The Spirit of the Doorway by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve In Greek tradition, Hermes doesn't simply acquire fire, he invents and spreads a method, a technique for making fire... –Lewis Hyde

The Palace, 1998 (Detail)

hen James Barsness came to the crossroads where childhood gives way to adulthood – that place and time where the wild eclecticism of youth must be exchanged for the tamed concentration of an adult career – becoming a writer (language) or artist (visual) were, according to him, equally possible choices. "It was a toss up. I wanted to be both." Such information tells us much about the art you are about to visit because what unfolds behind the "spirit of the doorway" of the work in this presentation, is a land as thick with fiction and character as it is with the history of art and gesture.

Yet, "I can't describe my drawings like stories," he tells us. "I start and try but I can't finish. And that's the whole idea because I want people to supply the stories." So while the seduction of adventure, and an array of potential plot-lines available to the storyteller, may propel his visual sense, narrative as an overarching system is not present. Snippets of storytelling (or better, a structure of story-evoking) appear in the form of allusions to impish folklore, monster movies, fairy tales, comic books, and neighborhood anecdotes. As an explorer in Barsness's magical landscapes, you, the protagonist, are actually better off trusting the unpredictable avenues of variation and distraction rather than the smooth turf of linear narration. For Barsness's aesthetic has the disruptive intelligence of the trickster, the mythic figure Lewis Hyde mines for its pertinence to art in his book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.[1]

The trickster, found in many cultures, is best understood as a figure of roguishness, or as a process that dissembles principles of social and cultural order. As Hyde puts it, "A trickster does not live near the hearth, he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier's tent, the shaman's hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town (the one where a little market springs up). He is the spirit of the road at dusk, the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither."[2] [emphasis added] Such a creative, albeit mischievous, intelligence is known as Coyote or Raven in native american cultures, Loki in Norse myth, and appears in many forms in cultures as diverse as Japanese, West African and East Indian. In Greek mythology the trickster is the god Hermes. The name Hermes means "he of the stone heaps" referring to the piles of stones travelers would put along roads in honor of Hermes to protect them from thieves and beasts. Such piles according to Hyde were altars to "the spaces of heightened uncertainty" that such dangerous paths embodied and to "the intelligence needed to negotiate" such zones.

I Know Who You Are, I Know What You've Done, 1998

As such, "Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox"[3], all qualities integral to the manner of aesthetic invention Barsness himself is engaged in. This is not to say that Barsness is a trickster, nor for that matter that he merely draws pictures of tricksters (although certainly he does), but that there is an affinity with the trickster myth in the very aesthetic practice he deploys.[4]

For instance one of Barsness's trademark talents is the manner in which he "intelligently" negotiates the uncertain space of the blank canvas. According to him his method is to lay the canvas down on the floor and then "drink a cup of coffee and see if there is anything that can distract me from what I have to do."[5] Such a confession paradoxically establishes distraction not focus as the foundation of his aesthetic practice. But to be distracted is to resist focus altogether and such monumental pieces as The Walled City (1996) or The Tower (1993) could not be made without a great deal of focus. But by using distraction as a tool, Barsness places contingency and a trickster inflected "aimless wandering" at the center of his aesthetic practice. Such an approach allows ingenious acts of discovery to unfold by way of an intelligent use of mischief. A door may open (The Palace, 1998; The World All Around, 1998), a crossroads may be breached, and the vague countenance of chance is suddenly slashed. Out tumbles a myriad of beasts, mythic beings, or, in the case of The Tower (1993), a sheer cacophony of Babel. He "seems to have developed an intelligence about contingency... the wit to work with happenstance."[6]

Barsness's affection for "Draw Winky," and its role in his development as an artist, is representative of the populist tradition he comes out of, particularly in relation to the central role of doodling to his practice. From the monumental The Monster's Progress (1992), St. Christopher (1992) or The Little Bible (1992) to the more colloquial, Boy on Horse (1992), or L'Economie (1992) a pop culture "Draw Winky" glee suffuses and mixes with the studied artistry and art historical illusions of his conceptions.

For instance, The Monster's Progress, made after the Los Angeles riots, privileges a giant Bruegelesque figure amidst a rolling landscape of cartoon figures. Comic strips serve as background for his giddy in-motion figures to scoot about on while figures in duress beat one another with spoons or an oversized diaper pin while others race at one another; one with a shopping cart as another disappears over the edge of a hill, clutching the prize of a gift wrapped package.

The Monster's Progress, 1992 (Detail)

The Monster's Progress is a study of social chaos. Looting and urban riot are drawn into a scene that is as much fairy tale as it is nightmare, laced with the rectitude and whimsy of doodling – the art of distraction. In fact Barsness often uses the tool of high school doodling, ball point pen which like gold leaf and pages of newsprint covered with cartoons (other mediums he uses) are materials that evoke particular tactile sensibilities. It "is all about drawing" he says. Drawing as an art, as an activity, as the scratch of a ball point pen against canvas that suddenly materializes into a spirit, or in his case, a giant.

But there is an even more mischievous manner in which the seemingly mercurial route of distraction is central to his art. It is the process through which his imagery actually comes into focus for the viewer. As one stands before his canvases one's eye and concentration are literally propelled into aimless wandering. The lumbering giant may be the initial spectral entry into The Monster's Progress, but it is not long before one's eyes are totally knocked off kilter and tossed about between the zillions of characters, shopping carts, automobiles, burning boots, and bustling activity that make up his piece.

The Walled City, 1996 (Detail)

In fact there is so much going on in such pieces as The Monster's Progress, The Tower (1993), or the impressive The Walled City (1996) that one might associate the genre of grand history paintings with his work. Yet the mode of contained chaos where narrative is cut from a patchwork of fragments and simultaneous times and actions, suggests the crazy, dreamy maps that appear in pirate fiction or Hollywood movies of the 1950s and 60s such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts.

In fact Barsness's highly tactile world owes much to such popular culture. His paintings are laid out like fantastic maps – or maps of fantastic mutable worlds – where the viewer is positioned as a naive but enchanted explorer like Jason and the Argonauts or Sinbad the sailor in the land of the trickster pirate or giant. Featuring the legendary special effects wizardry of Harry Harryhausen who Barsness lists as a major influence, such films are integral to an appreciation of Barsness's world.[7] "What I liked about them, " he says" was precisely the fact that they weren't real. Monster movies now, with all their special effects, are too real."

Indeed, Barsness approaches the two-dimensional plane of the canvas as though it were subject to the protean transformations of such monster movies. The World All Around (1998) could itself be a product of Harry Harryhausen's signature mythopoetic monster menagerie, appearing as it does as a lumpy golden globe with windows, or better cuts, that open up into magnificent beasts: a human-faced serpent, sphinx, shimmering sun, and series of butterfly creatures.

Like most children, Barsness spent hours developing stories and plays with his older brother (who, he says, is not only a "genius who could do anything" but a writer, naturalist, and big game hunter). Their specialty was monsters, particularly giants. Monsters tell us much about a culture's imagination, of what lives at the boundaries, or is relegated to the confines of societal norms. In Barsness's case, it is the bigness, the fact of being too large to really be effective in a small world that affected him. "Giants were my favorite monsters. Giants of all kinds whether they were the original Mighty Joe Young or Frankenstein or the Cyclops." What impressed him was the evident sensitivity or heart that these overgrown beings possessed.

"Mighty Joe Young was incredibly sympathetic and this recurs in monster movies. He's this big doofus with a big heart. King Kong was the same way. On the other hand both are way too big to be effective. They can't easily assimilate into small people's society no matter how they try. And that is really attractive. We were two boys who were really smart growing up in a tiny Montana farm town so all of that stuff about not fitting in – being too big – resonated."

Oddly enough, many of Barsness's canvases themselves feel "too big" made as they are in epic proportions and with mind-numbing density and detail. One must stand for quite some time in order to take in the intricate narrative interplay of The Walled City or The Trash Heap (1997). In many ways such a requirement highlights the ultimate moment of Barsness's trickster aesthetics, the moment where he transforms the viewer into the "spirit of the doorway," the trickster who glides along utterly flexible, ready at a moments notice to shift from scene to scene as in a Bosch painting.

The Trash Heap, 1997

"Trickster is polytropic, which in its simplest sense means 'turning many ways' (though the Greek polutroposis also translated 'wily,' 'versatile,' and 'much-traveled')."[8] How many ways does a piece like The World All Around or The Tower ask us to turn? Even as seemingly self-evident a piece as The Usual Difficulties (1995) requires the viewer to walk right up to the surface of the canvas in order to discern the layers of collaged material upon which the figures are drawn. And it is this quality of imminent transformation, of "giantness," of mythopoetic wiliness that each of Barsness's canvases contains. Such is the process, the very subject and method of his art.

Or maybe it's more simple, rooted in a definition of art that he himself discovered one day while wrapping Christmas presents with his daughter. As he describes it, she kept begging him to let her open a present, "I have to have a present, I've got to open a present," she wailed while crying. "I tried to explain to her how I had let her open a present earlier but that we can't just keep opening presents since we are wrapping presents for her Mom, and since we love her Mom we are going to give these to her because that is what presents are really about. But meanwhile she continues to cry." He says exasperated and amused. "And then suddenly she says, 'I know what I'll do. I'll wrap some presents to me!' And that's what she did, she made up some pretend presents and wrapped them up." His voice grows more enthusiastic. "Isn't that great? She invented her own object of desire and I thought, that's really what art is, that's why I am an artist. Desiring something so bad that you have to invent it for yourself." Exactly, inventing not just the fire but the very method for making, and viewing, the fire itself.