|
LEONARD LEHRER
Several decades ago I
became interested in gardens. Although I know nothing whatsoever
about gardening, I have visited many gardens (both modest and extravagant)
throughout Europe and the United States. As a curious tourist,
and under my wife’s tutelage, I have come to acquire a layman’s
basic
understanding of some of the cultural concepts upon which gardens
are based.
I have also come to
feel that the usage of the garden as a metaphor of life
has become somewhat clichéd and exhausted. Nevertheless,
in discussing Leonard Lehrer’s life and art, I sense that
some parallel discourse on gardens is fitting.
So I suppose
that I am going to be guilty of extending the allegorical role
of plant life on our planet.
The energy, the quiet
strength, manifested in Lehrer’s artwork
is hardly a tired cliché. Like his work, instead of embracing
exhausted allegories, I want to explore
the essential vitality that is evident in his process and production,
and, more importantly, the underlying motivations and reasoning
behind his designs.
I say designs because,
as well as a gardener, I think of Leonard as an architect–
a builder of structures in the present that both reflect upon the
past and project
into the future.
One may presume that
such a mélange of components would
place Lehrer into
the Post Modernist realm. Certainly a work such as the digitally
engineered The Birth of Venus, etc. combines apparently disparate
parts of art history and personal history (Ingres’ harem
scenes with Lehrer’s early life drawings). The center of
this work is fragments of his watercolors of water and sky. On
the far right and left, they are bordered with delicate line drawings
of coastlines seemingly extending across the expansive eighteen-foot
panorama into the very peripheries of perception.
Yet, I can not help
but feel that Lehrer is (to paraphrase Barnet Newman) about
as interested in the Post Modern tenets of art theory and the Deconstructionists
as a bird is intrigued with ornithology.
Long before the advent
of the moniker Post Modernism, Leonard was
fascinated with the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. This Argentine
author introduced critical constructs into Lehrer’s way of
thinking (I hesitate to say philosophy as
the term seems pretentious and inappropriately concrete when contemplating
a
state of fluidity).
In Borges’s world of The
Garden of the Forking Paths,1 one
is always faced with divergences; and, the reader becomes a creative
component. Within the author’s labyrinth, the route unfolds
as the inner workings of the mind–not as a narrative
about discovery so much as about the process of exploration itself.
Borges’s stories
were structured to engage the reader, to make the reader
into an active participant. Carlos Fuentes has compared Borges
to the writer of detective stories where the true mystery is the
thought process of the detective himself, as if “Poirot were
investigating Poirot, or as if Holmes discovered that
he himself is Moriarty.” 2
Inherent within this
garden is a multi-layered sense of time: A notion that
meaning does not simply lie behind us; that as we read we reinvent
a new reality; and, that reality is an infinite series of realities.
The nature of reality itself becomes
a contest of wills. What becomes known as concrete reality is actually
simply the
land of mutual perceptions, a consensus of sorts, a convergence
of parallel times. Within this realm of divergent beliefs, the
present is instantaneously composed of time past and time future.
As Eliot put it in Burnt Norton:
Time present and time
past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden...
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Looking back at Ingres’s harem scenes bears witness to how
the passage of time, cultural constraints, and new pathways of
interpretation, or reading, effect our perceptions. Strangely,
despite the conservative nature of French society, early in the
19th Century, nude concubines were considered acceptable as subject
matter. Yet, when Manet, some forty years later, depicted naked
Parisian women, it was considered scandalous. The difference was
that Ingres’s exotic women were distant and foreign, whereas
Manet’s women were local girls, too close to home–too
real.
In today’s world
of sexual politics, Ingres depictions are frequently viewed as
peep shows–voyeuristic exploitations
of women who were relegated by their society to become concubines
(prostitutes), but also were literally slaves. In his work, The
Birth of Venus, Lehrer has selected images from Ingres harems as
well as other voluptuous depictions of the female nude. Over these
images, he has super-imposed some of his masterful life drawings
of the female nude. This cultural overlay seems to suggest that
one learns from history and that one should be able to enjoy beauty
beyond eroticism. So, within a new reading (even if I am totally
wrong-headed in
my interpretation), it is demonstrated that paintings, like Borges
books, always
live in the present and are constantly being reborn. These combinations
of fragments
of Lehrer’s work and selections from art history trace how
the mind works and how the memory assimilates information–constructing
the temporal chimeras of recollection into a snapshot of dreamtime.
The inclusion of water
and sky within many of these images, such as Barcarole (the songs
traditionally sung by Venetian gondoliers) reflects matter that
is in a constant state of flux, flickering reality. Other works, The Rose Season and Boabdil’s Sigh,
depict architectural motifs from the Alhambra. At times, the very
titles, like Boabdil’s Sigh, indicate not only an interest
in Moorish history, but also the passage, the deathbed of a cultural
era (Boabdil was the last of the Moorish Kalifs of Granada).
Boabdil’s
Sigh was also inspired by Manet’s late flower
paintings. Here there are
a number of Lehrer’s own still lifes superimposed on what
could be a ceiling within the Alhambra. Clearly flowers are temporal,
sprouting from seeds in the past into their present beauty only
to fade into the future. When they are cut from a garden and placed
in vases, they are killed (they literally become nature morte);
but their beauty lingers on in the present and is captured in this
artwork.
I
Give Thanks for Love is perhaps the most poignant
plant in Lehrer’s garden. It includes
images of artwork by his late daughter, Anna-Katrina. Although she
was severely restricted by cerebral palsy, Anna-Katrina lived
a full and fruitful life, becoming, against all odds, both a poet
and a painter. Her struggle, her strength, her determination, was
born of her love for her parents and their deep and abiding love
for her. This work includes some EEG graphs, images of Anna-Katrina,
and, at the top, a Hebraic text. To some this may resemble a tombstone,
but it is much more than a memorial, it is a monument, a celebration
of life and love, that transcends all rational sense of time.
Self
Portrait with Almost Everything represents not the culmination of one’s
experience but the confluence of a life lived, remembered, influenced,
molded, structured, mended and torn, torn and mended. The complex
patterns combine virtually all of the components seen in other
individual works, creating an ordered yet elusive sense of self.
The work is like a river, flowing from the mountains into the sea.
The study of garden history
yields a wealth of information about the inner psyche of man and
definitive mindsets. In the eyes of the Western world, the Garden
of Eden was the sublimely beatific place; and Mankind’s fall
from Grace planted seeds of discord and discontent. The English tradition
of garden design was to copy nature in an effort to replicate Paradise.
The French theory of rationally planned geometrical gardens
was based on the argument that man was born into a bestial state
that was eventually overcome by technical and intellectual prowess. 3
Perhaps Lehrer’s
own fascination with the Alhambra and the Moorish occupation of Spain
lies with another super-imposition, an overlay of one culture upon
another and the remnants that encompass time past, present and future.
The ideal garden in the Quran was a reward for the faithful.
The Islamic gardens were
seen to reflect human biological and physiological needs as well
as the Islamic principle of unity and order.
The designs referenced
both the rational and spiritual nature of man.
While Leonard Lehrer incorporates
aspects of these divergent pathways into his design, his garden is
unique in its combination of emotional and rational thought. Unlike
many artists working in the realm of digital technology, with the
collaboration of his talented assistant, Erick Rowe, these compositions
do not become mired in simplistic plays of technical tricks: like
Anna-Katrina, they transcend physical limitations. They are carefully
cultivated to exist beyond the constraints of time.
1 The title of a book
by Borges.
2 From notes by Allen
B. Rush on a talk by Carlos Fuentes at the Unterberg Poetry Center
in New York City,
October 18,1999.
3 See Christopher Youngs, Paradise Revisited (Reading, Freedman Gallery, Albright College,
1999), p. 2.
|
