Abstracting the Dialogic Process: The Celestial Art of Cullen Washington Jr.


Published July 24th 2024
By Gregory Bruno


Primer 3 - Cullen Washington Jr. - Photo Courtesy of the Artist

On April 8th, 2024, a total solar eclipse traveled across a narrow band of North America, from Mazatlán, Mexico to the Canadian providence of Newfoundland and Labrador. Along this path, hundreds of thousands of people experienced dramatic shifts in color, light, and temperature. For many, they were even brought to tears. Such a seemingly inexplicable emotional response to celestial activity might at first seem strange, but for many this was a profound, if not divine, experience; one in which our relationship to the whole of humanity, the natural world, and the cosmic experience were called into focus. In rare and strange moments such as these, we are reminded of the ongoing dialogue within ourselves, amongst our species, and across our universe.

Given the frenetic nature of our lives, it can take something like an eclipse to offer us a window into these dynamics, even if they are living within us all the time. When I spoke with the Louisiana-born painter Cullen Washington Jr. shortly after the eclipse and a talk he gave at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in East Williamsburg, he developed this idea and explained that “art is a visualization of the cognitive,” that the process of artmaking helps him to explore these ontological questions. For the viewer, the act of engaging with the work becomes transactional, an act in which aspects of ourselves are introduced into dialogue with formal elements and philosophical trends written into that work of art.

Washington’s work, which has been celebrated for its “continually evolving philosophy” (Sokoloska, 2014), examines questions of science, philosophy, and identity. “Artmaking is two things,” he told me over the phone, “It’s autobiographical, and basically, it’s a thought. The art is the result of thinking.” Perhaps one way to read Washington’s comment is to consider this as an act of signifying, of working within a flawed and controlled sign system (like language) or an artistic medium (like painting). From a dialogic framework, we might recognize that abstraction allows an artist like Washington to emphasize the process of artmaking over the work itself. If the static work rests in a state of being, then the action of creating the work exists in a state of becoming. The tension between these positions, the static nature of the work and the dynamic process of the development is perhaps most evident in Washington’s recent series of paintings, Primers. In his own words, Washington describes Primers as seeking:          

…to come to grips with global suffering and the unjust killing of black citizens. Using formalist strategies to bypass representation laden with pretense or prejudice, I endeavor to reveal Blackness in a more expansive way as the human experience. Called Primers, these paintings combine an alchemic mix of raw pigments, graphite, and ink on large undulating sheets of paper which I mend together and adhere to canvas. I call the combined surface, “skin”, a metaphor for the human condition of suffering. Skin holds personal and collective history in the form of scars. (2023)

This effort, described as an exercise in “abstraction as the highest form of protest” represents Washington’s unique ability to not just navigate, but to operationalize, the tension between urgent, material, and concrete needs against abstract forms.

When I spoke with Washington, he clarified this statement by explaining that, for him and in his work, our elementary particles, or “the oxygen in our lungs, the iron in our blood, and the calcium in our bones” come from “stardust,” so by reducing his work down to these raw pigments, he abstracts the human condition into a shared and universal design – one that supersedes the identity-positions to which we tether both ourselves and as well as our ontological perspectives.

In this effort to “atomize” our component parts into raw pigments, it might be argued that Washington is asking epistemological questions, interrogating how we know what we think we know about ourselves and our universe. While one might be tempted to consider the inherent tension between art and science, Washington explains that simply equating science with the concrete and art with the abstract constructs a false dichotomy. He reminded me that “science isn’t concrete” and relayed the story of the now infamous Double-Slit experiment. In this story of quantum physics, Thomas Young, a British polymath, identified that energy from light that should have been behaving as a particle was instead behaving as a wave, essentially revealing that the photons of light share qualities with both particles and waves (Lederman & Hill, 2011).

That’s the scientific explanation, at least. Some physicists take this experiment to imply that the energy in question seems to “know” that it is being observed and will, in turn, “behave” in ways that satisfy speculations and hypotheses posited by the observer. The science of this is far beyond my own understandings, but in viewing the work of Cullen Washington Jr., I recognize that his questions function largely as ontological meditations balancing on the high wire held tight by the tension between our social expectations of truth and myth, values of the individual vs. the collective, and amidst a more pressing and urgent need to respond to social and political causes. What Washington does is thread the needle on an increasingly complex set of questions: Who are we? How do we relate? And how do we express this? For Washington, these are questions of signification: how we name the aspects of our lives and ourselves.

In raising such questions, Washington is working in a long and storied tradition of philosophical inquiry into identity positions. When Ferdinand De Saussure first distinguished the signifier from the signified, he sought to examine the relationship between symbols and ideas (2011). Implicit in this dichotomy is a tension between seeking to communicate using a shared set of symbols and to differentiate, or individuate, within that controlled system. This framework, which helps us to understand the delicate balance necessary for individual creative expression within open systems, is equally useful for understanding art as it is for asserting our own identities.

The tension within these relationships—how we recognize ourselves as individuals but tethered to one another within these complex contexts—might best be understood as a dialogic system, one that demands we consider the connective tissue between aspects within ourselves, between ourselves and each other, and between ourselves and the natural universe. Such concepts were notably examined by the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose idea of the “dialogic imagination” recognized that ontological reality was the composite of a network of intertwined and overlapping subjectivities, shaping, and coloring our perceptions of lived and imagined experiences (1986). More recently, these abstract concepts were applied by constructivist psychologists like Hubert Hermans, who argues that these networks might best be understood as a theory of “the dialogical self,” one in which identity is characterized not by a single identity position, but by the tension between a variety of identity positions, especially as they exist in shifting and evolving social, political, and emotional contexts (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010).

The additional theoretical framework of the Dialogical Self may be helpful in considering the dialogic nature of Washington’s work. For example, we are assigned certain signifying identity positions from hegemonic structures within our society. These include social status, class, and other cultural and biological determinants. Conversely, we assume and adopt a range of self-signifying identity positions, too. These are the positions we choose to identify with and can include any position we adopt, assume, or avow as a part of our overall identities. Meaning, thus, emerges from the meshed network of connections between these positions. Identity, according to this framework, is less of a monolith and more about navigating the tensions strung between these positions. Maybe another way to put this is that identity, really, is an abstraction.

Perhaps for Washington’s work, such positions on their own—while important—miss the overall significance of a globalized sense of the self in dialogue with the celestial. When I asked him to consider these aspects in his own work, he reminded me of the majesty of a global, and perhaps even cosmic network of positions. Maybe then, Cullen’s work—which addresses the fundamental facets that bind us together as a species and an ecosystem—is really about going back to the beginning, before what he describes as the political condition that “situates itself in the polarities of the superficial.”

There is, it is quite clear, so much more that binds us together. At the end of our call, Washington reminded me to consider one simple but near magical fact: that we are “at this moment, moving on a rock that is both revolving at one-thousand miles-per-hour on its axis and orbiting at tens-of-thousands-of-miles per-hour around a star. I’m not identifying based on the self-signifiers. I’m looking at a person and thinking they’re just like stars. This is a mind, an emotional being standing in front of me. That’s the celestial. That’s the kinship that connects us to the universe, and to each other. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” These shared experiences, whether they are our lived-experiences or the experiences we have in transaction with art, rely on a dialogic tension to give them meaning. We bring as much as we take away from any given work of art, but how much of the artist is transferred into that work? To call a work a “piece” of an artist feels shallow, saccharine, and perhaps even minimizing. The process of becoming, or in Washington’s case, abstracting seems more important.

It is not uncommon for viewers to identify with an artwork, or for an artist to express their own sense of identity through the creative act. But what happens when that identity is complex? Situated? Embodied by various forms of social, material, and cultural capital? As Washington states, as soon as one “opens their eyes,” they are engaged in a political dialogue…

Signifiers, thus, allow us to express and communicate within a generally agreed upon sign-system, but such systems sacrifice nuance and individuality for the sake of communicability. But abstraction does something different. The verb to “abstract” comes from the Latin “abstrahere,” to divert. In the case of abstracting art, we are diverting away from the concrete reality into something more obtuse, and with more potential for transactional relationships with both a viewing audience and a creating artist. But still, it is worth remembering that abstraction as a process – that pulling away from the conventional set of prescriptive norms – may, itself, be a form of art. At least according to Cullen Washington Jr., abstraction allows for an inclusive dialogue. He reminds us that abstraction is “generous, hospitable, it makes room for the individual even though I’m not painting faces.”

From the dialogic perspective, this makes sense. Language, and perhaps art too, is never a fully ordered or organized system. Like all other aspects of society and culture, it is perpetually engaged in an on-going process of growth and development. It is in conversation with the world around us, flexing, changing, and evolving to meet the needs of shifting local and global contexts. It’s a bit like Washington says: “orbiting tens-of-thousands of miles an hour around a star.”

References:

Bakhtin, M. (1986). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Texas University Press.

De Saussere, F. (2011). Course in general linguistics. Columbia University Press.

Hermans, H., & Hermans-Konopka, A. (2010) Dialogical self theory: Positioning and

counter-positioning in a globalizing society. Cambridge.

Lederman, L., & Hill, C. T. (2011). Quantum physics for poets. Prometheus Books.

Sokoloska, P. (2014). “Challenging painter as a three-dimensional object.” BUtoday.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2014/challenging-painting-as-a-three-dimensionalobject/

Washington Jr., C. (2023). Cullen Washington Presentation. [Video].https://www.youtube.

com/watch?v=qPyp_iIM1E4&t=45s