Activity

The title “Activity” operates on several levels. On the straightforwardly perceptual level, these works are intended to present the viewer, in the words of Michael Fehr, with “…an indissoluble thicket in which the eye becomes entangled and perception may become an…intense experience of seeing.” [Catalogue essay, “Indeterminable Painting; Thoughts on the Work of Robert Sagerman,” Munich 2006; p. 12.]

The word “activity” in this regard refers to the opticality of the work; I seek to lead the eye around a surface charged with an emphatic materiality and with often vibrant color interactions. On another level, the word “activity” refers specifically to the practice of making these works. This activity is not properly encapsulated fully in the term “painting.” Certainly, the works qualify as paintings; they are comprised of oil paint on canvas, and they clearly partake of the venerable tradition of abstract field painting. But the repetitive (and sometimes laborious) activity of their making is meditational in nature.

At some point it becomes disengaged from the traditional formalistic concerns of painting; the work simply grows, incrementally, and seemingly at its own pace. The sense in which I refer to the work as “meditational” relates to the analogy that I am inclined to make with medieval Jewish meditational practices, the subject of my current doctoral pursuit.
On the one hand, the objectives pursued by the mystics with which I am concerned and my own run parallel. It is the encounter with the ordinarily imperceptible and immaterial substratum of everyday reality that interests me. The accretion of sometimes vibrantly sensual material as a method for such an objective is paradoxical but appropriate, for the material itself may ultimately be subsumed in the immateriality of the field that it constitutes. In this way, I work to thwart the material nature of the substance with which I work, to make a lie of this exaggerated sensuality.

On the other hand, the analogy to some medieval Jewish mystics relates in one final way to the term “activity.” The kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, the subject of my doctoral dissertation, pursued the mystical encounter with the so-called Active Intellect. This terminology Abulafia adapted loosely from Aristotle, who coined the term Active Intellect to indicate that feature of the divine realm from which humanity’s intellectual capacities derived and through which one might return to a state of communion with the divine. Abulafia’s method of pursuing this mystical return to the divine centered around operations referred to as “letter permutations.” The numerical values of Hebrew letters served as the basis through which, by a ritualized and methodical practice of ceaselessly combining and recombining these letters, they themselves could be returned to their originary nature as divine numerations.

My work activity in its purest form centers ultimately for me around the counting of each stroke for each color that comprises each painting. For me, the numbers themselves are the most direct expression of my work activity; it is they that suggest the immaterial essence of the work. The extent to which such an immaterial reality is objectively real, as against its status as a subjective projection, is one over which I puzzle.

In the experience of the kabbalist Abulafia, the encounter with the Active Intellect manifested as a dialog in which the divine entity stood before the mystic and imparted otherwise inaccessible insights into Scripture, insights whose objective truthfulness suggested clearly an encounter with a bonafide transcendent reality. Yet objectivity and subjectivity merged for Abulafia, as he reports that the Active Intellect that appeared before him is none other than he himself, his mirror image. It is this quality to Abulafia’s experience that perhaps most intrigues me, as I recognize the artwork that is the product of my activity as simultaneously both a self-projection and a conduit.