By DONALD KUSPIT October 21, 2024
Loss of a loved person, Engel insists, is as traumatic psychologically as being severely wounded or burned is physiologically. Invoking homeostatic principles he proceeds: ‘The experience of uncomplicated grief represents a manifest and gross departure from the dynamic state considered representative of health and well-being…It involves suffering and an impairment of the capacity to function which may last for days, weeks, or even months.’ The processes of mourning can thus be likened to the processes of healing that follow a severe wound or burn.
— John Bowlby, Loss: Sadness and Depression, Volume III of Attachment and Loss(1)
Alchemy is a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life…Alchemists believed that lead could be “perfected” into gold, that diseases could be cured, and that life could be prolonged through transmutation, or a change of some essential element into a superior form. …the transformative liquid that was constantly being sought through experimentation by alchemists is elixir.
–Britannica
In 1980 Ben Woolfitt’s mother died. He responded to it by making an etching, Number 2, 1981. The art historian Ken Carpenter tells us that Woolfitt thought of the etching “as a kind of last letter to her.”(2) In 1996 his sister Shirley, the “main sustenance” in his early life, died of cancer. “And so, Shirl,” Woolfitt wrote, “I have come to the last page…But Shirl, I really don’t understand why there must be a last page in every book.” In 1999 Woolfitt’s father died. His first “Crinkle” drawing “was done within a day or so of my father dying.” The drawing was “crinkled, as was my father’s hand.” “The last day (of his life) I was there with him holding his hand.” Woolfitt was born in 1946. His mother died when he was 35. His sister died when he was 50. His father died when he was 53. When his mother died, he was mid-way through the biblical three score and ten allotted us, suggesting that his mother’s death coincided with the so-called mid-life crisis, bringing with it the loss of hope, which is what Dante experienced when he stood before the gates of hell, mid-way through his life.(3) All of this suggests that Woolfitt’s art is “motivated” by an awareness of personal loss, more pointedly, death.
Woolfitt’s life is a sum of existential losses—losses that threatened his own existence—losses made good by his essentialist art. They are aesthetic compensation for losses and suffering inflicted by life. Death is inescapable, and inevitably traumatic—an irreparable break in the continuity of life, as the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said—but the dead can be remembered and memorialized, if rarely in the exquisite form of Woolfitt’s memento mori. They are not stone tombstones, nor do the inscriptions on them state the raw data of their lives—the day of their birth and of their death—but rather breathe poetic life into them, as their ironical directness, not to say deceptive simplicity, indicates. They have something in common—certainly an emotional affinity—with the Japanese “death poem,” spontaneously written, with a Zen-like directness and simplicity, reminiscent of the Japanese haiku that Woolfitt admires. Like them, with even greater aesthetic concentration and finesse, Woolfitt’s haikus, even more minimalist than Zen haikus, tersely convey the emotional wisdom that can come from the acceptance of the emotional suffering of loss of a loved one. Psychoanalysts would say they are his way of working through the pain of their loss—of finding some good in it. Woolfitt’s abstract visual poems go on and on, implicitly to infinity, a compulsive tour de force of reparative creativity, their mercurial luminosity—their mercurial surface has an inner light even as it absorbs and reflects natural light—conveying their inner sublimity. Taken together they form a stream of consciousness monologue making Woolfitt’s unconscious feelings manifest.
Woolfiitt’s remarkably persistent continuity—his continuous creativity—suggests his undying love for his mother, sister, and father—in effect his inspiration, muses. They were what the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut calls “self objects,” that is, intimate and indispensable objects who become part of one’s self—who were internalized as the foundation, not to say essence, of oneself. Essentialist art “solves the question of art exclusively on the basis of internal necessity, which was capable at every moment of overturning every known rule and limit.”(4) Woolfitt’s so-called drawings—to me they are more like pages from an illuminated manuscript—are the most consummate, subtle quintessentialized modern art made—even more than minimalist art and his all-over color field paintings. Both are consciously made and one-dimensional rather than unconsciously motivated and multi-dimensional, “readable” in more ways than one, complexly emotional, not to say ingeniously “expressive”—compensation for loss of loved ones, internalized forever in his art, the household gods that inspire him and that he communicates with through his creativity—rather than mechanically, not to say impersonally, formalist.
But dying his family are disappointing, leave him in the lurch, abandoning him rather than loving him, never as much as he loves and depends on them, which is why he comes to love and depend on his medium more than he loves and depends on them, for the medium endures and inspires and supports him as they no longer do, and can be used, as they no longer can, can facilitate one’s growth, as they no longer can. A family—at least a good, supportive, understanding family–is a facilitating environment, as Winnicott writes, a sort of medium in which one can grow and develop. When one no longer has an immediate family to facilitate one’s growth and development—one’s creativity—the artistic medium can become a compensatory substitute for it. For Woolfitt mastery of the artistic medium—the more an uncanny mix of incommensurate materials—graphite, metal leaf, silver, all handled with mercurial wit—the more it comes to seem “the only thing in human existence that has precisely the same range of sensed feeling as people themselves do,” as Robert Motherwell writes. Paint no longer communicated Woolfitt’s deepest, subtlest feelings—it was too blatant—the way pencil and lustrous, malleable metal could. “If a creative person in the arts is a person with an extraordinary capacity for love, who for whatever reason—say because of his early experience with his mother—as an example—rather than direct his love to another person in full strength, but who nevertheless must love—he therefore directs his love toward the other thing in human existence as rich, sensitive, supple, and complicated as human beings themselves; that is to say toward an artistic medium, which is not an inert object, or conversely, a set of rules for composition, but a living collaboration, which not only reflects every nuance of one’s being, but which, in the moments in which one is lost, comes to one’s aid; not arbitrarily and capriciously (like the Greek goddesses intervening in men’s fate), but seriously, accurately, concretely with you.”(5) Woolfitt loves his medium as much as he loves his mother, sister, and father, for it gives him the support he needs for his creativity. He remembers them through his medium but his use of it becomes more memorable than them. “The object is always being destroyed,” Winnicott argues, but it “survives the destruction,” sometimes in the form of an artistic mirage, or as a “touching” trace, aesthetically lovable. I suggest that Woolfitt became more attached to his medium than he ever was to his family, which is why it became more of a “secure base,” to use Bowlby’s term, and “facilitating environment,” to use Winnicott’s term, than they ever were, if only because the medium is always available for one’s use, and is immortal.
In A Long Ride, 2024 a thin black horizon line streaks across two pages of an open book—the book that has no last page, to recall Woolfitt’s remark to his sister Shirley. The pages have a mercurial luminosity, with a few blurred areas of thin shadow. At the base of the two pages is an eruption of blackness—black death, as it were. The break between the pages becomes a line rising from the blackness, its base cupped by two waves of it. In another work the black base disappears, the quadrants formed by dividing the space with the horizon line fill with thin shadow, diluted by the white—light—of the page. In another work bits of shadow linger in the grayish white space, and in the final work of the sequence the black lingers in few streaks that float across the two pages, in effect the dregs of death. The pages are now grayish white, suggesting an ambivalent overcoming of black death. Woolfitt is a gnostic, a word derived from the Greek gnostikos, meaning “leading to knowledge.” “Gnostics believed in a transcendent God who created the world through a process of emanation,” and “a Demiurge who created the material world.” Woolfitt’s drawings strongly suggest that he was a gnostic, struggling to find transcendence—and with it lasting freedom from the suffering caused by the death of his family, and with it the loss of their life-giving love. The battle between light and dark—whiteness and blackness–in his drawings symbolizes the battle between transcendence and death—salvation and suffering. Alchemists were gnostics, and the elixir they used to change opaque lead, heavy as death, into luminous gold, symbol of transcendence, was mercury—Woolfitt’s quicksilver. It is worth noting that Woolfitt’s “Solid Silver” series is one of the first not signed or written about on its surface, indicated it is an aesthetic thing in itself—a distillation of lived sensuousness.
In Found, 2024 both blackish-grayish pages are mottled with luminous material and divided into quadrants. An amorphous black form appears in the upper right half of the right page—a sign of death in the grayish–foggy?–twilight zone. In Yea—A Win Win, 2024 the amorphous black form grows like a cancer, the surrounding area growing dimmer. The left page continues to be divided into quadrants. Its luminous area now almost fills the page. Will These Are My Tears, 2024 is a startling departure: the pages are now sky blue, with little black lines spotting the blue, perhaps suggestive of dead angels in heaven. In The Bright and Tomorrow Will Be Different, 2024, two pencil drawings, the pages are also sky blue, flickered with demiurgic black lines In The Bright, which change to transcendental white lines in Tomorrow Will Be Different. As The Thoughts Race Through, 2024 is a flurry of white spread across two pages, with a small amorphous yellowish form on the lower part of the line dividing the pages. In It Is Late In My Day, 2024 the amoeba-like amorphous yellowish form changes shape, as does the surrounding grayish-whiteish fluid form that surrounds it. It is hard to find words that do justice to the exquisite subtlety and inner meaning of Woolfitt’s “drawings”—one can label them as biomorphic abstractions, and he calls some of them “landscapes”—oddly surreally abstract landscapes, that is, dreamscapes—but one might call them “germs of healing,” to use Kandinsky’s paradoxical phrase.(6) They are certainly what he called idiosyncratic mood paintings.
Carpenter tells us that “Woolfitt draws every day, usually starting around 6:00 a.m. He sees this early hour as a time when ‘you’re as close to the sleep state as you can be, and you’re not really involved in a thought process.’ Almost all the early drawings have writing on them, a diaristic record of the artist’s concerns and mental state at the time. Woolfitt says, ‘The texts are a way for me to examine my interior world.’ Often they simply record the time, ‘So early in the morning, the sun burning…’ Or a point in his travels, ‘On my way back home.’ Sometimes they record his meditations on the nature of human existence: ‘We are really always alone.’” The simple declarative texts add existential poignancy to the subtle aesthetics of the formal structure of the work. The words reach out directly to the viewer, inviting him or her to enter into a dialogue with the work, more subtly engage it emotionally—experience the lived emotion in its ingenious aesthetics. Woolfitt’s works are profoundly personal and aesthetically extraordinary but they reach out to everyone through the ordinary language that accompanies them. Often waking before the sun has risen, Woolfitt is in a kind of liminal state of mind, a kind of psychic limbo between the unconscious and the conscious, to allude to Freud’s topographical theory of the mind. It no doubt lends itself to free association, and with that to automatism—some of Woolfitt’s drawings seem to have an oblique relationship to Andre Masson’s automatic drawings—Woolfitt’s hand sometimes seems to move with a similar randomness—freely associating and as such more evocative than descriptive. Breton once described surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”—a term he borrowed from the psychoanalyst Pierre Janet—reminding us that there is an automatist aspect to Woolfitt’s handling, as befits an art that engages the unconscious. Acutely conscious of his feelings, Woolfitt’s art embodies them, in exquisite aesthetic camouflage befitting their nuanced character.
Woolfitt is a great modernist master; his use of language gives his work a certain conceptual character; his texts, ostensibly the titles of his works, are in effect his signature. They are free associations, and invite the viewer to free associate to them: the words in effect arouse the viewer’s free associations to the material medium and abstract form of the work, suggesting it can function as a sophisticated Rorschach test. Kandinsky suggests all abstract art does, for it engages us emotionally, however much we may cognitively analyze it to fix it in our minds. “In composition using purely abstract forms, the only judge, guide, and arbitrator should be one’s feelings,” Kandinsky wrote.(7) Woolfitt is acutely conscious of his feelings, as the nuanced subtlety of his handling of his material medium, the slippery vehicle of their expression, as Motherwell makes clear, especially if it is compensation for the loss of loved ones, as he suggests, and finally more engaging than them, for the feelings one projects into the medium will not be rejected by it, perhaps because the medium is more receptive and responsive than they ever were.
I regard Woolfitt’s drawings as major visual abstract poetry. “Poetry speaks to the unconscious and facilitates the mentalization of the nonverbal substrate of the psyche,” the psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar writes. “Poetry informs one about the inner state of affairs, enhances empathy with the self, and therefore facilitates mourning. Writing poetry involves self-holding, illusory though omnipotent manipulation of objects, discovery of the internal source of anguish through its mentalization, and a mastery of pain through ‘self-dosed’ suffering and surviving that suffering.”(8) “Poetry,” Aktar adds, “far from being merely a psychic anodyne, can have an impact upon pain that is akin to a psychoanalytic intervention.”(9) It seems that Woolfitt, who has had extensive psychoanalytic experience, should make psychoanalytic abstractions, the slipperiness of his medium emblematic of the slipperiness of feeling, not to say the unconscious. WM
Notes
(1)John Bowlby, Loss: Sadness and Depression. Attachment and Loss, Volume III (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 42-43
(2)Ken Carpenter, “Ben Woolfitt,” Bordercrossings, January 2022. Review of “Ben Woolfitt: Rhythms and Series,” exhibition catalogue.
(3)Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2009), 172, entry on mid-life crisis.
(4)Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences/Three Pictures,” Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 373
(5)Robert Motherwell, “A Process of Painting,” The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 139
(6)Kandinsky, 137
(7)Ibid., 169
(8)Salman Akhtar, “New Clinical Realms” (Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 203), 15
(9)Ibid,, 21