by William Hull
When we find an art operating on those higher levels of abstraction where, in the process of evaluation, structurally kaleidoscoping sense-memories organize prophecy; when we find paintings employing symbols to suggest, not by definition but by extension, meanings too complex for precise statement; it is wise to dismiss tried but woefully weary “isms” and search for fresh verbal directives. These paintings necessitate such a venture: the strategy functioning in the selection of events — figures and relations — is their potential, in communication, for discharge of the highest associative vibrances; the ordering strategy, the establishment of a multiplex structure of mutual value-illuminations with circling ironies of comment manifesting larger meanings than events can carry as sense-isolated experience on the descriptive level, the meanings existing as formula with contained variables, implying but not restricted to specific applications.
There is discernible in human functionings a polarity which seldom, even in the most naive, oc cur as a or z, nor in the most intense: each posited extreme contains magnetic lure and dire yearning for its antipodes. Words have been assigned: Apollonian-Dionysian, natural-spiritual, classical- romantic, epic-dramatic, objective-subjective, cortical-thalamic; but these hinder usage, for vary in levels of application refuse such verbal rigidity.
Our concern is with those areas of operation where the polarity poses problems in modes of reacting to the catastrophic awareness — basic to Greek tragedy as to contemporary art — of the insecurity of human existence. One extreme: acceptance working through solution to harmony; the other: re jectio working to harmony through dissolution. But even here patness fails us: the extremes con foun us with lively paradox. The polar spheres stretch from the Sacred Wood where the buried god, laughing, malicious, becomes Till Eulenspiegel, through the clotted desert of Job and the aborting seas of Oedipus, to the Darksome Cave where Prometheus haunts in agonied rebellion himself.
These paintings — their bias clearly being from Cave to Wood — have existence in three areas of the continuum between poles, with marginal vergences in every grouping.
1. Rejection, involving lyrical revulsion from necessity. Here we are darkly moved inside the revelational chasms of the human spirit, the backgrounds blank or differentiated in areas of unawareness and of grief. The symbols are Job of the many and futile hands, protesting the stigma, Job the scarecrow saint, fixed between his rigid polarity: Oedipus hurling unaware in his questionable corridors the sun of his guilt while wait the sphinxes walled and patient; Oedipus fixed in terrible innocence on the grinning and hunching cat while grief commands us to silence: the cat chaired and evilly human: the self-lover made idiot by shock: fertility confounded with issue’s latent horror, confronting (environs are a reflecting mask) the arrant creator with the dish of shared guilt, the outstretched and birthed foetus refusing to assume the posture of the living. The Cave is dark.
2. Acceptance of a sort making criticism necessary on a homocosmological level with an accompanying rigidity of revulsion. Here humanity is allegorized flatly in flux of environs. Note the earth areas, clotted dark with horror; the skies, jagged with terror. We are acrobats with a fixed margin for error, our existence precarious, an exact skill imperative for survival. The fugitive is reduced to vanishing legs: the fatal joke and final paradox. This is the familiar unseen, the grip of unease in an empty room: what we know, but clustered meanings so persistently shift that our familiar angle of knowledge, with its utter revelation of no inclusive or absolute knowledge, results only in terror. This sense of terror pulses under the fixity of the composed forms: it is the dream rigidly held under by the deliberate calm of the waking mind. The acceptance is not liberating.
3. Acceptance of a sort making criticism possible on a socio-political level with an accompanying and devastating irony. Here blankness of background or the decorative virility of the machine confronts hierarchied swirls of the masked and hollow men, the final Karamazovs, wicked and sentimental; or the blankness assumes and reduces the thing to a poignant obscenity of memory. The collage, no matter how assimilated, provides in its textural contradiction that shock- sensation we call humor. This humor does not, however, exclude horror. These paintings are best characterized by such paradoxes: this dynamic continent of humor which is horror; of composure which is terror; of innocence which is abysmal guilt; of the Wood, dire and dark-rooted in the Cave.
Dr. William D. Hull, 11(1918-1984), a widely published and distinguished poet, scholar, translator, and for thirty-eight years Professor of English at Hofstra University, collected over forty of Jim Moon’s paintings during his lifetime.
Reprinted from the Jim Moon catalog of Norlyst Gallery, NY, NY 1949