"Landcape as Thought"

Butterfield, Jan. "Landscape As Thought," Main Art Gallery - Visual
Arts Center, California State University, Fullerton. 1989.

LITA ALBUQUERQUE
The horizon is the place that maintains the memory

Lita Albuquerque’s exquisitely tuned awareness and perceptual keenness are among her most important tools.  Hers is neither an intellectualized, self-centered sense of being in the Kantian sense, nor is it Merleau Ponty’s softer and more amorphous sensate world.  The parameters of her curiosity and wonder are not confined solely to the envelope of her being---but rather to the entire cosmos.  She is a phenomenologist in the fullest sense of the term.  Nurtured on a phenomenological litany of light and space, Albuquerque’s development moved quickly into a phenomenological arena.  One suspects she never paused to be concerned with the dialogue of painting versus sculpture, stretched versus non-stretched, object art versus non-object art.

There appeared to be no guilt or angst about working in the realm of the phenomenal or the ephemeral.  A “younger generation” artist who lives in Los Angeles, Albuquerque came to her maturity in the 1970’s.  If her peers are artists such as Elyn Zimmerman and Susan Kaiser Vogel, direct predecessors are Robert Irwin, Eric Orr, James Turrell and others of their cluster.  Granting that generations now take place in less than a decade, Sam Francis and Richard Diebenkorn are, in many respects, even earlier ancestors.  Although Francis and Diebenkorn remain pure painters to this day (both have worked extensively and powerfully on paper), Irwin was a painter before becoming a phenomenologist.  His work can now be seen as a major bridge between the generations, appearing in time slightly after the sublime cosmological work of Sam Francis (but not influenced by it) and the ordered, intelligent paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.  Irwin’s painterly work segued exquisitely into concerns with light and space and experiments of a phenomenal nature.  Lita Albuequerque is a direct inheritor of all that rich and compacted history.

The examples having been set in the 1970s, it is now possible for the current generation to move back and forth with ease.  In Albuquerque's case, she is both a painter and a sculptor; she has produced an important body of ephemeral work with which this exhibition is concerned. She has worked extensively on paper.  She has created and acted in her powerful performance work, Albuquerque is the beneficiary of all of the experimentation of the past two decades: everything is possible---nothing is taboo. For her, the work is seamless.

“In the early 1970’s I was deeply enmeshed in art and technology, non-object art and performance art. I wrote articles that were on the ‘cutting edge of the avant-garde.’  I wrote my "painting is dead" articles. I glimpsed the future and there was no painting in it.  Then one dark Friday afternoon I drove in a thunderstorm for more than an hour and a half on the Dallas/Fort Worth turnpike to see a Sam Francis retrospective at the Dallas museum. When I emerged from the museum four hours later, stunned, the sky was black and tornado-watch bulletins crackled over the radio. Oblivious, I returned to the freeway, and as I drove directly into the eye of the storm, I realized what had kept me riveted for four hours. It was the power of those paintings. Painting wasn't dead-1 had to take seriously anything that possessed the capacity to impact me that profoundly. As the eye of the tornado swept over both the freeway and my car, I realized that the images in the exhibition had made a deep and lasting impression on a complete reevaluation of my attitudes as a critic. Obviously, painting was alive and well.”

In examining a full body of Lita Albuquerque's work, it is apparent that lessons and struggles of the early 1970’s have been fully absorbed. A visit to her studio is a revelation: clearly it is content and not material with which she is concerned, and she lets the images emerge however they may. Alchemical blue pigment and gold leaf are everywhere---on the floor, on the walls and in the paintings, mingled (usually with gold, often with copper), or lying in strips and sheets. Everything is in stasis. Nothing feels "finished." 

It is as if the work is in a continual process of transformation. One piece informs another piece, which informs another piece, and soon and so on and so on. In one corner is a pile of rocks that had been shattered along force lines as they sheared off larger segments of rock or wall. They will lie there until one day they are co-mingled with circles of copper dusted with a magical red pigment, or combined powerfully with others and gold-leafed. They are sculptural, yes, but they also are painterly. The pigment, exquisitely ephemeral, blows about gently as a slight wind whirls in from the door. One sees also that these pieces took their placement in a kind of dance-they couldn't have arrived at their infinitely rich balance and placement by simply having been thrust there.

Everywhere in the studio there are paintings: paintings on board, paintings on canvas, paintings to be stretched or framed, paintings to be reconstructed/reconsidered. Paintings to be understood. These paintings have been informed by the ephemeral work, and in turn, the ephemeral work is informed by them.  There are all manner of sculptural additives as well---the rocks, the circles, sheets of copper, piles of gold leaf. Painting
clearly is not dead here---it has merely become transformed. Albuquerque's work---especially the ephemeral pieces---is more about seeing than anything else, and painting is only one way to describe an image or a state of being. The language she speaks is a language learned from painting.

Given a phenomenological perspective, her work did not take the quantum leap one might think---from the caves of Altamira or Lascaux or from the Nazca lines, to her dust-blown figures in the desert, images of which she has tacked to her studio wall. It is also a short distance from the dulled sheen of gold in decorated Egyptian tombs to the curious profiled figures that rise up in gold leaf from the brilliant blue ground of some of her paintings. All connections are there.  If the knowledge of the adept, or fully skilled alchemist was based on historical formulae that were closely guarded alchemical colors.  It is also generally known that both copper and blue powdered pigment represent steps in the alchemical process---whether it be the search for the philosopher's stone or for profound knowledge.  Alchemy, as it manifests itself in the work of any artist, is difficult to deal with in a literate fashion.  At worst it is relegated to a superficial and meaningless category.  At its best, or at its most complex, it eludes us because it demands an understanding and knowledge of which only an “adept” is capable. Throughout the centuries, the best work has been difficult---in some cases impenetrable---yet the very strength of its presence demands our engagement.

What are we to make of Lita Albuquerque's sculptural work mater/a prima (1979), a term C.G. Jung used for the primary material of the universe?  In this work a triangular-shaped rock, which has been wrenched at some point in its history from its place in the stratification of a mountain or wall, now rests casually in the studio.  The work glows with brilliant yellow pigment that drifts across its surfaces---pigment that seems to have exploded or erupted with great force.  Here and there on the protrusions, the yellow powdered pigment has insinuated itself to create the impression that the stone glows from within.

It is not only alchemy that interests Albuquerque, but astronomy as well.  She is also deeply interested in what she terms “scanning” a perceptual process that allows her to access things in the physical world that cannot be seen, but that can be sensed. Albuquerque has charted a very particular reality as a result of putting hererself through  specific exercises.  Her works come about as a result of this search; they are what she comes back with when she plunges into the depths of a phenomenal reality.

“One of the most powerful transformative symbols that has occurred, is the image NASA brought back of our own planet.  There is a special kind of objectivity that comes from looking at the planet from a great distance, being able to visualize it from the outside.  That kind of "other lens" on reality is much the source of my work.  In order to access that source, I've devised an exercise: I start out by focusing on the time, date and location.  For instance, this is February 27, 1989, 1:49 p.m., Los Angeles, California. Then I mentally and visually imagine my point of vision coming from the far regions of the universe, traveling down through the various galaxies---down, down, down---then finally getting to our own planet until I can see it, half in darkness, half in light.  Then getting closer, the image of the blue planet with the continents delineated. Then coming further down until i can see the mountain ranges and the ocean.  Then finally to the grid of the basin of the city of Los Angeles, surrounded by mountains... Until we get closer... Until we see a grey cube, a building in which two women are talking, at 1:50 p.m., February 27, 1989, Los Angeles, California.  This is what I do to put myself in a context of the present moment, and this is one of the primary sources of my work.  I have done that kind of exercise for the last ten years.  I do it at least ten times a day, and sometimes thirty or forty times a day.”

Albuquerque's intense involvement with landscape and the search for location, which is the impulse behind her ephemeral work, comes from her own past.  She was born in Santa Monica, California, of a playwright mother from Tunisia and a French father who was a diamond dealer. Her parents separated five months after her birth.  Lita's mother took her and her brother back to their home in Tunisia, and her father returned to Paris.  Because of all the family turmoil, at the age of three and a half, Albuquerque was sent away to live in a Catholic convent in Carthage---not far from her mother's house, but away nevertheless.  Missing a father she never knew, and lacking a mother's closeness, she sought stability in the known, the tangible---the earth, the sky, the sea and the horizon---waiting for the phantom ship that might bring her father home.  Even as a child, the horizon was her point of reference, her hold on reality.

There was perhaps a time when Albuquerque was unaware of the importance of the horizon to her work, but that was before her move from Malibu to Venice, which brought with it a profound sense of estrangement and loss.  Albuquerque had lived for some ten years on an unspoiled hillside at the top of the Malibu mountains, facing the ocean.  Overgrown with natural bushes and shrubbery, it also was planted with brilliant bougainvillaea, and was punctuated with tall California palms in the same manner as those of her childhood home.  The ocean spread out as far as the eye could see in either direction, its glittering, undulating patches of light dancing off to the horizon to form a nonphysical boundary.  That horizon became the one constant in Albuquerque's life; she lived and worked with it, never letting it get much further away than the corner of her eye, its presence constantly informed the ephemeral work.  When some years had passed and it was time to relocate the studio, Albuquerque was both shattered and depressed.

Initially she could not identify the depression, but eventually it became clear that the horizon was the key, and she began to look backward to her earliest years for insight. The sense of loss she experienced in the move from Malibu to Venice was inevitable, perhaps, but not the claustrophobia.  To combat it, Albuquerque returned to her secret site in the Malibu hills daily:

“The main shift in my work occurred in January of 1978, but the beginning of that shift was in 1975 when I moved my studio from the hillside property overlooking the Pacific Ocean to a small studio in Venice, California. With no windows.  Even though I maintained a residence on the Malibu property, the move of my work space made me question what it was about the environment I missed."