New York Nightmare:
Arthur Robins's Expressionist Paintings
By Donald Kuspit, Copyright 1996
Who that has had experience of our social reality will doubt its alienated condition?
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity
In [the nightmare] dread reaches the maximum intensity
known, in either waking or sleeping state, so that we
should not be surprised if the source of it lies in the
region of maximum 'repression', ie of maximum conflict.
Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare
"Living is keener," said Jackson Pollock, "more demanding, more intense
and expansive than in the west,"1 and presumably the rest of the United States. But also, as Arthur Robins's paintings of New York's lower
depths -- its subway underworld -- indicate, more nightmarish. They are a
remarkable development in the history of Expressionism, and the imaging
of modern life in New York, bringing both to a kind of ironic conclusion.
For where the old German Expressionism began on a utopian
note of optimism -- it was a revolutionary "attempt to create a dynamic
transcendence which projects ...an unalienated relationship between
human beings"2 -- Robins's new American Expressionism is profoundly pessimistic: it is a startling revelation of "alienated social
reality."3 And where the imaging of modern New York began above ground, with the work of the Eight, who regarded New York as "an innocent
overgrown village, governed by natural law,"4 however much it was also, in Lewis Mumford's words, a "multi-form non-segregated environment,"5 where very different people from different worlds rubbed shoulders in lively crowds, Robins's New York is a demented, depressing city ruled by a demonic unconscious. In short, a kind of hell.
Robins's New York has been emptied of "cliff dwellers," to allude to
George Bellows's famous 1913 painting of the city, and has none of the
quaintness of John Sloan's 1922 view of it from Greenwich Village.
Instead, it is a sinister, underground dungeon -- a morbid, murky place,
as dramatic as the city itself but now the epitome of the alienation
that prevails in it, that is, the alienated relationships between human
beings inescapable in the megalopolis. By mid-century the subway had
become a symbol of alienation, as in Mark Rothko's images of it from the
early 1940s, and now, at the end of the century, in Robins's paintings,
it has become an abyss and labyrinth of alienation. There is no escape
from it: it is not the "bursting container" that Mumford thought New
York was, but rather a hermetically confining tomb. Indeed it is a
medieval, Boschian place for the emotionally tortured: it symbolizes
the depressing truth underlying the bustling life of the city. Robins's
Piranesian subway embodies all the suffering hidden beneath its
surface -- all the painful depth hidden behind its charismatic
superficiality: all New Yorkers experience, however unconsciously, a
Dantesque feeling of hopelessness when they enter the subway, and
Robins's visionary paintings of it remind them that they do not lose the
feeling when they exit from it. Robins is a fin de siecle
Expressionist, showing New York in all its fin de siecle decadence,
suggesting that the idealism with which the city began the century -- the
idealism with which the century itself began -- has come to nothing. He
tears the scab from the scarred city, and fearlessly peers into the
lower depths of its wound.
He does more: he restores Expressionism to the intimate scale and human
purpose it lost with the mural-sized Abstract Expressionism -- the scale
and purpose it had in German Expressionism. In his hands an
expressionist painting is no longer a grandiose signature, but
addresses social reality -- the same grim apocalyptic urban reality we see
in Kirchner's "Red Tower in Halle", 1915, and Ludwig Meidner's "Street
at Night in Berlin", 1913. Expressionism has always been apocalyptic,
and the apocalypse has been a prelude to resurrection, but the
apocalyptic space of Robins's subway is the grand finale of the unlived
life.
Indeed his subway performs the dance of death: it surges in frenzied, manic movement, charged with the brutal energy of the city's death wish. The tunnels and staircases of The Nine Paths of Life are as contorted as the limbs of a corpse. Robins's painterliness is more primitive -- harsh, dense, vehement - than Nolde's in his early paintings,
perhaps the most violent and crude in German Expressionism, just as
Robins's subways are more deserted -- horrifically empty -- than any street
in Halle and Berlin. Thus, Robins does not offer a reprise of
Expressionism, but carries its apocalyptic gesture and space to a new
extreme, which is appropriate to a rendering of New York, a city of
exttremes -- the apocalyptic center of world captialism, a place of
instant gratification and perennial frustration, a world that is always
on the verge of disaster and delirious wish fulfillment. In other words,
New York is a place of unresolvable contradictions, which makes it
permanently confusing and precarious. All its confusion and
precariousness seems concentrated in its subways: they are ecstatically
conspicuous in Robins's subways. It is in them that the conflict between
New York's wildly impulsive libido and death defying risk-taking plays
itself out.
What strikes me is for all the brightness of many of Robins's
paintings -- "Eternal Tunnel," 1990, is a conspicuous example - his subways are still rather grim perplexing places. It is not clear whether the
eternal tunnel goes to heaven or hell. It seems to be a kind of Jacob's
Ladder between both, but it clearly points to hell rather than heaven,
for we peer down into its abysmal space. Both the "Hell Tunnel," 1991,
and "Eternal Tunnel"--and for all its apparent difference from "Hell
Tunnel", the "Eternal Tunnel" has a similar harsh, fiery aspect, if also
lit by what seems like soft yellow sunlight--are unstable dangerous
constructions, ripe for catastrophic collapse. The wobbly staircase of
the "Hell Tunnel" and eccentric framework of the "Eternal Tunnel" offer
poor support. The coiling space of "The Nine Paths of Life," 1996, look
like viscera, and indeed there is an eviscerated feel to the empty space
of "Culture Club Tunnel," 1996, and "Under the Subway Platform," 1996 -- a particularly brilliant example of the Manichean, subliminally gnostic tension between dark and light, angle and curve, that characteristically
inform Expressionist painting. In the remarkable "Lover's Rejection",
1991, the tension becomes turbulent, the space a sea of chaotic
impulses, the conflict palpable, and in "The Tribulation", 1989, it, and
the guts of the subway -- which are the guts of the city spill out at us.
I am suggesting that Robins's paradoxical subway offers a glimpse of
the internal life of the psychosoma: the viscerality of the paintings is
a refraction, as it were, of the guts of the body -- the site of our gut
feeling. All of Robins's paintings convey gut feelings -- our innermost,
most sincere and authentic feelings, often hard to grasp, however
strongly felt, but in Robins's paintings explosively self-evident. And
their characteristic gut feeling is that of being lost -- in the subway,
in New York, in life. Perhaps nowhere is the feeling of being lost so
sensationally and clearly conveyed as in "Crossed Tracks", 1996, where
it is not clear what direction we should take. It is a contemporary
version of the age-old dilemma of Hercules at the crossroads: one tunnel is dark
the, the other enters a brightly lit station, but there is no stopping
the train whichever tunnel one takes, and whatever choice one takes
leads nowhere, that is, into the unknown. Just as Dante found himself
lost in the dark forest, Robins finds himself lost in the dark subway,
made all the more grotesque by being artificially lit. The subway is the
objective correlative of the existential feeling of being lost in life,
no matter which path one takes, indeed, the dreadful, sinking hollow
feeling of being thrown toward death however much one tries to "catch"
oneself. That is Robins's subway articulates the annihilation anxiety
that comes from recognizing the basic existential truth of life: it is a
perpetual falling toward nothingness, and there is no safety net to stop
the "free" fall. The subway's steps lead downward into inhuman
nothingness, just as Dante's forest led him into the hell of perpetual
human suffering -- the lower depths of the unconscious, where people lose
their humanity. And thus there are no people in Robins's pictures, or no
more than ciphers of people, only unconscious, instinctive forces -- only
the elemental struggle between life and death, with the conclusion of
the battle foreordained.
But it seems to me that the most telling, suggestive contrast -- the most
subtle incongruity -- in Robins's paintings of his Rimbaudian season in
subway hell is between their densely packed painterly gesture and their
looming empty space, a truly ominous void. I think the ingenious
combination of congested, claustrophobic gestures and agoraphobic space
conveys the primal wish to be securely contained in a good, warm, safe
space -- in effect a loving womb in which we can feel omnipotent -- but the
ugly hateful reality of finding ourselves traumatically expelled from it
by the uncontainable pressures or our own tense self-contrdictory
existence. Like all determined expressionist painters, Robins
acknowledges that we are fated to be traumatized by ourselves -- by our
underworld -- however much the external world seems to make us its victim.
And his "guttural" painterliness reminds us that Expressionism is the
only way of making such basic, dangerous emotional truth explicit, if we
feel compelled to. If the task of art is "through expression [to] help
raise into the consciousness diffuse and forgotten experiences without
'rationalizing' them,"6, then
Robins's urgent hyper-expression overwhelms consciousness by flooding
it with the dread New York evokes, if only in the underworld of the unconscious.
Notes
- Quoted in Maurice Tuchman, ed., The New School (London, 1969), p.38
- Stephen Eric Bonner and D. Emily Hicks, "Expressionist Painting
and the Aesthetic Dimension," Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist
Heritage, eds. Stephen Eric Bonner and Douglas Kellner (New York,
1983), p. 239.
- Lionel Trilling, Sincereity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA 1972), p. 171.
- Amy Goldin, "The Eight's Laissez Faire Revolution," Art in
America, July-Aug. 1973, p. 45.
- Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961), p. 451.
- T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), p. 82.
