Saunders grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District and attended Saturday art classes at the very museum that houses his first major retrospective exhibition.
By Emma Riva
Everything about Raymond Saunders’ work seems to be telling you not to write about it. The wall text in Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden at the Carnegie Museum of Art gently suggests that “it can be challenging to convey the power of abstract art through language.” A collection of essays about the artist was called Nothing to Say. Saunders himself said that “The minute you try to translate art in terms of written language, you’re using the known to do the unknown. You don’t do anything but describe something. We’re dealing in painting with the simultaneous event as opposed to the sequential events of language.” But here I am using language to attempt to conjure art, taking the drab known to approach the fantastical unknown.
I would like to make the case that writing about art isn’t all dull academia, the bad guy taking all the fun out of interpretation. Edward Hirsch’s Transforming Vision: Writers on Art calls the act of writing about art “transgressive,” not in the sense of a social taboo but in crossing a boundary, attempting to bend the membranes of mediums. Words and images are intertwined. As you read this. you are experiencing some image. Raymond Saunders himself is aware of this in a painting entitled Beauty as Syntax that plays with how syntax (word order) becomes something new when the arbitrary structure is removed.
Saunders grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District and attended Saturday art classes at the very museum that houses his first major retrospective exhibition. The resulting show does feel he like a garden, with large pieces seeming to “grow” out of the harsh white stone of the floor. The Heinz Galleries are a challenging place to stage artwork, bedside there is little to no natural light. Something about that lack of windows works for Saunders’ show, though: it feels as if you have to immerse yourself in what you’re seeing, entombed in a chamber of Art and Only Art. The now 91-year-old Saunders has a singular vision that demands writing about in the present tense while he is still living,
For Saunders, art is the self and it is everything. Under his brush, nothing is what it seems, but everything is what you make of it. In Palette I saw him puzzling with the use of color itself. Every part of a Raymond Saunders painting is an individual smaller painting, made up of ephemera that you’ll find something that resonates with you within. Places Near and Far uses a ruler, a child’s drawings, a faded poster for David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and a taxonomical drawing of a bird.
Many paintings have sequences of numbers—1 2 3 4 5—as if Saunders is trying to figure out what’s behind the simplest and most familiar symbols. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 read to us as numbers, but they are also visual. Why does the typed 1 have a tiny notch on top of it, whereas the handwritten 1 is often only a straight line? Or, why does 4 have a triangle on its left side in some people’s handwriting and a straight line in others’ version of it? In another chalk composition, Saunders writes out a line of cursive letters once ubiquitous and now a lost skill, the very same letter as a typeface A, but somehow changed.
A similar interrogation is Saunders’ use of East Asian calligraphy. To someone who can’t read the symbol 中, it is just a symbol, a blank spot in the inner voice of your thoughts. To a Japanese speaker, it’s “naka,” to a Chinese speaker, it’s “zhong”—either way it means “middle.” But to someone who doesn’t recognize it as such, it’s just a picture. Written out, some of this can veer into brain-rotting levels of epistemological philosophy, but when seen in art, it’s easier to feel and understand. Saunders gets across complex ideas through images that I felt inside of me when I looked at them. One painting is simply a black canvas with the words watering a black garden. Though there are no symbols on the painting, my mind imagined a black garden as I read the words. Saunders works on Black (capitalization his), because he feels it has a “presence” that an empty white canvas does not. The Black canvas is a space of imagination.
Saunders’ paintings are run-on sentences of symbols, and he is right that to describe them too literally does them a disservice. They dance and fluctuate. They are abstraction, but not in the sense of a square or a color, they are the known transformed into the unknown. The word Oaxaca, the number 10, a tiny crocodile, a panther, a blotch of teal paint, an elephant, a funnel, a palette, a can of spray-paint. What are they? They are familiar but unfamiliar.
Saunders’ work is necessary viewing for any creative person. His paintings have endless complexity to them, but one of their many layers is that they’re some of the most cogent work I’ve seen about art making. Saunders lives within the visual medium and pushes it to its limit. What David Lynch is to filmmaking and what David Foster Wallace is to the written word, to me Saunders is to visual art. His art gets at the truth of what it means to be in the world, to experience, to see, to feel.
Saunders’ comments on art and writing made me reflect on what it means to write about art. To me, to write is to experience and to record it. It’s observation and emotion, a commitment to feeling with depth and rawness and looking around at the world with a sensitive eye. When people ask me why I am a writer, my short answer is usually something like “I wanted my job to just be being alive.” Saunders and I might not disagree after all about writing and art. To write about his show required of me to drop my instinct towards reporting and just allow what I felt to flow out of me.
Flowers in a Black Garden is a triumph for the Carnegie, even more so in that the artist is still living and attended the museum’s own art class workshops. In the space, the show fittingly ends with Pittsburgh (2007). There’s no indication what about it is Pittsburgh, but as with all of Saunders’ work, symbols pepper it. A vinyl record. A crown. A tear-off ad for a Section 8 apartment in a mix of English and Chinese, on 35th Avenue. A poster of Miles Davis. A scribble. A baby. A heart.
Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden is on view through July 13.
Emma Riva is the managing editor of UP, an international online and print magazine that covers the intersections of graffiti, street art and fine arts. She is also the author of Night Shift in Tamaqua, an illustrated novel set in the Lehigh Valley. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA.
