Nick Riggle on Eva Struble

Soar/Shift/Shelter, 2018, digital print on vinyl, 6 x 96 ft. Admiral Boland Way, San Diego Airport. Photo by Pablo Mason.

[Image description: A photograph of a road passing in front of a gray industrial building with a fence in front of it. On the fence hangs a long mural that stretches into the distance. The mural is covered in a dreamlike, abstracted rendering of California plants, painted in a vivid Fauvist color palette. The piece is clearly designed for public viewers driving or walking by.]

Tokyo. Joshua Tree. Mexico City. London. Manhattan. 

Each has its image. The image that just occurred to you.

What is the image of a place? How is it constructed? 

Images of place compel and define. What is captured in images of Shibuya and Shinjuku? People flock to those neighborhoods to experience Tokyo, and when they think of themselves as people who have visited Tokyo, they often see themselves in those places. People identify with what those images capture. Yet so many of these images are clichés. What is in your mind is on the postcard, and what is on the postcard excludes so much of the life of a place.

Why would clichés populate a culture’s conception of place? So much of our experience of space is delocalized, or disconnected, abstracted, from the specificity of the land. (1) We often experience our surroundings as kinds, as fungible, as places of employment — another Taco Bell, a vacation spot, a weed – rather than as rooted in the specificity of place: this white sage plant here now on this path in this canyon. Images aid in delocalizing place and in delocalizing our relationship to a place. Delocalized spaces are not essentially tied to the land and depend instead on abstract or general relations — economic, social, cultural, conceptual. Consider what it takes to think of a place as a “vacation spot” or as “another Taco Bell” or to conceptualize a sage plant in Western scientific terms (Salvia apiana).

What is the image of San Diego? One often meets people in San Diego who, when asked why they moved here, say that they were working a job (cashier, retail, food services, bartender) in a place (Kansas City, Boise, Little Rock) and realized that they could do that same job in San Diego. What attracts them is a certain conception of the good life that the image of San Diego promises: the weather, beaches, bars. If their home could be anywhere, it might as well be where beaches and good weather promise more fun and freedom.

What happens to a person when their image of a place is delocalized, unmoored, lost in some heaven of fungibility? If one place is as good as another, give or take a beach, then you are free to move from one to the next, with no ties, where your love for a place is tied to what the place can offer you, not to what it essentially is. Surely you are liberated. Or at least you seem to be.

Is there a localized image of this place, San Diego, an image tied to this land, the unique coastal sage and chaparral ecoregion, with its scent of black sage in the summer, its bright cactus buds in the spring, its morning light that glows through the cholla cactuses, its coyotes and misty canyons?

How do you construct a cultural image of place?

Distance Signals, 2020, acrylic on panel, 43 x 216 in.

[Image description: A landscape rendered with a turquoise sky, pink rocks, and plants in bright, surreal colors. The foreground is covered in chaparral, succulents, and castor bean, among other plants.]

***

When our surroundings change, so must we, and when we change, so must our surroundings. 

Late in his life, when he was 72 years old, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was diagnosed with abdominal cancer, almost certainly fatal. A radical surgery gave him 14 more years of life, but his mobility was severely restricted, and he could no longer paint. For some, death would be better than suddenly, after a long life, feeling like they did not belong to their body, unable to pursue their vocation. For Matisse it was transformative: “My terrible operation has completely rejuvenated and made a philosopher of me. I had so completely prepared for my exit from life that it seems to me that I am in a second life.” In his second life, with a new self and a new body, he turned to collage. Assistants would help him apply paint to paper then cut out and arrange the pieces into works that range from small to almost monumental, abstract to symbolic or evocatively representational. Matisse called them “gouache découpés,” or “gouache cutouts” (gouache being the type of paint), and he regarded them as the culmination of his career. “I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say… Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated.”

What was he freed from? Matisse’s feeling of liberation was no doubt partly liberation from the techniques and traditions he spent five decades immersed in—those that defined his style, that he helped create, and that determined the course of 20th century painting. With paper, paint, and scissors Matisse constructed, drew, and carved a new self. 

But there is something puzzling about the thought that he was liberated. The best works from this period were made after years of perfecting his new technique, near the very end of his life. In 1946-47, Matisse created two works, Oceania, The Sky and Oceania, The Sea. The large rectangular works are composed of various cut-out abstract figures in white against a uniformly beige background, evenly spaced, and reminiscent of coral, seaweed, birds, and fish. 

Are these images of a place? Their titles suggest so, and in making them Matisse was inspired by his memories of a trip to Tahiti. He writes: 

This panel, [Oceania, the sea] printed on linen — white for the motifs and beige for the background — forms together with a second panel, [Oceania, the sky] a wall tapestry composed during reveries which come fifteen years after a voyage to Oceania.

From the first, the enchantments of the sky there, the fish, and the coral in the lagoons, plunged me into the inaction of total ecstasy. The local tones of things hadn't changed, but their effect in the light of the Pacific gave me the same feeling as I had when I looked into a large golden chalice.

With my eyes wide open I absorbed everything as a sponge absorbs liquid. It is only now that these wonders have returned me, with tenderness and clarity, and have permitted me, with protracted pleasure, to execute these two panels. (2)

Is Matisse trying to relive the life he lost? One might wonder what is liberating about embodying, in memory and art, a self he could no longer be. From that perspective, these are mournful images of places and selves forever gone. So how has he discovered a new self? How is he liberated?

In fact these images are of no place in particular—they are abstractions of place imbued with Matisse’s liberated artistic style. Through these works, Matisse reactivated memories of “inaction,” memories that evoke the current state of his body — but where that inaction was a source of “total ecstasy” and “protracted pleasure.” Other works from this period similarly attempt to recreate spaces he could no longer inhabit and where immobility reigns along with leisure, calm, tranquility. The Swimming Pool (1952) is a large blue cutout of waves and splashes that lined the entire dining room of his apartment in Nice. The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952), among the largest cut-outs he made, gave him a garden he could always visit. Matisse is using his new art to create a space for, to define, his new self. Now when Matisse goes to the garden, the swimming pool, Oceania, he sees himself, a new self, staring back at him.

As Matisse’s death grew nearer, his images became more and more abstract. See, for example, the stunning 9 x 9 in. abstract cut-out Memory of Oceania from 1953. What is the significance of Matisse’s increasing abstraction? The less concrete the place, the more easily it can float around — in his studio, his dining room – and the less it would remind him of the fact that the place is lost to him forever. Matisse seems to want to both relive a very specific memory of a very specific place and, through art, strip that place of specificity so that he can be there again. The more abstract it is, the more he can possess it.

The images of place we create, the way we understand our surroundings, resonate with our images of self. If our images of place are delocated clichés, what does that say about us?

What would it mean to do the opposite? To free ourselves not by delocating ourselves from the land, but by immersing ourselves in it, through the local, the individual, the concrete? 

Matisse could not travel, so he created delocated abstractions of place for private meaning. Eva Struble creates specificities of place for public meaning. To localize a delocalized place one must construct by deconstructing, subtracting, peeling away.

Distance Signals (detail), 2020, acrylic on panel

[Image descriptions: A closeup of a landscape, with green brush and pink rocks in the background. In the foreground is a castor bean plant, with pink-red leaves. The forms are all slightly abstracted and have delicate variations in each color.]

***

This is a detail of the center-foreground of Struble’s Distance Signals (2020, above), which depicts in vivid red the (typically green) leaves of a castor bean plant. To create the image Struble makes large sheets of dried paint by layering differently weighted paints (controlling for weight by thinning different pigments with water) that then dry at various levels. When the paints combine and dry, they create fascinating patterns of color on the invisible underside. Struble then peels the sheet off to reveal the underside; the paint sheets serve as her “paper,” which she then cuts to form and adheres to her surface.

Castor bean plants are an extremely poisonous invasive species, full of the deadly toxin ricin, and oddly abundant in San Diego. And so, in the center foreground of this large painting that depicts our raw, natural, unique desertscape is something that, in a sense, does not belong, is not at home.

***

Not belonging, being out of place, being cut out or peeled away from a sense of self: San Diego is treated as a place of transition, of border crossings, military assignment, various transplants, and out-of-state students, many of whom are people in pursuit of or implicated in the delocated image of SoCal beach life. This image is supported by a massive industrial and economic network. 

Agriculture is the most concentrated nexus of these forces, nestled between locality and delocality, between individualized nature and fungible land. Its output is one of the most glaring symbols of delocality, our commodity food. Roads obliterate the land; housing tracts and malls disappear it. Agriculture obliterates, too, but still depends on this very earth — on this sunlight, this daylength, this climate, this soil. Farms retain the essence of what they overwrite, even as migrant workers are hired by outside firms to tend engineered matter to feed tourists.

Left: Lemondrop, 2014, acrylic, paper, and screen print on panel, 65 x 40 in.

Right: Mellano, 2014, acrylic, paper, and screen print on panel, 54 x 40 in.

[Left image description: A close-up of abstracted plant life in a mix of earth tones with bright red, blue, and green. There is a faint geometric pattern underlying the image. A length of barbed wire stretches across the painting’s top left corner. Right image description: A highly abstracted landscape with a foreground in deep purples and grays underneath an orange sky. At the top left of the image is a mass of multi-colored marks suggesting foliage. Geometric patterning is visible in some of these passages of color.]

Struble’s work displays a sustained interest in the processes and products of cultivated land. Her series Produce (2014) is a collection of large, poetic images that juxtapose lyrical depictions of San Diego County farms with patterns inspired by the Mexican textile traditions of the farms’ migrant workers. Struble joined up with California Rural Legal Assistance to interview the farm laborers and better understand their lives.

There is no mistaking the beauty of these images, but what is the function of beauty here? Why render these farms with their questionable agricultural and employment practices in such lyrical tones and forms? Struble is calling our attention to an overlooked local site by aestheticizing its image. The textile patterns give presence to the unseen workers on whom the image of San Diego depends, the very image that erases migrant labor in a bright wash of sunshine, IPA, and fish tacos.

Notice though that Struble renders the places not merely aesthetically but abstractly; she makes them less concrete. When Struble addresses a more pressing social issue, her work tends to become more abstract in its imagery and more concrete in its media. Part of the Produce series is a risograph book, entitled Daily Labor, full of Struble’s interviews with day laborers. In Produce and other works, Struble’s emphasis on brush-stroke-free flatness lightens and she centers instead the potential for contact; the works reach out to us through space. This materiality signals that these are our obstacles, these matters affect our actual world, today. These are things we can touch now. 

Heavy Grass, 2017, bamboo, acrylic, flocking, dimensions variable. Installation photograph, San Diego Art Institute.

[Image description: A sculpture hangs from the ceiling of a white gallery space. The sculpture is composed of two lengths of shaggy, woven material in red, orange, white, and deep purple, which are suspended at each end.]

Heavy Grass (2017) further materializes the theme of unseen labor in cultivating land for food. But here instead of presenting an aesthetic image of the land, the land itself is presented to us, plucked, painted, and adorned. It is composed of undesirable elements of a garden, pieces of overgrown bamboo, which are woven into a large tapestry then painted and flocked. Struble reclaims what is rejected and amplifies, empowers it, with paint. In doing so she invites us to consider how we apply the concepts “natural” and “artificial” to land. Again Struble invites us to reconsider, even reimagine, what is right before us, especially when we tend to overlook, reject, or ignore it. 

In addressing these themes, Struble produces beautiful abstract images of concrete, real places and things, peeling away the concrete and placing it in a more abstract realm. Another example of this is Between Highways (2018), a large quilted abstract banner. The title refers to a community garden developed on neglected land between two highways — another site that complicates distinctions between natural and artificial, wild and cultivated, familiar and strange. We typically ignore these spaces and yet, as the garden demonstrates, they are beautifully rich in potential for community education, climate action, sustainability, and human connection. The image itself is abstract, seemingly expressive of the wild allure she finds between highways and that we might find there too – a call for us to change how we relate to actual space.

Between Highways, 2018, mixed materials, 192 x 40 in. Installation photograph, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

[Image description: A banner-like artwork hangs from the tall ceiling of a gallery space. The gallery has white walls, a green door on the left, and a window high up on the right. The artwork appears as if part painting and part collage, with a mix of geometric shapes and organic marks in vibrant colors.]

Yet when Struble asks us to imagine a more concretely localized image of San Diego, one more connected to the land, she presents us with more detailed images of an almost imagined place. Notice the detail in Distance Signals, Soar/Shift/Shelter, and Ocotillo Sunset (below). Thus when Struble moves toward the ideal — inviting us to construct new images of space and self — her method flips: the imagery becomes more concrete, more localized (detailed ocotillos, leaves, birds) and the medium more abstract, more shareable (digital print, reproducible photography, public murals). In constructing a new image of San Diego, Struble asks us to strip away the old one and distribute the ideal.

***

In asking us to reimagine ourselves and refigure how we relate to and imagine our surroundings, Struble does the same by putting herself in challenging or unfamiliar circumstances and by reworking her own canvasses and images. Obstacles are at the heart of Struble’s work; she often creates them for herself to make overcoming the obstacle part of her process. Obstacles to what? To her own habits of seeing or not seeing, of ignoring, overlooking, misrepresenting? Whatever it is exactly, obstacles are inseparable from hope, from a sense that something better lies on the other side of a challenge.

WW, 2017, oil on canvas, 36 x 43 in.

[Image description: A scene of vegetation and rocks in riotous color. In the background stands a small building in pink against a mint green sky. On the right are two high tunnels, which are fabric covered structures used to cover plants and extend the growing season.]

Her 2017 series Cover Crop plays on the term “cover crop.” Cover crops improve land and promote biodiversity by enriching soil and covering over weeds and erosion. Where Produce highlights dubious local farming practices, Cover Crop focuses on hopeful ones. Struble’s subject for the series are local small farms that promote sustainable agriculture and community education (Wild Willow, Nopalito Farm, Solidarity Farm). To create the images, Struble enacts the artistic version of the farms’ transformation: each piece is a reworked old painting that she cropped or flipped and painted over. (Motifs from the bottom center of Earthlab feature in Between  Highways.)

Earthlab, 2017, oil and acrylic on canvas, 47 x 33 in.

[Image description: An abstracted landscape with farm buildings in the background. The scene is rendered in a combination of flat planes of color and bold brushstrokes in mint green, reddish orange, pink, mustard yellow, and blue. Dense marks extend from the bottom and top of the painting, creating a perspective as if the viewer is looking through dense vegetation.]

Here Struble plays again with the abstract/concrete theme: In these paintings the farms – what is real and good and hopeful – are rendered with almost photorealistic definition and surrounded, almost shrouded, by colorful abstract forms and images from Struble’s past. Pigments and forms from the past bleed through to the present, as the past is reimagined and renewed, and the hopeful present is set in sharp focus, but in the distant center.

In Struble’s work as a whole I find hope and despair about the inescapability of our living together on and with this land, with its problematic history and present culture, while trying to make sense of and be at home in our surroundings. There are consequences of our thinking about land one way rather than another. Her work insists that the self be shaped by the local while acknowledging the myriad forces drawing us up into an illusory heaven of abstract relations built into delocalized space drawn by industry, military, economy. Struble leverages the tension there — between local and delocal, between coming and going, moving and staying put. Whether and how these tensions are resolved is of seismic collective import, and she sharpens her and our sense of these tensions through her brilliant choice of subject matter, her innovative and varied techniques in painting, photography, and collage, and a masterful sense of color and form. 

Ocotillo Sunset, 2019, digital print on vinyl, 15 x 82 ft. New Children’s Museum, San Diego.

[Image description: A mural on the wall of an outdoor parking area underneath a gray building. The mural is an abstracted, mountainous landscape in burnt orange, mustard yellow, ochre, and green, featuring transparent plant forms.]

***

Struble peels away, cuts, and arranges her paint in asking us to peel away and redraw our sense of place. Peeling away, seeing through things, seeking something deeper, more profound beneath the surface — the notion figures in the mythology of aesthetic experience. Beauty is said to conceal, to withdraw and withhold. Behind the alluring surface lies some profound truth. If only we could peel away the surface and grasp the truth that beauty contains.

Proust, in In Search of Lost Time, repeatedly depicts Marcel struggling with this experience. Initially he sees sunlight bouncing off a stone, which “seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings.” Later, Marcel is unable to grasp what he sees in distant church steeples he notices while riding in the back of a carriage:

In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, their shifting lines, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the core of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal. (3)

As alluring as the spires seemed, he could not understand why they compelled him. “I did not know the reason for the pleasure I had felt on seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to discover that reason seemed to me irksome.” (4) But he begins to grasp something of the “reason” for his pleasure, something of what the steeples hid:

And presently their outlines and their sunlit surfaces, as though they had been a sort of rind, peeled away; something of what they had concealed from me became apparent; a thought came into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier, framing itself in words in my head; and the pleasure which the first sight of them had given me was so greatly enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer think of anything else. (5)

What would it mean to peel away the surface of our surroundings? What difficult and beautiful truths lie beneath the superficial image of San Diego, under its hot cement, its intersecting twelve-lane highways and malls, the homes and cul-de-sacs that outline and hide the canyons — beneath the abstract relations of commerce, tourism, industrial agriculture, and the general categories of things that impose themselves on our image of home?

What if our image of San Diego were Struble’s image?

Nick Riggle is a philosopher who specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He teaches at the University of San Diego.

Notes

(1) I borrow this concept with gratitude from Native American philosopher Brian Burkhart, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and an expert in Native American and Indigenous philosophy. See his book Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State Press, 2019.) Burkhart argues that the delocalization of concepts and practices is central to the process of colonization.

(2) Labyrinthe, vol. 11, no. 3, December 1946, 22-3; reprinted in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art, (London: Phaidon, 1973), 109-10.

(3) Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1992), 196.

(4) Ibid., 197.

(5) Ibid.