By the ninth room of Ocean Park paintings, drawings and prints “Isn’t that lovely?” had been replaced by “Right, right, right.” The pleasure of being transported had been supplanted by the pleasure of recognition. The visual beauty—ravishing and august as it is—becomes just one aspect of a much larger adventure: an inquiry into a mood, which is to say, an inquiry into reality.
What the work does not do is attempt to scandalize, provoke, satirize or instruct. It is not theatrical and never a proclamation. It doesn’t shout or argue. Visual pleasure is never lacking, but it is a philosophical hedonism that can never be mistaken for fun.
Seeing the works together emphasizes their character as a journal. With discipline and patience, Diebenkorn began each day afresh: Where am I now? What next? Each journal entry is in the same vein, with the same vocabulary. Start with a rectangle, divide it into bands and boxes, pause, reflect, begin again.
The works inhabit a distinct mood, something too ordinary and too powerful to have a simple name. Call it the trepidation and hope of first looking out at the morning. Elements include intense introspection, extreme self-doubt, un-judgmental curiosity, a tendency towards refinement, but, at the same time, a tendency to accept whatever happens.
It’s not clear what the pictures “are.” Diebenkorn denied that they were landscapes—which should be kept in mind when people go on about the border of Santa Monica and Venice where he made the work. His pictures don’t provide any information or anecdotes. The “light” that everyone talks about could be that of any Mediterranean-climate beach town in the world. He was too fastidious to tie himself down to “capturing the spirit of a place.” He was creating, not reporting.
But he didn’t create in a void. Diebenkorn drew from life and made representational throughout his career. He was not a doctrinaire abstractionist: he didn’t bother about the categories. Probably nothing in his work is totally abstract or totally representational. Abstraction, for him, wasn’t a goal, but where his intense looking and reflecting often ended. I suspect that with the Ocean Park pictures, there was often some subject matter, but it dissolved under scrutiny, as Picasso and Braque dissolved their sitters into shimmering hermetic cubist canvases.
The OCMA exhibit begins with a little gouache from 1969 that is a straightforward landscape: a vista of rooftops and palm trees with a strip of ocean in the distance, blank bare walls appearing as bands on top and bottom of the rectangle.
It is not a key, and does not explain the subsequent work; but it states a theme to be elaborated in variations. And these variations don’t reject associations: the bare expanses of smudged pastel can recall certain dirty, faded stucco walls, and the crisp green rectangles can recall certain crisp green rectangular parks, and the rough grids can read like street plans or circuit boards, ….
But the more time I spent with these pictures, the more I felt they were less concerned with place than with time.
In the first place, the pictures often seem to register a specific time of day: a fogged in morning, the brilliant saturated colors of mid-day, the onset of evening casting all into shadow.
In the second place, the pictures seem to register the time spent looking, the time spent making.
The works are not realizations of a design, but documents of the struggle to design. Every surface is a palimpsest, bearing traces of an extended history of trials, false starts, second thoughts. Order and balance are achieved, but in a way that suggests that they are only provisional, only for the time being. The sturdy, straightforward structure derived “rationally” from divisions of the rectangle will be erased by the next wave, a few more year’s of sunlight.
[Image: Ocean Park goauche #13, 1983]
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