[N.B All images reproduced in this essay are copyright and courtesy The Estate of Ken Kiff and Hales London and New York. ©The Estate of Ken Kiff. All rights reserved, DACS 2024.No image should not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd].
Wholeness
Ken Kiff The Radiant Woman (Sequence 185)
Ken Kiff saw the evocation of a sense of inclusivity or wholeness as the central challenge shared by visual art, poetry, and music. Typically, he used a Shakespeare sonnet to discuss the challenge involved in relation to his own work. He notes that the Shakespearean sonnet has: ‘… a syllabic construction but on top of that he overlays rhythms caused by alliteration, and another brought about by the relative force of the words, or by abrupt stops – then he might reverse some of the stresses. Shakespeare is a master because he can hold the basic structure in his subconscious all the time yet do all these other things too’; adding that the poet needs ‘all these structural things moving along’ in his own work, but needs them simultaneously ‘all flowing into one organic thing’. (quoted in Inge ‘2019 Archive interviews with painters: Ken Kiff’). This concern with wholeness as a confluence of multiple, tensioned, yet also closely related, elements becoming ‘one organic thing’ informed his work and was informed in turn by his reading very widely and in particular, according to his daughter Anna, his reading of Chinese philosophy. A philosophy that, unlike the elevation of the spirit/intellect over the bodily that characterises cultures based in the binary religious of the West, recommends a down-to-earth holism predicated on the observation that the heart-mind is nothing without the body and the body is nothing without the heart-mind. A view that can serve here to link Kiff’s search for wholeness with his commitment to a “realism of the psyche”.
A Realism of the Psyche
‘Elusive, mercurial, the unconscious is not a place, not a state, but a dark ironic brother, an echoing sister, reminding’.
James Hillman (On Paranoia Dallas, Spring Publications Inc. 1988, p. 41).
In Flight Out Of Time the Dadaist Hugo Ball writes of the search for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience necessary to social and cultural renewal. A search that, starnge as it may now seem, united groups as apparently disparate as the Dadaists and the Jungian Psychological Club. In the visual arts that search was informed a wide range of aesthetic experiments, including the Orphic Cubism of Kupka, Delauney and Chagall. A key aspect of their experimentation, all-too-often misrepresented by Modernist art historians as the early pursuit of a “pure” abstraction, was in actuality the exploration of the evocative power of colour-as-a-felt-structuring, an approach that emerged in its earliest full form in Chagall’s work during his time in Paris. In an important article from 1985, Martha Kapos uses this element of Chagall’s work to challenge the presuppositions used to validate the re-emergence of figurative painting in exhibitions like Timothy Hyman’s 1979 Narrative Painting (which includes Kiff’s work) and the Royal Academy’s 1981 New Spirit in Painting (which did not).
Ken Kiff On brown
She sees the Neo-expressionist claim to ‘individual expression’ which underwrote not only European Neo-expressionist, Transavantgarde and, in time, much “post-modern” painting, as reactionary in the sense of being predicated on the notion that artists are wholly self-contained and exceptional individuals able to express a unique self-based vision in paint. A notion that, as she points out, entirely fails to acknowledge the larger psychosocial processes that help shape both self and work. She exempts Kiff and Chia from this criticism, however, citing their engagement with Cubism’s potential to both radically reorganise pictorial structures and to liberate colour so as to enable new, more open, forms of figuring reality in all its complexity. Adopting these concerns in turn enable them to challenge the ideological formation and control of given or assumed unities and continuities within both the self and the world by both opposing and transforming conventional presuppositions about representation. This “return” to a genuinely radical re-figuring of the painted image enhanced the poetic polyvalence of painting, allowing it to access new pictorial structures and, as a result, new ways of knowing and envisaging self and world. It is this that enables Kiff not only to break with expectations regarding self and world, but also to alter, expand, and altogether transform them; to undertake, in the phrase Kapos borrows from Chagall, a new ‘realism of the psyche’.
Ken Kiff Head incorporating blue space face towards the street
Kapos’ analysis of Chagall’s use of colour is fundamental to understanding the importance of his paintings to Kiff, but I would also want to stress the relevance of Chagall’s commitment to an inclusive approach to imagery. One that relates to his desire for art as ‘an open invitation to everyman to “look in his own way, interpret what he sees, and how he sees”’. The resulting balancing act, matching Cubism’s radical restructuring of the world with a sense of a common and inclusive reality, seems to me fundamental to Kiff’s approach. One that once again might be related to Ní Dhomhnaill’s concerns as an Irish-language poet with vivifying that language in a post-colonial context.
Or, equally, to the Indian artist Arpita Singh’s shift from non-figurative painting so as to submerge herself in the forms of Bengali folk art in the late 1970s, before moving on to draw together the possibilities she discovered in both types of work. I cite such parallels so as to offer a reminder that Kiff’s psychic realism is, in no small part, an attempt to overcome the alienation produced by the supposedly heroic “progressivism” and the absolutism within Western European and American Modernity; its ultimately authoritarian/colonialist insistence on subordinating all other ways of knowing, including alternatives within its own geo-political region, in an attempt to induce them to serve the reductively monolithic conception of reality that, in turn, serves global capitalism.
Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ní Dhomhnaill identifies two interlinked forms of this alienation: a self-distancing from a shared reality and a disassociation from the daily language of interaction in home and community. Taken together these constitute a psychic fault-line all-too-easily denied or glossed over. I believe it was precisely to address this psychic fault-line that Kiff revisited the radical possibilities of early twentieth century painting when looking for the means to reimagine everyday life; possibilities that would enable him to refigure the world in terms of understanding that life as inclusive of both “inside” and “outside” worlds, and from the viewpoint of a multiple self. In so doing he attempted another kind of thinking, one articulated through the visual polysémie necessary to any genuine realism of the psyche. His visual poetics thus enabled him to evoke objects, animals, and human beings in the context of a relational sense of “home” and “community” in ways that parallel the richness and expressive potential that Ní Dhomhnaill draws from the use of her native Irish, over against the psychically-colonising language of English, so as to write a properly contemporary Irish poetry.
Against the grain
Above: Ken Kiff The Selection Committee’s Fear of the Irrational (Sequence 140)
Below: Ken Kiff The Conversation (Sequence 139)
Within his work as a whole, only a few of Kiff’s images – for example The Selection Committee’s fear of the irrational (S. 140) and The Conversation (S. 139) reproduced above – suggest something of his response to the prevailing critical culture within the visual arts in his time. Among other things, a dominant culture contemptuous of the direct articulation of psychic realities as these relate to daily interactions in the home and the community. In turn, the dominant art world culture’s perception of Kiff is all too apparent in the two comments directed at his work discussed below.
In 1980 the art critic Stuart Morgan suggested that: ‘to walk into a room of Ken Kiff paintings is like finding a grown man in tears at a bus stop’. He goes on to claim that, in such circumstances, ‘an excess of fellow feeling, well-meant but sentimental’ follows an initial coldness and distaste that makes it ‘doubly hard to sympathise with the stranger or to truly understand his problems’. He continues: ‘spectators like being permitted to condescend to artists, and Kiff, like the man at the bus stop, gives them every opportunity. They leave in a spirit of emotional largesse, confident that they have discovered a new Chagall or an L.S. Lowry’.
However, Morgan then goes on to identify what he sees as a central problem for reviewers of Kiff’s work such as himself. In doing so, he appears to distance himself from his own, rather convoluted, initial position, perhaps suspecting these may say more about his own personality than they do about Kiff’s work. He goes on to suggest that, while reviewers will ‘concede that Kiff is no naïf’, they will still face the problem that his concerns are not those ‘of any other advanced abstractionist’, since to do otherwise would be to ‘deny the power of his imagery’. Morgan then claims that, because looking for ‘buried narrative is futile’, ‘the rightness of… these works resembles that of a nursery rhyme’. (‘Ken Kiff at Nicola Jacobs’, Artforum April 1980, p. 86).
It is hard to know from his observations whether Morgan does in fact sees Kiff as a sophisticated painter whose work is undercut by a child-like imagery or whether he views Kiff’s work as offering something more positive. After all, a good proportion of nursery rhymes began life either as more or less coded political satires or as “Mother Goose Songs” or “Old Wives’ Tales”; that is as indicative of the traditional understanding of vernacular folklore. All in all, it seems that at best Morgan’s attitude towards Kiff’s work is both itself convoluted and highly coded, suggestive of a critic more anxious to protect his own sense of sophistication than to honestly engage with work that challenges it. Although, in the last analysis the review is possibly less dismissive on a careful re-reading than might initially appear, it remains indicative of the critical reluctance to engage with Kiff on his own terms rather than those of the “advanced abstraction” dominant at the time.
Ken Kiff Dog in the street (Sequence 63)
What I suggest Morgan fails to engae with can be indicated by a brief discussion of Dog in a street (S. 63), a work easily presumed as visualising a scene from a nursery rhyme or children’s story. At first sight the image appears mundane enough – “dog discomforted by over-friendly man”. Kiff’s subtle stylistic shifts clearly question the conventional expectations about the relationship between dog and man. The three-dimensionality of the cringing figure of the large dog, emphasised by black outline drawing, contrasts with the less emphatic figure of the man who appears all of a piece with the wall behind him (and, by implication, with his surroundings more generally). The resulting sense of tension between isolation and belonging puts in question the emotional expectations conventionally attached to encounters between a large dog and a man. The painting suggests what might be called a “dog’s eye view”, one in which, faced with the man’s gesture, the dog is perhaps uncertain as to whether it is being greeted or threatened. This focus on the emotional state of uncertainty of a non-human being is, I suggest, a significant aspect of the quiet radicalism of Ken’s work, its challenge to conventional expectations. If, as an image, its’ ‘rightness … resembles that of a nursery rhyme’, then it is surely a nursery rhyme that offers a highly unusual and empathetic view of the lives of non-human beings.
My second example is a claim by the abstract painter John Hoyland, who fully identified with the ideology of Modernist painting. Hoyland dismissed Kiff as turning his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’ and, as a result, ending up doing ‘some idiosyncratic little kind of painting’, ‘an escape’ said to result in the artist painting his own ‘nightmares’. (A rather extraordinary characterisation of Kiff’s work, given the sense of joy and wonder articulated by much of it). Hoyland’s assumptions about the “progressive” nature of modern art are part-and-parcel of High Modernity’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, common life. Perry Anderson has indicated the cause of that alienation in Modernist culture: its complicity with a market preoccupied with ‘commodities, including works of art’. For Anderson, the revolutionary possibilities that informed Cubism and Surrealism came to an end with Abstract Expressionism, after which painting in the West was increasingly driven by a commercial gallery-system that needed a regular turnover of new styles to supply a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. To Hoyland, wholly identified with the Modernist belief in a “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s work could only appear isolated and regressive. That work appears very differently, however, if we accept to see it in Kiff’s terms; namely as the articulation of an expanded, and inclusive, visual poetics concerned to maintain connections with, or attempt to inform, common life.
Ken Kiff Posting a letter