““I believe it was John Cage who once told me, ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.’” ”

— John Cage/Philip Guston

PAINTERS’ PAINTER Philip Guston was not certain about his attribution to John Cage for this chimeric observation. It’s made up of an odd accumulation of sentences. In its above version, one that has presumably gone through the tangled and tipsy grapevine that makes authors out of witnesses and poets out of the illiterate, it sounds like John Cage is not telling Guston anything, but describing what happens to Guston, the painter, when he goes to work in the studio. This is especially odd, because it’s coming from Guston’s mouth.

When the almost too famous line is spoken aloud by painters, or in the presence of painters, it is never elaborated upon. There is no need to elaborate: it is understood, absolute, tout court. It is a line that stages a possibility. The line unburdens the painter of all their fears, their “past”, their “friends (let’s from now on call a spade a spade: ‘influences’) & “enemies”, their “art world”, “and above all” else, their “ideas”, releasing them to do the doing of painting, before the verb of painting inevitably, and sometimes regrettably, becomes a noun.

The opening line “I believe it was John Cage who once told me” has the smell of the gospel, void of truth if not faith. At the very least “I believe” could be Guston just parting the waves for his own gospel. There is something of the sacred attributed to Guston, even his paintings of the KKK are received on bended knee if not a Rothko tear. Nevertheless, this sacred observation by Cage or Guston, Guston or Cage, or a synthesis of both that ends up neither, registers as both advice and experience, and fits the avant-garde composer of negation, specifically Cage’s 4”²33”³, a composition “performed in the absence of deliberate sound”, wherein “musicians do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title”. In the line, Cage is talking about Guston while talking about himself as all artists do.

No matter the attribution, Guston is the placeholder and protagonist for Cage’s observation, especially for the painters who believe and hope to follow this impossible mental decluttering in the studio. We can imagine Guston in the studio, unpacking the shit that painters unpack before they forget (or lose) themselves in the act of painting. But, according to Cage’s observation, it is the very anxieties of Guston’s past, Guston’s influences, Guston’s enemies, Guston’s art world and Guston’s ideas that brought him here in the first place. They entered the studio with Guston, looking over his shoulder until there was no shoulder to look over. The artist enters the studio with “the kind of generalised anger that Bruce Nauman said got him into the studio” an artist told me recently with the same empathy.

Even though Cage’s observation is anything but practical, it works on a mental level that is somehow comforting if not something the painter can follow or rely upon. Perhaps this process of withdrawal or denial naturally happens in the studio, and the specificity of words just confuses things in their failed correspondence with reality.

It is interesting when you question painters on being a painter — as I have and did in a recent panel discussion in Zagreb with five painters – how they are either struck by amnesia or conceptualise being a painter in the studio, as if they do leave the studio at the moment the painting becomes. If this mental and figuratively physical decluttering does naturally happen in the act of painting, then it is something that places peaceful withdrawal above the confrontation with anxiety, what some philosophers call the spur for art – art being defined here as something that rearranges and reconfigures cultural practices around it, from Heidegger’s Greek Temple to Dave Hickey’s Andy Warhol.

According to Cage’s observation, when the past, influences, enemies, art world and painter’s ideas (along with the painter) exits the studio, something happens that is not the painter’s doing in a conscious sense. The painter is just in the way. Guston is there, not in spirit or mind or intention, but in body, a body freed from the petty mental torments of the past, influences, friends and enemies and art world and his own ideas, to be solicited by the present and paint, a painted present coloured and composed by forms, marks and an edge that gives a necessary limit. Painters need limits as much as anxieties.

That said, there is something awfully romantic about Guston’s picture of the painter withdrawing from the world’s anxieties to produce a picture of the world without them looking over the painter’s shoulder. What we are left with when there is nothing left in the studio is the painter as puppet to the master of a metaphysical universe separate from the world of memory, envy and competition. Nothing ever withdraws fully, it is always there, underneath. Especially emotions we try to suppress: hate beneath love, rage beneath peace. When you deconstruct a word or feeling you end up with its opposite peeking back with bigger eyes. Binaries need each other to be the thing they are, the same way day needs night.

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time had lots to say about withdrawal that we can draw upon in virtue of Guston’s disappearing act in the studio. Heidigger writes that when we are using equipment skilfully, the tool in hand withdraws and becomes transparent. What he calls “readiness at hand” transpires and transcends materiality into a moment of attunement. Only when the action is interrupted, like the head of the hammer being flung off in the action of hammering, do we notice the hammer — the thing in itself — as it materially is. Maybe this is what Cage is observing and Guston is hoping for every time he goes to work in the studio.

The self is a burdensome thing, especially in this age when the sovereignty of the individual is sacrosanct. Indeed, there is something sacred about becoming transparent, painter or hammer, that is very seductive. But there is also something powerful and necessary in the experience of the flung head of the hammer shattering seduction in the process of making art, art, I repeat, that rearranges and reconfigures cultural practices around it.—James Merrigan