+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
n+1 is a twice-yearly print journal. n+1 posts new, web-only material once or twice a week.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
You have never heard of Marvin Gates. But then, few people have. He is that art world myth: a painter who develops in hiding and emerges late, fully formed. I first met him in my studio in Boston, where he told me, after observing that I was the kind of person he would enjoy talking to at a cocktail party, that when it came to painting I should just "tack my balls to the wall and face ridicule." His shirt was buttoned to the top button.
In graduate school, Gates was known for engineering pulley systems to make paintings too big for the gallery space (they scrolled down onto the floor), and basically not acting like any kind of student. Upon receiving his MFA, he said he had "some questions." He spent the next decade asking them, and they resulted in a group of pictures now on display at the Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City.
The four pictures that constitute the centerpiece of the show are identical in size and tell a single story, so Gates considers them one piece. He spent a year on each, and told me that one of his questions is why he would do such a particular thing over such a long period of time. When you see the paintings (we'll bring you one each day this week; click here for The Blue Bag, Head of the Driver, and Forwards), it becomes pretty clear. They are keen, fierce, and strange—and clearly a labor of love.
—DP
July 13th, 2006
+ + +
As the species of the same genus usually have, though by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct genera.
—Charles Darwin
A Donald Duck head. A miniature windmill. Some patterned cloth. Three rats sniff around the cage. I can't tell if the Environmentally Complex cage affects their mood. I laugh. There is no illustration for Isolated Cage. I don't need one. EC rats have heavier brains than IC rats. EC rats have higher dendritic fields than IC rats. Living in Environmental Complexity seems to make a rat smarter.
I wonder if there exists a complexity threshold, a point after which the accumulation and compounding of visual stimuli overburden the visual cortex. The brain cries uncle.
+ + +
All but a handful of stray citizens have given up on the City in On Things to Come. No buses, no dogs, no jackhammers, no hustle, no cramps, no squeezes. It is silent, Gates cranked the volume down. The voluminous space punishes every one in his separateness. A sewer king—a subterranean game piece—surveys the scene from his hole. A majorette, half-shaded, stands idly. She waits for a bus, for the light to change, for a sound. A street vendor sells nothing to nobody. Off on the horizon's edge, isolated against the white infinite where the painting ends, an old man hobbles to his conclusion.
Volume, from volumen, meaning a scroll, hence a book written on a parchment. The past participle of volvere, to roll. Evolved: literally, rolled out, like a carpet. Evolution is a disclosure. In the iconic poster a parade of hominids, from homo habilis to homo erectus to homo sapiens, marches across a long stretch of time. The story ends with bipedal man walking off the page. Walk, traced back through its Middle and Old English roots walken and wealcan, finds its etymological ancestor to be volvere.
His work done, Death hangs up his running shoes, lays his briefcase to rest, slips on spandex shorts and a yellow jersey, and rides a cab home. His legs hurt. He plays tired. Twirling a baton, he looks down the asphalt stretch from whence he came, back that way, over there.
We forget to survive. We have forgotten to survive. We have survived by forgetting.
+ + +
