'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is
all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know.


John Keats's poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn is famous for these last lines. Keats was not a scholar of Greek art. He approached it aesthetically, for its formal qualities. He explained in the poem that the scenes pictured on the vase were incomprehensible to him. He was not interested in deciphering information. The vase's beauty is something made manifest in its form and presence. We know form this poem and others by him that Keats was interested in experience, and the revelations that might occur there.
TURN 1996, enamel on wood & steel
22 x 19.5 x 24 inches
While Keats explained truth--the possibility of attaining perfection and wholeness--as something transcendent, we talk about truth today more often as "the hard truth", or fact. Fictions are for transporting us away from reality, for distraction or diversion. They are mistrusted for their subjectiveness, as if the person spinning the yarn had a distorting motive. However, the best fictions do tell truths, truths of a different order than a pure flow of information. In a recent memoir about her childhood called Liar's Club, Mary Karr describes her father as a great story-teller, despite being a liar. She recounts one time listening to him: "I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth". Keats writes of the same transportation when he addresses the urn: "Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of/thought..."


Truth and lies. When we talk about story-telling, aren't we talking about art?

From the first glance, James Hyde's paintings look like art. This may even be a radical position for an artist today to take--ever since Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and exhibited it as an artwork, avant-garde practice has involved crossing over into the realm of non-art, intentionally shrugging off high art's conventions. Some of Hyde's materials nod to this position (he often uses Styrofoam, silk, industrial carpet and vinyl tape) and sometimes a work is not attached vertically to a wall. But the work comes together according to an aesthetic logic, a part-whole relationship that exists in things that are made with intentionality. As art, and unlike nature, Hyde's works direct your attention. He makes them to refer to the history of painting.
PUMP 1997, cast glass, steel bracket, sewn fabric, enamel, 12 x 16 x 7 inches
Although a Hyde painting sometimes has no paint on it, and usually will assert its edge and a volume in addition to its surface, it is a painting rather than a sculpture (which it resembles). Neither is it a painting-sculpture amalgam. To clarify this point it is essential to explain Hyde's relationship to Minimalism, which was still the dominant style when Hyde arrived in New York in the late 70s. Some of his strategies are similar, for example how he explores the physical nature of the materials he uses, and will leave them more or less intact. Minimalism has been called "the art of the real". Artists followed the logic of abstraction to remove narration completely from painting, and to enter the world with its objects and physical facts. Part of this orientation came from a deep wariness of composition, which meant that as long as one stayed within the illusionistic space of the picture (and continued to make "abstractions") one was fated to an unending and irrelevant matching of shapes and colors. Frank Stella professed an interest in "no relational" painting, saying that he wanted to see the whole idea of a painting instead of getting stuck in the details. "If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, right enough, you would just be able to look at it."
SPECIAL BARRIER 1996, steel enamel
18 x 75 x 27 inches
Hyde, on the other hand, has employed an approach within painting that achieves the transcendent potential of fiction without risking the narrowing effects of narration. In his work he has broken with modernist abstraction's illusionistic picture--even if there is space in one of his paintings one is always prevented entry into it by one's awareness of the physical object. The surface of a fresco painting, layered strokes of paint over a background wash, is linked to its projecting Styrofoam base. You want to see the surface as an illusion, but cannot deny its limitations because of the clear presence of its underpinnings. Hyde also encourages references to useful objects and everyday situations--handles, shelves and guard rails can be seen in past works. Minimalists favored industrial materials like steel, aluminum and plastics and used them hermetically, which prevented them from touching everyday experience. Hyde makes art that seems thoroughly vernacular; the materials furnish accesses for the viewer, meeting her halfway, and perhaps invoking in her the desire to believe in the work, or to be transported by it.
SEEM 1998 fresco (chipped) on board , 44 x 29 x 2 inches
Since I've brought beauty into the discussion, it is important to point out that Hyde really side-steps the issue. Kant distinguishes between beauty and the sublime in this way: beauty is the multifarious while the sublime is great and simple. Keats's beauty is clearly along the lines of the sublime. Hyde avoids the idealizing aspects of Romanticism by incorporating faults into his works. His relationship to physical objects is a thoroughly contemporary reaction to a culture whose rapacious progress encourages a constant desire for newness. Hyde's works function like just out-of-date objects, as Walter Benjamin talked about them, that since they remind you of moments gone by, they give you a reflection of yourself in relation to the present. Hyde's mix of "natural" and artificial materials accomplish this by the way they scramble time. His works do not ascribe themselves to some transcendent time, which way be either in the past or the future, but keep to the present.

Hyde's works are like well-told stories. Some aspects are tangible and worldly, rock-solid since you know them to be true from you own experience. Other parts are exaggerated: the sheer drape of a piece of silk--how suggestive! bubbles in a piece of cast glass--so many that that they are no longer mistakes but beautiful in their excessiveness. Most importantly, a work by James Hyde gives you a way to understand what you know, but does it by making you suspend yourself from the "real" world and enter a fictive experience, one where immersion and fascination can take hold and tease you out of thought.


© Alison Green, 1996
DROP 1997 cast glass, steel bracket, vinyl, velvet, 12 x 16 x 7 inches
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