Edition: U.S. / Global

BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Counterpoint of Artist and Short-Story Writer

Published: December 8, 1995

AIR: 24 HOURS Jennifer Bartlett By Deborah Eisenberg 167 pages. Illustrated. Harry N. Abrams. $49.50.

It's hard to imagine two more compatible artists than the painter Jennifer Bartlett and the short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg.

Both have looked at the mundane transactions of daily life from a slightly askew vantage point that lends their work an edgy sense of humor. Both are keenly attuned to the formal demands of their craft, yet use their mathematically precise skills of observation to delineate the chaotic emotions lurking beneath the pretty, polished surface of our lives. And both have focused on that nervous interface between an individual and the world, creating works of art that play upon the dialectics of stillness and motion, isolation and connection, darkness and light.

As a painter, Ms. Bartlett (who has also written a finely observed but messy novel called "The History of the Universe") has long evinced an interest in the possibilities and limitations of narrative, while Ms. Eisenberg has consistently demonstrated a painter's love of image and nuance in her stories. The book they have produced together "Air: 24 Hours" is one of those happy collaborations that illuminate the work of both while propelling us into a reconsideration of the creative process itself.

At first glance, "Air" might look like a conventional, if beautifully appointed, exhibition catalogue. It begins with a somewhat pedantic introduction by Ms. Eisenberg to a series of 24 oil paintings created by Ms. Bartlett between 1991 and 1992. The language in this introduction does not initially sound like the Ms. Eisenberg readers have come to know in her fierce, funny short stories (collected in "Transactions in a Foreign Currency" and "Under the 82d Airborne"); she writes about how an "instant begins to imbue, and be imbued by, its surroundings" and how "ordinary, or reasonably situated, images" project "a hieratic potency."

This willfully formal preface, seemingly meant to give the reader a dispassionate view of the paintings, describes the highly schematic rules of design around which the series was based: how the 24 canvases are meant to depict the 24 hours of a day, how each canvas represents a single hour, and how each is divided -- by a grid of lines -- into 60 rectangles (or minutes).

Such mechanistic structures, of course, have played an important role in Ms. Bartlett's work for years (her famous 1970's installation "Rhapsody" was made up of 987 enameled plates that worked a series of musical variations on several themes). In the case of "Air," it provides a set of rules (much like the rhyming structure of a sonnet) against which the painter can exercise her imagination.

The canvases themselves are anything but schematic: an insomniac's view of a garden of ominously white blossoms blooming in the night; a bright, daylit shower stall, offering a refuge of cleanliness and safety; a murky fishpond populated by huge carp swimming in unison in circles; an empty garden at noon, the sunlit lawn strewn with the remnants of a party; a child's bedroom, doll and tea party seemingly abandoned in medias res.

In the second section of the book, which turns out to be structured like a three-act play, Ms. Eisenberg provides us with running commentary on these paintings. In these passages, the arch, formalized tone of the introduction disappears, replaced with marvelously supple descriptions that explicate the individual paintings and teach us, again, how to see. We come to see how individual canvases develop themes articulated in others: how the image of a door can go from being a symbol of vulnerability to one of refuge, how the color yellow can acquire a sense of menace.

Treating each canvas like a short story contained within the larger narrative of the series, Ms. Eisenberg does a nimble job of showing us how each part relates to the whole. In doing so, she underscores the mood of disquiet, even terror, that haunts these paintings, the constant struggle between the inchoate designs of nature and the angular constructions of human habitation.

Many of the ordinary objects in these paintings appear to have been given a heightened, surreal gloss that makes them feel oddly portentous. Ms. Eisenberg points out the "feeling of excess and urgency" embodied in a rose, the "brute vitality" of a clump of heather growing in the garden, the danger implicit in a pair of scissors left by the pool.

As Ms. Eisenberg notes, the canvases are nearly devoid of people: there are signs of human habitation (a ghostly towel draped on a door, water left running in a sink), but the real action appears to have taken place offstage. As a consequence, we are left with the sense that we are looking at things filtered through the scrim of memory or expectation.

In the third and final section of "Air," our sensory perceptions of the paintings are enhanced by further information -- information about the actual creation of the canvases that emerges from a conversation between Ms. Eisenberg and Ms. Bartlett.

Ms. Bartlett talks freely about her methodology (how working from photographs changes perspectives in the picture plane, how the use of a grid structures the content of a canvas) and the technical problems she encountered in executing the series (how she painted and repainted a door to make it look three-dimensional, how she experimented with a series of different shadows for a dog). In addition, she is remarkably frank about the meaning of objects, images and motifs in the paintings -- meanings, she says, that often revealed themselves to her in retrospect, as she looked back on her work and events in her own life.

In discussing these events, Ms. Bartlett is sometimes startlingly candid, recalling an incident of sexual molestation that occurred when she was 9 or 10 and that she says that she repressed for many years. She discusses how specific images in these paintings (the pair of scissors by the pool, the glasses strewn on the lawn, the fish swarming in the pond) refer back, directly or indirectly, to this terrible event, and hints at how more general imagery in her work (water, houses, boats) grew out of these memories as well.

"As we've been looking at these together," she tells Ms. Eisenberg, "I sometimes switch into a different mode of thought and I can describe in an animistic way what every object is, as if it were a person." Ms. Bartlett adds: I certainly don't think that's the entire content of the painting, but I think all my work involves contrasts between terror and the ordinary. So these paintings reflect those memories, which seemed to intrude from the beginning in a nonverbal, nonconscious way, and what I picked would eventually tell me the story, and still is telling it to me."

While in no way impinging upon our initial reactions to the sensuous surface of Ms. Bartlett's paintings, these observations shed new light on the canvases, enabling us to understand the source of the tension -- between turmoil and control, fear and safety -- that animates her best work. They also leave us with a renewed appreciation for the transformative mysteries of art: its ability to create beauty out of adversity, order out of confusion.