NO SEMBLANCE OF MEANING

NO SEMBLANCE OF MEANING

By Lew Blink

According to legend, the great abstract artist Kazimir Malevich experienced a spiritual vision in 1913, when he painted a black square on a white field, demonstrating that a painting could exist completely free of any reflection or imitation of the external world. In his defiant brush strokes he managed to transform art itself from the dead weight of the real world and appropriate a black square into a symbol of iconic negation. He wrote: “Objectivity, in itself, is meaningless, the concepts of the conscious mind are worthless. Feeling is the determining factor... and thus Art arrives at non-objective representation.”

Malevich’s Suprematism movement ushered in a new receptivity in modern art that could transform the pictorial arts into a “supremacy of pure feeling.” Malevich became one of the most important artistic voices in post- Revolution Russia. In 1928 his painting Head of a Peasant prompted public outcry because, critics claimed, he’d reduced the human face to meaninglessness. By then the Stalinists had taken power and declared Socialist Realism as the only official art form, Malevich’s work was destroyed and he was forced to paint representational art until his death.

Another Russian abstract artist working with non-objective art was Wassily Kandinsky. He believed color contained a spiritual level that transcended meaning and moved beyond representation, that one could feel the essence of each color.

Art became an emotional aesthetic experience for Kandinsky as he created paintings that were non-representational and full of, what he referred to as spiritual vibration. He felt that only a true poet and a master of shape could create abstract art, his influence was nothing short of a cultural grenade with his conviction that art should be concerned with the spiritual rather than the material.

No Semblance of Meaning is a 2005 painting portfolio by local artist Randy Titus. Abstract art served as an inspiration point for the artworks included, particularly Malevich’s Suprematism manifesto, and Malevich’s strange theory that the visual phenomena of the objective world was in itself...meaningless.

Randy Titus, No Semblance portfolio image (courtesy of Lew Blink)

Randy Titus, No Semblance portfolio image (courtesy of Lew Blink)

To test this concept, Titus began to paint non-objective shapes on a series of squares. Typical of the abstract art world, he would describe his process and what led to the creation of the work: “I paper-masked the squares quickly and painted the opening pure white as a base to push color into.”

These odd abstractions of shape attempted to be devoid of meaning or had no recognizable symbol of reality.

Randy Titus (image courtesy of Draven Steinbecker)

Draven Steinbecker poses beside her grandfather Randy Titus’s representational but still absurd painting in her Chop Shop hair salon in the Grove (left),

This spiritual art experiment also had roots in Titus’s dedication to Zen meditation. He explored the Buddhist idea of “mu” or “no-mind” in his artistic creative process and completed the first part of the project relatively without meaning. As his oil painting squares became a portfolio, and the layers of the work manifested, he sought to recreate his own experience for the general public.

No Semblance was meant to push the viewer on a journey of non-meaning, but began mapping meaning over the images with absurd text and small graphic symbols. The totality of the project was similar to a Zen koan in that it would confound the viewer and jolt them into their own thought process.

The portfolio contained 24 squares, all filled with shape, color and meaninglessness. The individual squares are labeled and numbered with absurdist text descriptions such as Plate 7, Dance of the Gods , relates to the discovery of ceramic tiles in Hesperone.

The tile designs were based on a traditional dance of the gods for the upbeat vestibular gavotte, a metaphysical choreography of a forgotten civilization. Of course there is no Hesperone or ceramic tiles, Titus was making it all up. At the heart of No Semblance of Meaning is a supremacy of feeling that is not easily described in words — a notion that moves the viewer from non-meaning toward a transcendent understanding that ushers us hopefully toward our own non-representational spiritual experience.

Randy Titus was a classically trained painter, philosopher, graphic artist, teacher and chess club coach. He was fond of saying about his art: “you either get it or you don’t.” He passed away early last year, and his legacy is currently being discovered.

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