Milt Jewell: Studio Viewing (1979)

“Milt Jewell: Studio Viewing,” Artists Review, 2:10 (February 1979), p. 7.

Milt Jewell: Studio Viewing

 Do we see some betrayal of intelligence here, in the sense of showing it? Is the painter no longer content with being “dumb like a painter” as Duchamp expressed it? And with this, are the paintings losing their “dumbness,” their apodicticity, their inability to signify except as a “sign system on a single level of articulation?” What happens when one admits the formalism of phenomenology, and the idealism of the phenomenological work that only presents itself in its specificity? One concludes that the identity relations it establishes are non-productive in the pure intentional relation of self to self in the absolute presence it promotes. Do not phenomenological works “put the world out of play” as much as “return to the things themselves?” Perhaps then we should look for the non-identical in the intentional structure of art. The non-identical is that which destroys “totalities,” except those that are peripheral, which denies identity relationships and the unity and totality of the whole. Jewell opens himself to this, although he qualifies his eccentricity (in the sense of destructuring the centre, he brings another firm structure into play). He still imposes some structure on this conjunction of fluxes, but the slippage, the break, is there. No, Jewell is still a painter, but he has contaminated the phenomenological purism of reductive systems painting in such a way that might open for him some commerce (production) of painting with the real, and not the so-called “real” of literalist art.