Congdon - “It Had to Happen”

The Color of the Milanese Plain

“I paint not how I see, but what I see.” Paintings dense with the experience of life. A contribution whose starting point is an exhibition in Buccinasco (Milan), where the artist spent the final years of his life

BY MARIO CANCELLI

“Only, here in this wound, my sun” (W. Congdon, 1982): a wound that cannot heal, recognized as the reality that is most his, this and this alone led William Congdon to Lombardy, to Gudo Gambaredo, to a Benedictine monastery set among fields that had very little of the exotic about them, but that would go on to become his ultimate summation of the world. Thus the initiative of the city of Buccinasco, in collaboration with the William G. Congdon Foundation, to organize this immense and splendid collection into an exhibition is an invaluable one, which could no longer be postponed. The title, “It Had to Happen. The Place, the Crucifix, the Field. William Congdon 1979-98,” in its threefold structure, gives a precise, illuminating key for interpretation; this is a “painting experience,” then, that does not bring to a close but rather re-opens the intelligence of the past. It is a fascinating and complex synopsis whose catalogue is supplemented by contributions from P. Mangini, G. Barbieri, R. Balzarotti, F. Licht, M. Vallora, and M.M. Poncet.
The “summation” of these fields, as we were saying, was immediately perceived by Congdon when he recognized, in the unexpected gift of waving fields of ripe grain, the sea he had left behind long ago. Thus, while the wound–as the long series of annihilated crucifixes painted in the 1960s and 1970s express in an exemplary way–went back to oozing “nothingness” and “glory,” this “glory,” which was earlier “a dream of water” (viz. his painted Venices of the 1950s, a hallucinatory psychic foreshadowing of the “event”), now became “all of earth.”
“Nothingness” and “glory,” an irreconcilable contrast, which does not pose an obstacle to the subject’s relationship with reality but gives instead an uninterrupted welling forth of beauty and meaning; it is a personal and cosmic liturgy that draws everything toward the event of the relationship, to the “glory” of being expressed.
So much so that the first splendid paintings of the Bassa (Bassa milanese 3, 1980), with their downpour of pure snow or fields flooded by irrigation ditches, with their lacerated texture teeming with natural life, are in essence a reproposal of the first New York cityscapes that marked his earliest beginnings in 1948-49. These are almost a new network of roads and pathways, but here Congdon acts with new freedom, reaching the point of tracing the very physical outlines of what he called “the hole of the world” in a gesture that moves from being the magnetic, solitary center of gravity that draws everything to it, to becoming ever more “distributive,” “ostensive,” “prayerful.”
This is a “hole of the world” that attains to glory much more than the Venices, benefiting from a “temporality” that is no longer the slave of the instant in which his relationship with things was rapidly consumed, in visions that are nonetheless extraordinary. It is a “measure,” a dialogue that “holds,” which can stand up to otherness. Only in this “hole of the world” could that miracle take place. Action Painting, in the “navel of the world,” Manhattan, had attempted to capture this in vain, using strategies that were as sacral as they were disastrous. Here, in Gudo Gambaredo, and not in Manhattan or Venice, Calcutta or the Sahara (which were other stops along his itinerary), Congdon became a citizen of the cosmos.

A pulsation of life

“The other who is in my paintings!” The perpetuation, the creation of so much beauty testifies, to be sure, to a creative apex but, above all, to the resolution of a dynamic seized in a “greater freedom,” an “ora et labora,” which manifests the “impulse to beauty” as in no way a substitution, but as an introduction and a celebration (thus the term “liturgy”) of the “impulse to live.”
For Congdon, as for all of contemporary artists, nature “stands for” man (the signifier for the signified, Lacan would say), a stance that was produced by historical conditions and that can lead to resentment toward nature perceived as a limit, or to reconciliation. This depends, of course, on whether the affirmation of one of the terms leads to the negation of the other–as happens to Rothko, for whom the great illumination came at the expense of the world immolated in a crossing of the Red Sea toward the “spiritual.” Or, instead, the “sacrifice” can become a proposal of a world that is reborn immense and delightful every time a new step is taken, even if only by an insect.
A Red Sea, a Jordan River that leaves no one behind but is constantly and eternally being crossed. The photograph in the catalogue that shows Congdon jumping over the ditch that he saw in front of his window for all those years and to which he had consigned all his impotence, identifies the transformation of “dust thou wert and to dust thou shalt return” into “desire thou art and to desire thou shalt return,” enacted here, this “deposition of self”(“self-generation”)–this “recognizing oneself” as a son.
The secret of William Congdon, the genius of William Congdon is thus all a secret, a genius of making relationships, in which even the nothingness of the fog he walked through every day is lifted to the level of creaturehood, of presence (“I paint not how I see but what I see”).
This “relationship” is one that Jackson Pollock, in his evocation of energy, sought but that, sacrificed in his “eternal return,” he never attained.
The works exhibited at the Cascina Robbiolo of Buccinasco candidly protect this secret, but they also speak of a destruction that, even if from the very beginning it was not total, was always threatened where the primary impulse, the desire generated by the presence of another, was disturbed by a secondary impulse, of the artist to turn back in on himself in the form of narcissism, biography, aestheticism. Congdon flushed out the “other” in the shape of a “mass-city” in the desert (Sahara 12, 1955), onto which he stamped the imprint of his own foot, to articulate his need for acceptance, for a gesture that did not originate only with him. This is the opposite of a “beautiful gesture” of pure rebellion, but is instead the affirmation of a need for freedom from every form of censorship, including the super-ego of the laws of aesthetics, of “having” to make a beautiful painting. Congdon in this way avoids a much more radical nihilism, that is, the claim that one can do, can be, without the other.

The earth and the artist

“The roof, simply placed on top, like a toy,” wrote Congdon about his painting of the monastery building where he lived during his last years in Gudo Gambaredo. At Gudo, Congdon discovered that he is this earth and this earth is he. Rimbaud’s beloved words, “je est un autre,” find here, in this “journey” that was, to use his words, a “stopping,” their ultimate exegesis. “I is another” precisely because the other does not remain totally other, but “acts” the I in the form of a you, in a nearness that is as obligatory as it is liberating. The Crocifissi, too, are the brown color of the earth on which Congdon and the monks walked every morning; “they are” clods, beaten, overturned, broken apart. In their light color which is the gray of the road, they speak, like the landscapes, of the other, and at the same time of the self, of one’s own nothingness consigned and revisited (Le tre ali della nebbia, 1988).
Congdon’s work achieves the giddiness of the freedom of a child, who plays with and sings of the world before running up against his own nothingness and the glory of the real, or better, not being scandalized by it, as he is satisfied by a presence conquered. This freedom grants Congdon the liberty of needing less and less the support of the “symbolic” (the “Christ figure,” and things pertaining to it, as a scheme, so to speak) in order to institute a game of staggering familiarity with what being offers of itself, right there (corn, snow). Thus “the night,” the “fog,” the “moon” are no longer symbols, but become the “wave” of a punctual and practically unending eros.
Here, then, is the sequence suggested by the exhibition: the “Place,” that is to say, all the places visited by the artist and summarized in the “place” that is Gudo and its field; the “Crucifix” as the fundamental but also in some sense obligatory form for translating the world into a work of art (the stroke of a palette knife cutting through the image in many paintings); the “Field” as a new, free way of singing of reality precisely as it offers itself to us.
Modernity, with its artificial infancies, its “regressive” languages, as astute as they are forced, does not know the “temporality” of works like Cimitero San Martino 4 and Cascinazza Luna 1, texts in which the moon dangles like a head, kephalè, over a pleroma of earth and darkness that subsumes but also summons it, rising up as “wall-monastery” (boundary-love: the ultimate oxymoron); a “sitting and talking” (and no longer a mute and paralyzing “looking out”), staying there, without being bored, in Pascolian silence, like a child who has found his source of pleasure.
All of this seems to be contained in Congdon’s Fort-da, (“Fort-da”, Freud reports, was his grandson’s cry when he would throw a spool attached to a string and then pull it back to him. The child used this game as a way of exorcising his mother’s absence but also of capturing her attention when she returned. Freud judged it to be a supreme act of civilization) his true act (in the sense of testament) of civilization, his faithfulness to the burning and sacred instant of the drama never repressed and his reproposal of it in a language that is increasingly freed of any form of aesthetic self-censorship, in a sacramental acceptance of being.