CHARLES FINE

Essay by Jonathan Griffin

Even though he makes singular objects and images, sculptures and paintings that can hold their own alone in any antiseptic white gallery, Charles Fine’s art is best understood as a richly fertile eco-system of forms. No artwork of his is an island; each, as John Donne wrote, “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” The shape of that continent, in the fourth decade of Fine’s career, is now hard to map, its extent so broad and its borders so restlessly expanding. Nevertheless, it retains certain landmarks that may help us to navigate across it.

In the 1970s, absconding from an unsatisfactory and unconsummated relationship with art school, Fine began traveling regularly to Mexico and to an avocado ranch owned by some friends in San Juan Atezcapan, across the lake from Valle de Bravo, a couple of hours’ drive west from Mexico City. It was walking that high terrain, amongst pine trees with unpredictable and dramatic weather patterns rolling through the low mountains, looking out over valleys of furrowed farmland, that he began to draw together the threads of his thinking about humankind’s relationship to its environment, and to translate them into material form.

Beyond drawing or painting, carving or casting, Fine was always a collector and a curator. At first, his collection amounted to no more than six or eight objects, things that he had gathered along his travels and which he could not leave behind. Over time, they grew in number, eventually amounting to whole cityscapes of bristling and eccentric forms. Some were natural - like fungi or seedpods, oddly shaped rocks or pieces of wood - and others were manmade. Some he would pick up and drop into his pocket when walking in the countryside; others would entail special pilgrimages to markets were local women laid out on woven blankets the curious old artifacts that their farmer husbands had pulled from the ground.

When he brought them all together on a tabletop, it seemed to him that these things shared something ineffable and important; that they all belonged to one unnamed and unnamable category. On the face of it, the things made by humans varied widely: from ancient tools discarded by indigenous peoples to implements fashioned in the present day; from accidental by-products of metal-casting processes to items created by Fine himself. The natural objects were just as disparate, belonging to classifications both of flora and fauna, vegetable and mineral. They mostly adhered to an earthly color palette, and were often palm-sized, or pocket-sized, or, if not handmade, then agreeably responsive to the shape and touch of the hand.

One other quality they had in common was a sense of the rootedness in place. With few exceptions, they were all shaped in some essential way by their environments — that is to say the regions through which Fine’s peregrinations led him: the American Southwest, Mexico and Central America. In that part of the world, late Modernity has an uneasy, estranged relationship with the past, which feels very remote indeed. In somewhere like Britain, where I was born, the urban areas and the countryside have an unbroken tether to past inhabitants, whose enduring presence can be felt in place-names and in the routes of paths and roadways, in the boundaries of counties, parishes, fields and woods, even in the shape of the land itself. In the American Southwest, and increasingly in the more developed parts of Mexico and Central America, the rapid spread of infrastructure, the brutal manipulation of terrain and the exhaustion of resources has tended to obliterate whatever existed before. Especially in the United States, the knowledge that native peoples once held about the environment in which they lived has not endured.

The great chronicler and advocate for the Western wilderness, Wallace Stegner — a writer who was influential on Fine’s early thinking — attributed the rapacious exploitation of the region to the historical rootlessness of its largely migrant population:

Migrants deprive themselves of the physical and spiritual bonds that develop within a place and a society. Our migratoriness has hindered us from becoming a people of communities and traditions, especially in the West. It has robbed us of the gods who make places holy. It has cut off individuals and families and communities from memory and the continuum of time.

Fine, too, as a traveller, was a migrant of sorts; his material attunement to the places he moved through was his way of reconnecting with the continuum of time.

When I write that Fine was a curator before he was an artist, that does not mean that he organized exhibitions of others’ art. Rather I use the term in its traditional sense: the curator was historically a caretaker of a particular collection, a conservator and the principal authority on its origins and interpretation. Fine not only physically cares for the objects in his possession, he also nurtures their resonances, their poetic significance, their imaginative potential. He extended his curatorial role in the late 1980s when he first presented volumes from his collection on tables with sculpted cement tops, under glass, within exhibitions of his own paintings and sculpture. He titled the series Table of Contents (1989-2008).

His collection — which he has likened to a notebook or a complex computer program, growing alongside and in response to his art — has always functioned as an engine for generating visual ideas. Fine’s first mature works are charcoal drawings derived from (if not actually representing) certain objects in his possession. In the worked and reworked marks and erasures of Eleventh Floor (1983) and Outlier (1984), forms loom out of the darkness. Oddly, despite the solid materialism of the things that inspired them — a rock perhaps, or an ocean-smoothed shell — Fine’s drawings are climatically miasmic, evanescent, ghostly. He has referred to them as “drawings of man in — and as — weather”. In some, it is as if he is working away to release the soul beneath the object’s hard surface.

Do spirits reside in objects? Or only some of them? Fine’s entire oeuvre seems to be shaped by unseen past lives, mysterious former functions and users, and inscrutable materiality. The objects in his collection have power, even if we can only guess at its source. It may come as a surprise, for instance, to learn that a root-like tuber on the table is in fact a hardened excretion from and ill-sealed can of expanding foam, or that the timeworn-looking totem next to it is actually an improvised whisk from mixing plaster in a modern metal foundry. What elevates these things above mere curiosities is their communion with other objects in the collection; even though they may be broken, dead or discarded, they maintain an active discourse across time. The expanding-foam tuber, for instance, resembles the fractal-like burls known in Mexico as flor de incino, which Fine has carefully cut from within parasitic branches on oak trees and, as recently as 2012, cast into an aluminum sculpture of the same name. The contemporary wire whisk is in conversation with much older iron hand-tools, as well as a nearby piece of coral. These resemblances are neither coincidental nor arbitrary, in Fine’s view, but reveal the objects to be manifestations of a common energy and intelligence deeply rooted in time and space.

Fine did not know it yet, but around the same time that he was developing his speculative theories of object memory and gestalt, trans-material consciousness, a scientist in Cambridge, England, was pursuing similar ideas about the memory of natural species. Rupert Sheldrake’s first book, The New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, published in 1981, radically proposed that, “Cosmic evolution involves an interplay of habit and creativity.” As Sheldrake argued, “natural systems, such a termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind, however far away they were and however long ago they existed.” Memory is contained in morphogenic fields, according to Sheldrake, that shape the gestalt forms of a species — the growth habits of crystals, for instance, or the clocking pattern of birds. When Fine read Sheldrake’s work, he realized that through his collection and arrangement of found objects he was giving form to a particular morphogenetic field.

At the outset of Fine’s career, the Southern California art scene was consumed by an infatuation with Light and Space, and Finish Fetish — two artistic movements that took the rejection of the maker’s hand to obsessive, even maniacal extremes. Artists devoted themselves to making things that looked brand new, fresh off the production line or — better yet — beamed down from outer space. There was no memory to these works; they aspired to exist in a perpetually emerging present. Many of Los Angeles’ most prominent artists at the time — Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, for instance — were outsiders, recent arrivals to the city, who experienced only its newness and whose work was ostensibly unconcerned with the strata beneath its asphalt and stucco skin. By contrast, Fine was born in Hollywood. He understood that the place consisted not just of what was built on top of it.

Fine told me that his impulse was to plane through the perfect resin surfaces of John McCracken’s planks to expose the living organic fiber beneath. Working through, rather than building up, polishing or finishing, rapidly became his modus operandi. He is always concerned with what lies unseen or buried, rather than what is most readily apparent. The subterranean, the horizontal and the obscure is resurrected into vividly transcendent verticality. In an early painting, from 1986, he summoned a spiraling shape from a shower of vertical, scarified marks, inspired by a dogfish’s egg case in his collection. He liked the idea that — despite the egg case’s desiccated appearance — it once contained something living.

A comparable object, a kelp seed pod that Fine retrieved from the ocean and lightly dented as he carried it to shore, is the basis for a series of sculptures titled Alga (1987-2010). The dent is reproduced precisely; Fine considered the flaw to make the object even more perfect. The original plaster form, from which a mold was taken for a bronze, is a sculpture in its own right, in no way subordinate to the later patinated metal versions. The spirit of one object or image sits beside (or within) another: from the seed in the pod to the plaster in the bronze, to the photography to the memory of the sculpture and finally to the memory only of the abstracted form.

Fine hit a breakthrough in his paintings when he began experimenting with a viscous dark brown substance called asphaltum. This medium, sold in printmakers’ supply stores as a masking solution for the metal etching process, is a refined version of the bitumen that bubbles up in the La Brea Tar Pits and washes onto the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. It has been used by craftsmen the world over as a sealant and a decorative paint since prehistoric times. In Fine’s paintings, the dark asphaltum reacts with oil paint, coloring it from beneath. He works, at first, with the painting on the floor, moving over it as if viewing terrain from the air. (An important series of paintings, titled Fieldmarks (1991-2011), explicitly refers to the experience of looking down on hand-ploughed fields from above.) Over initial layers of translucent color, he will apply marks in asphaltum, which he regards as a “living structure” in the painting and “a network of growth.” He sprays this surface with mineral spirits, which cause the different substances to erode and merge. A further layer of colored oil paint is applied on top. Finally, these sequential strata of paint are activated by an application of clear alkyd resin, which acts somewhat like a photographic developer and draws impression of concealed layers through to the surface. He may repeat the process several times. In some instances, he will witness a under-painted area of asphaltum emerging as a ghostly amber stain a number of days after the topmost layer of oil paint has been applied. The first time it happened he was surprised and delighted that the painting almost seemed to make itself. He likens this to a fruit ripening; his paintings are both of a natural process and also literally are a natural process, through their slow and unpredictable realization.

This technique of painting is consistent with Fine’s more general aim to set up a system whereby his art develops a sustaining life of its own. The generative function of his object collection; his openness to the gifts of chance, to unforeseen by-products of his fabrication processes; his willingness to draw attention to what lies beneath or behind the surface of the work: all these factors contribute to an oeuvre that continues to grow while remaining absolutely coherent and interconnected. As an artist, Fine has created his own atmospheric system. Long may it continue to sustain and nourish him.

References
Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), Random House Ince., New York

Rupert Sheldrake, The New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981/2009), Icon Books, London

Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988/211), Icon Books, London