Absence

Last offices, the process of washing a recently deceased body and preparing it for burial, is an intensely intimate ritual that has been practiced for millennia. Ancient Egyptians would carefully wash a body before removing the organs and placing them in canopic jars. The body was then wrapped in linen and prepared for mummification. Tahara is the Jewish ritual in which a body is cleansed and prayers are recited by religious leaders and sometimes family members. These end of life body washing rituals are preceded by baptism ceremonies where a baby is washed and then welcomed into a Christian church by their minister and family. These processes of cleansing, which are practiced by the world’s religions, mark important moments of transition for a person, a fresh start, whether it’s at the beginning of their life or when they are departing into the hereafter.

James Holmberg has been interested in depicting transformations and processes of change in his artwork at the same time that his work has gone through its own formal and conceptual evolution. In previous exhibitions he’s created beautiful transitions in his paintings that include ridiculously smooth gradients of color, light and dark, openings and closing, and bodies in motion that move slowly up and down. Forever, his exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, brought many of these interests together, elegantly and ambitiously, in a new series of paintings and what was his largest site-specific installation to date. In the same way that Forever peeled back the skin of the gallery wall to look deeper into the structure of the museum and institutions of display, Holmberg brings a similar interpretive action to bear on his study of the human body. Since he uses his whole body to make these pieces he has focused on how the body goes through transitions, from sickness and health, youth to old age, life to death.

Each of the five canvases in James Holmberg’s painting exhibition, Absence, goes through three distinct phases. First, he paints the surface of each canvas covered panel with oil paint using brushes and his bare hands. Holmberg has an adventurous palette, with colors ranging from deep earth tones to Day-Glo neons to Easter egg pastels. Second, when the composition gets to a place he considers ‘finished’ the layers of paint are scraped off with a skimming blade knife. Third, the canvas is then washed clean with mineral spirits and cloths, leaving faded but distinct traces of color. Most of the paint comes off but plenty of pigment bleeds into the canvas leaving behind beautifully stubborn stains. After the canvas is dry the process begins again: paint, scrape, wash. The surface of the painting bears multiple layers of color. The canvases have been painted then cleaned 12 times, each iteration marked with a fingerprint on the right side of the panel. The paintings are there for you to see but since his process is so intricate there is still a suspension of disbelief: you have to trust that Holmberg did the work and that he hasn’t contrived the effort. Nonetheless, they’re fascinating contradictions; Holmberg’s paintings are heavy with process and content yet what you see on the walls are veiled abstractions; they’re full of temporal gravity but have only a minimal color palette. It’s not easy to keep these oppositional forces in play but this is something Holmberg has been developing for years.

What is new about this work are some of the questions that Holmberg has started to ask himself, such as, “What is the beginning of the work?” Even though his collectors and audiences have always been drawn to the intricacies of his process Holmberg hasn’t revealed just how physical his studio practice is. During our conversations about the work he talked about Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint pieces from the 1990s. Like Barney, Holmberg has created a deceptively simple task of making marks within a set of self-imposed physical restraints. Holmberg’s studio practice is an intensely physical and active process. The barriers he sets for himself, both real or imagined, physical as well as mental, are generative the same way that muscles respond to exercise. Resistance produces growth. The reward for both Barney and Holmberg’s efforts, albeit in very different ways, is a renewed appreciation of art and art making as a physical performance. 

Tamra Ober, a dancer and choreographer, has talked extensively about the physicality in Holmberg’s work. During studio visits to see the works in progress she immediately picked up on the momentum and movement in the paintings. Since Absences put an additional layer of scrutiny on his work and process, she said, “Process matters. But for an artist to reveal their process is really complicated. You want the process to be as crafted as the work. You have to preserve the magic of what you’ve created and how you created it.” Even though Holmberg has put his studio practice and the final paintings on equal terms, he’s still careful about what is being revealed and shared. He has said, “There’s a lot there in the videos and app and, of course, you can see the painting on display. But the paintings aren’t done. They’re endless.”

Katie Uphus, a death doula who cares for people who are in the final stages of their lives, has been an important contributor to Absences too. Holmberg and Uphus connected over their shared interest in historical preservation and how objects become building blocks of community. Many of her patients are suffering from different stages of memory loss so she has provided invaluable input to Holmberg’s interest in how each painting recalls different stages in its life. During a zoom call, this summer Uphus shared an intensely personal story that also connected with important life transitions. Uphus’s mother suffers from dementia. She has watched, helplessly, as memories and recollections of her formative moments have vanished, never to be recovered again. In spite of guiding patients through this process, it was that much more difficult to see it happening to her mother. Yet Uphus talked about the process as a gift rather than a slow motion curse. Uphus described her mother as someone who maintained her roles in relation to others, such as being a wife and mother but also her identification with religion and political beliefs. Dementia has wiped away all of those adopted identities and her true nature appears to be revealing itself. And as the defenses and barriers have withered away she saw her mother’s innocence being uncovered, unburdened from the past,  joyful and full of laughter. She said, “Life piles on all these false identities, delusions and deceptions, and dementia lifts that right off, exposing something utterly essential - pre-verbal - a soul perhaps. That’s scary as hell from one perspective, unbelievably gorgeous from another.” Holmberg took this story to heart just as he was beginning work on the exhibition, integrating the idea of reductive additions into his studio practice. It’s one of those contradictions he’s so fond of but it’s also one of those transformative moments that are so important to his work as an artist.

Holmberg has been thinking about memory for most of his career and a lot of it can be connected to some foundations of psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s famous essay “A Note on the Upon ‘The Mystic Writing Pad’” (1925). It describes how a children’s toy provides a remarkable discourse on human memory, therefore how behavior can be predicted. It goes like this: The Mystic Writing Pad was a slab of dark resin covered with a sheet of wax paper. A stylus was used to draw shapes or write cuss words. Images and letters were quickly erased by simply lifting the wax paper. What was written was erased forever, or so it was presumed. The crux of Freud’s essay is that, in fact, nothing is completely erased. Instead, "The permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights." This is why the toy is so important: The Mystic Pad becomes a form of memory whereby nothing is permanently erased. What has been written, or what has happened, continues to imprint itself on an infinite number of present moments. It’s also an accretion of what happened before, “permanent traces,” so in a way taking on the sense of a personality. Holmberg’s work is a constant repetition of peeling back that protective waxed surface to reveal the dark yet soft resin beneath, how it has been imprinted and scarred. But like Freud’s traces, Holmberg’s canvases are only a piece of what was. It may be significant or it may be inconsequential since what remains is only a trace of what was. 

When Freud’s essay first appeared it was a novel use of recent technological innovations to illustrate his theories of behavior and personality. The essay still casts a long shadow, especially when studying our contemporary reliance on tablets, screens, and internet browser search histories. It’s in that same spirit of embracing technology that Holmberg made a major innovation with his work. Breaking down the barrier between analog and digital technology is a maneuver he is continuing to refine. When visitors came to Kolman & Pryor Gallery to see Absence they were instructed how to use their smartphones to access a completely new layer of the work. Essentially, all of the images are floating around the gallery so when you download the Absence app on your device, the successive layers of paintings that were painted can be seen on your screen. The images find you through a Bluetooth beacon in front of each painting that connects to the app on your phone. There are 12 layers of paint so there are 12 images accompanying images to be seen. When you zoom in on an image it’s easy to see that very little of each iteration was left behind but it is possible to see some color contours from some of the largest fields of color remain in the final piece. Like the writing pad, the core of the Absence paintings is a sense of loss; a loss of life as each painting is scraped off the canvas then washed away and ready to be covered again.

How the app integrates with the paintings is important for a few reasons. First, Holmberg is fortifying each of the works with additional content so that visitors can see that, in spite of the delicately spare compositions, the paintings are in fact massive accretions of layered data that has been captured for viewers to access. Obviously, this extra content isn’t physically connected to the piece but it is connected to the work like embedded digital media. Holmberg goes back to Lucio Fontana famous Spatial Concept paintings (1958 - 1968) when talking about this facet of his work. Fontana would slash the surface of his mono-chromatic canvases, revealing a murky meaning-filled depth beneath the surface. For Holmberg, “The phone is like a razor blade that cuts the air. Once it’s exposed you can get all of that invisible data that is right next to you.”

Secondly, this very complex technological gesture is another means for Holmberg to share his process. Again, it’s not something many artists are willing to do and as Tamara Ober cautioned above, it’s not something that should be taken lightly either. “This process totally liberates me. What I wanted to show is that the painting is the byproduct of an experience, of my relationship with the canvas as I worked on it for hours and hours.” Holmberg explained. He filmed hundreds of hours of studio time in preparation for the exhibition. And in doing so, Holmberg is feeling more freedom with the process but he has also found new ways for the app’s creative potential to be leveraged by other artists as well. The genius of the project is that Holmberg’s app works like the others apps we are already using to consume and participate in contemporary culture. Although, one could argue that more happens on our screens than in real life. The mediation of the event is more interesting than the thing itself.

When you watch Holmberg’s studio videos you’ll see that the process is very gestural. It’s very different than the ultra-fine gradients and hard edge paintings that he’s known for. Here, he’s scratching and clawing on the canvas, making deep marks in the pigment. He’s thinking with his hands and, sometimes, painting with his eyes closed too. As this part of his work transitions closer and closer to performance art, what the canvases reveal are the ‘remains’ of what Holmberg has done.

One of the central topics we returned to during our conversations was the value of images. Not just the price of a work but what components of artwork are the most valuable for making, containing and transmitting meaning. With Absence, more so than in any of his other works, Holmberg is pushing the limits of what viewers can see in the canvas and, therefore, making it harder to discern what he has done with the work. Many artists continue to push the conceptual limits of authorship and attributable mark making, especially how their artworks exist as ideas rather than a document of what an artist has done. Holmberg is performing a similar conceptual maneuver but he hasn’t left viewers with an empty space where color and brushstrokes should be. Quite the opposite. Instead of asking viewers to suspend their disbelief and trust his process (both the labor and final artwork) he has created a digital archive for each canvas that can be accessed with a mobile device. Unlocking them using the Bluetooth beacon gives some clues to the additive-reductive process each painting has gone through. In order to avoid turning his process into kitsch, he used this digital process to open up new realms for how content is shared and, very importantly, how it substantiates the works visitors see in the gallery. And it does so while keeping the original artwork intact.

Edith Garcia, professor of art at UC Berkeley, understands, better than anyone, how Holmberg’s artistic practice and conceptual frameworks have evolved over the past 20 years. She has seen, through their friendship and collaborations, how he has become more open to the fluid exchange of concepts with other individuals about his work, and the implementation of those open discussions throughout his works and exhibitions. Garcia and I talked a lot about the creative coefficient in relation to Absence. It’s a concept that was first presented by Marcel Duchamp, in a famous paper called The Creative Act (1957). He sets up the creative act, whereby:

 […] the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. [Their] struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.

What this formulation makes possible are the tools to appreciate artwork on its own terms, despite the artist’s intentions. What we see does not belong to their creative intentions alone. If the work is not a pure realization of an artist’s intention a gap opens in which audiences can insert their responses and appreciate the creative dissociations that art produces. But, and this is the important part for our conversation about Holmberg’s work, is Duchamp’s famous conclusion, “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.” Holmberg has always talked about himself as a vehicle for the work, the performer as well as a spectator to what is happening on the canvas. Even though he has set up the creative parameters for this project, the works in Absence take on lives of their own. They move through a series of disruptive transitions and cleansing fresh starts, remembering as they go. 

James Holmberg: Absence. Kolman & Pryor Gallery. September 11 - October 31, 2021.