BUILDING ON HISTORY: RECENT PAINTINGS AND A WORK OF SCULPTURE BY MATTHEW VAREY by Gary Michael Dault

It was while recently browsing through the “Modern Art” volume of Elie Faure’s stirring History of Art (1909-1927), that I was struck by the great French art historian’s noting, during a discussion of Chardin, that “Lyricism never comes when the conquest is being prepared, but is born of the conquest itself, when energy attains its summit and catches its glimpse of the future.” (1) We don’t write like this now—with a personified energy catching glimpses of things—but it is a salubrious enough idea for all that: that neither lyricism nor energy can be legislated into anything—and certainly not into a painting or a sculpture—but, rather, appear as a kind of crystalline fallout from a work’s being a supersaturated solution of ideal, idea, ambition, will, technique and, in the end, a kind of rapture generated by a meaningful congruence of intent and achievement.

We live in an age that, while it is sensitive to and welcoming of idea, ambition (which, oddly, we tend to fetishize), will and technique (indeed, we are pawns and knaves of technique), is nevertheless deeply wary of conditions like lyricism and states like rapture. This is an age of calculated aesthetic distance (how far is it proper to stand from somebody else’s joy?); we live, for the most part, in a state of post-ironic detachment that inevitably, over time, forges for each of us only a sort of prosthetic extension of (first) feeling and (then) being—an emotional phantom limb or “complexity of conjunction” (2)—that serves almost to touch the world.

Matthew Varey’s art is built on the complexity of conjunction. “I have lived on the border between agricultural land and suburbia in Canada, Greece and England,” he writes in an artist’s statement he has provided for Building on History. “I have moved nineteen times in thirty-nine years, four times from one continent to another. My recent stint of stability”, he continues [the result of his living in Toronto, of owning a house], “has connected me in a way I have not experienced in more than a decade.” By “connected”, I am assuming Varey means connected to the earth: being in possession of a piece of land, having a footprint, a place to stand (3). He goes on to point out, however, that this new-found centeredness has been “unexpectedly destabilized by the sudden re-shaping and condo-ization of the city’s skyline.”

The kind of spatial and emotional recalibration required in any attempt to reconcile the essentially visceral satisfactions generated by the bounded (but fictively endless) horizontality of one’s own plot of land and the ascensional thrusting of the surrounding urban skyline is frequently dispiriting: two crossed axes, one considerably more vigorous and more morphologically violent than the other. How can flat-land hold out against the bristling urgencies of the upwardly mobile building-imperative?

But Varey adds a new and unexpected triangulation to these age-old, archetypal, horizontal-vertical tensions: “The sight of concrete structures rising with inhuman speed generates an imposing authority,” he writes. An authority he claims to be able to confront only by means of his interest, which has apparently been going on for decades, in “concrete military structures.” Such structures (military bunkers, for example), he adds—now bringing a quite new consideration to the usual commonplace about the alarming rapidity, the exhausting instant-ness of the appearance among us of our tower-buildings—“not surprisingly, contain the origins of the technology used to manufacture the towers.” But what Varey offers as “not surprising” is, I think, a rather new idea, for most of us, at any rate. In a little over sixty years, he continues, “the bunkers have grown up into condominiums.”

All of the dark towers in Varey’s recent paintings feel decidedly confrontational. Or maybe even something less than that: most of them look like (albeit hi-rise) bunkers—besieged. Black as coal—but sometimes, as in Passage of Near Comet, midnight blue, or in Henge, a lichen-like green, growing part-way up the building—they stand, almost invariably in silhouette, passive witnesses to Varey’s convulsively painterly skies (4), sometimes pierced and sliced by comets and meteors (5), against which (and in the case of Being one of a race capable of imagining, beneath which) they prevail, in attitudes which are unsettling admixtures of (since it is difficult to get past their anthropomorphic nature: who did not think, during the horrifying hours of 9/11, of the fatal wounds of the Twin Towers, their broken spines, their bleeding?) pride, defiance and even fearfulness.

All buildings are walls (we tend not to see them that way, however, speaking only—and rather delicately—of “curtain walls” when referring to hi-rise towers hung with glass). And while there are other walls everywhere that are easy enough to categorize by function (prison walls, barricades, garden walls, the walls around detention camps, walls like the late Berlin Wall that cut through cities and cultures (6), walls that gather inside themselves—rather like snails in their logarithmic shells—ghettos, enclaves and gated communities), all of them have two sides: they contain and they exclude. As urban planner Peter Marcuse puts it, in an essay titled “Walls of Fear and Walls of Support” in Architecture of Fear (see footnote 3), “Walls today represent power, but they also represent isolation; security, but at the same time fear….” (7)

The tall wall-systems that we call buildings (8) are born of the will to power, and in order to function properly (i.e. according to program), the machinations of that power purr along most smoothly within the embodiment of architectural anonymity. The urge to expressive, morphological eccentricity in architecture (Gehry, Hadid, Liebeskind and the like) is pretty much reserved for the design of private homes and art galleries (which are clearly regarded as sites both of celebration and frivolity). Almost all of corporate architecture, government architecture, and the slightly defensive realm of condo architecture (9), by contrast, invariably sidles up, asymptotically, to the astringencies of plainness, architectural equivalents to what, in clothing design, would be the pinstripe suit. The nature of the contemporary metropolis is surely to be found most nakedly in the ongoing relations between the anxieties of modern existence and its outered, exo-skeletal forms, these high-rise outcroppings of structural rigidity and repressed desire.

The buildings in Matthew Varey’s paintings (most of which are towers) are ruthlessly erect and unyielding: the unbending dinosaurs of conventional urban engineering, where the designer has set them up within their allowable morphological boundaries and has then simply gone away. Some of the buildings in the paintings appear to be—or could be (who can tell?) –abandoned (those in Understanding how to attain glory, for example). They evoke, in fact, the buildings in a number of Hollywood films of a decade or so ago (Escape from New York, Waterworld, etc.), which—gigantic in the grotesquerie of their new emptiness—they seemed like ponderous shells, emptied of whatever meaning they once appeared to possess.

But there are a number of paintings in which the dark towers exude a strange, disquieting feeling of defensiveness (see, for example, the tattered Henge, and the equally beleaguered Stratum ; see also Promise (dolmen), where the sheer, burning fall of the comet across the sky behind the two towers seems more acidly destructive than the black, quiescent structures can adequately accommodate, and Passage of Near Comet, where the ghostly white comet, unnaturally large and imminent, streaks through the tortured sky that it may or may not have brought into being.

This strange architectonic defensiveness beings us back to the artist’s early and ongoing fascination with the bunker—as object and idea. The thralldom began early; in a recent email, he wrote that:

and

These concrete bunker structures have haunted him forever, Varey says. “I see them now when I drive downtown.”

But what is it he sees exactly? “The anonymous and generic nature of our [hi-rise] monuments is truly telling” he writes me, momentarily replaying for himself the “something grand and romantic and meaningful” aura inevitably generated by the stirring there-ness of any high building (see, in this regard, Ayn Rand’s epic hymn to architectural hubris, The Fountainhead from 1943, and the unintentionally hilarious film of it from 1949). Acknowledging that such high buildings, “temporary embellishments within the urban core,” are “powerful graphic statements of the human ability to…contain chaos, to drive away the extraneous,” Varey nevertheless sees them, at the same time—and with a nice feel for the poignant nature of paradox—as “lasting monuments that won’t last.”

Which renders them problematic for him, when compared to the monad-like bunkers which loom so large in his memories and in his sensibility. A reinforced concrete bunker, 15,000 of which made up, for example, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall project (10), begun in May of 1942, was a gnarled fist of a structure, inward, hermetic, centripetal, designed for immediate protection but built so prodigiously strong (with roof/walls made up to a dozen feet thick) that, as Varey is fond of pointing out, such bunkers still exist today (witness his school outing, above), simply because nobody can successfully dismantle them (11). They are clearly just as demolition-proof (12) as they were attack-proof.

What is the relationship between our contemporary hi-rise buildings and the culture of the bunker that Varey finds so endlessly fascinating—and which so centrally informs his art? With both hi-rise and bunker, form follows function to an almost ostentatious degree, each of them proffering a transparent sense of utter declaration: with each building-form, what you see is what there is. This makes for the site of a certain kind of rapture where, as was mentioned earlier, intent and achievement have become one.

For Matthew Varey, the stygian buildings in his loaded and teeming canvases are simultaneously proud but beleaguered entities—as old as Stonehenge, as defensive as bunkers and flak towers (both hi-rises and bunkers are riddled through with, porous with compartmentalization; each of them divides the continuity of the lives lived within them into a calculus of moments (13) and functions). In the end, I think Varey sees hi-rise buildings simply as vertically stretched bunkers. There is some sort of feeling for safety in a hi-rise (“Good fences have become a matter of 4” of concrete—which makes for good neighbours”). We live in proximity to one another, but we do not see or talk to one another one another. This is both comfortable and frightening (“there is a modern evolution,” Varey writes, “from the trench of 1916 to the bunker of 1943 to the condo of 1999, a meandering ascension of a reversed Babel where we are slowly learning to speak exactly the same language”).

And it is in Varey’s pre-apocalyptic paintings of dark, hermetic towers, each of them tinctured with a philter of nihilism, each pushing up against the chromatic rapture of the unbuilt-unknown of throbbing firmament and quickening endlessness, that we may detect the stinging presence of energy that, as Elie Faure put it, “having attained its summit, catches its glimpse of the future.”

A Brief Note about a small Meteor:

Varey’s single sculpture in Building on History is a compact, mixed-media meteor. The work is called Lapis ex coelis—origins of intrusive incidents are both externally and internally formed, a title that is almost as long as the piece itself. Varey’s chunky meteor model, both heavenly body and modernist sculpture (its tapering tail, which is also, depending where you stand, an assertive, insinuating, pointy prow, reminds me, somehow, of, Giacometti’s sculpture, Nose, from 1947),

is, for Varey, as he notes in an email, a talisman of threat, “descending through the atmosphere, completely unexpected and unpredictable, mostly harmless, usually dropping into the ocean or the arctic, but symbolic of the "threat" that causes us to bunker down [the bunker again, this time as a verb!]. Varey sees the meteor as a “possible ossified angel,” and, as lapis ex coelis, a stone from heaven (14) or from God, an inert but almost sentient thing, small but destructive, unguided and therefore all the more menacing as it targets whatever is below.”

For the artist, the meteor is also Metatron, sent from God to collect the souls of those He has chosen, who unfurls into the pillar of fire as he walks the earth or streaks through the frictional atmosphere. Varey notes that Metatron is charged, as well, with the sustaining of mankind, and is thus a link between the divine and what is human. Meteors, therefore, are “two things at all times, and consequently unknowable to us.”

The paradox of meteors or of comets, for Varey, is that “the more we attempt to understand them and see into their intent, the more we are likely to be struck by the raw force of their impact.” For him, there is a profound, richly poetic connection between the meteor’s plummeting to earth, and the blaze of “the artillery rounds the concrete structures [i.e. the military bunkers] were built to defend themselves against—bunkers, he adds, “that I love so dearly, and which are symbolic of my childhood and my home and which represent a false sense of security, and are emblems of the idea of an indefensible defense—which one of the ironic givens of the human condition.”

*************************************************

1) Elie Faure, History of Art: Modern Art (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1937), p.236.

2) “Complexity of conjunction” is from David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: University of California Press, 1995), p. 18.

3) French theorist Luce Irigaray, invoking Spinoza (in her An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Cornell University Press, 1993, p.83), identifies God as “that which provides its own envelope.” “This is what people want and work so hard for in L.A.,” writes Fred Dewey in an essay called “Cyburbanism as a Way of Life” in Nan Ellin, ed., Architecture of Fear

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, p.262), “to provide their own envelope, to become God on their own quarter acre.”

4) “Using the sky now furthers our disconnection with the land,” Varey adds, in his notes for the present exhibition. I am assuming, though, that “using the sky” refers not only to the omnipresent upward thrusting of built towers in the urban environment, but also to Varey’s own maniacal painting of the skies in his pictures—which are host to hundreds of painterly incidents and events, products of the artist’s not inconsiderable arsenal of procedures with pigment: hurling it, piling it, troweling, squeezing, scraping it, sanding it, and otherwise loading and distressing his surfaces. Compared to his hectic treatment of the atmospheres with which his paintings are suffused, Varey’s mute and internalized buildings seem located in some architecturally private realm, some place of old ruminations, which are now turning into a site informed by constructed introspection. These dark towers of Varey’s are ripe to the point of incipient decay with the old raptures of their initial promise.

5) Meteors and comets, which function like nocturnal versions of jet streams, are part of the firmament of fear beneath which Varey’s towers stand. “Jet streams in the sky,” writes Franz Fuhmann in Twenty-two Days or Half a Lifetime (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992, p.193), “they too are part of the landscape.”

6) “The Berlin Wall was a fascinating example of an arbitrary work of architecture, like Christo’s Running Fence or [Peter] Eisenman’s brutal geometry. It cut through buildings and streets and this exposed the raw nerves and charred flesh of the city more effectively, so for several decades it was the best place in the world to see the perverse effects of political conflict on ordinary lives.” Robert Harbison, Thirteen Ways: Theoretical Investigations in Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997), p.125.

7) Peter Marcuse, “Walls of Fear and Walls of Support” in Ellin, ed., op. cit., p. 104.

8) It is interesting to recall, at this point, that one of the best known projects of the visionary American architect/theorist, John Heyduk (1929-2000), was his Wall House, in which the house, except for small, inhabitable, pod-like excrescences, really was more or less two-dimensional. Heyduk’s Wall House II was finally built at Groningen, The Netherlands, in 2001.

9) Where such design-expressive moments as there are turn up merely in trim: in porticos, in timid balcony ideas (variant railings, etc.), in cosmetically tinted walls of glass, in roof treatments (variable within exceedingly narrow limits). Condo high-rises are thus only shards of architectural tokenism; such buildings are in fact, scarcely architected at all, but are rather just design-built. Amusingly, such buildings tend to bear lyrically over-compensatory names such as “Shangri-la” and “Mirage”.

10) Disparagingly referred to by Canadian intelligence officer, Milton Shulman (during an interview in a German prisoner of war camp) as “so many knots in a piece of string.” See Keith Mallory and David Ottar, The Architecture of War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), p. 178.

11) Varey’s exquisite, small plaster models of military bunkers, real and fanciful—not included in this exhibition—are powerful works, lodged in some energetic place between architecture and sculpture proper. Morphologically, they are rather like hunched, hunkered-down variants upon Malevich’s plaster Suprematist architectural models.

12) See, for example, the outlandish historical longevity of the 37 meter high, Berlin Zoo flak tower, known also as the Tiergarten Flakturme, built in 1941-2 of 190,000 tons of monolithic concrete.

13) The modern hi-rise condo is a honeycomb of compartments and activities, all of these melded together and annealed, however, by the enforced continuity—the river-like fluidity—within the complex, of the endless and texturally homogeneous continuum of the TV.

14) See Umberto Eco, Baudolino (New York: Harcourt, 2001).