We recently spoke with author Morgan Meis about his new Slant book, The Grand Valley

Like the other two books in your trilogy, The Grand Valley focuses on a single work of art—in this case, it’s fair to say, on a series of paintings. The artist is Joan Mitchell, who many people may not have heard of. Can you give us a “teaser” for the book—why is this artist worth paying attention to?

Joan Mitchell was an abstract painter who is often considered an Abstract Expressionist of the “second” generation. But that designation probably isn’t very helpful. She herself wasn’t interested in categorizing her painting in that way and also pretty much hated all attempts to categorize her work or even to talk about it much at all. She was an irascible character, is what I am saying here. She sometimes called herself a “lady painter” and she said it with a huge sneer. She was raised in an upper-crust family in Chicago but she preferred the rough and tumble life of the mid-century artist-bohemian and she could mix it up with the best of them. It can take some time to learn to look at and understand and appreciate her paintings, at least it did for me. But one thing that can draw you in right away is her incredible sense of color. Many of her paintings are dazzlingly beautiful in the splashes and swaths of really luminous color. But there is also something else. Something difficult and troubling and troubled in them too. That’s what makes them so powerful, once you get to looking and reflecting and letting them settle into your soul. She painted some of the great paintings of the mid to late twentieth century, in my opinion.

The book is about Joan Mitchell but the cover features a painting by Monet. Could you explain that?

Well, one thing is that the people at the Joan Mitchell Foundation are, let’s say, very very picky about when and how they allow reproductions of Joan Michtell’s paintings to appear in books and other places. This fussiness would, I think, have greatly annoyed Joan Mitchell herself, but what can you do? Life is chock full of such ironies. But the choice of Monet is no mistake. In some ways, I think you can see much of Mitchell’s artwork as a kind of response to Monet. She kept going back to that well. She didn’t like to think of Impressionism as being done or superseded. Of course, she hated being compared to Monet. But she hated many things. She spent the last period of her life living in Monet’s old house in Vétheuil, for Christ’s sake. The more you get to know Joan Mitchell, the more you realize Monet is everywhere all the time.

In order to help readers understand an abstract artist like Mitchell, you talk about some of the Modernists in literature and the arts, including Gertrude Stein. Aren’t these Modernists intimidating to read and understand?

I’m tempted to simply answer this question, “yes,” and move on. But yes, the answer is yes. On the other hand, just because a work of art demands something of you, that it is not easy to understand, that it resists your attempts to penetrate it, that it feels frustrating and sometimes overwhelming, that maybe it changes you in a lengthy process that might take years of your life…is this a bad thing? Doesn’t that sound like maybe an exciting experience to embark upon? Do you want a work of art really to matter to you? Do you think that’s going to be easy? Do you want everything to be easy? Don’t you want to be faced with a work of art and feel, perhaps, even a little bit scared? Would that be so bad? Might it, maybe, have the potential of being very, very good?

The psychologist Carl Jung enters into your narrative—but you point out that he became interested in mysticism. Is that right?

Yes, it is right. Carl Gustav Jung was, in my opinion, a mystic. That’s to say, he was interested in the age-old practices and techniques by which a human being can attempt to transcend the limits of their own subjectivity and get in touch with something that is beyond—in us, but also beyond us. What are you talking about, you may ask? Well, it’s hard to talk about since it is beyond us and we are normally bound by what we can express and put into words. Trying to express the inexpressible is called apophaticism in the language of mysticism or at least some strains of mysticism. What is apophatic is that which cannot properly be talked about or can be talked about only by way of negation. Like many mystics, Jung had his more kataphatic side (that which can be said) and that side came out in his regular therapeutic practice and in the academic papers he wrote. But when Jung was letting himself be apophatic, he would write myths and fables and stories and also paint crazy-ass pictures. This is the side of Carl Gustav Jung that can be helpful in trying to understand a painter like Joan Mitchell.

Is there a structure to your trilogy…a progression? Or is it more a matter of simply taking on the three works that have inspired you and then delving into their origin and meaning?

Yes, there is a structure. But I will never ever reveal what it is. Just kidding. The structure is a spiral. I think I have been interested in the spiral as the proper structure for a work of art since I read Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I know this sounds highly pretentious and, to many, baffling. I am genuinely sorry. But if you really want to get deep into what I’m talking about here you’re going to have to read Kojève and Hegel. For those uninterested in such a task, and I feel for you, let’s just say that I think of a spiral as a circling repetition that gets deeper and denser as it goes further into itself.

Now that you’ve completed your trilogy, are you contemplating another book project?

Not only am I contemplating another book project, I am actively working on another book project. This one I call, tentatively, The Sordid Sublime. I’m interested in exploring the concept of the sublime through what many people consider bad and maybe even sleazy art. B-movies and “exploitation” films. Soft porn and erotica but not even the good stuff. I’m especially fascinated with the films of Jess Franco and especially one film he made in 1970 called Vampyros Lesbos. There’s much in the film that reminds me of things the ancient philosopher Longinus (or we should probably say Pseudo-Longinus) talks about in his treatise On The Sublime. Seriously. I’m not kidding. I will also look at some of the written works of Alexander Trocchi, who was a Scottish novelist and junkie who wrote a terrible and also wonderful novel that is meant to be the autobiography of Sappho of Lesbos. I’ll also go on and on about Kant’s Third Critique, but it will be pretty amusing because I’ll swear a lot. And there will be long sections about lightning and about YouTube channels devoted solely to footage of lightning hitting different objects all over the world. Which relates back to Longinus and Sappho, actually. But now I’m revealing too much.

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