mike glier
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mike gl ier
With All The Holes In You Already There’s No Reason To Define The Outside Environment As Alien*
mike gl ierWith All The Holes In You Already There’s No Reason
To Define The Outside Environment As Alien*
February 28 - March 28, 2013
24 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075 | tel 212-628-9760
With essay by David Bresl in
*Jenny Holzer. © 2013 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Imminence and Intimacy: Mike Glier’s Landscapes
In a move that we might now melancholically assess as
a rehearsal for another paired destruction, the Taliban leveled the
monumental statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley of central
Afghanistan in March of 2001. Carved into a cliff, hewn directly from
the sandstone banks with details plainly elaborated in mud mixed with
straw, the sixth century statues were constructed when this corridor
of earth was a holy Buddhist site along the Silk Road and not the
geopolitical formation now so completely associated—even if unfairly—
with war and global terror. Though we live in the wake of their end, the
ultimate destruction of the statues only came after many attempts to
vanquish this land of the faces and bodies it once wore. The Mughals,
the Persians, and an early Afghan king—all former claimants to this
place—attempted to violently efface these signs of the past well before
the Taliban. This violent reflex to render the land to a place and time as
if without touch, to return it to an impossible point of unfettered nature
that would seem as natural as the inevitability of that particular present’s
primacy, seems endemic to power or at least acts as a claim to power’s
mechanisms. Though infinitely less consequential than the devastating
loss of life suffered and the disastrous wars that the September attacks
festered, the acts of terror seven months after Bamiyan also robbed
a point of reference. The sky itself seemed sliced. I still catch myself
in Manhattan looking up to determine south. In these moments of
disturbed orientation, the control that the land—and those influencing
its form—has on me is visceral. Even in absence, in that shaft of sky torn
into another history, landscape touches every part of me.
Those nefarious alterations—in Afghanistan and Manhattan—
attempt to control by projecting a desired history, an imaginary tabula
rasa where power can be displayed. But would we be surprised if
the same were said about the history of landscape and the history
of landscape painting itself? W.J.T. Mitchell, the cultural theorist, has
written exactly that: “Landscape might be seen more profitably as
something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism, unfolding its own
movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding
back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected
imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence
and unsuppressed resistance.” Mitchell’s argument is structured by the
concept that landscape is not a genre of painting or anything else but
a multiply-constituted medium (stone, water, sky, vegetation, sound,
light, etc.). As such, landscape is a repository for values and meanings
that can be encoded and ascribed to it like any other medium.
But why begin this brief essay on Mike Glier’s nearly decade-
long landscape painting practice with this miserable and too familiar
history and this critique of the medium and genre he has embraced?
In a painting such as September 20, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown,
MA, 60°F, when Glier makes a circumflex of fleshy yellow-pink slope
into the sagging bottom half of a tagger’s exaggerated ‘S’ to articulate
a tree in dying bloom becoming cloud, I am far from misery. When
his DeKooning-like skeins of mustard and ochre spill into language,
or at least a remnant of script, when suggesting an early fall sky in a
motion like transcription, I am lost in knots of sensation. I begin with
disaster only to reveal it as the too obvious opposite of the pleasure
this form of looking elicits and to suggest the inextricability of misery
from pleasure—as in any dialectic—when looking at landscape. As I am
susceptible to this volatility of emotion that landscape can evoke, I am
suspect of it. Landscape seems out of my control or, perhaps, too much
under the control of others—as Mitchell suggests—who would want to
control me. And then I grow wary of joy—my own, the very possibility
of it—when I try to transpose Bamiyan or other sites of cultural or
ecological collapse over anything as transcendent as Mt. Hope.
But perhaps doubt is also implicit to Glier’s act of painting. I ascribe
transcendence to Mt. Hope, but is this what the painting really depicts?
Or does Mt. Hope function here not as dreamwork or as fact or as a
category but more simply as a proposal? Perhaps to think of Glier’s
painting as a proposal—as an act inscribed in but also losing time—is to
think of landscape in a perpetual state of imminence. Though about to
occur, it never comes. Our only responsibility is to work against an end.
It is my contention that Glier outflanks the dangers of
landscape that Mitchell associates with it by critically examining the
operations of both media at hand, landscape and painting. By doing
so, he not only reveals the precariousness of our ecological state but
suggests that embodied performances of reflection and resistance—
from painting to protest—are the only means to counter powers that
violently shape vision and the world we are left to perceive. If landscape
is in a continuous state of both being shaped and shaping behavior,
painting becomes a way to touch back, a means to model resistance to
disaster that does, as any good doctor would, no harm.
Glier has premised three of his projects on following
geographic coordinates to determine his site of production. In 2005, he
began the “Latitude” series and painted near his studio in Hoosick, New
York, the spin of the earth as it traffics the sun providing the changing
context for what would appear in paint. From Pangnirtung, Canada, to
San Cudo, Ecuador, to the island of St. John, to Manhattan—and from
June of 2007 to May of 2008—the second series, “Along a Long Line,”
took a single line of longitude as a space to cover and describe. The
latest project, “Antipodes,” finds him painting on two sites on opposite
points of the globe. Glier painted in Botswana in 2009 and in Hawaii
in 2010. Work this past year in New Zealand is to be complemented
by a still to be realized project in Spain. By establishing sites in a
Lewittian preestablished order where latitudinal and longitudinal points
are determined in advance and worked through, Glier can paint the
particularity of geographical locales but in a system that also embraces
equivalence and non-preference. No particular value is given to one
place, one vista, one tree, one sky, over another. It is, in the words
of Donald Judd, one thing after another. This practice of radical
equivalence and the embrace of a plurality of scenics and picturesques
reveal the ecological concerns that underpin the project as a totality.
In the very enumeration of paintings from a multiplicity of sites, import
isn’t accorded to the preservation and documentation of one place at
the expense of another. Glier paints the very impossibility of thinking
the existence of one place without the reciprocal vitality of the other.
If this procedural investigation of the landscape medium suggests his
demonstration of the interdependency of the ecological order (one
obviously far from an imperial one), the individual labor evident in
his interrogation of the medium of painting suggests an unflagging
commitment to personal perception and action in daily life.
If gestural painting as a historical discipline and medium
has any contemporary relevance in a world where image-making
is devoured by the digital, it is in its requirement that a body be
attached to the apparatus in the act of making a presence known.
Time is complicit with touch when Glier marks his surface, with the
transmission of perceptual data into a physical response that yields
a trace. But just as potentiality is inscribed in each act of making and
looking, so is loss. When you see the disturbances of whites and
blues in the weakened sky of October 28, 2011: Hedgerow, Mt. Hope,
Williamstown, MA, 34°F, the expected symphonic autumnal tree tones
is nearly redundant. Time also pales. The fragile body of the maker
is caught painting a dying scene with each of his marks performing
an honest, if not melancholic, double task—the act of making is
also one of encountering one’s own undoing. In this witnessing and
making, Glier establishes himself, what he sees, and the painting made
all as constructions continuously caught within a web of factors—
physical, environmental, social, political, economic—that determine
the very existence of each. Just as the radical equivalence of Glier’s
sites establishes an order that resists hierarchies of worlds (first, for
example, is no more significant that second or third worlds), his acts
of painting—between gestural and precision, between abstract and
referential—disavow stasis and the operations of power that stasis
conceals by demonstrating the enormous heave of flux and change in
each moment. The landscape, in such a schema, never is. Just like the
artist who depicts it, and the process of painting itself, it is incessantly
being made, shoved into existence, and threatened with annihilation.
The empathetic work that Glier performs in these paintings is in his
attending to these changes and insisting that landscape also creates
him. It is not a retrograde call to return to the land or to escape the
time in which we live for an imagined better one. The paintings model
a mutable world embedded in a particular historical moment when the
very future of a stable ecological order is in serious doubt. The ultimate
task is to see if change can be tipped away from collapse.
Glier functions not only as a painter and a theorist of
landscape and ecology in this practice, but he also assumes a position
that has been maligned in modernity: the storyteller. The activity of the
storyteller, as discussed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on the Russian
author Nikolai Leskov, already had lost favor at the conclusion of World
War I when the enormity of change in such a clipped period made
the communication of experience nearly impossible. This process of
alienation—from others, from political orders, from the very shape of
the land—made unadorned information the substitute for knowledge
gained through experience. The inability to access formerly shared
collective memories left vacant the role that the storyteller once
occupied. Wisdom, Benjamin suggested, now seemed old-fashioned,
even quaint. At a moment when crowd-sourcing dictates marketing
and decision-making and information is the main byproduct of the
digital empire we are subjects of, our time is also not one friendly to
the storyteller. We already know, we think. We don’t need your tedious
practical lessons gained from something so antiquated and subjective
as experience.
But such a conception of storytelling fails to understand
it as an accretive process, one formed not in isolation but in the
aggregation of voices and historical narratives, one that treats a story—
or a landscape—as a script to be worked on as a form of maintenance
and not simply rehearsed. Unlike the work of the novelist which is
done in isolation and produces a product for private consumption, the
storyteller only can function in the presence of others. The storyteller’s
activity of listening is indelibly bound to his ability to tell. When Glier
takes to the landscape both far from and close to home—and here,
unsurprisingly, he functions within both categories Benjamin describes
as the bearers of the storytelling tradition, “the trading seaman” and “the
resident tiller of the soil”—he transmits his own experiences of places
seen and shared by persons throughout time. His paintings aren’t
the recordings of the newly discovered or renderings that wring out
common references and leave us with a personal or hermetic system
of signs. Through titles, Glier places us. In his paintings, through the
hook of a limb or the sine curve of a flinty valley, we are given signposts
for places we might go. It is even more than conceivable that another
painter has been at Glier’s sites before him and has painted the same
mountain or stood under that very tree. But the issue at stake in the
act of storytelling isn’t the novelty of the event but the particularity of
the telling. It is the activity of placing one’s self in the current of what
has come before and acknowledging what has changed. The helix-
like entangling of convention and innovation avows a connection to
the collective as it demonstrates the centrality of individual acts in the
making of future shared memories. If Glier’s story ultimately is in the
contemporary tradition of the environmental protection movement that
emerged in the late 1960s and saw nature as a social movement, his
is also a story of personal intimacy and proximity. These places he has
been, that he has painted and experienced, he desperately wants for
himself as well as us.
David Bresl in
Paint ings 2010 - 2013
September 20, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 60°F
2010, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
November 15, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 45°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches. Private Collection.
December 19, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 30°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
December 31, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 36°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
February 21, 2011: Morning, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 15°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
February 21, 2011: Afternoon Birds, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 25°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
March 13, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 38°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
April, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA
2011, oil on panel, 45 x 60 inches
May, 2011: Lilacs, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA
2011, oil on panel, 45 x 60 inches
May 21, 2011: Lilacs, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 70°F
2011, 40 x 32 inches, oil on panel
May 23, 2011: Lilacs and Low Clouds, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 59°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
June 20, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 73°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
July 4, 2011; Petersburg NY, 78°F
2011, 40 x 50 inches, oil on panel
July 20, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 92°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
August 5, 2011: Anne McClintock Swimming, Blue Mountain Lake, NY, 78°F
2011, oil on panel, 40 x 50 inches
August 10, 2011: Loon Fishing, Blue Mountain Lake, NY, 75°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
August 15, 2011: Morning Fog, Mergansers, Blue Mountain Lake, NY, 68°F
2011, oil on panel, 40 x 60 inches
August 22, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 70°F
2011, oil on panel, 47 x 70 1/2 inches
October 6, 2011: The Arrival of Fall in the Berkshires, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 58°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches. Private Collection.
October 11, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 62°F
2011, oil on panel, 45 x 60 inches
October 28, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 38°F
2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches
October 28, 2011: Hedgerow, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 34°F
2011, oil on panel, 47 x 70 1/2 inches. Private Collection.
August 22, 2012: Dusk, Long Lake, NY, 68°F
2013, oil on panel, 72 x 48 inches
Works on Paper
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
2011, oil on primed paper, 26 x 15 1/2 inches
October 11, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 62°F
2012, oiled charcoal and acrylic on paper mounted on aluminum panel, 44 1/2 x 59 7/8 inches
August 6, 2012: Birch, Hoosick, NY, 85°F
2012, oiled charcoal and acrylic on paper mounted on aluminum panel, 44 1/2 x 59 5/8 inches
June 4, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 75°F
2012, gouache, 11 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches
July 21, 2012: Money Brook, Williamstown, MA, 72°F
2012, gouache, 14 x 11 1/2 inches
August 6, 2012: Birch, Hoosick, NY, 85°F
2012, gouache, 22 1/2 x 30 inches
July 21, 2012: Money Brook, Williamstown, MA, 72°F
2012, gouache, 11 1/2 x 14 inches
August 22, 2012: Long Lake, NY, 69°F
2012, gouache, 11 x 14 inches
July 20, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 72°F
2012, gouache, 14 x 11 inches
August 25, 2012: Lake Utowana, NY, 82°F
2012, gouache, 12 x 18 inches
August 22, 2012: Long Lake, NY, 70°F
2012, gouache, 14 x 11 inches
August 22, 2012: Dusk, Long Lake, NY, 68°F
2012, gouache, 14 x 10 3/4 inches
July 4, 2012: Croak, Hoosick, NY, 82°F
2012, gouache, 16 1/2 x 18 inches
July 3, 2012: Call, Hoosick, NY, 80°F
2012, gouache, 16 1/2 x 18 inches
August 17, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 65°F
2012, gouache, 11 x 14 inches
July 16, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 90°F
2012, gouache, 14 x 11 inches
August 2, 2012: Hedgerow, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 85°F
2013, gouache, 20 1/2 x 30 inches
August 17, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 75°F
2012, gouache, 11 x 14 1/2 inches
July 5, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 75°F
2012, gouache, 12 1/4 x 18 inches
July 5, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 75°F
2012, gouache, 11 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches
© 2013 Mike Glier, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
For more information contact Lily Downing, Director
(212) 628-9760 or lburke@gpgalleryny.com
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