The revered Guggenheim Museum in New York has been holding some somewhat unusual exhibitions lately. First there was "The Art of the Motorcycle," an ode to this all-American mode of transportation arranged on Frank Lloyd Wright's famed ramp which drew record crowds, many among whom were not the type to visit an art museum at all - "easy riders." Currently on view is "The Worlds of Nam June Paik," an electronic extravaganza that features lasers and televisions and recalls Disneyland or a theme park of that sort. Hilton Kramer must be packing for the Eighteenth century.
           Then there was the last show of the 1900's, a retrospective of the work of Francesco Clemente, which the Guggenheim billed as the first "comprehensive" retrospective of his work ever. What is so unusual about this is that Clemente, born in 1952, was only 47 years old at the time of the show, making him the youngest artist ever to have the honor of a full-museum Guggenheim retrospective bestowed upon him or her, usually him. Perhaps "greater" artists have had retrospectives at the Guggenheim at later ages, or posthumously, but this should not concern us, as "greatness," for those who care to calibrate it, is for posterity to judge anyhow. The point is that Clemente's time has come, and that the Guggenheim show does justice to an artist who is one of the most significant of our era.
           Although the Guggenheim claims that this is the first "comprehensive" retrospective of Clemente, Clemente has had significant shows in the past. In London in 1983 the Whitechapel Art Gallery revealed his landmark "Fourteen Stations" series. He had his first retrospective in 1985, sparked by interest in his leadership in the New Expressionism, at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art at Sarasota. Other retrospectives confined themselves to specific media: the Madrid in 1987 to frescos, the Basel in 1987 to drawings and watercolors, the Philadelphia in 1990 to works on paper. The Guggenheim has one-upped all these shows, or two- or three- or four- upped them. Drawing from several private collections, two New York art galleries, several museums, and Clemente's personal holdings themselves, it presents a look at Clemente's opus reaching back into the 1970's in virtually every media he has worked in, including obscure book illustrations, and illuminates the entire body of Clemente's work as no one has before.
           Prodded by Clemente himself, the museum has chosen not to arrange the show chronologically, as is customary in retrospectives, but by eight themes: "I;" "Unborn;" "Bestiary;" "Conversion to Her;" "Amulets and Prayers;" "Sky;" "Rooms;" and "Books, Palimpsests, Collaborations." Clemente has said, "Certain constellations of work[s] are formed even at a distance of years... If you were to show my work chronologically, you would have a discontinuous representation since formats disappear for years and then return." Such constellations include Clemente the excruciating self-dissector; Clemente, the migrant multi-culturulist at home in New York, Rome, and India; Clemente the connoisseur of eros. Yet, there is a certain sleight of hand at work here. As one ascends the Guggenheim's ramp from "I" to "Sky" ("Rooms" and "Books..." are in adjourning rooms) themes invariably repeat. "I's" self-portrait's occur in the medievalist "Bestiary," "Conversion to Her's" eroticism in India's fetishistic "Amulets and Charms." This is not to question the wisdom of the Guggenheim's thematics. Rather, it is to point out that Clemente is an artist who, despite claiming many constellations, has these constellations occupying the same sky, a consistent field of both subject matter and style, where the body, fetishism, eroticism, and neo-expressionism are constant.
           Clemente came of age in the anything goes '70's, and among the anything that went was a return to figuration, after its banishment during Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and early Conceptualism. Among the contexts for Clemente's maturation were the sexual revolution, feminism, and, in the intellectual world, the work of Foucault. With Clemente's ascendancy in the '80's, the AIDS crisis would provide a constant impetus to focus on the body, a theme that would become infectious in the work of a great many artists. As Meyer Shapiro points out in his valuable essay on "Style," stylistic tendencies do not isolate themselves in individual artists but apply to "the broad outlook of a group," to a socio-historical moment. In articulating a personal vision, in making it his own, Clemente speaks for the tribe as well.
           There is, of course, a long tradition of self-portraiture in western art, where Clemente has several of his many feet. Among those who have said "I" have been Durer, who vainly celebrated his own artistic success; Parmigianino in a convex mirror; Rembrandt who touchingly documented his aging in over a hundred pieces; Delacroix with a touch of the "Romantic agony," and Manet, Whistler, and Cezanne among the early moderns with a touch of formal experimentation. Perhaps Clemente's forerunners are the likes of van Gogh, Munch, and von Jawlensky, early Expressionists who took to the self-portrait, in van Gogh's case, with effects, "almost colourless, in grey tones against the a background of pale malachite." And Clemente? His is a postmodern "I." As he declares: "The self-portrait for me is justified... by the idea that the ego re-emerges, continually new.... The idea of the self-portrait is tied to the repetition of the ego and the rebirth of the ego. It is the contrary of the mirror." The ego for Clemente is unstable, in flux. As with Lacan the "mirror stage" is both synchronous and diachronous, can be captured on occasion, but never fixed, like mercury. Postmodern. Perhaps we can say postmortem, for if the artist's gaze is "a gaze behind" him or herself, the gaze of thanatos, as Lacan suggests in "What is a Picture?" then Clemente is literally dissecting himself in a fluxus, hence the images of death that accompany the images of his ego in transition. There is "Self-Portrait with a Hole in the Head," a fairly realistic representation of Clemente's head with a brick wall in the background, with what looks like a bullet-wound the size of a rose above his right eye-brow. Clemente is at the left of this canvas; in the center is a blood colored rose. Clemente is not in pain here. He understands that his portraiture is an ideal representation of the process of self-representation, hence the rose, hence the satisfied look on his face. "Pagan Self-Portrait" is more of the Clemente as examiner of ego in flux. In this startling oil on linen, all in hot shades of pink and red Clemente portrays himself in what seems a womb, with five breasts, his head slightly askew. The womb image suggests birth, the ultimate trope for change, coming into being itself. Moreover, the Clemente being born is a polymorpous creature, exceeding hermaphrodism - male and female he can fulfill any sexual role, even a parahuman one. His head is askew, eyes asymmetrically colored even his gazes are not in temporal synchronicity. He is living in different moments. The askew head questions the world, the viewer that Clemente, or the split Clemente is meeting. It is a masterwork of the self in flux. Craig Hauser provides valuable commentary in the Guggenheim's superb catalog to the another "Self-Portrait" of 1980, when Clemente was trial-blazing the New Expressionism. The oil depicts Clemente holding his own head over the center of the painting, severed from his body (postmortem again), indulging in auto-oral sex. The work, in red, looks like an inverted image, "an inked printer's block," such inversions in media complementing the thematic inversions of deconstructing the Cartesian privileging of mind over body that Clemente's forerunners in Western self-portraiture preferred. Such an image is utterly solipsistic, but Clemente is not solipsistic painter. The other is a constant presence in his opus, so constant, as to intrude upon his vision of himself. A perfect example of this "blurring of identity," as Hauser puts it, is the "Alba & Franceso," mischievously included under "I." The painting, a watercolor done in realistic skin tones superimposes the faces of Clemente and his wife, much as Bergman had Liv Ullman and Bibi Andesrson arranged in Persona, to the right of his canvas, with the signature flowers to the left of the canvas. The flowers are once more a sign of affirmation: yes, the ego is in flux, in intersubjective relationships, but this does not imply abnormality or chaos, just the way of the world.
           Again, Clemente is not a solipsist, though it may seem the case that he is rather imposing himself on the other than acknowledging the other's influence on him. The latter is clearly true. Clemente's full-fledged treatment of the other is poignantly revealed, with embellishment from the Guggenheim's catalog, in the section "Conversion to Her," which includes poetry by Robert Creeley, one of several poets with whom Clemente has collaborated. Creeley, in one of many gorgeous poems writes:

Not metaphoric,
flesh is literal earth.

turns to dust
as all the body must,

becomes the ground
wherein the seeds' passed on.

The flesh, its passing, the regeneration of the flesh, and the mysticism of the process - these are Clemente's preoccupations. In his popular book The New Subjectivism, Donald Kuspit writes of Clemente's "beatific bawdiness." But Clemente is hardly bawdy in the manner, say, R. Crumb is, nor is his art surrounded with a medieval aura of beatitude. Nor, as Kuspit has it, is Clemente's neo-Expressionism "child-like;" it is fully conscious of sexual politics and mortality. The "spiritualism" of Clemente that Kuspit is so found of speaking is not a western one, nor is it a mere Freudian sublimation of sexuality. Creeley is much closer to the truth. And one will have to look to Clemente's feet in India, where he has often travelled, for answers. "I Hear," a 1988 pastel on paper, depicts a woman with her legs spread before the viewer, as if to give birth. The body is human, but the head, the same size as the body, is a red flower. Creeley writes:

One cannot say, be as women,
be peaceful, then. The hole from which we came

isn't metaphysical.
The one to which we go is real.

           Clemente is insistent in portraying that "hole from which we came." It is ubiquitous in his work, a constant reminder of parturition, of coming into being. The head is as large as the body, a flower, the woman's mind avenged for the association of her with her body, with the assumption that she is always a peaceful, graceful creature. The title indicates Clemente's receptivity to the condition of woman, and humanity. The woman, long associated with virginity in the west, has, as Gita Mehta points out, her fertility, her sexuality returned to her. One thinks of Kenneth Clark's classic study The Nude. Clemente's nudes are those of both "energy," sexuality, life, and "pathos," conveying deep expressivity.
           And that other hole? Clemente is consistently conscious of death, in touch with the reality principle. Take the third installation from Clemente's breakthrough series "Fourteen Stations." A self-portrait, it depicts Clemente's face, its left tendons showing, its teeth replaced by miniature white skulls. The gaze is intense, fierce. Clemente associates the instrument of consumption, teeth, with death itself - even teeth, which digest that which maintains life, will be given to death, life's mere surface skin, stripped bare to reveal tendons. Indeed skulls are pervasive in Clemente's work. "Silence," depicts three figures the color of caked blood on a yellow background, as emaciated as Giacometti figures, as if they were fingerprinted. Death, and its silence, is as banal as a fingerprint. It emaciates. What other color to associate it with than dried blood?
           Clemente's investigations are done under the sun/sign of the east, as the sections such as "Amulets and Prayers." In 1973 he first visited India, and he would return there often. Much of the Eastern connection fuels Clemente's focus on fertility and rebirth. Additionally, Clemente is attracted to the fetish, which, psychoanalysts contest arises from castration, a concentration of meaning on an object generated from some lack. For Clemente, this lack, the manque, often finds an object whose signification fulfills a nexus of his thematic concerns. The Pondicherry Pastels consist of talismanic drawings which repeat some of Clemente's persistent motifs, such as flowers and self-portraiture. The King and the Corpse, a series of tiny sculptures in copper, tin, brass, and lead, takes for its departure the tale of a king who takes a ghost under his control and has the ghost narrate stories to him. The series thus captures Clemente's concerns with energetic, and pathetic, nudity and mortality, as well as revealing Clemente's respect for verbal art. Quite a bit of Clemente's work is indeed in imitation of Indian media, further indicating the Eastern influence. Clemente may be a westerner, but without India, he is simply not himself.
           Clemente has also done work in auxiliary media such as book illustration. This work distorts Clemente formally while retaining his subject-matter, adding a very interesting dimension to his opus. "Twins," done in gouache, ink, and colored pencil looks like a Clemente through the prism of, well, gouache, ink, and colored pencil: it is a flesh colored piece, containing two twins, holding each other, showered by flower petals. The theme of creation, of birth is present, as is that of the troubled ego, but affirmed by flower. "White Shroud," an ink, pencil, and watercolor work done for an Allen Ginsburg text is similarly refreshing. The piece has hallucinatory blues and oranges surrounding a naked white self-portrait of Clemente. Again, same artist, entirely different prism of medium. By looking at Clemente's more "obscure" choosen media, one gets to see through Clemente's vision with a different lens.
           No discussion of Clemente's work could be complete without a treatment of his magnificent master series The Fourteen Stations - originally exhibited in London in 1983 --, included in the side gallery "Rooms" at the Guggenheim retrospective. Francesco Pellizi's commentary is probably the strongest in the exhibit's accompanying catalog. As Pellizi notes:

On the title page of the original catalogue... Clemente drew the black-and-white image of a clock surmounted by two Janus-head donkey profiles, one with eyes shut, the other with eyes open. The hands of the clock are represented by what looks like a sexual organ; here is movement, desire... recurrent deaths and rebirths. The cycle announces itself at fist as dumb time plodding through stations -sites at which action, and time itself, have stopped, transfixed in the stillness of the room.

           Desire, rebirth, movement of self - these are the typoi which make Clemente. And where better to root himself than in that central site of Western mythology of death, resurrection, and love than in the via dolorosa. Each oil and wax on linen of these stations help constitute a stunning majestic series, each of whose images is singularly jarring and arresting. I shall constrain myself to the first and last of these. The first shows two women (the Marys?) bathed in white light each embraced by a black demon. At the center of this symmetrical scene is a formless void of light, implying the sanctity from which the women are wrestled. They are wrestled by the painting's black edges itself; it is almost as if art itself, Clemente, were an instrument in imposing suffering - are the demons self-portraits? The last painting is a self-portrait, of a seated blackened Clemente, with white snow falling in the background. Twin male heads reside within Clemente's breast. White and darkness are again at odds, yet harmonious, in the giveness of the snow which is the giveness of the sitter's posture which is the giveness of art itself of which Kant speaks in his third Critique.         

"Paradigm" (figure 1), appearing in the middle of the exhibit, in "Conversion to Her," in the section on eros, on the life principle itself, is the epitome of the Clemente self-portrait. A pathetic nude, it shows Clemente in two color fields, enclosed in life's womb in transition between two of life's stations. At the bottom of the Guggenheim's ramp is Clemente's "I." At the top, "Sky," one finds "I" as well. Here is Clemente in "Sperm," his body blissfully floating, eyes closed, head, sperm-shaped, approaching through the canvas in a brown field entering nirvana. He could be about to fertilize. Death, on the other head, could be imminent. The viewer could be fertilized. The viewer is about to walk away. It is the most peaceful painting in the exhibition, validating the very process of looking at art. Unorthodox for Clemente as it may be, it signals his occupations: change, death, birth, ambiguity, affirmation.