Joseph Amar is messy...

Joseph Amar, Untitled, 1986, oil, dry pigment, wax and lead on plywood

In the eleven.2 2018-19 issue of the Hamilton Arts & Letters ("HA&L"), the Canadian poet and essayist BW Powe published the most incredible reverie entitled Amar, Artist: Essay-Memory Fragments. A raw and deftly emotional recall of random days, events and conversations with his friend Joseph Amar, it's an account that will demand a search for all you can then find on the career of this forgotten artist. It seems Amar was as much stuck in the contradictions of postmodern's high and low art milieu as he was destined to become obscure. And it left me asking: has art history lost more artists than it's remembered?

That's probably not a fair question. An artist's oeuvre doesn't just disappear because history mandates it. And rediscovery is as much a tenet of history as recognition and celebration, that linear disruption that can make art history messy. Amar is nothing if not messy.

Joseph Amar was born in Casablanca in 1954, immigrated with his family to Toronto in 1957, entered the Ontario College of Art in 1974, and was on his way to New York by 1979. He admired New York's Ab-Ex old guard elite, and especially sought Tapies. His hero was Picasso. His curiosity was Duchamp.

In 1981 he got his first big break exhibiting with Ivan Karp, the owner of O.K. Harris Gallery. In 1985 the Bess Cutler Gallery, the largest in SoHo, began to represent him and he would stay with the gallery for the rest of his short-lived career while also exhibiting in Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Düsseldorf, and Paris. His works were acquired by the Guggenheim Museum and the Carnegie Institute and collected by such celebrities as Elton John, Yoko Ono, and Bianca Jagger.

He soon caught the attention of curator Rainer Crone, who in 1987 included Amar’s new works in a major exhibition — Similia/Dissimilia — which originated at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, then traveled to Columbia University, the Leo Castelli Gallery, and Sonnabend Galleries in New York. And then he was in rare air. His art was shown and discussed alongside Joseph Beuys, Richard Artschwager, Donald Judd, Yves Klein, John Chamberlain, Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns, and Dan Flavin. He counted Anish Kapoor, Philip Taaffe, Roni Horn, Peter Halley, and Francesco Clemente among his peers.

It was all unfortunately short-lived. In 1991, Amar was in a car hit by a drunk driver. His wife was killed instantly, and Joseph and his young daughter were critically injured. Though his daughter eventually recovered, Amar was paralyzed from the neck down. He had limited use of his right arm and eventually learned how to “speak” again with the help of a computer’s voice synthesizer. But that was it. Joseph Amar died in January 2001.

Powe remembers Amar stating: "Everything’s connected. It’s a question of how you see. What seems out of place is just art that hasn’t fully revealed itself yet."

Amar was most inventive at those intersections of connectivity. He assembled pieces of past and present to weave stories in a solipsistic renewal. These are absolutely an art in search of identity, Amar's struggle to find his fit in an art world seeking its next era. So he hid in that art not yet revealed where a focus inward allowed his metamorphic cage to create without permission. He always wanted his paintings to live beyond the walls that shackled his spirit, and so much of what he produced finds a stage in that space above a viewer's mark. Even his drawings seem poised to leap and grab and strangle the air above it. Amar was never conditioned for the frame. He preferred the messy parts, the stuff tucked beyond the edges we would otherwise dismiss.

I think art history sees a Joseph Amar so that it can stay remembered. Amar is as connected to those he never saw -- Venessa German, Huma Bhabha, Theaster Gates -- as those he clearly did -- Kurt Schwitters, Louisa Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheimer. His own art can move in either direction, as a vestige of art history or as an inspired contemporary voice. So perhaps Amar was never lost. Perhaps he was always meant to just be found.

Joseph Amar, Untitled, mixed media