Weightless
"Weightless: The art of John Heward" by Gary Michael Dault, Fall 2008, pp. 102-5
Somewhere in the open, ongoing white space of his fiercely minimalist unpublished novel on, John Heward writes, “Not th.” This is a fragment of the phrase “Not there,” and it runs like a river through this exceedingly spare book, a book of “wordings about being” that, as he wrote in the book’s haiku-brief foreword/afterword, “can be read in any direction, forward, backward, sideways, or seen as markings in space.” There is also frequent recourse to the word “circumstance,” which Heward usually cuts in half and rearranges as “stance” followed shortly thereafter by “circum.”
This word-breaking, this slippage in language, this linguistic snipping and torquing is the verbal equivalent of Heward’s visual art—his “paintings,” sculpture, graphics and photo pieces (Heward’s works hover so lightly over each discipline, they touch down so gently, so ascensionally, as it were, within each genre, that they almost always seem to require quotation marks). And like on and its 1987 predecessor, instructions, Heward’s music—a dedicated and accomplished drummer, he has spent years working with small free-jazz ensembles and engaged in sonic improvisation—is the waging of his visual art by other means (“how right you are,” he writes about Thelonious Monk in on, “that is your life/between chords/in chords/and runs./evident resolution,/apparent irresolution.…What is there is there/but not there./there but there”). There but there, for sure. Wound, unwound and rewound. “In determination claim, name, redress, repeat,” he writes in instructions, “I eyed indetermination.”
The extent to which John Heward’s work has been the ongoing product of his having so relentlessly, though gracefully, eyed indetermination was exuberantly demonstrated in the exhibition “John Heward. Un parcours/Une collection,” which opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec last March. Not strictly or exhaustively a retrospective, though clearly more than just a survey, this trajectory/collection, referred to by John R. Porter, executive director of the museum, as the 74-year-old Montreal-based artist’s first “retrospective-themed” exhibition, was the result of Heward’s donating to the museum 95 of his works produced between 1970 and 2005.
The 35-year trajectory of works in the exhibition (curated by the venerable Michel Martin) was simultaneously opulent and astringent—the two polarities around which Heward’s art has always been wound.
Although Heward, who is the nephew of the Beaver Hall painter Prudence Heward (1896–1947), was raised in a home where art was as important (and as normal) as breathing, he was, in fact, a long time coming to it himself, having worked in publishing, in the exhibition section of the National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization), as a coordinator of thematic material for the Canada pavilion at Expo 67 and then as a management consultant: until, as he tells Roald Nasgaard in an essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, “painting got to me.”
It got to him and it stayed. Though richly informed about contemporary art before he began to make any, Heward considers himself self-taught. This may have been all to the good, considering that six years into his academically unaided career, which began officially in 1964, he was already producing some quite advanced work—such as a couple of pieces made by slinging vertical lengths of semi-stretched raw-cotton canvas over two dowels. He exhibited these works as Untitled (landscape structure) and, as Nasgaard puts it in his essay (itself titled “John Heward: Diction and Contradictions”), they “show him to be increasingly favoring thingness and materiality over the depictive function of painting.” From this early point on, Heward would eschew formal rigidities of all kinds—canvases on stretchers, for example—in favour of a sort of inspired flaccidity of form, a vigorous passiveness according to which his “paintings” (his self-portraits, his edge paintings, his forming paintings, his tarpaulin-like or drop cloth–like abstractions and his small, purse-like clamps) would attain their exhibitable form (which was often not their “final” form) by virtue of having been pinned, tied, draped and clamped into place. As Nasgaard notes, “Not entirely in jest, Heward, while discussing with the curators the installation of this exhibition in Quebec, proposed to toss all the works in a bundle in the middle of the gallery and allow visitors to pull out individual pieces one by one, lift them up, hold them out and hang them, drop them again, determining along with each work the structure and quality of the encounter, in effect making their own multiple individual exhibitions.”
Certainly Heward is a virtuoso of the informe. I remember being in his studio a couple of years ago and quickly finding myself drifting on a fecund sea of Heward’s rayons, which were hung in huge closets like suits of clothes or, more frequently, spread languidly on the studio floor like lengths of drying kelp. At one point my wife ended up wearing one—a chic fall of white rayon (with black markings) tumbling from her shoulders and gathering on the floor like seafoam.
Heward is a mark-maker. But although the marks he makes on his unstretched canvases—or, more often, on his preferred sheetsof rayon (lustrous, heavily woven, ripped, frayed)—are undeniably exquisite (see, for example, the handsome black T-shapes catalytically invigorating the grey-and-white tumbles of fabric in his Untitled (abstraction), from 1989–90), he is not a calligrapher. Calligraphy, as rapid and deliciously dripped and frayed as its markings are, brings with it a vast and fragrantly felt cultural history within which the practitioner contends with the medium, willingly entering into some flowery combat with tradition.
Heward works the opposite way: his handmade additions to his “paintings”—the neatly superimposed lozenges of colour of the edge works, the runic configurations riding next to the smears and hectic graphic abuse visited upon his abstractions, the spontaneous swipes and stainings of his exquisite little clamps—are all pictorial core samples used to test the densities and atmospheres of the present. Their purpose is not to honour the gestural past, but to free him from it, to release him from tradition, to hurl him—mindlessly, as it were—into a perpetual present (Heward once told me he thought of his markings as“gestures of being”).
But just as he has always admired the gestural agon that is the stuff of Abstract Expressionist painting, for example (Heward tells Nasgaard he has always been moved by the “seizure of energy” enacted by the classic mid-20th-century painters), he also continues to honour the searching directness of calligraphy, perpetually partaking of what Henri Michaux, writing in Ideograms in China (a book Heward knows well), refers to as calligraphy’s embodiment of “the grace of its own impatience.” Calligraphy, says Michaux, represents an “Ascesis of the immediate, of the lightning bolt.” Heward and I were talking about calligraphy recently. “I think what I do,” he suggests, “might best be described as subliminal calligraphy.”
Heward’s oeuvre is large and complex and there is much to enjoy and to understand within it—his performance photographs, his painted photographs, his maddeningly beautiful little clamp works, his distressed and stapled books, his etchings—and not enough space here in which to discuss all of it. It does seem necessary, however, to take a moment to acknowledge the not-inconsiderable achievement of his exceedingly forceful metal sculptures. While it is true that all of Heward’s work is arguably as sculptural as it is painterly, there has, since the mid-1980s, been a series of small, solid, dense floor works that gather to themselves, centripetally, a remarkably powerful streaming of collected energies—works that are as black-hole absorptive as his rayons and other fabric works are ethereal and discursive, fluid and capable of perpetual shape-shifting.
These tight, heavy sculptures—as gnarled as fists and as irreducible as hockey pucks—are made of iron, having been cast from found wooden models (industrial spacers) or, alternatively, carved from Styrofoam and subsequently cast, as well, in iron. Some of them are doughnut-shaped rings. Others are blunted, abject, shard-like things so unheralded in shape and so unlikely as detachable gestalts as to be initially overlooked in any high-art milieu. And yet, while compact and heavy, these robust little sculptures are nevertheless buoyant with paradox: the curiously unbearable lightness of their being—and here they align themselves with the rest of Heward’s work—can be traced to their possessing what might be termed a calligraphy of surface: bits of painting, passages of permissible (even encouraged) rusting, the scars of cutting, the mysteries of abrasion and splashings with ink or acid, all of which serve to loosen the sculptures’ hold on the earth and allow them to float as a kind of parsing that imbues them with meditative liftoff.
These little sculptures—compared to the more obvious lightness and levitation characteristic of the rest of his work—are the nouns of John Heward’s lexicon. But then, as Ernst Fenollosa noted so cogently in his Ezra Pound–translated The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1936), “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. There are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract notion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one…” John Heward’s eye certainly does.
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