Fragmentation and Wholeness : Experiencing Divine Madness in Truman Marquez’s ConTemplate (2006)

Truman Marquez’s performance piece ConTemplate, was held at The New Art Center in Manhattan on November 17, 2006. During this public event the artist invited participants to carve out (or "deconstruct" as Marquez termed it) his stretched oils on canvas works from the Contemplate Series using acrylic templates and surgical cutters. Some participants declined the use of the cutters and sliced irregular segments from the various surfaces. Each section was then signed by the artist, placed in a transparent bag, photographed and handed over to its new owner. The remaining tatters of the once-whole works were left hanging on the gallery walls for a week following the event as part of the overall exhibition. For a bit more than two hours in the evening starting at six o’clock. ConTemplate was met with an admixture of horror, mirth, indifference, surprise. What was the audience (and history) to make of this manifestation?

Whichever way one could frame Marquez’s dramatic actions it is clear that in ConTemplate the artist was enacting an essential creative law deliberately. The archetypal dualisms of creation and destruction, love and hate is certainly the ur-ground and background upon which this performance is based. In this respect the tensions realized by this poised position have been re-enacted by numbers of performances in the history of the genre. In these works as in Marquez’s performance piece there is a symbolism and a ritual aura that clings to such dramatic aesthetic manifestations.

Let us review in detail the actions of which ConTemplate of consisted. The artist had the presence of mind to take his original imagery which had taken a year to paint, six bold canvases, and in two hours time proceeded to engage the audience with his next narrative: the cutting of his work using two specially fabricated templates and razor sharp cutting knives. The procedure went roughly as follows: the viewer was to take one of templates and with a black marker was to draw an outline using the template demarcating whatever piece of the canvas he or she desired. The knife was then used to cut the piece and extract it from the body of the work. One could see this in medical terms, as the ground of the canvas, its body, incised and part of it is removed as in an operation for the removal of some organ which might or might not be diseased. On a more benign note one could see this operation following a split narrative: on the one hand the story line accentuates the parable of the loaves and the fishes, in which many paintings are found through the large painting. On another metaphoric level one might imply that a surgical removal of a diseased part of the body needed to be performed, an exorcism if not an excision. On the plane of transformation one might easily see Marquez’s act as regenerative and metamorphically fecund. Marquez re-positions, resituates the original work and in doing so operates on an entirely other epistemological level than in previous times. The work (as a body of work) is seen and experienced differently. It is a radical departure for the artist who finds another measure in the work. He sees his painting not as painting per se but as a springboard to another horizon of possibility. Within that space, time and value structures mutate and alter themselves forever. Marquez’s act of slicing his work up appeared to be a flaying of the self. In this sense it appeared to be an agonistic act while it also appeared to be liberating and freeing as well. The seeming negation of his own work soon turned positive as each segment offered as a gift to each viewer were participating in a rite of metamorphosis and renewal. The artist in his notes has confirmed this interpretation, writing: "…The paintings are surrogates for the artist, his person, his thought, his creativity, Offering up the canvases to be cut, the artist, metaphorically speaking, offers up his surrogate self…"

The performative construct that Marquez imposes on his work allowed the art to find home again through an act born out of generosity and communality. On a broad ideological plane, then, Marquez’s actions allow him to repossess the works by having his audience re-initiate the original status of the paintings through the act of eviscerating them and leaving them like ravaged cadavers hung by wires, pressed against the walls of the gallery. In this way one could re-imagine the Contemplate Series as having attained another energy level through the ConTemplate rite of dissection (if one were to apply a medical metaphor) or flaying (if one wished to see the action of cutting as a mortification or cleansing ritual) or dissolution into a greater if unknown cosmic pool (if one were leaning more towards the quasi-existential or Tantric inclinations).

In my conversation with the artist Marquez informed me of his influences, both pictorially and in regard to performance art. He noted how key Cezanne and Rodin were to him art-historically. In the performance field he suggested Nat Tate, the Dadaists and Yoko Ono (of who will be mentioned later in the text) affected his mind-set. Additionally Marquez remarked on the importance of the Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski whose life-styles and bearing affected him greatly. I’d like to expand on some of these thoughts.

In order to put all of this into some type of focus it will be crucial to see the historical framework of performance in Modernism and performance’s origins in Dada and Surrealism. Three late Modern artistic predecessors to Marquez come to my mind that I believe are worth considering. The first is Yves Klein’s enamored invocation of the triadic symbolism of blue, gold and pink through the use of industrial blowtorches to create his Peintures de Feu of 1961 produced in the Centre d’Essais de Gaz near Paris in 1961. The second is Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece performance first staged in Kyoto in 1964 and the following year at Carnegie Hall. In this vivid artpiece the artist sat motionless on a stage, large scissors in front of her. Audience members were invited to come to the stage and use the scissors to cut the artist’s clothing and to take the pieces home with them. Ono said not a word throughout the entire performance. Her clothes in tatters, she was nearly naked by the piece’s conclusion. The third artist, whose post-war paintings were completed under the ideological banner Italy’s Spazialisti Group, is Lucio Fontana. The artist’s acts of slitting, gouging and skewering of his canvases and metal surfaces were not meant to be experienced as public performances, (that is as "performance art" as we understand that term to mean "art as theater" pioneered in the sixties by artists such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden). Nevertheless the transgressive act of violating the surface of canvas in such a radical way as to slice it or to perforate it in some way through the concept of Concetto Spaziale was pioneered by Fontana and abetted by close members of his circle such as Alberto Burri. In 1962 Fontana described the conceptual envisaged mental space that he was invoking in the following manner: " My cuts are after all a philosophical comment, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. When I sit down and contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at once with the immensity of the present and the future."

In a manner of speaking the performance artist’s body becomes the "site", the canvas if you will, onto which is inscribed the aesthetic code. It is not coincidental that an artist’s oeuvre is often referred to as the artist’s "body of work". It is consequently not unreasonable to make allusions between Marquez’s stripping away parts of his canvas with the tearing away, the laceration and the flaying of his artistic body, his artistic self. Performers such as Marina Abromovic, for example, have used the site of the body (her body) as a source of conflict and suffering. In Lips of Thomas, first performed in 1975 and later at the Guggenheim Museum in 2005, the artist carves a five-pointed star on her stomach using a razor blade. Included in the performance along with the slicing of skin are acts of self-flagellation, the drinking of honey and wine and the use of a bed of ice in the form of a crucifix. In essence, what we are examining here are the facets which comprise modern day art performance. Time, space, the performer’s body and a relationship (and exchange) between the artist and viewer are the four critical ingredients, which comprise what we understand today as performance art. These factors and features interpenetrate Truman Marquez’s ConTemplate piece, as we shall see. The artist recounts the events in his writings: " I’ll begin by pointing out that I would characterize my role as "facilitator". I discovered during this initial performance that there are nuanced and subtle things that I must do as an artist to ensure my audience is receptive. For instance, at the outset it was clear that some people were alarmed and uncomfortable. Some in fact left. Through body language, I tried to impart to my viewers confidence and sincerity which was critical at the beginning. My gesture (the performance) is born out of a generous spirit, charitable heart and a sincere respect for one’s neighbor, one’s self, and a love of the creative process, and all that this may encompass. It was also apparent to me that if I was to be successful, I had to displace my ego, leaving it outside the gallery doors. The true performers were the guests themselves. My role was to facilitate the exchange enabling [each] guest to participate and essentially contribute a necessary part to the performance as a whole."

At the beginning of his action Marquez’s spoke to the audience. In his introductory remarks he noted that the artist has often been seen as a "con man" playing tricks on his viewers. This was an apt comment as some of the greatest developments in art making in the twentieth century were derived from pranks or started off as play launched by aesthetic philosophers. I am thinking here of a revolution of thought which was spawned by the presentation in 1917 by a certain jokester named Marcel Duchamp of an ordinary urinal turned 90 degrees, signed "R. Mutt" and submitted in New York City to an exhibition sponsored by the Society of Independent Artists, of which he was a member. This act partly inspired by Dada thought opened up cultural parameters which led to Surrealism. In 1924 Andre Breton described that movement in this way; " Surrealism aimed to reveal the real function of thought." It was founded to find ways of short-circuiting conventional reason and rationality and in so doing was poised, as a trigger mechanism, to explore the mind’s capacity to invent and dream, by allowing the subconscious realm free play and shielded from judgment.

Marquez’s performance shared ideological space with the Dadaists and the Surrealists in the displacements and juxtaposition which occur within each of his paintings’ pictorial surfaces such as in "Upside - Down Demoiselles D’Avignon, "Moral Divide", "Binoculars: GW Twisting Our Liberties" and "A Painter Contemplates the Fifth Wall ". In such works Marquez denotes the ins and outs of the paradoxical topological surfaces and structures. He refers to his spaces in the following manner: "The spaces within the pictorial space between the cylinders are called "Tube-o-clefts"…The space remaining in the canvas after the fragments are removed with this rectangular template have not been named yet. For the spaces where the guest didn’t use a template but instead chose to cut out an arbitrary portion …[are]…RIP BONES!"

His playfully involuted descriptions of social and aesthetic space as well as the space of consumer desire connotes an intense desire on the artist’s part to have the viewer reassess notions of the senses and their relation to art-making and art’s relation to culture in the broad and restrictive sense. The writer D.F.Coleman aptly describes the spatio-temporal relations addressed in Marquez’s paintings in the following way: " Truman Marquez allows us entry into a vision that signals the emergence of a new world. This world has internal worlds within it obvious for all to see, yet these internal folds in time and space are co-existent and self-contradictory, simultaneously. Marquez implies not only that the spatial body is dynamic and that this dynamic is the very condition which allows the world to become manifest in and through consciousness. In a broad sense Marquez depicts a determinate world where objects can begin to co-exist simultaneously. The artist teases out another riddle from this presupposition. He seems to be questioning the very condition of dynamic spatiality and effect on the body. Here the use of the word "body" is sustained in its narrowest and its widest sense; body of being, human body, body of mind, space, thought, time etc. Is the body in control of its own physical destiny (or determination)? And if so how are we to picture the indeterminate horizons (both internal and external in the sense of the physiological and in terms of outside stimuli) which signal to becoming manifest and us that the world is emerging?" Marquez himself, in his notes, alludes to the phenomenological arena in which he is working. In mentioning Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influence on him through his study of The Primacy of Perception, Marquez writes: "…My solution in the pictorial space [within the paintings themselves] was to hybridize the geometry with the human figure. This unit (Geometry/Figure) alludes to… [Ponty’s]… discussions about the subject-object, and how the soul is not merely in the body like a pilot on a ship, but is instead intermingled wholly within the body. The body is no longer an object in the world under the authority of spirit, but instead falls on the side of subject (it is our point of view of the world)."

Keeping these thoughts in mind and further extrapolating on them brings us to the next series of observations. The actual exchange of canvas pieces which took place at Marquez’s performance was real in an experiential sense; yet what was experienced as well was an exchange from a symbolic as well as ritualistic viewpoint. The physical cutting-up and re-distribution of his works as if they were morsels handed out to an art-hungry public has Biblical implications (the Parable of the Loaves and Fishes comes to mind) but such movements and gestures have other ritualistic and symbolic value as well. In order to arrive at the core of what I am proposing it is useful (qua Coleman) to see Marquez’s work as participating in an overall metaphor which can be identified as the container metaphor. This metaphor is expressed through the use of language, which makes analogies in language with the body, its shape and its functions in space and place as a form with an inside and outside. The form is a bounded space with "stuff" within it held in place by a wall which we might call skin. It is indeed useful to frame Marquez’s work as his "body" of work, just as it is practical to begin ascertaining the artist’s intentionalities, suppositions and perhaps his hidden suppositions by ascribing to them the outlines demarcated by a "body" of thought. The somatic reference and its inferences in Truman Marquez’s work is the chief structure upon which Marquez’s work relies. This can be seen quite readily by the iconographic use of spheres as in his painting Moral Divide perforated with holes through which human figures peer out. These containers within containers themselves are depicted floating in circumscribed spaces that are part of something larger. Truman Marquez’s use of such pictorial devices not only point to the subject matter which he is addressing (the specular gaze, surveillance, conditional freedom) but the artist’s approach to his work and his state of mind as well. If one were to apply the relational conditions of "embodiment" and "disembodiment" in referring to the symbolic equivalencies or analogies in referring to Marquez’s paintings before they were cut up and after they were cut up one would start to have access to the content addressed in and through Marquez’s imagination.

On a extra-artistic level Marquez ’s performance (which was in essence a public "gifting") can be seen as a critique of the post-modern artworld’s equating (and ultimately, justifying) of " quality" and "aura" with a higher and higher sales index. The artist’s dematerialization of his "master paintings" works challenges the viewer to reconsider what Western society deigns as being important from less important. In this case a fragment of a large masterwork diminishes the entire enterprise. It does not elevate it. Through the re-making (perhaps we can term it "transubstantiation") of his work Marquez seemed to be suggesting that the work’s original incarnation as a large individual "master" paintings was to find another form through what Jean Baudrillard in Passwords calls " …a kind of universal colusiveness of inseparable forms." He continues: " … It is the same with the body, which does not have any "individual" status either: it is a kind of sacrificial substitute that is not opposed to some other substance such as the soul or any other spiritual value. In those cultures where the body is continually brought into play in ritual, it is not the symbol of life and the question is not that of its health, survival or integrity. Whereas we have an individualized view of the body, linked to notions of possession and mastery, there it is subject to a constant reversibility. It is a substance which can move through other- animal, mineral, or vegetable- forms…"

Finally, Marquez Marquez’s ConTemplate in some respects ideologically closely follows renegade Surrealist George Bataille’s concept of the gift and his corollary of gift = sacrifice = leads to greater expenditure. Bataille’s thoughts (predicated on Marcel Mauss’ The Gift) sees the archaic potlatch ceremony as a fundamental alternative and negation of Western rationalist capitalist economics; Bataille sees gifting as a way of annihilating excess not by controlling it (through hoarding and regimentation as in Western European societies) but through the ethos of sacrifice. Seen in this way Marquez’s performance can be appreciated as a sacrifice of the self, a self-mutilating sacrifice that is then offered to the public in order to enrich the tribe through greater spiritual force. This potlatch-type of distribution and re-circulation of aesthetic goods and cultural capital (each fragment torn from the larger whole is subsequently signed, validated by the "author") and the sensations which accompanied ConTemplate can be further appreciated through Jean Baudrillard’s comments on gifting and circulation in respect to the potlatch ceremony. He defines it this way in Passwords "…a certain type of circulation of goods operates, exonerated from the idea of value, a type of circulation which includes prodigality and the squandering of things, but must never stop. Exchange must never have an end, it must always increase in intensity, possibly continuing until death."

Truman Marquez’s multi-leveled ConTemplate performance must be seen as a richly generous act coming from the artist who is operating from a state of mind in which abundance (not scarcity) is the primary rule of the universe. My work, he seems to be suggesting, is of the world; the world is of my work; there is no separation. The imagination knows no bounds; it is ever expanding and self-generative. Such affirmation is reflected in the artist’s notes. He writes: "…Fundamentally, the idea set forth here democratizes the process of making art, suggesting everyone be invited to the table. Why not provide for a whole new range of potentialities and outcomes for the audience by giving them the freedom to touch, feel, carve out and take home with them actual portions of my painting. Essentially, deconstructing (not destroying) the work at the first event using templates and Rip-Bones, the audience/performers were collaborating with the artist in constructing new works based upon the remaining fragments left by the participants. The audience participated in the actual process of making art. This journey is an ongoing exploration of that process; a continuous art making process, if you will, Con Art. Should this simple gesture (the performance itself) give rise to a more meaningful reality whereby the art itself is amplified for the viewers and the experience transcends above ordinary everyday experience then perhaps a multitude of possibilities may reveal themselves within this new paradigm."