One-Shot Art |
Image by Michael Venezia Untitled.
This essay is for S. G. and A. N.
A successful artist, we are accustomed to think, must develop. And so we preserve her (or his) juvenilia, following his identification of a mature style, and trace his old age style, in which a synthesis of the entire career is achieved. Certainly, we think in these terms when the artist is long-lived, as when we trace Henri Matisse’s astonishing emergence from Post-Impressionism into his late 1950s cut-outs. But even when the artist is relatively short-lived, we treat the last works as summations of his career. Caravaggio began doing genre paintings, taught himself to make altarpieces and in his 30s created amazing original history paintings.
In what way, then, are we to understand what I call one-shot artists, those whose greatness is manifested essentially in just a single work or way of working? Here, I consider three examples: a filmmaker and two visual artists.
I viewed and wrote about Diva (1981) forty-some years ago. This film is the story of a great soprano who refuses to record, and the boy and his accomplice, a teenage Vietnamese-French girl. Enchanted by his bootleg recording, they bring down a corrupt Parisian gangster. Needless to say, now this work has become a period piece, both because recording technologies have changed radically, and because some of the gender roles in Diva have become obsolete. Since you can see it for $3.99 on Amazon Prime. I won’t describe the details. Jean-Jacques Beineix, having made this almost perfect film, apparently was unable to develop others. Diva is a great one-shot artwork.
In the 1980s, when I met a great many abstract artists, I met Michael Venezia (1937-2025). What is a painting? Many artists in that era were answering this question. And Venezia gave what I found the most convincing answer. He took long wooden bars, 4” by 4”, painted the front edge, and then hung them on wall supports. And because he very generously gave me a small painting, I’ve often thought about his aesthetic.
Making films demands commercial success to gain the necessary financing. Paintings can be made by one artist in his studio. When the artist reaches an endgame, how then can he continue. What Venezia did next was mount one bar on top of another, thus (as Sean Scully rightly said) doubling the work but halving the effect. Venezia and I didn’t stay in touch. Looking back now, after his recent death, I realize more sympathetically how difficult the situation must have been at the time. Since he had found a perfect solution to his style of painting,........