Trent Tate: Levity/Gravity
Tate Gallery
- Alana Keres -
We favor the honest expression of the uncanny truth. We work to unbind the picture plane. We are against shallow forms because they fear allusion and deny reality. We are for large trout because they find levity in depth, defying gravity as well as wayward lines cast by those who are unfamiliar with the nature of water and stones.
Dave Melrose and Trent Tate
2003 Letter to the Yellowstone River
During their first year of practice, young lawyers inevitably wonder how they can bill for the hours spent dreaming about a particular case. In the nearby but inverted cosmos of art gnosis, we critico-muciferous types consider ourselves sub-employed if we do not dream about our work at least once a week. Still, with only so much R.E.M. to go around, we also rely on another, more immediate sign of art’s innate energy: the eidetic trace I call a ‘third look.’ After examining an artwork with normal, binocular vision, does the image reverberate in the mind’s eye? Not with the tenebrous light of memory, but presenting itself even more vividly than in the first (or second) look? If so, the work has activated that faculty classically termed—what else—the ‘third eye,’ allowing vision to perform as completely as touch.
Why touch?
(Sidebar, your Honor:) Touch, as it turns out, has two basic modes. Tactility, like conventional vision, is a receptive faculty and simply perceives whatever falls across its surface. Its other mode, hapticity, actively shapes the surface it encounters. Together, the tactile and haptic form the full, chiasmatic circuit that informs our experience of touch. The ‘third eye’ is the haptic faculty of seeing; ‘making a find.’ It energetically meets its object with a shaping of its own. Subjectively, this kind of vision is most active in our dreams; objectively, its algorithms are embedded in art objects. Hence, dreaming about an art object is a plenipotent event—full verification of a work’s power to elicit the ‘third look’—a vision that creates what it finds.
For the last ten years, Trent Tate has been recognized for his meticulous tempera landscapes—immense treeless plains, mountains oddly intimate in their distance, water resting under water waiting. In November 2003, the thirty-three year old Austinite unveiled a new set of works, still committed to the “honest expression of the uncanny truth”—but in a vernacular even more insistent and condensed than his earlier, more illustrative paintings.
Trent Tate, Not Empty, 2001
Egg tempera on panelboard
31 x 35 inches
Photo: David Melrose
Two days before Tate’s November vernissage, the R.E.M. chariot dropped me off inside of one of these artworks, Not Empty (egg tempera on panel). (I’ll have to ask my assistant to check the Greater Keresian Archives, but I’m pretty sure this was an unprecedented event.) Driving along a washed-out road, swarmed by the colorless grasses that Tate often depicts in his Midwestern plainscapes, I stopped my car in front of a white frame house (Andrew Wyeth echoing throughout) and pulled a cello case from the back seat, which then transformed into a coffin with a handle. Surprised by its lightness, I trailed it down a long path through the prairie grass. As I walked, a small, dense sphere played through the case, bouncing from chamber to chamber like a pinball. Reaching the porch, one last satisfying ‘thunk’ announced the ball had found its slot.
It could be said that Trent Tate is an iconophiliac. He likes his images neat, turned out with the snap of a wrist like a well-cast trout line. But once the eye has taken his bait—to follow the metaphor to its Lacanian headwaters—we find other depths (and heights). The first of his new works reveals a simple, jade-gray globe resting in a curvature so subtle as to argue both volume and plane. Recalling the unseen sphere of my dream, I gave a little chuckle of recognition; its title, Gravity, shocked me back to the musical coffin in which it was at play. We all roll downhill eventually.
Trent Tate, Gravity, 2003
Egg tempera on panelboard
40 x 24 inches
Photo: David Melrose
Then up again. Consider Levity, the etiolated brick floating in its Fibonacci space. The Tatean exegesis tells of bricks taken from the hospital—later demolished—in which the artist was born, then recycled by the contractor who built his childhood home. And of course the artist has his own ideas concerning Gravity: “This is the cannonball that should have been a horse,” he says, referring to the story of Da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece, Il Cavallo. Like most artists inclined to figuration, Tate has to contend with Modernism’s picture plane and its emboldened claims to pictorial truth. In these paintings, he alters the colloquy between figure and ground, taking them from parable to parabolic waves (or were those particles?). As in earlier paintings, these new, iconophile works reassure us with a known object: “It’s a cannonball, a limestone, a lacustrine horse....” But as we relax into certainty, the image gives way to its trackless place. That space, neither Euclidean nor quantum, glows from within like luciferase. I doubt we’ll find trout at those depths.