I began thinking that something else was happening, and that something else had to be brought into my thinking as a social realist painter — how the hell can I bring that into my thinking as an image maker?

Arnold Mesches, “Eternal Return,” 2013, acrylic on canvas and paper on canvas. 50 x 60 in.
© Arnold Mesches. Image courtesy of the artist and Life on Mars Gallery, Bushwick.

“What was going on was an awareness of the technique of the form of art — because they stopped making images. They made art! I began thinking that something else was happening, and that something else had to be brought into my thinking as a social realist painter — how the hell can I bring that into my thinking as an image maker?”

That’s Arnold Mesches, talking with Robert C. Morgan, Irving Sandler and Michael David about the first time he laid eyes on a painting by Franz Kline. It was 1951, roughly six years after he began painting the kind of Social Realism he’d later abandon, then redefine. “It knocked me the hell over,” Arnold said, about seeing Kline’s “Chief” (1950) that first time.

What occasioned Arnold’s story: a panel—part symposium on, part celebration of his career and commitment to painterly expression of social concern, stretching back, uninterrupted, to 1945. That story, and the question that prompted it (Irving Sandler: “How do you change that Social Realist tradition, how does the whole idea of painterliness, of gesture, enter into your own painting?”), came as a kind of fulcrum moment for me, lending force to all but forgotten ideas about image, message and painterly invention. At a time when the stories told by art seem to be stories about the artwork’s own making, the conversation that afternoon (4 May) at Life on Mars Gallery, was entirely welcome. As was the chance to view, up close, new, recent or, until now, unseen paintings—the panel capping off “Eternal Return,” Life on Mars Gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition and Arnold’s 140-something. (Arnold: “Who keeps track?”) Each of those paintings felt entirely of the political moment, but achieved in its authority through touch and paint-handling, not through ideology or passing social concern. Here’s how Arnold put it, elsewhere on this site, in December 2013:

“By combining unlikely juxtapositions, both in painting techniques and disparate imagery, I have tried to re-create the sense of utter instability and sheer insanity that I feel has so often permeated my years. Instead of, as in my salad days, veering toward the overt, I have, for some years now, found myself depicting our time with a sense of unreality bordering on the more unsettling absurd.

“Absurdity, as a concept…can transcend immediate frustration by asking the viewer to question, not only what they are seeing and feeling, but, more importantly, why they are questioning their awakened uneasiness. Hopefully, the dichotomy only increases when one is seduced by the richness of the painting’s surface and the enticing vividness of color… “

Tilted Arc is grateful to Life on Mars Gallery for allowing us to record and broadcast an edited audio clip of Arnold Mesches in conversation with Robert C. Morgan, Irving Sandler and Michael David. The full tape runs just under 50 minutes. It’s well worth the listen.

Recorded at Life on Mars Gallery, Bushwick, 4 May 2014. Audio © 2014 Life on Mars Gallery. All rights reserved. Reproduction and/or distribution is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Life on Mars Gallery. For more information: info@lifeonmarsgallery.com.

— R. B., New York City, 12 May 2014

Editor’s Recs:

Read: Robert C. Morgan’s essay, Arnold Mesches: A View from the Bridge.

Read: Hunter Briathwaite’s essay, Daze of the Locust.

Read: “Arnold Mesches and Jill Ciment in conversation with Robert Storr and Phong Bui”, Brooklyn Rail, 4 March 2010.