Philip Guston Now

FROM THE BOOK

Excerpts from the Artist Statements

Trenton Doyle Hancock
Guston describes something beyond the occasion, something lurking under the white hoods. One figure stands alone in the foreground, seeming defeated. His eyes evoke the limited consciousness of a catfish as he peers downward at broken shards, reflections of his own busted humanity. He wears his own shadow as a cape, breaking the rules of sunlight. Is he a dissenter from the group? Does he represent the potential for humanity in those devoid of it?

Rirkrit Tiravanija
The fragmented legs and limbs of Mr. Guston’s images can be read as tokens of humanity’s present pitfalls. The rush to freedom is capitalized by fear: the ball of limbs crowded together becomes a form of otherness that can only be read as indeterminate, and in what is indeterminate, seemingly unidentifiable, a picture of fear emerges. Perhaps the balance between life and death in this society can only be addressed by the lightest of forms, the cartoon, seemingly childlike, without the weight of reality. But it is in that balance that Guston’s symbolism arises, and the laughter of criticality, of the self not taking itself seriously.

Amy Sillman
I can’t feel this much existentialism in other painters…. In places of high art you’re supposed to see the majesty of time’s arrow as it arcs across time, not the way the failed arrows fall out of the quiver between wonder and stupidness.

Tacita Dean
Rather than coax his idiosyncratic forms out of his early representational process, which might well have been fraught with danger, he found them instead within his own brushwork, mark-making and the color palette of his abstraction, and brought them forth from there. His sojourn in abstract expressionism was a necessary rupture, which gave freedom to his forms to sally forth without the constraints of any representational forebears.

David Reed
Painters since have gone where he advocated, finding many ways in which a painting can be both representational and abstract. Figuration and abstraction can merge, or arrange an alliance, or contradict each other but still coexist. There can be interactions of unexpected complication and possibility — abstraction can become an image, as can the photographic or cinematic.

William Kentridge
A painting always meets us halfway. It presents a report of the world and we project onto this report associations and memories, including, of course, memories of other images—the painting always contains a fragment of the world and its history, and also a conversation with the history of image-making.

Glenn Ligon
Political activist and bad Negro H. Rap Brown once said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” and in the midst of a corrupt presidency, an escalating war in Vietnam, and unrelenting brutality directed at the civil-rights and black-power movements, Guston, unable to continue going to the studio “to adjust a red to a blue,” made a precipitous move from abstraction to figuration in order to explore issues of domestic terrorism, white hegemony, and white complicity. At the time, to be “in the hood” was a solution to a problem, one that enabled Guston to break from the elevated critical discourse surrounding postwar abstraction and dive into the muck and mire of the American experience, allowing him to tell the truth of what it meant to be a citizen reckoning with a particularly turbulent moment in the nation’s history. Guston’s “hood” paintings, with their ambiguous narratives and incendiary subject matter, are not asleep—they’re woke.

Peter Fischli
His is the struggle of the modernist artist. When he turned away from abstract expressionism and went back to the figure, he had to battle all the rules of the canon. He struggled with what he saw as the “pureness” of abstract painting. He was sick of it.

Art Spiegelman
Vitriol and empathy combine in a masterpiece of engaged caricature that transcends categories of low cartoon and high art…. When Guston leaped across the High-Low chasm, he passed a generation of comics artists leaping in the other direction, using their craft for self-expression and not necessarily looking for punch lines. I stare into Guston’s cyclopean eye and see the history of painting and the history of cartoons staring back at me.

Dana Schutz
Guston’s figures never come off clean. Bludgeoned and heavy headed, murderous and mundane, they are the accuser and the accused. Pointed fingers are speckled with blood in the afternoon; beady blackened eyes throw daggers and doleful stares beneath helmeted scalps; the backs of behemoths lug tangled pistons of horseshoed legs, as if hauling all of human atrocity; Klansmen, rendered dumb in brutal idiocy, take up painting. They eat and drive just like us. Guston is never far from his characters; even at their most scathing and satirical his depictions have pathos.