacting art.

Ill hath he chosen his part who seeks to please
The worthless world,—ill hath he chosen his part,
For often must he wear the look of ease

Assent with lying tongue.

The lament is Michelangelo’s (a translation of this madrigal can be found in The Life of Michel Angela Buonarroti [1807]). Even this great man—who lived in an age when the rapport between the artist and the world seemed to have been ideal, and when fetes and processions celebrated the completion of works by the artists of renown, for whose services dukes, popes, and kings fought — even he bore his full share of calumny and disapproval. The principles of his art were constantly assailed; and, after parrying those criticisms, his morals were found wanting. Aretino attacked the nakedness of the nudes in the Last judgement as inconsistent with Christian piety. The reasonableness of Aretino’s point cannot be denied. Michelangelo’s vision of the Celestial Court can be easily mistaken for an orgiastic bout. These doctors and moralists, they are always right! Like our own social moralists and critics, their facts are so neat, and their reasoning so pretty: but what disastrous falsity to the cause of truth!

Most societies of the past have insisted that their own particular evaluations of truth and morality be depicted by the artist. Accordingly, the Egyptian artist had to produce a definitely prescribed prototype; the Christian artist had to abide by the tenets of the Second Council of Nicea or be anathematized or, like the monk of the iconoclast age, work in danger and by stealth. We should note that Michelangelo’s nudes were forced to wear, in the end, the appropriate panties and drapes. Authority formulated rules, and the artist complied. We shall not speak here of those whose daring periodically revitalized art, saving it from its narcissistic mimicry of itself. We can accurately say that, within these periods, the artist had to submit to these rules or simulate the appearance of submission, if he were to be permitted to practice his art.

It will be pointed out that the artist’s lot is the same today, that the market, through its denial or affording of the means of sustenance, exerts the same compulsion. Yet there is this vital difference: the civilizations enumerated above had the temporal and spiritual power to summarily enforce their demands. The Fires of Hell, exile, and, in the background, the rack and stake, were correctives if persuasion failed. Today the compulsion is Hunger, and the experience of the last four hundred years has shown us that hunger is not nearly as compelling as the imminence of Hell and Death. Since the passing of the spiritual and temporal patron, the history of art is the history of men who, for the most part, have preferred hunger to compliance, and who have considered the choice worthwhile. And choice it is, for all the tragic disparity between the two alternatives.

The freedom to starve! Ironical indeed. Yet hold your laughter. Do not underestimate the privilege. It is seldom possessed, and dearly won. The denial of this right is no less ironical: think of the condemned criminal who will not eat and who is fed by force, if need be, until his day of execution. Concerning hunger, as concerning art, society has traditionally been dogmatic. One had to starve legitimately—through famine or blight, through unemployment or exploitation—or not at all. One could no more contrive his own starvation than he could take his own life; and for the artist to have said to society that he would sooner starve than traffic with her wares or tastes would have been heresy and dealt with summarily as such. Within the dogmas of the totalitarian states of today, you may be sure, the artist must starve correctly, just as he must paint by the dictates of the State.

But here, today, we still have the right to choose. It is precisely the possibility of exercising choice wherein our lot differs from that of the artists of the past. For choice implies responsibility to one’s conscience, and, in the conscience of the artist, the Truth of Art is foremost. There may be other loyalties, but for the artist, unless he has been waylaid or distracted, they will be secondary and discarded in his creation of art. This artistic conscience, which is composed of present reason and memory, this morality intrinsic to the generic logic of art itself, is inescapable. Violate her promptings and she will ferret out the deepest recesses of thought and conjecture. Neither sophistries nor rationalizations can quiet her demands.

What did those artists of the past do about their conscience? The Law of Authority has this saving grace: it can be circumnavigated. One can pay lip service to the letter and with equanimity violate its spirit. One bows to necessity, then schemes to defeat it. We are told that there were times when the Truth of the Law coincided with the Truth of Art. Granted! But when the divergence became too great, what ingenuity the artist displayed in disguising one to have the appearance of the other. What guile and shrewdness in this seeming moron. One needs but but recall the great Apollo. How easily this Hellenistic deity, with all his draperies and trappings, was slipped into the niches of the Christian saints. He had merely to change his name, and to look much sadder than he really felt.

What abetted the artist in his little game was the dogmatic unity of his civilization. For all dogmatic societies have this in common: they know what they want. Whatever the contentions behind the scenes, society is allowed only one Official Truth. The demands made upon the artist, therefore, issued from a single source, and the specifications for art were definite and unmistakable. That, at least, was something: whether submission or deceit were intended, one master is better than ten, and it is better to know the size and shape of the hand that holds the whip. In a master, definiteness and stability are preferable to caprice.

Today, instead of one voice, we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority—instead there is a score of would-be masters who would usurp their place. All are full of histories, statistics, proofs, demonstrations, facts, and quotations. First they plead and exhort, and finally they resort to intimidation by threats and moral imprecations. Each pulls the artist this way and that, telling him what he must do if he is to fill his belly and save his soul.

For the artist, now, there can be neither compliance nor circumvention. It is the misfortune of free conscience that it cannot be neglectful of means in the pursuit of ends. Ironically enough, compliance would not help, for even if the artist should decide to subvert this conscience, where could he find peace in this Babel? To please one is to antagonize the others. And what security is there in any of these wrangling contenders?

The truths of India, Egypt, Greece spanned over centuries. In matters of art our society has substituted taste for truth, which she finds more amusing and less of a responsibility, and changes her tastes as frequently as she changes her hats and shoes. And here might the artist, placed between choice and diversity, raise his lamentations louder. Never did his afflictors have as many shapes or such a jabbering of voices, and never did they exude such a prolixity of matter.

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Hope you enjoyed.