Transience, A Book from Lincoln Schatz Studio
One More Time
Lincoln Schatz has a lifelong relationship with the sea. But as a native Chicagoan, the artist’s concept of a vast body of water is of the inland variety, one of a series of great wells carved by glaciers, filled in with icy fresh-water melt. Defining the city’s Eastern border, Lake Michigan’s lengthy reflection can cast a winter twilight in a glow of cerulean blue, extending over the urban skyline of glass and steel towers and to the Midwestern landscape beyond. Even urbanites ensconced in a frenzied, 21st-century pace, often blithely content to acknowledge the shore as a mere recreational asset or property enhancement, are soothed by the lake’s steadiness, unable to escape its magnetic pull. “Look east and you see the lake, only the lake,” says Schatz. “Turn around and you see Chicago.”
The notion of ritual can conjure thoughts of solemnity and discipline, veering on intransigence. Yet, a daily practice often results in the sort of meditation that focuses and calms the mind, enhancing powers of observation, analysis, even strategy. Finding the axis where an object can evoke the personal experience of visceral transcendence is the artist’s challenge. Traditional landscape (and still life) aims for this goal, and its most successful manifestations find fixation in the viewer’s gaze as captured by painterly acuity.
The burden on transparent media, however, rolls into the realm of the conceptual, as seen in On Kawara’s iconic “Today” series of paintings, for which the artist rendered the date in acrylic block letters on 18-by-24-inch canvases every day for 48 years. The impetus for the series being, “to fix his attention on the movement and interactions of time and space, and the mindfulness required to achieve the sense of an eternal present,” as I wrote in an essay on the occasion of the artist’s 2015 retrospective at the Guggenheim New York. Despite his use of paint, Kawara’s straightforward compositions seek the directness of the photographed image, the challenge to the viewer being to contemplate only the artist’s endeavor as transformative exercise.
Perhaps here Schatz has advanced Warhol’s concept of artist as machine and landscape’s mission of object as transcendent channel to image as transformative mechanism. Ironically, Schatz’s choice to focus these conceptual, theoretical, conjectural investigations on an ever shifting, natural landscape provides staunch ground from which to scrutinize such exquisite complexity. Or in another moment, it’s a place to still the mind. That’s a point of reflection to which one willingly returns again and again.
Deborah Wilk
If you are interested in obtaining a copy of the book please contact studio@lincolnschatz.com