Mike Glier

mike gl ier

With All The Holes In You Already There’s No Reason To Define The Outside Environment As Alien*

mike gl ierWith All The Holes In You Already There’s No Reason

To Define The Outside Environment As Alien*

February 28 - March 28, 2013

24 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075 | tel 212-628-9760

With essay by David Bresl in

*Jenny Holzer. © 2013 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Imminence and Intimacy: Mike Glier’s Landscapes

In a move that we might now melancholically assess as

a rehearsal for another paired destruction, the Taliban leveled the

monumental statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley of central

Afghanistan in March of 2001. Carved into a cliff, hewn directly from

the sandstone banks with details plainly elaborated in mud mixed with

straw, the sixth century statues were constructed when this corridor

of earth was a holy Buddhist site along the Silk Road and not the

geopolitical formation now so completely associated—even if unfairly—

with war and global terror. Though we live in the wake of their end, the

ultimate destruction of the statues only came after many attempts to

vanquish this land of the faces and bodies it once wore. The Mughals,

the Persians, and an early Afghan king—all former claimants to this

place—attempted to violently efface these signs of the past well before

the Taliban. This violent reflex to render the land to a place and time as

if without touch, to return it to an impossible point of unfettered nature

that would seem as natural as the inevitability of that particular present’s

primacy, seems endemic to power or at least acts as a claim to power’s

mechanisms. Though infinitely less consequential than the devastating

loss of life suffered and the disastrous wars that the September attacks

festered, the acts of terror seven months after Bamiyan also robbed

a point of reference. The sky itself seemed sliced. I still catch myself

in Manhattan looking up to determine south. In these moments of

disturbed orientation, the control that the land—and those influencing

its form—has on me is visceral. Even in absence, in that shaft of sky torn

into another history, landscape touches every part of me.

Those nefarious alterations—in Afghanistan and Manhattan—

attempt to control by projecting a desired history, an imaginary tabula

rasa where power can be displayed. But would we be surprised if

the same were said about the history of landscape and the history

of landscape painting itself? W.J.T. Mitchell, the cultural theorist, has

written exactly that: “Landscape might be seen more profitably as

something like the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism, unfolding its own

movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding

back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected

imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence

and unsuppressed resistance.” Mitchell’s argument is structured by the

concept that landscape is not a genre of painting or anything else but

a multiply-constituted medium (stone, water, sky, vegetation, sound,

light, etc.). As such, landscape is a repository for values and meanings

that can be encoded and ascribed to it like any other medium.

But why begin this brief essay on Mike Glier’s nearly decade-

long landscape painting practice with this miserable and too familiar

history and this critique of the medium and genre he has embraced?

In a painting such as September 20, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown,

MA, 60°F, when Glier makes a circumflex of fleshy yellow-pink slope

into the sagging bottom half of a tagger’s exaggerated ‘S’ to articulate

a tree in dying bloom becoming cloud, I am far from misery. When

his DeKooning-like skeins of mustard and ochre spill into language,

or at least a remnant of script, when suggesting an early fall sky in a

motion like transcription, I am lost in knots of sensation. I begin with

disaster only to reveal it as the too obvious opposite of the pleasure

this form of looking elicits and to suggest the inextricability of misery

from pleasure—as in any dialectic—when looking at landscape. As I am

susceptible to this volatility of emotion that landscape can evoke, I am

suspect of it. Landscape seems out of my control or, perhaps, too much

under the control of others—as Mitchell suggests—who would want to

control me. And then I grow wary of joy—my own, the very possibility

of it—when I try to transpose Bamiyan or other sites of cultural or

ecological collapse over anything as transcendent as Mt. Hope.

But perhaps doubt is also implicit to Glier’s act of painting. I ascribe

transcendence to Mt. Hope, but is this what the painting really depicts?

Or does Mt. Hope function here not as dreamwork or as fact or as a

category but more simply as a proposal? Perhaps to think of Glier’s

painting as a proposal—as an act inscribed in but also losing time—is to

think of landscape in a perpetual state of imminence. Though about to

occur, it never comes. Our only responsibility is to work against an end.

It is my contention that Glier outflanks the dangers of

landscape that Mitchell associates with it by critically examining the

operations of both media at hand, landscape and painting. By doing

so, he not only reveals the precariousness of our ecological state but

suggests that embodied performances of reflection and resistance—

from painting to protest—are the only means to counter powers that

violently shape vision and the world we are left to perceive. If landscape

is in a continuous state of both being shaped and shaping behavior,

painting becomes a way to touch back, a means to model resistance to

disaster that does, as any good doctor would, no harm.

Glier has premised three of his projects on following

geographic coordinates to determine his site of production. In 2005, he

began the “Latitude” series and painted near his studio in Hoosick, New

York, the spin of the earth as it traffics the sun providing the changing

context for what would appear in paint. From Pangnirtung, Canada, to

San Cudo, Ecuador, to the island of St. John, to Manhattan—and from

June of 2007 to May of 2008—the second series, “Along a Long Line,”

took a single line of longitude as a space to cover and describe. The

latest project, “Antipodes,” finds him painting on two sites on opposite

points of the globe. Glier painted in Botswana in 2009 and in Hawaii

in 2010. Work this past year in New Zealand is to be complemented

by a still to be realized project in Spain. By establishing sites in a

Lewittian preestablished order where latitudinal and longitudinal points

are determined in advance and worked through, Glier can paint the

particularity of geographical locales but in a system that also embraces

equivalence and non-preference. No particular value is given to one

place, one vista, one tree, one sky, over another. It is, in the words

of Donald Judd, one thing after another. This practice of radical

equivalence and the embrace of a plurality of scenics and picturesques

reveal the ecological concerns that underpin the project as a totality.

In the very enumeration of paintings from a multiplicity of sites, import

isn’t accorded to the preservation and documentation of one place at

the expense of another. Glier paints the very impossibility of thinking

the existence of one place without the reciprocal vitality of the other.

If this procedural investigation of the landscape medium suggests his

demonstration of the interdependency of the ecological order (one

obviously far from an imperial one), the individual labor evident in

his interrogation of the medium of painting suggests an unflagging

commitment to personal perception and action in daily life.

If gestural painting as a historical discipline and medium

has any contemporary relevance in a world where image-making

is devoured by the digital, it is in its requirement that a body be

attached to the apparatus in the act of making a presence known.

Time is complicit with touch when Glier marks his surface, with the

transmission of perceptual data into a physical response that yields

a trace. But just as potentiality is inscribed in each act of making and

looking, so is loss. When you see the disturbances of whites and

blues in the weakened sky of October 28, 2011: Hedgerow, Mt. Hope,

Williamstown, MA, 34°F, the expected symphonic autumnal tree tones

is nearly redundant. Time also pales. The fragile body of the maker

is caught painting a dying scene with each of his marks performing

an honest, if not melancholic, double task—the act of making is

also one of encountering one’s own undoing. In this witnessing and

making, Glier establishes himself, what he sees, and the painting made

all as constructions continuously caught within a web of factors—

physical, environmental, social, political, economic—that determine

the very existence of each. Just as the radical equivalence of Glier’s

sites establishes an order that resists hierarchies of worlds (first, for

example, is no more significant that second or third worlds), his acts

of painting—between gestural and precision, between abstract and

referential—disavow stasis and the operations of power that stasis

conceals by demonstrating the enormous heave of flux and change in

each moment. The landscape, in such a schema, never is. Just like the

artist who depicts it, and the process of painting itself, it is incessantly

being made, shoved into existence, and threatened with annihilation.

The empathetic work that Glier performs in these paintings is in his

attending to these changes and insisting that landscape also creates

him. It is not a retrograde call to return to the land or to escape the

time in which we live for an imagined better one. The paintings model

a mutable world embedded in a particular historical moment when the

very future of a stable ecological order is in serious doubt. The ultimate

task is to see if change can be tipped away from collapse.

Glier functions not only as a painter and a theorist of

landscape and ecology in this practice, but he also assumes a position

that has been maligned in modernity: the storyteller. The activity of the

storyteller, as discussed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on the Russian

author Nikolai Leskov, already had lost favor at the conclusion of World

War I when the enormity of change in such a clipped period made

the communication of experience nearly impossible. This process of

alienation—from others, from political orders, from the very shape of

the land—made unadorned information the substitute for knowledge

gained through experience. The inability to access formerly shared

collective memories left vacant the role that the storyteller once

occupied. Wisdom, Benjamin suggested, now seemed old-fashioned,

even quaint. At a moment when crowd-sourcing dictates marketing

and decision-making and information is the main byproduct of the

digital empire we are subjects of, our time is also not one friendly to

the storyteller. We already know, we think. We don’t need your tedious

practical lessons gained from something so antiquated and subjective

as experience.

But such a conception of storytelling fails to understand

it as an accretive process, one formed not in isolation but in the

aggregation of voices and historical narratives, one that treats a story—

or a landscape—as a script to be worked on as a form of maintenance

and not simply rehearsed. Unlike the work of the novelist which is

done in isolation and produces a product for private consumption, the

storyteller only can function in the presence of others. The storyteller’s

activity of listening is indelibly bound to his ability to tell. When Glier

takes to the landscape both far from and close to home—and here,

unsurprisingly, he functions within both categories Benjamin describes

as the bearers of the storytelling tradition, “the trading seaman” and “the

resident tiller of the soil”—he transmits his own experiences of places

seen and shared by persons throughout time. His paintings aren’t

the recordings of the newly discovered or renderings that wring out

common references and leave us with a personal or hermetic system

of signs. Through titles, Glier places us. In his paintings, through the

hook of a limb or the sine curve of a flinty valley, we are given signposts

for places we might go. It is even more than conceivable that another

painter has been at Glier’s sites before him and has painted the same

mountain or stood under that very tree. But the issue at stake in the

act of storytelling isn’t the novelty of the event but the particularity of

the telling. It is the activity of placing one’s self in the current of what

has come before and acknowledging what has changed. The helix-

like entangling of convention and innovation avows a connection to

the collective as it demonstrates the centrality of individual acts in the

making of future shared memories. If Glier’s story ultimately is in the

contemporary tradition of the environmental protection movement that

emerged in the late 1960s and saw nature as a social movement, his

is also a story of personal intimacy and proximity. These places he has

been, that he has painted and experienced, he desperately wants for

himself as well as us.

David Bresl in

Paint ings 2010 - 2013

September 20, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 60°F

2010, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches

November 15, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 45°F

2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches. Private Collection.

December 19, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 30°F


December 31, 2010: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 36°F


February 21, 2011: Morning, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 15°F


February 21, 2011: Afternoon Birds, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 25°F


March 13, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 38°F


April, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA


May, 2011: Lilacs, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA


May 21, 2011: Lilacs, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 70°F

2011, 40 x 32 inches, oil on panel

May 23, 2011: Lilacs and Low Clouds, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 59°F


June 20, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 73°F


July 4, 2011; Petersburg NY, 78°F

2011, 40 x 50 inches, oil on panel

July 20, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 92°F


August 5, 2011: Anne McClintock Swimming, Blue Mountain Lake, NY, 78°F


August 10, 2011: Loon Fishing, Blue Mountain Lake, NY, 75°F


August 15, 2011: Morning Fog, Mergansers, Blue Mountain Lake, NY, 68°F


August 22, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 70°F

2011, oil on panel, 47 x 70 1/2 inches

October 6, 2011: The Arrival of Fall in the Berkshires, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 58°F

2011, oil on panel, 32 x 40 inches. Private Collection.

October 11, 2011: Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 62°F




October 28, 2011: Hedgerow, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 34°F

2011, oil on panel, 47 x 70 1/2 inches. Private Collection.

August 22, 2012: Dusk, Long Lake, NY, 68°F


Works on Paper

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

2011, oil on primed paper, 26 x 15 1/2 inches


2012, oiled charcoal and acrylic on paper mounted on aluminum panel, 44 1/2 x 59 7/8 inches

August 6, 2012: Birch, Hoosick, NY, 85°F

2012, oiled charcoal and acrylic on paper mounted on aluminum panel, 44 1/2 x 59 5/8 inches

June 4, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 75°F

2012, gouache, 11 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches

July 21, 2012: Money Brook, Williamstown, MA, 72°F

2012, gouache, 14 x 11 1/2 inches

August 6, 2012: Birch, Hoosick, NY, 85°F

2012, gouache, 22 1/2 x 30 inches

July 21, 2012: Money Brook, Williamstown, MA, 72°F


August 22, 2012: Long Lake, NY, 69°F

2012, gouache, 11 x 14 inches

July 20, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 72°F


August 25, 2012: Lake Utowana, NY, 82°F


August 22, 2012: Long Lake, NY, 70°F


August 22, 2012: Dusk, Long Lake, NY, 68°F


July 4, 2012: Croak, Hoosick, NY, 82°F


July 3, 2012: Call, Hoosick, NY, 80°F


August 17, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 65°F




August 2, 2012: Hedgerow, Mt. Hope, Williamstown, MA, 85°F


August 17, 2012: Hoosick, NY, 75°F





2012, gouache, 11 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches

© 2013 Mike Glier, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

For more information contact Lily Downing, Director

(212) 628-9760 or [email protected]

Documents

Mike Glier