Guston Exhibition

I never tire of the figurative paintings of Phillip Guston. Not his first figurative works but those that followed an Abstract Expressionist period that ended in the 1960s, when he found he could no longer ignore the literal world of evil, as manifest in the Ku Klux Klan. 

The recent postponement of the touring Guston exhibition (already delayed eight months due to Covid-19) is not surprising. Americans of all races/racializations and creeds have never been more literal, more polarized, than they are now -- a transformation brought on by a myriad of variables, including a growing disparity between rich and poor, years of state-wide cuts to public education, a local emphasis on community-based decorative imagery and a fear of ambiguity.

Guston's later figurative paintings are cartoonish, but they are also highly ambiguous, and it seems you cannot have both without potentially triggering a gunman. Ambiguous spaces are places for engagement, discourse, but no one has the time. Like the can of Campbell's on the supermarket shelf, we grab it, check it off the list and race down the aisle for the Planter's. Polarization has us clinging to only one of two poles in fear of getting swept away by the inevitable flood. I can't blame people for feeling this way, for acting this way.

Many of the artists who signed the open letter in protest of the exhibition's postponement feel otherwise. I too would have signed a letter in response to an announcement that stated an exhibition would be postponed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted." There are no clear interpretations where ambiguity is involved the room, and I guess that's the point. I would say we have lost the ability to revel in art's ambiguities if I didn't think we never truly possessed it.