John Yau, 2005
Michael Mazur has been exhibiting regularly since he graduated from Yale in 1961. A well-known painter and printmaker, he has depicted haunting and haunted figures (humans and animals) as well as articulated evocative abstract landscapes that were inspired by both a visit to China and his own study of Chinese painting. Whether working figuratively or abstractly, his paintings have always been distinguished by a masterful command of a wide range of brushstrokes, at once physical and suggestive. As a printmaker, he has been credited with reviving the monotype, celebrated for his illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, and been crucial to the development of the painterly print. At the same time, Mazur has never fit into any of the major and minor movements that have preoccupied the art world during the past fifty years. And because he has been so restless and independent, one should resist looking at his work in relationship to either his contemporaries or to stylistic trends. Rather, one should look at Mazur’s work and the significant changes it has undergone—ideally, this is true of all artists—in light of his entire oeuvre, which is substantial and diverse. Thus, one of the few constants a viewer will inevitably notice about Mazur’s work of the past five decades is the brushwork: it is distinctive and most often lush in both his figurative and abstract paintings, and something similar happens in his monotypes. This is an artist who knows how to make painterly marks that are both precise and redolent, which is why his recent “Diary” paintings and collages (2004-2205) will surprise even his most ardent followers.
Few artists ever walk away from what they know how to do, particularly when it is likely to be the very thing that gained them attention in the first place. In America, which is constantly celebrating youth and undergoing another wave of nostalgia, it is not altogether surprising that older artists seldom change. Who wants to risk rejection and scorn after having worked so hard, and for so long? Who wants to chance falling on their face in front of an unforgiving public? It’s a quick way to commit suicide without actually pulling the trigger. Think about the artists who walked away from what they were celebrated for, and the list will not be very long. The famously imperious Clement Greenberg turned against Willem de Kooning when he moved away from his black-and-white abstractions and started painting the figure, and, as is well known, pronounced that Jackson Pollock had retreated from abstraction when, after his ground-breaking drip paintings, he incorporated figural elements into his work. The initial response to Philip Guston’s move from abstraction to cartoony figuration was harsh and dismissive. Although no one will come out and say how they first stood on the matter, not everybody in the art world embraced Brice Marden’s dramatic change from monochromatic panels to drawing in paint. And at least one well-known critic said of Bill Jensen’s change from heavily worked iconic abstractions to abstract landscapes, that he had forgotten how to paint. Consider the many negative responses to Jasper John’s recent show, Catenary, and you realize how close-minded and resistant to change the art world is on every level.
The art world’s conservatism is one context in which to acknowledge the sea-change that Mazur’s work has undergone. The other context is, I think, a far larger and more significant one. In his “Diary” paintings and collages, Mazur brings into close proximity two distinct ruptures, one in his own life and the other in the world. Rather than addressing these ruptures in a way he knew how, Mazur chose to face them without relying on his vast trove of painterly skills. He investigated these traumatic events by starting fresh, by learning how and what to do as he went along, which I see as both a bold and courageous step. I also suspect that Mazur realized that he didn’t want to be painterly about these events, his health problems and September 11th, because it would ring false for him. He wanted to change his practice because on both a private and public level his life had been completely changed by events over which he had no control. Thus, like Guston, who was disturbed by the events he witnessed in the news and on television, Mazur changed for both aesthetic and moral reasons. There is nothing painterly about Mazur’s new, intimately scaled paintings. Instead of utilizing a brush loaded with paint, he used stencils and layers of spray paint, as well as employed flatfooted marks and emblematic images. There is a freshness to these paintings, and the viewer senses the quickness in their execution. I have the feeling that Mazur had to get these paintings out, but refused to fetishize his urgency. They are diary paintings, a record of feelings, dreams and news, different kinds of stuff that passes through one’s mind during the course of a day. Their abstract space moves between the atmospheric and the layered, sometimes incorporating both, while the glossy artificial colors are jaunty, richly optical, and urban. In using spray paint, he is employing the tool favored by graffiti artists, which should make clear how much of his own painterly past he has left behind. It also should be pointed out that Mazur resisted the graffiti artists’ penchant for flourishes and tagging. By developing a vocabulary of distinct signs, he locates these paintings in an environment that is urban and anonymous.
The stenciled vocabulary Mazur developed for this group of paintings and collages is iconic and sign-like. The combination of bright colors and iconic images are open to interpretation. Part sign and part abstraction, Mazur has concocted something akin to a contemporary ideogram and a street sign. Within the paintings, each image not only stands on its own, but also works in concert with the other images and the color. Thus, a black geometric figure in profile suggests persistence and vulnerability when combined with red heart, white tears, and yellow ground. But a very different feeling is suggested when the same figure, its head tilted slightly down, is walking amidst black triangles (shards) and ghostly, pale blue tears falling through an atmospheric red ground.
Mazur’s sign-like vocabulary (tears, hearts, butterflies, falling and floating geometric shapes, iconic figures, abstract, symmetrically placed, snake-like lines, dots and circles, a repeated stitch-like zigzag and staple-like line) helps define the parameters of his preoccupation. For all of the urban cheeriness of the colors and coolness of the vocabulary, the deep pools and currents of feeling animating the paintings struck this viewer. They are truly diary paintings in that they reveal a side of daily living one doesn’t ordinarily show the world, states of vulnerability and precariousness, private joy and passing, easily forgotten instances. And the image of the geometric figure trudging through a world that is collapsing around him eloquently registers what it is like to feel both determined and helpless in a post-September 11th world.
Alongside the paintings is a set of collages that are unlike any others that I know, and here I am talking about ones by Max Ernst, Anne Ryan, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, and Robert Motherwell, just to name a few of the most obvious artists who made a significant contribution to the history of collage. As a poet, I have always been envious of artists who are able to incorporate everything they have done into their work. Nothing seems to get thrown away or wasted. The primary materials of Mazur’s collages are the stencils he used to make the paintings. Thus, in contrast to the artists I mentioned, he didn’t set out to make collages. They are the result of his recognizing the possibilities presented to him by the used stencils, their cutout shapes covered with spray paint. The other difference, and this is particularly noticeable in contrast to the collages of Ryan, Schwitters, and Motherwell, is the layered, abstract space the artist is able to get by weaving together different stencils, combining their negative and positive spaces. By intertwining them, Mazur is able to define a formally innovative spatiality that is at once physical and pictorial. And, like the paintings, the collages form a diary of the artist’s preoccupations. Throughout the collages certain images surface again and again. While the collages are inflected by the soberness of his concerns (his health and a world that is frightened and awry), what is remarkable about them is the artist’s inventiveness.
The poignancy of Mazur’s recent body of paintings and collages is not simply because of the artist’s subject matter, his health and recent world events. The bright industrial colors and almost anonymous vocabulary of signs subverts that reading by lifting the work into another realm. The deeper subject of this visual diary is the human desire to keep looking and looking until time itself finally and unavoidably intervenes. As these works make manifestly clear, the will to live is a cause for joy.
