Sean Scully
"Sean Scully" by Randall Anderson, Spring 2007, p. 89
In anticipation of visiting the Sean Scully exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I had a question in mind for the artist: “Sean, how can you be so boring?” When you think of a body of work like Scully’s you have to wonder how it is that he can keep on doing what appears to be an exercise in repetition. Once I entered the space and started moving from one piece to another, however, it was clear that the work was anything but boring. It was like seeing Robert Ryman’s many permutations of white, but Scully isn’t a conceptualist like Ryman. Donald Kuspit summed up Scully’s position best: “It’s very bold to be a traditionalist in a time of Pop Surrealism (e.g., Jeff Koons), visually noisy installation spectacles, neo-I-want-to-save-the-world-from-its-bad-self art (meaning the protesting artist is a good guy, a morally superior being, etc.) and, above all, that now gray cat-of-a-thousand-lives, the redundant idea of transgressive-subversive épater le bourgeois (and thus automatically ‘advanced’) art.”
Scully’s art exists in an accelerated state of stillness. He builds experience like a mason, one block at a time; and, like encountering a great wall, we come up against the work viscerally. It’s painting that situates the body, enlisting the viewer as an integral player in the process of experience. You don’t think a Scully painting, you feel it. On this trip to New York I decided, after seeing this exhibition, as well as the Brice Marden retrospective at MOMA, to forgo the Chelsea art-gallery buffet and the inevitable indigestion that follows. After an afternoon there, I usually feel robbed and somehow culpable for many crimes against art. Scully, on the other hand, gives back, and I went back to the Met the next day for more.
Scully’s colour, brush strokes, built-up layers and stacked rectilinear blocks of space bring forth a romantic poetics where feelings count. There are no inane tongue-in-cheek references or in-jokes. There’s no joke about being mortal. I’ll risk superlatives here and say that, as with Pollock, Guston and Bacon, we live and die in front of these paintings. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
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