Schweitzer in Seriation
John A. Schweitzer
November 9 to December 10 , 2006
An intertextual approach has defined the art practice
of the Montreal-based collagist, JOHN A. SCHWEITZER, RCA [Canadian;
1952 - ], for over thirty years. Since his undergraduate years at The
University of Western Ontario in London (Honours Bachelor of Arts, Visual
Arts, summa cum laude, 1974), with the painter Paterson Ewen, followed
by the graduate tutelage of multidisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel, at
York University, Toronto (Master of Fine Arts, Painting, 1978), and doctoral
studies at McGill University, Schweitzer’s singular æsthetic
focus is the paragone of text and image. With the subsequent encouragement
of American critic Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionist Robert
Motherwell (whom the artist calls his “spiritual father”),
Schweitzer has extended and subverted the modernist canon, introducing
textual referents to the medium of collage. |
| SCHWEITZER in SERIATION: IN PURSUIT of THE LINEAR and THE VERTICAL Looking at Montreal’s 6 o’clock crowd rushing about just below Schweitzer’s salon,I asked what defined him as an artist – and by extent what fed his work. Schweitzer was quick to respond, “I don’t really care about what’s out there.” He paused and smiled, “I care about what’s in here.” Seriation, a pivotal notion in the oeuvre of John A. Schweitzer, invites one to question the intent with which the artist addresses the medium of collage. Beyond the immediate cohesiveness of the works featured in this exhibition one can be puzzled by the subtle opposition of collage and seriation, as we may justly consider the rhizomatic propensity of an artwork to be an apparent contradiction to logic and order. Yet it seems important to note that the rhetoric at stake here is the manner by which the works negotiate their many layers of form and meaning within a spatio-temporal parameter. Should we care to examine the dynamics bonding subsets to ensembles, we may come to understand an essential construct, and dare we say, the occurrence of beauty – the point of it being: Schweitzer in seriation. It should come as no surprise that, as a child, he had entertained the thought of becoming a writer. Fate, it appears, had shifted the matter slightly for Schweitzer, the artist: electing a literary syntax to explicate a visual theme. Tellingly, his practice began with The Preposition Series (1974-75), The Conjunction Series (1976-77) followed by The Solfeggio Suite (1977) – serial works that, as art and architecture historian Ricardo L. Castro remarked, handled “oppositions via syntactic linguistic elements” from a “semantic perspective, at a conceptual level.” Here, Schweitzer has established a structural framework for later works with an intent much like that of a writer’s purposeful diary. Notwithstanding the fact that Schweitzer established a pattern of revisiting the literary methodology of preferred authors such as Beckett, Eliot, Goethe, Joyce and Mallarmé, the collage projects that originated with his Sunt Lacrimæ Rerum series (1991) – pace Virgil’s Æneid – would effectively summarize his mature concerns with the metaphorical sense of narrative transmuted through a modernist sieve. Subsequent series – The Pilgrimage (1997), Of Porphyry (1998), The Erehwön Cycle (1999), The Arcadian Suite (1999), Lust and Delight (2001), Fresh Kills (2003) and Benjamin’s Alphabet (2005) – adroitly broached both overt and covert stories that coexisted with found objects and literary motifs. More to the point, the artist has resolved his preoccupations in an effective way, one that critic Northrop Frye described as “linear and vertical,” in that a Schweitzer collage can be appreciated as both a visual essay and a fragment of an anthological project. “Modernism as seen from a rear-view mirror,” as Schweitzer half-jokingly claimed, best describes the æsthetic canon he has interrogated and subverted in the last two decades. There is, in this approach, a postmodern stance, be it of recycling hypertexts that are bricolaged into something new, or simply revivifying a visual archeology. Schweitzer cobbles citations from the Abstract Expressionist ethos together with the Nouveau Réaliste lexicon of de la Villéglé’s déchirures – all stemming from the formative tradition of papiers collés as articulated by Picasso, Braque and Schwitters. To deconstruct the formal sphere of the artist’s collages is to unravel both architectural and literary influences within a cosmopolitan agenda. In this sense, Schweitzer’s oeuvre, in itself, is evocative of this city and the urban experience. Salvaged literary ephemera and branded images of consumerist culture from Montreal’s cityscape are heteroclite references to the mundane reality from which art and literature is often crafted. The eight series represented here, replete with autobiographical and literary allusions, share with all of Schweitzer’s serial strategies an investigation of the typology of literature, or, more specifically, the act of “reading a picture.” Yet I suspect Schweitzer’s discourse to be inspired by loftier principles. In terms of literary and musical enjoyment, modern psychology describes the experience of æsthetic beauty as an embodiment of three modalities: the recognition, repetition and variation of specific elements; whereas seriation, according to art historian Erwin Panofsky, is predicated upon the analogous occurrence of phenomena. I am suggesting that Schweitzer’s artistic syntheses embrace at once these two very similar notions. Consider, as a parting thought, Schweitzer’s first textual collage of the 1990’s, Was mir gefällt, a German translation of “What pleases me”… The crowd eventually disappeared into the night and I turned around to see Schweitzer standing in front of one of his monumental collages, as if he had always been a part of it. Guest Curator, CLAUDINE ALBERT, M.A., a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, is involved in the international trade of modern and contemporary art. |
