Endgame

Lydia Litchfield at June Fitzpatrick Gallery

By Chris Thompson

“Lydia Litchfield: New Work” shows through Feb. 24 at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, (207) 772-1961.

“SUBTEXT, #2,” by Lydia Litchfield, encaustic, oil on paper.

About 90 years ago, Marcel Duchamp had the idea of exhibiting everyday items, from bottle-racks to urinals, as “Readymade” works of art. One of these was a snowshovel, dubbed “In Advance of a Broken Arm.” If it wasn’t winter in Maine, the bright red shovel tucked behind the door of the June Fitzpatrick Gallery during Lydia Litchfield’s opening last Friday might have been mistaken for this very piece. Judging by the way their works look, Litchfield and Duchamp couldn’t be farther apart. But they share a way of working that joins them at a level deeper than that of visual appearance.

Soon after his “Readymades” moved the artworld into stalemate by bringing up the still unanswered question of what makes art art, Duchamp announced that he was leaving art altogether in order to play chess. Though Litchfield’s intentions are not so disruptive as Duchamp’s, her approach to her work as a kind of chess match with the painting that has yet to emerge links them both. Every mark/move anticipates the next one, even the next several — but at each instant Litchfield appears prepared to drop her strategy and reinvent it depending upon the situation that she finds herself faced with.

Stylistically, Litchfield’s work has more of an affinity with American painter Cy Twombly. The shaky but deliberate line tiptoeing underneath the upper layer of “Subtext, #2” (pictured) is a distinct echo of his paintings from the late 1950s. Both are concerned with the way line, its pace and rhythm, can orchestrate a painting’s space. But while the use of line in Twombly’s work fuses drawing and writing, and whereas his style and subject matter are often as literary as they are painterly, the drawing in Litchfield’s works has a quality that is much closer to music.

Her paintings want to be listened to almost more than looked at; each stroke that is made and each line that is etched could be assigned an accompanying sound. With some of the images, like “Subtext/Recovered,” you almost hear the frenetic tempo of Litchfield desperately pulling the painting back from the brink of collapse; digging into it with a fever, hoping that after working its surface so painstakingly she’ll be able to save it from the trashcan. Her paintings give a score to this struggle, their scratches and worn places testify like wrinkles in skin to the trials they’ve been through.

With what looks like a set of targeting crosshairs etched in that familiar wobbly hand, the painting “Subtext/Mute” has a stillness like the aftermath of a bombing. Its early layers, and a few remnants of the charcoal under-drawing, are muffled by smooth, flat, beige vertical strips that seem to hover between bandaging and suffocating what they cover. What operates as music in other paintings here takes the form of a silence that gets quieter, heavier, and more haunting the more closely you listen. “Subtext/Mute” makes it clear that this silence underlies all of Litchfield’s work, even the more animated ones.

In this way her work articulates in visual terms an understanding parallel to John Cage’s realization that silence and music were one and the same. Cage used this idea to explore a different kind of music, one that didn’t force sounds into harmonies but tried to permit them to emerge according to chance and to their own inherent properties — composing without imposing his own notion of how they should sound. As the result of her attempt to let her painting make its own suggestions to her about how it ought to proceed, Litchfield’s paintings have a similar feel. There is an interplay between putting something in place, like a patch of paint, and scraping it away: an adding and subtracting, an ebb and flow. But because she works in encaustic (a mix of wax and pigment), every removal of an undesirable mark leaves a trace. What we see is a kind of narrative that can’t get rid of its loose ends, that can’t make its mistakes disappear, but must find ways to accommodate and deal with them.

If Duchamp’s and Cage’s work help us think about Litchfield’s, her words return the favor. In her statement accompanying the show, Litchfield writes that her work is meant to “resist understanding, equivocating on the edge between revelation and concealment, meaning and randomness, grace and indifference.”

It was the mix of the meaningful and the random that permitted Duchamp to watch a shovel become transfigured into a “Readymade,” and Cage to oversee the transformation of everyday sound and silence into music. And the equivocation between grace and indifference just about sums up their approach to their work — especially the one performance that Cage and Duchamp did together. In 1968, they met to play chess before an audience on a chessboard built to produce random electronic music in response to the players’ moves. After a while, Duchamp was beating Cage so handily that the Readymade maestro lost interest. His wife took over for him. She and Cage played an even match. Duchamp would occasionally look on and tell them how poorly they were playing.

Like a chess match, Litchfield treats a painting as something that can be won or lost. But as Duchamp’s boredom shows —and this, more than anything, is what binds the two artists — how interestingly and elegantly the match is played is ultimately much more important than whether it ends in victory or defeat.

Chris Thompson can be reached at: xxtopher@hotmail.com.