Maudee Carron

In 1912 Picasso created the revolutionary collage "Still Life with Chair Caning," inaugurating Synthetic Cubism. This work was profoundly important to the international art world. (The Art of Assemblage, by William C. Seitz, 1961.) But just as important to you and me, for our personal art worlds, was the birth in 1912 of Maudee Carron. We must refrain, however, from construing this curious coincidence as some auspicious conjunction. Maudee's dialogue over the years with the avant-garde was not a destiny determined by stars, but a destination she chose anew over and over again with every fork in the road.

Maudee is, as she bluntly insists, an existentialist. With the tragic suicide of her mother, Maudee awoke realizing that the decision whether to live or to die is made with every dawn in complete solitude and unnerving freedom. John Dewey, the early twentieth century American philosopher, observed in Art as Experience (1934), that "To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise." What now became essential was not what haunted any longer from the past, but rather what always arrived from the future, the new. Rather than drift in a predestined rut, Maudee chose to live at the extreme limits of possibilities available, out there where stars shine in a vast region of black unknown.

Those who charge forward toward the threshold of the future, toward the horizon of all new possibilities, march with the avant-garde. This march approaches the future without suppressing or disarming it, even as it approaches us with all its violence and wonder. We must leave nothing within us hidden. We must accept all that befalls us with grace. But this march does not want mere acquiescence. Joining ranks with the vanguard, Maudee Carron transgressed the boundaries of art, always to expand them further than ever before. Her iconoclasm was all the more daring for its reveling conspicuously in the backwoods of Texas and Louisiana. Maudee's art, her thinking, indeed her every way of being has always been suffused with the spirit of the avant-garde.

In the world of art during the first half of this century, the Dadaists playfully constructed opportunities for accidental art, even if - and just because - this was absurd. The Surrealists mined the subconscious. Together they marched upon two fronts, confronting the suppressed within themselves and stalwart traditions everywhere else. They undressed their discursive and conventional selves to march against an all-too-well-dressed conventional establishment.

Surrealism was not an already obsolete historical movement in Maudee's time. Her letters to Margo Jones, written in the late 1930s, reveal a young woman already fascinated with "this wonderful surrealism that... is neither realism nor idealism but both and stands higher than either... with its feet on the smelly snips of grass and its head knocking symphonic poems on the stars...." When Maudee discovered anything new, whether in philosophy, literature, music, art, theater or dance, her unflinching response was to experiment with it. Inspired by Gertrude Stein, Maudee searched in those early years "after a pure and non-objective writing," hoping not merely to imitate the great woman; "where Gertrude Stein has left off, the next young creator must pick up ...." In an early play, Maudee concerned herself not with "the conventional, certainly worn-out, idea of plot," but with "the inner side of things without allegory or sentiment." Her writing aimed "to achieve an intellectual reaction solely through words and rhythm." Her literary experimentation must have been, however, a little risky, for she notes that "I'm getting to where I can't even talk right anymore." But what mattered the risk since "after I'm just a handful of dust, I won't be able to talk anymore, so I'm chattering chattily till I expire...."

Maudee's experiments led her, as her friend Joe Manry has pointed out, to apply to the materials of art what her abstract writing did with words: the juxtaposition of images related simply by rhythms, synchronized with the pulse of life. Her artistic intuition fathomed in this method the wellspring of freshness and vitality. Ola McNeill Davidson's educational technique nurtured this adventuresome disposition. Recalling McNeill Davidson's championship of modern art, Maudee confides that "non-objective art has no rules. It has to do with a kind of mysticism." (Personal interview with the artist, June, 1993.)

Maudee assured herself of contact with the ideas of the avant-garde by her ceaseless reading. With her bohemian friends in both Houston and New Orleans, these ideas, batted about in bistros and museums, buoyed her with an exhilarating and ever-widening variety of experiments. Indeed, experimentation, integral as it was to all her friendships, was perhaps in truth a more sophisticated, more adult form of play. To the child all is still yet new in her world; play is the child's means to explore this world.

John Dewey, whose philosophy Maudee studied closely during her school years, examined aesthetics in terms of experience, regarding the working which results in a work of art and the viewing of that work as basic. Such activities as exploration, play and experimentation are focused episodes in life played out through time, experiences which are fundamental to art. James Johnson Sweeney, an art educator and critic whom Maudee knew personally, emphasized in his book Vision and Image (1968), the centrality of the experience of playfulness in art. He remembers "listening time after time to the late Constantin Brancusi, even in his eightieth year, repeating to visitors who came to see him... in Paris: 'To keep one's art young one must imitate young animals. What do they do? They play.'"

Maudee's incessant experimentation plays with art by inviting spontaneity and accident to enter into the experience of working up the work of art. The working of the work plays spontaneously with elements which arrive accidentally. The working of the work becomes, in this way, concurrent with living itself; and when living thus unites with working, the zest for life imparts itself to the work.

Familiar already with the spontaneity of Surrealist automatic drawing, Maudee quickly absorbed an oriental version of it even before Zen Buddhism became popular with the beatniks and flower children of the 1960s' counter-culture. Her many paintings of flowers with long, slender stems drawn with free, spare and summary brushstrokes betray as little deliberation as the plant itself gave to its growth. She seems also to have relied upon this same spontaneous brushstroke in such paintings as Oh, my Gaud! and Hallelujah! In these, black figures, with baptismal robes of either red or green, gesture ecstatically as the Spirit enters them. Maudee captures the surge with the quick but decisive strokes of a very wet brush. If in other flower paintings we see considerably more detail, her method still sacrificed no spontaneity, for in them the proliferation of detail occurs, like doodling, in a trance-like state, the mind fixed solely upon what is immediately at hand, repeating and repeating a motif until spontaneous inspiration creates a next and newer form. The similarity of these flowers to Oriental mandalas is more than superficial; the same focused meditation used by monks as an act of devotion, also allowed Maudee's mandala-flowers to grow. (see Evening Flower)

Such a drawing which continually proliferates and elaborates small, calligraphic-like forms, Maudee first discovered in the work of a painter also influenced by Oriental thought, Mark Tobey. After studying Tobey's "white writing," Maudee realized she could transform a fault, her tendency to niggle, into a fruitful technique. (see Wild Flower) Maudee's "niggling," as she herself refers to it, may often enough, driven by a horror vacui, fill a whole surface, as with Number's Racket and Belle Epoque Queen as well as Elegance for an August Sunday Evening. What may have begun many years earlier as a fascination with reduplicating windows evolved, through niggling, into later works filled with runic-like inscriptions.

The spontaneous element in Maudee's works results from her opening to her inner resources. But equally important are those elements Maudee encounters and incorporates accidentally. Maudee's use of found objects in her assemblages is, of course, a primary example. But in her response to the injury of her right hand in the automobile accident of 1979, we discover the true depth of Maudee's ability to transform an ominous future into a promise, accident into art. She rebounded, as she always has, with experimentation. Besides a variety of new media, she also explored drawing with her left hand, indicating this by adding "l. h." to her signature.

She relieved the tedium of a slow recovery by using her left hand also to tap and bang objects throughout the house. Once again she took up the dialogue with the avant-garde, this time engaging with what she had learned, through her friend Punky, of John Cage's controversial methods of composing music. Reciting ad lib lyrics, she composed a spontaneous music through which she would, by exploring chance, come to terms with her own devastating encounter with chance, the auto accident.

The inescapable consequences of the auto accident included other more fortunate accidents in her art, such as we find occasionally and sometimes inconspicuously in some assemblages. Take, for example, the bent nails in Sad Saint. Could Maudee drive a nail straight with her crippled and weakened right hand or with her untrained left hand? Do they represent all-too-casual technique or do these bent nails have all their presence and meaning because they originated in the living experience of an artist determined to conceal no truth about herself? When we understand that these bent nails are crippled hands, can we miss that they also symbolize every frail and fractured bone in our own bodies? We have noted that Maudee introduces into her art works spontaneous elements from an inner source and also accidental elements from outer sources. These elements impart to her works their freshness and vitality. What should we make then of the found objects of which so many mixed media works are composed? By their very nature found objects are already old; they have been used up and discarded. By probing how found objects are reappropriated as vigorous and novel elements, we shall arrive at perhaps the fundamental principle which underlies Maudee's creative energy. We shall find also that this links her unmistakably and perpetually with the avant-garde.

We find our first hint in a letter to Margo Jones, written in 1938. After three years of experimentation, she asserts that now she aims for "a pure and non-objective writing" and "so the next things, remote and obscure as they may seen, will be clear...I've had to go back to history of the antiquarians, back to the hieroglyphics, back to Neanderthal man, past that into the obscurity of what a human mind and animal and plant life is before birth - in the embryo, and out of it emerges the twentieth century, daring and full of innovations...." She realizes that to create her art, she must return to origins. The archaic which Maudee seeks, and to which she refers often in titles, is not the old which decays in obsolescence, but the archetypal, what stands at the very beginning. To grasp truly and firmly the moment in which art is created, one must continually renew the sense of beginning.

Upon encountering each found object used in her assemblages, Maudee seizes it not as it once was when it was used for this or that, but as a raw element from which she strips all traditional or ordinary interpretations and to which she restores the nakedness of birth. Forgetting what it was, she affirms what it may yet be. An apple may look like one of Cezanne's still life apples just as easily as it does a nutritious huddle of molecules.

There is a lesson to be learned in such works, and this lesson stands before us with nearly all Maudee's assemblages: what stands before us so often is a human figure. If we can put aside all our prejudices and unwarranted expectations with each person we meet, then we may affirm all the new, surprising and sometimes mysterious possibilities of our relationship to him or her. That person becomes no longer merely a given, but now a gift. Our world becomes no longer just a disposable resource, but, retrieved from the precipice of oblivion, a home where new beginnings are nurtured.

Those who march with the revolutionary vanguard, always inaugurating a new world, find, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed in The Use and Abuse of History (1873), that "in the smallest and greatest happiness there is one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting, or, in more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling 'unhistorically' throughout its duration. One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy."

Maudee makes us all very happy.

Alan N. Reeder

Copyright © 1999 by Alan N. Reeder ~ All rights reserved

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