SEAN MULLER
I used to make the case that my work required my life to be a total mess. To build up all the necessary layers of dust and dirt on the canvas torn and piled around the studio I had to let things start to rot. Had to smash bottles, furniture, and phones against the walls so the broken glass and splintered wood could settle into the floor and scrape the edges of paintings when I moved them from one end of the loft to the other. Had to piss in empty deli coffee cups so they might productively get kicked over by accident or in anger and soak into the scraps. Had to sleep nested in the oil soaked piles to get the creases looking just right. The more total the mess, the more compelling the work.
When my devotion to this elusive creative totality had become a destructive passion, I gave up drugs and alcohol first and my studio a year later. When Covid-19 forced New York into an indefinite quarantine it had been a year since I stopped making art and started detoxing from my painterly ego and my 20s. A month into quarantine everyone was talking about their Covid projects. The Times was publishing op-eds about how to maximize productivity while reminding readers that Shakespeare had written King Lear during a quarantine (to which Fran Lebowitz astutely countered in the New Yorker: “You are not Shakespeare”). I was doing a lot of sleeping. I was cooking for my partner. I was rereading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest between afternoon naps. After a few months sleep eluded me, I was sick of cooking, and had gotten too depressed to read about depression.
I had no interest in making art. Not anymore, I told myself. I had a bad relationship with art after a decade of making big, dramatic black paintings first as a juvenile gothic maximalist, then an austere crust punk minimalist, and finally as an accumulative structural abstractionist. I had quit painting for my mental and emotional health.
As the months in quarantine have passed, I haven’t changed my mind but I have noticed the things I miss. I miss art being an active presence in my life, I miss wandering the Metropolitan Museum with no intention or destination, I miss visiting the paintings that I’ve had longer (and more productive) relationships with than most people in my life. That images of art are a secondary, lesser level of aesthetic experience is an antiquated Greenbergian perspective though one I believe to be true. Seeing a painting or sculpture on a phone or in a book is better than not seeing it at all but can never be a replacement for the physical and emotional experience of standing in the presence the object itself. It’s the physicality of art that I miss these days.
I began making tracings from art books that I had in my apartment for no real reason; just something to do like taking a walk or making a phone call. I was tracing photos of Bernini’s sculptures in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and the Galleria Borghese in Rome. These images were the most compelling for two reasons: photos of sculpture are formally incomplete and interpretative, staking out an artistic position of their own through the object’s conversion into the photograph, and because, as an American, I’m not sure I’ll be able to go back to Rome anytime soon. I’ve been drawing as a form of mourning; longing for the presence of art in my life and, particularly, the sort of presence that can’t be reproduced in images. The world outside has become the complete unmanageable mess and I, in my cleaned and simplified corner of our greater disorder, find myself drawing dark longing fantasies of things I can’t see and places I can’t go.
Sean Muller
Brooklyn, October 2020