Decreation: Critical Notes on Ruben Pang’s Sutures of Infinite Laughter
i.
In March 2018, I composed poems for Ruben Pang’s Halogen Lung, an exhibition of paintings held in Lugano. I wrote one poem for each painting. Unbeknownst to me Ruben inscribed each poem on the back of their corresponding image. From that point forward I have accused Ruben of having a sense of humor.
Prior to Lugano, I accepted Ruben’s invitation to work on painting and music in his “Tuas studio.” At the time I was completing a lengthy study of the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) whose high regard for painting was on my mind. Yet it wasn’t until I sat down to prepare this text that I had time to reexamine Stevens’s prose “Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. There writes Stevens
“I suppose … it would be possible to study poetry by studying painting or that one could become a painter after one had become a poet, not to speak of carrying on in both métiers at once, with the economy of genius”
Only by an “economy of genius” could one take-up painting and poetry simultaneously. Stevens’s example was William Blake (1757-1827). In Blake’s paintings there are convincing parallels to Pang’s images. Setting aside an analysis, I wish to emphasize what it means, at least to me, when a painter inscribes poems on the back of his paintings. It evokes what Stevens considered
“The poetry of humanity … to be found everywhere … a universal poetry … reflected in everything.”
Despite the fact that arts are differentiated by technical skill and industry, it is painting and poetry which resemble each other most. Thus, a universal poetry regards an elusive form which binds them together. The painter’s use of poetry is a strong move. If we know in order to be a good artist, a painter must study painting, we also know a good writer must read. What is often not found is a painter who engenders his technē by an economy of genius. For Ruben Pang this is exampled by his simultaneous practice of painting, recording and production of music, and sculpture. If Pang’s recent exhibition in Singapore, The Instrument Possessed (2019) revealed traits of such an economy, the works collected for Sutures of Infinite Laughter marks an arrival.
This artist, whose works for the current exhibition I have watched come into existence, whose growth I have had the pleasure to experience, offers something vital and necessary. Ruben Pang’s instinctive regard for poetry offers a critique in terms of the industry in which he works but equally in regard to our troubled times.
ii.
To make the case, I refer back to the opening paragraphs of “Relations Between Poetry and Painting.” There Stevens reminds us it was French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) who established a fundamental rethinking of painting and poetry. Furthermore, it was Baudelaire’s critical prose that renovated the concept of critic and criticism in terms of “modernity.” It begins with his Salon de 1846 when the young poet declares critics should not be impartial, dispassionate, or apolitical. Criticism should be “amusing” and “the account of a picture may well be a sonnet or elegy”. Art criticism should be poetry.
Humor is not entirely synonymous with amusing. A painter who selects poetry to have his painting’s back, literally and figuratively, could be considered funny or foolish. The thing is, I am not sure either Ruben or myself understood what it meant to compose verse as an account of his images. Moreover, I wonder if we understood what it meant when a painter’s hand inscribes a poet’s verse in this way. That is my first point which is particular to the exhibition’s title Sutures of Infinite Laughter.
To my second point: Pang has potentially improved Baudelaire’s concept of poetry as art criticism. I refer to Baudelaire’s critical prose of the early 1860’s “Richard Wagner and Tannerhäuser in Paris” which lauds the force and power of music while serving rebuke to an overly dry, institutional criticism. Says Baudelaire
“To find a critic turning into a poet would be an entirely new event in the history of the arts, a reversal of all the physical laws, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets naturally and fatally become critics.”
In other words, poets who become critics are superior to critics who had never been poets. Baudelaire’s claim reads in stride with Stevens’s maxim “poets are born, not made.” And Stevens, like Baudelaire, was skeptical about industries which form around the arts, including academia. Both view poetry as a general, universal sensibility which facilitates the simultaneous practice of disciplined arts. It is the hallmark of a great artist.
iii.
Sooner or later an artist must deal with criticism. They may come to understand criticism as a consequence of their drive, desire, revelations, and existential crises. Indeed, it concerns the commerce surrounding their works. For Baudelaire to become a critic meant to face what is not only natural, but fatal. One shall inevitably face
“a spiritual crisis … when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation.”
When it comes to poetry there is a logic, albeit arcane. Because it is so, poetry protects creative precepts from a paradoxical desire for a final, if not total resolution. Poetry protects the destruction of art from ourselves and others by circumventing the reduction of formative strength to nothingness.
In other words when Ruben critically situates his art by a poet’s verse, he uses a reasoning which is not his own. This weirdly improves Baudelaire’s poet forced to reason about him or herself. Ruben’s act evokes a maxim known to high theory: Poetry guards the work by ensuring precepts remain unresolved. The act guards against internal, spiritual crises brought by an external, critical apparatus. Internal and external criticism comes on the painter’s terms which are contrary to finality or total resolution. If this artist thwarts an institutional machinery the act also concerns, whether he is conscious of it or not, a relationship with his creations. It means to fight “spiritual enemies” both internal and external, thus the work pushes back the destruction of meaning-making art facilitates. This is why Ruben Pang is a critic whose stance seems to improve Baudelaire’s. That is the first of two points.
The second point concerns contemporary meaninglessness. Our life is increasingly characterized by technical automation or a constant, invasive augmentation of personal and planetary creativity. Technicity has renovated common sense, just as modernity was characterized by technologies which brought about industrialization, urbanization, and the fragmentation of the family along with long held communal values. A contemporary illustration would be ‘death-by-selfie’. Specifically, the recent spate of hikers who accidentally fall to death when taking their pictures against a vast chasm, mountain summit, or waterfall. Death comes by a desire to reflect our image into a world machinery. This desire is excited by a machinery which seemingly masters creative drive. Users of social media constantly actualize creative force into a content. This desire is not only creatively metabolic. To belong to the world-image means a full definition, if not mortal resolution. Death means we cede the ability to make and form. There will be no more selfies to take, only the desiccated content of a former life.
We abide by common sense but rarely question it. Historically, art has been thought to rupture common sense. We sense and feel its form, the force of a deeper appeal, and carry this strength with us. Yet death-by-selfie illustrates common sense has been transformed. Common sense seems tuned more to defining if not resolving our lives. If it is by and for technological sense that we increasingly live shall art be able to rupture its claim? The challenge in terms of how I assess Ruben Pang’s work is not only in regard to pristine technique, mastery, and strong study. This painter resolves his work, without doubt. But his use of poetry critiques this technological claim on common sense. Precisely because it is contrary to his innate disposition of resolving his works, the development of an economy of genius, and artistic mastery.
Thus, I am compelled to ask what, if any responsibility would this painter-critic, have? For one, Ruben’s work is not compatible with Baudelaire’s modernité. Pang’s images concern an inner life of the mind, not the vacuous subtleties of an urban life a painting would otherwise document. Conversely, the pressure of the exterior world, its ever increasing and amplifying force, may have situated his gaze entirely inward. Thus, a fleeting or ephemeral scene is left to us, and this painter documents the flames of his dreams.
Yet I think it appropriate to claim Pang’s works exemplar of poetic-painting. This accords to Baudelaire’s later prose “The Painter of Modern Life” specifically “Mnemonic Art” where he remarks of “barbarism” or “an inevitable, synthetic, childlike barbarousness … which comes from a need to see things broadly and to consider them above all in their total effect.” Baudelaire remarks of fatal assumption assigned to painters and poets, one which is also reflected by Stevens.
Yet Pang’s images are not demanding of the imagination. They are not draining for trained or untrained eyes. They resist contemporary realism and hyper self-awareness. Pang’s lines are delicate and swift, they respect abstraction by celebrating the rush of imaginative flight with precision. Often, I have watched him against these giant surfaces, as if diving into a liquid. Sometimes his hands are smashed into the surface, other times as if an eyelash, swift, soft. If missing features of the world ‘out there,’ this work is not a translation of external life. You are not tasked to see abstract batik, naked breasts, or cultural litter. One ventures to tour the mind.
iv.
By a final critical note Ruben Pang’s work utilizes “decreation”. In other words, decreation is a strategic feature of Pang’s critique and the work’s aesthetic qualities. In “Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” Stevens briefly remarks of Simone Weil’s concept
“She says decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness.”
By poetry, Pang’s work decreates itself, warding off destruction. Poetry concerns a form which all technically disciplined arts spawn. The final form of all the arts is this undefinable form. And because poetry is the least technical of arts it resists final conceptualization, as Hegel discovered, to his dismay. It has no definition, which is something of a definition. We know of it, yet cannot capture it. For Stevens this portends, without doubt, the faculty of imagination. In other words, the form of poetry guards human technē, it does not fully exhibit it, which is why imagination has the force and appeal that it does.
Conversely an economy of genius runs a serious if not fatal risk for an artist who lives. This risk is particular to decreation, says Stevens
“Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that … truth is the final resolution of everything. Poets and painters alike … make that assumption.”
If the artist or poet does not give regard to his or her absolute tendencies, this assumption can be fatal. If this artist guards himself from destruction by decreative tactics, they need check their rapacious insistence on resolution. That is itself something of a truth. Yet infinity is a concept, not a reality. The artist must decreate themselves in order to ethically practice their great potency.
Pang’s work stands against the junk of cultural milieu typically heaped on the artist. It comes to this: the artist presents and that is it. By the work’s creative engine, we nourish our mental vitality. Persons seek to possess such work in order to nourish their lives. Yet artists, like the rest of us, face a world driving backward into nationalism and ethnocentrism, a world lurching closer to governance by automation. Artists, like the rest of us, face the same claim on our imaginative faculty. And it shall be the poet within him or her, that will critique irrationalities of the day.