NOTE: I wrote this for my first solo exhibit at Meyers/Bloom Gallery in Santa Monica. It was a mix of paintings shown previously at Simon Watson and some new things. -- RM

JUST THE FACTS
March 1990
Robbin Murphy

"The plain fact, nine times out of ten, is that (the artist) painted his picture without any rational plan whatever. Like any other artist, he simply experimented with his materials, trying this combination and then that. Finally he struck something that pleased him. Now he faces the dreadful pb of te11ing why. He simply doesn't know. So he conceals his ignorance behind recondite and enigmatical phrases. He soars, insinuates, sputters, coughs behind his hand. If he is lucky, he, too, invents a cliche. Three cliches in a row, and he is a temporary immortal."
-- H. L. Mencken (1925)

You could always count on H. L. Mencken to have an opinion about anything. Even if he knew nothing about the subject he always had an exemplary and entertaining style. My verbal abilities, I fear, are not quite up to Mencken's strict standards, so I'll just give you the facts about the paintings on view at Meyers/Bloom, April 1990.

ARBORETUM
These twelve paintings form a series about nature controlled and contained. The elements are: an upside-down police badge that can also be read as a highway or park sign, a tree leaf from an Audubon Field Guide and a field of text from Henry David Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." They are all some form of an image of nature.

The catalyst was an incident that occurred in the summer of 1988 when I was chased down and beaten by two police officers while observing a riot at Tompkins Park in New York. Video tapes showed that some of the officers involved removed or covered their badges to avoid detection. My response was to turn their badges upside down like you would a flag or a stamp on an envelope to signal danger or distress.

I'd been working with fields of text in other paintings so I used the one by Thoreau to cover the badges. But there was something wrong with Thoreau in this context. He taught that, when confronted with an immoral government action, like war or slavery, you should refuse to cooperate. But then he was neither a soldier nor a slave and he didn't have the bruises that I had from a nightstick.

Thoreau has a prominent position in our national literary and political tradition precisely because he didn't advocate confrontation, but passive resistance. As a result, we are like the trees in an arboretum, contained and controlled by our own government, hoping they won't cut us down.

GHOSTS
I wasn't done with Thoreau just yet, but I needed a bigger field to work on him and a field guide to my own thinking.

The first panel has a pattern of trees in a grid. A cross shape in the middle has been painted with a forest scene and a sign that says KEEP OUT, then covered with the Thoreau text. The entire panel is then "signed" with an image of Thoreau.

The second panel has replaced the pattern of trees with a pattern of Thoreaus turned back on himself. In the middle is the upsidedown badge and the image of Smokey Bear. This panel is "signed" with the tree pattern.

The third panel has the pattern of trees again, but turned on their sides. The center cross is now on fire, obliterating the KEEP OUT sign. This panel is then "signed" again by the image of Thoreau.

This triptych uses a number of images (Thoreau, Smokey, a forest fire) and techniques (turning, mirroring) to recontextualize Thoreau into a more useful image. Smokey is the subversive element here because he lost his job with the Forest Service for doing it too well. He learned the hard way that we need the small fires to prevent the big ones like those in Yellowstone in 1988 (the same summer I was attacked by the police). I've hired him to help modernize and radicalize the image of Thoreau.

* * *

The remaining three paintings are each a continuation of an ongoing series where I combine image, text and words on a single canvas. The unreadable text is a field of words in which the image is seen. The result is a visual disruption somewhat like that of an impressionist or pointillist painting and is also a representation of the way a person suffering from migraine aura sees. The field of vision is made "scotomatous" (a dimness of light or blank spots) making it "obscenographic" (ob- in the way; -scenography the art of perspective representation.)

Confronted with this obscene view our senses strive for a restitutio ad integrum, a return to wholeness, one of the major themes of American art and philosophy from the 19th century. Words painted in glosss on the surface of the painting make this impossible because the viewer must change position and obscure the image to read them.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE/RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER/FATAL SCIENCE
The image is of a gate and arbor in Prospect Park in Brooklyn "trapped" in a text from the Hawthorne short story "Rappaccini's Daughter." Over the field are painted the words FATAL SCIENCE in gloss.

The story is about a young man who falls in love with a girl he sees in a garden outside his window. The girl cannot leave the garden because the flowers are poison and, as part of that garden, so is she. Her father, a scientist, wanted to protect her and as a result destroys her. That is the fatal science.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU/ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE/FREE WORLD
The image is of a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park. In a free world a fire burns when it must. I was working on this painting the day the Berlin Wall fell.

CATHOLIC PRACTICE/BANNED BOOKS/BASIC TRAINING
An image of a formal garden in Spokane, Washington is covered by text from a 1910 edition of the Catholic Practice that belonged to my father. The text lists books that a good Catholic (like my Dad) should not read: Rousseau, Hugo, George Sand. Over the painting are the words BASIC TRAINING in gloss.

Both the garden and text are from roughly the same era and are both types of basic training. Each imparts a sheen of civilization.

* * *

In his book Lipstick Traces Greil Marcus proposed a concept of "Secret History": movements in culture that barely leave a trace yet linger on in terms of how people actually behave. Characters step out of "official history" and become important not as ancestors but as contemporaries adapted into new forms useful at that time.

Ars longa, vita brevis. A work of art is like a reference library for that secret history that may, at some point, provide an antidote to "official History."