Herbert Marks
Herbert Marks is Professor of
Comparative Literature at Indiana
University. He divides his time
between the US and Europe,
where he has also taught at the
universities of Paris, Hamburg,
and Lisbon. His edition of the Old
Testament with full commentary
was published last year by W. W.
Norton. Other recent publications
have been on Prophetic
Stammering, Elizabeth Bishops
Art of Memory, Prousts Weather,
and the Ghost of Samuel.
R O B E R T YA R B E R
Panic Pending
Robert Yarber
Robert Yarber has exhibited
internationally since the early
eighties, having achieved
recognition through his inclusion
in the 1984 Venice Biennale, and
the 1985 Whitney Biannual. In
1989 Yarber was included in the
Horn of Plenty exhibition at the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
In addition to being represented
by Alex Daniels in Amsterdam,
Yarber is represented and shown
by the Sonnabend Gallery in
New York, where he has had a
number of exhibits since 1985. His
photography has been represented
by Sonnabend, Julie Saul Gallery,
New York, and Galleria Valentina
Moncada, Rome. The artist is
credited with having inspired the
visual mood of Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas, directed by Terry
Gilliam, as well as several other
lms. His theoretical works
include The Cloud of Unknowing,
Congurations, John Hopkins
University Press, 2008, and The
Body of the Painter in the Face
of the Virtual, Art and Design,
London, 1996. Robert Yarber is a
Distinguished Professor of Art at
Penn State University.
When not painting and drawing,
Yarber performs with his noise
band, Captain Bob and the
Psychopomps.
Panic Pending
 Robert Yarber
Panic Pending

Text by Herbert Marks

2 The Hidden Hand Revealed - 76 x 56 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 3
4 The Romantic Urge - 35,5 x 28 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2010 5
6 Auxiliary Jack, (Its the Sublime!) - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2010 7
 THE ARTIST WILL NOW WRITE A STATEMENT!
Robert Yarber
Let me say at the outset that this project is Art,
thats right, Art, and nothing else. That means it doesnt
do a thing. Its a pitch, like in a sales pitch and like a
throw of the dice. Its an amusement, a diversion, or, as
they used to say, a LAFF RIOT!
I use an antiquated technique in this project,
drawing. What a bother. And I describe these drawings
in the vocabulary of mid-twentieth century American
advertising, TV commercials, and sideshow carnival
argot. The present day and its dilemmas are partly
rooted in these language games. Must I go there? Okay.
I mean in ballyhoo, hype, exaggeration, promotion,
push! Bigger, Better, Best! New, Newer, Newest! The
throb of the carnie pitch infects everything. Come on
up folks and see the big show. See it here right now!
Buy your tickets folks, because tonight we will present
to you...Alligator Girl!
But the popular advertising of the mid-twentieth
century was also informative and scientifically proven.
More doctors prefer Blah Blah Cigarettes than any
other brand. And they were optimistic too. Things are
getting better and better as I speak!
But there also lurked the warning of hidden
dangers. Dont be fooled! And Smokey Bear, the forest
fire prevention mascot, oversaw a world that seemed to
teeter on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
8 The Slots are Hot! - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009
These drawings take great pains to promote
material and spiritual inflation. We need great
enthusiasm to get up in the morning. So weve got to
make ourselves excited about the possibilities. And if
there arent any we invent them. And if its flying purple
elephants that excite us, and we cant get that going
for real right away, we make it up in our heads. And if
that gets boring we build computers that can make the
virtual purple elephant realer than real. We hunger for
sensation. We need our fix.
This all goes for the people with tickets of course.
Plenty dont have tickets and are scrambling to get
them. Others, not content with one ticket, buy out the
whole show. But we hunger for the pitch. We want to
know the meaning of this or that and what its for. The
utility of things is supplanted by the spectacularity of
their presentation.
So these drawings attempt to be spectacular,
jarring, over the top. Theres an inherent boredom in
that, I know. How much spectacularity can we stand?
But the twitch never fully dies; the inner ear yearns to
hear the buzz.
But therein lies the joy. The pitch, the hype,
the con, all relate to a kind of prayer for divine or
superhuman intercession. Wouldnt the most stalwart
atheist want to be blown to pieces in divine joy if such
9
 a possibility existed? If youre going to go anyway, why
not with a bang? Dont miss the spectacular arrival
of Divine Forces on planet earth, brought to you by
the Ever Ready Exploding Cigar Company! Let your
announcer introduce you to some of the cast:
Anamorphic Skulls: Skulls attempt to avoid detection
by becoming anamorphic. It doesnt really work; you
see them anyway when you look at them from the right
angle. But no one tells anamorphic skulls the truth
after theyve gone to the trouble, and we pretend we
dont see them. Weaponized anamorphic skulls have
proven ineffectual in the field since their trajectories are
unpredictable, and they pack no punch on impact. They
have performed more satisfactorily in exchange of fire
with floating weird eyeballs.
AUX: The dyslexic inversion of XAU, symbol for one
troy once of gold on the precious metals market, as well
as an abbreviation for the word auxiliary.
Brain: The brain is the thing in itself. Sometimes sprung
from flip-top hats, brains have been know to develop
thin, linear segments forming tails, that propel them
towards The Omega Point at the End of Time. Recently,
the end of time was cancelled due to poor ticket sales,
resulting in formations of rogue flying brains propelling
themselves towards targets of false hope. Some brains,
seeking explosive combustion in sheer ecstacy, have
begun inhabiting the burning ash of hurtling, nebulous
cigars, with astro-neuroscientists reporting favorable
outcomes.
Captain: A seaman of old, who walks the deck night
and day repeating monotonously, I am the Captain
of the ship, to no one in particular. A former carnival
mage, he was kicked out of the Brotherhood of False
Seers, after repeatedly giving away the ruse during
sance. Forced to embark on a seafaring life, he
failed to develop any interest in actual seamanship.
He was, on the other hand, enamored with the care
and maintenance of his uniform. When driven off the
deck by his crew, he would repair to his cabin where,
defacing his charts with jam, cream, and gravy until
they were illegible, he developed a technique for
10
determining the course of the ship through pure
clairvoyance. (See below.)
Clairvoyance: Sometimes called Prairie Vision,
a technique developed in the nineteenth-century
American Midwest to read minds, call forth spirits, and
predict the future. Tools of this doubtful art include the
spirit horn, through which departed souls communicate
during sance, rope to ensure the immobility of the
medium as the horn is sounded, and a blindfold and
gag to prevent him from receiving signals or emitting
sounds that might be misconstrued as authentic
communication. The Captain has been repeatedly
caught manipulating the spirit horn with his feet, lifting
it to his gagged mouth, and uttering in falsetto words
from departed Ancient Oracles while tied to the ships
wheel. He insists on steering the vessel through blind
preternatural prognostication alone, bleating the while
through his brass trumpet. Many accidents at sea
have ensued.
Cowboy: Doctors ask: Do you have a problem with...
masculinity? Typified by desperation, cunning, and
occasional muscles, usually found between the ears.
Exploding Cigar: A device inspired by Freud, who
said, Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Well, we know
better than that, Herr Doktor. Through the explosive
potential built up during oral manipulation of the cigar, it
sometimes attains self-awareness, and itself develops
a taste for exploding cigars, lips protruding to smoke its
own copy. The series recopies itself over and over in
fractal regeneration. Astronomers have theorized that
spiral nebulae are composed of a countless myriad
of cigars smoking cigars. Health officials, concerned
for the aspiration of the cosmos, have advised that
exploding cigars smoke themselves outside the
curvilinear limits of space and time.
Flesh: The stuff dreams are made on, in its stubborn
materiality. Would you kindly get off my toe please?
Floating Weird Eyeball: Model for the abstract visual
drive, sometimes referred to as the Gaze. What you
looking at? Are you looking at me?
Pay to Play - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 11
 Homunculus: The issue of blind chance during the themselves, and the Brotherhood is busy cornering the
development of the human embryo, the homunculus market and hoarding supplies.
is the little man or woman lodged within the skull,
screaming to get out. Sometimes described erroneously Space Bunny: The companion and spirit guide.
as the Cyclopean Eye, he or she is in reality a tiny Alternatively, SB is the hunch, the bet, our best guess
person who stands and observes, in abject terror, and hope for a favorable outcome. Sometimes male,
the missteps and bad turns of its bodily host. This sometimes female, there is one thing for sure: Space
tortured inner witness is of no benefit whatsoever and Bunny is always either coming or going.
science has been unable to determine any reason
for its existence. Its life is cut short, however, by the The Thing: Everything that is not the market.
emergence of the Third Eye, which obtrudes upon its
space. XYZ: The coordinates that determine reality, and your
position in space-time at any given moment. Hedge
Labyrinth: The totality of secret possibilities, hidden Funds have begun offering investment opportunities in
dangers, and dead ends, from which the seeker is XYZ trading, which has resulted in the displacement
forever trying to emerge. of whole continents in the cycles of boom and bust
resulting from manipulations by religious organizations
Mage: One of twelve carnival magicians said to rule and pension funds.
the world from a carnival tent outside of Kansas City.
They were secretly smuggled there by the theosophist And now sit back and enjoy the show.
dowager Madame Blavatsky from the region of Tibet
known as Shambhala. Their job is to convince humanity
that Dorothy was right when she said, Were not in
Kansas anymore. In fact all humankind resides in
a planetary Kansas or is heading there. To conceal
this profound truth, the Brotherhood of False Seers
manipulate market crashes and instigate booms,
international health scares, and other distractions to
prolong the illusion that humanity in its entirety is not
in Kansas. If the truth were revealed, the Seers are
convinced that mass planetary suicide would ensue.

Market: A Parisian Apache dance team defined by its

enthusiasm, bordering occasionally on violent delirium.
Enthusiasm is the tall one, known as Derivi-Dave, and
Depression, aka Nude Short Sal, is the short one.

OIL: In Sanskrit translated as amrita, or soma, it is

known in hermetic lore as ambrosia, the philosophers
stone, and the Good. The world breathlessly awaits
the arrival of what has been called Peak Oil. Recently,
scientist-magpies, using a technique called fracking,
have discovered that all material things can be
transformed into Oil. Technicians are already at work
designing cars made entirely of oil that can run on

12 Wax Lips - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 13

14 Veil 79 - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 15
16 Binocular Rivalry - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 17
18 Always Already - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 19
20 Empty - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 200 21
22 Void - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 23
24 A Cigar is Never Just a Cigar - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 25
26 Binocular Rivalry, (Auxzone.) - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 27
28 Yes, No, Maybe - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 29
30 Psychobilly Nights - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 31
32 Dead and Alive - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 33
34 Artist and model - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 35
36 Pay Out - Colored pencil on paper - 35,5 x 28 cm - 2009 37
38 AUX - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 39
40 Hidden Hand - 35,5 x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 41
42 Prospect - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 43
44 Colored Clown Heads Come Down - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 45
46 Skinny Come Back - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 47
48 Wild Caught - 35,5 x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2009 49
50 Solar Chariot - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010 51
52 The Collapse of the Now Could not Have Come at a Better Time 35,5x 28 cmColored pencil on paper 2010 53
54 One Taste- 82 x 65,5 cm - Pastel, Colored Pencil on Paper - 2010 55
 The Ugly Baby and the Beautiful Corpse:
Robert Yarbers Gnostic Comedy
By Herbert Marks
A young mother, surrounded by angels, gazes
reverently at a balding dwarf. Why is the Christ-child
in early images of the Madonna so often grotesque?
Why should Christianitys most sacred image revolve
around a creature that looks like a mistake? To pose the
question is to ask about the meaning of ugliness in art.
Tendentious or perverse when put to trecento
altarpieces, the question is forced upon us willy-
nilly by our first encounter with Panic Pending, the
recent drawings of Robert Yarber. Art that eschews
the beautiful may still aspire to the sublime, but it is
hard to invoke Burke or Kant when the images before
us are not only freakish, twisted, and deformed, but
also--to anticipate a possible response to Yarbers
work--trivial, cheap, brash, gauche, crude, clownish,
goofy, abject. It takes time to warm up to a cross-
eyed skull (to choose one iconic image), its electrified
gaze fixed on a cross-legged pinup who is emerging
from its own nose cavity with the mystic signs of plus
and minus, and even more to understand why such
a figure should preside over a drawing called Corpus
Resurrectum Est, in which a metaphysical struggle-we
could call it the contest between freedom (the trickster
corpse who attempts to auto-levitate by reeling himself
up with his own fishing rod) and fate (the Zoroastrian
magus manipulating a robot by radio remote control)--is
played out in the helical course of a corpses ascent.
Confronted with a collection of such images--a riotous
mash-up of the comic, the macabre, and the lurid; of
cartoon clichs, hypertrophied nostalgias, and futuristic
new-age fantasies, all rendered in a psychedelic palette
of diaphanous pastels and with an edgeless line that
makes the forms deliquesce--we have reason to protect
ourselves by laughing, like the hopped up magus
himself. How, we ask, do these drawings differ from any
number of brilliantly rendered parodic manifestations of
popular culture, from the Al Jaffee fold-ins in
Mad Magazine to the comics of R. Crumb and the
paintings of Peter Saul? What is distinctive about the
56 Corpus Resurrectum Est - 96,5 x 61 cm - Colored pencil on paper - 2010
ugliness of Yarbers work in an era when bad taste is
the currency of the art world?
One might see Yarbers outrageousness as a
paradoxical act of dandyism--what Balthus, speaking
of his own antithetically polished work, called the
aristocratic taste for displeasing. But beneath this
nod to the avant-garde, there is something deeper:
a consciousness of uglinesss long genealogy and
a highly theoretical, even theological understanding
of its implications. In Yarbers work, the prophetic
impulse is strong; his pictures project what he has
called a confrontational stance in a world giddy with
absurd excess. And yet the barbaric is not simply a
satirical comment on the times. There are conceptual
challenges (not incompatible with humor) that keeps
one returning to the drawings again and again, and
finding new meanings each time.
In what is possibly the oldest Western image
of the Madonna and Child, the hauntingly mysterious
sixth-century panel hidden in the sacristy of S.
Francesca Romana, the enormous eyes of the Virgin
seem to float in their sockets, emerging from a semi-
transparent whiteness, as her long fingers point with
the hallowed gesture of the Hodegetria (the one
who shows the way) to the. . . to the what? For the
child on the Virgins other arm, its own fingers raised
in the gesture of blessing, looks like a shapeless
ventriloquists dummy, and its head, lolling on its
swollen neck, is practically faceless. So far as we know,
images of the Madonna and Child begin to appear in
the late fifth or sixth century following the resolution
of the Christological controversies. They illustrate the
victorious orthodox claim that Mary was not merely
the Mother of Christ (Christotokos) but the Mother
of God (Theotokos). Christs divinity, therefore, is not
apparent or phantasmal; nor has the divine nature
appropriated and transfigured the human form. The
Word is both fully divine and fully human, impassible
57
 divinity and suffering humanity, the Son of God by
nature and the natural son of Mary. I would suggest
that to an artist this perfect union of two natures--one
human and familiar, the other divine and ineffable--
might seem not only miraculous, but literally monstrous;
not only ineffable, but unspeakable. Historians adverse
to enigma will sometimes insist that the category of
childhood is a modern invention, so that a medieval
artist could not have drawn a normal infant--a view that
ignores both those artists who did and the theological
paradox that justifies the distortions. The Gospel of
John has Christ proclaim, Before Abraham was, I
am (8:58), and many early Italian painters, including
Duccio, Giotto, and Bernardo Daddi, accordingly depict
Jesus as an aged man, sometimes wrinkled, sometimes
balding, beside a radiantly youthful Mary. But even
without the scriptural prooftext, an artist inheriting the
Byzantine conventions and intent on creating a more
realistic representation of the infant Word incarnate,
might have found monstrosity a suitable vehicle for
conveying the mystery of the two in one.
He might also have recognized in the figure
of the incarnation an image of art itself giving material
shape to the immaterial idea. If one thinks of drawing
as the ideas embodiment, then the image of the
Madonna as Mother of God does not simply represent
the incarnation, it repeats or reenacts it (an analogy
that would become crucial during the iconoclast
controversy). As the Word assumes material form in the
Virgins womb, so the idea assumes material form in the
artists image; or, to put the same point from a secular
perspective, Gods incarnation, the central mystery of
Christianity, is the mythopoetic projection of an artistic
act. However one turns it, Christian art participates in
a sophisticated recursiveness, insofar as its primary
image is always reflexive--a representative embodiment
of the enigma of embodiment. Part of my argument
for the high seriousness of Yarbers work is the self-
conscious virtuosity with which he elaborates on this
recursiveness, even while resisting the incarnational
premise. For whereas Christian art is self-consistent
--an incarnation of incarnation--Yarbers art is anti-
incarnational. Its cynosure is not the baby but the skull
or corpse.
This distinction is already implicit in the title
of an earlier collection, Calaveras Gnosticos (gnostic
skulls), which is the seed of the present book.
58
The word gnostic is sometimes reserved for groups
of mostly Christian sectarians who claimed to possess
an esoteric knowledge (Greek gnosis) of spiritual
truths, but the term can be used more loosely to refer
to a set of dualistic myths and beliefs based on the
conviction that the physical world was created by an
evil demiurge as a prison for the human soul. This
action was in turn only a repetition of previous actions
in the spiritual world that had brought the archons
(malevolent rulers) into being in the first place. In
gnostic anthropology, physical embodiment is the
method devised by the archons to entrap the pneumatic
spark or soul, whose true home is elsewhere. The task
of the initiate is accordingly liberation from the world of
appearances. In one celebrated text, The Hypostasis of
the Archons, a heavenly instructor in the form of the
serpent persuades Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge forbidden by the archons, thereby opening
her eyes to her true spiritual nature and inaugurating a
process that will lead in the end to a cosmic revolution,
when, the rulers having been destroyed along with the
material world, the enlightened will enter into the glory
of the unbegotten. Yarber translates this esotericism
into drawings such as Empty, in which a soon to be
transfigured gunslinger is shown falling backwards,
pistols still smoking, into a state of disembodiment,
while on a distant horizon, just visible through the great
hole blown out of his chest, the word EMPTY hangs
like a setting (or rising) sun. The drawing was originally
the first half of a diptych. In Void, its sequel, the slinger
has become a hobo junky hooked on negation.
Asceticism and licentiousness, sensual restraint
and sensual indulgence, are equally satisfactory ways
of showing contempt for the flesh. In Yarbers work,
reverence for material creation is often displaced by
spectral lewdness, part of a dynamic of unfulfillable,
objectless desire. The most direct illustration of his
gnostic eroticism is the drawing Solar Chariot. Yarber
has called himself a mystical atheist. . .with the internal
equipment and yearning of the mystic, and his drawing
seems to allude to Gods mystical throne, the merkabah
or chariot of paternal deity. But instead of the sublimity
of the four living creatures, each with its wheel within a
wheel (as described by Ezekiel), he gives us an emblem
of the erotic drive--a paradoxically priapic corpse in
a solar bathchair drawn by four crowing cocks. We
may compare this to an earlier version of the motif,
Yes No Maybe, where the panic-stricken poultry rather
look distraught and the giant phallus is crowned by a
poisonous pre-ejaculatory pearl of mercury. But where
such merely generative coming is ultimately lethal,
the continual gnostic becoming of Solar Chariot is
ecstatic and salvific. There is a different but related
evolution from The Romantic Urge (in Calaveras)
to Its the Sublime drawn two years later, where the
enormous erection is literally lost--dematerialized or
rendered useless, as the legend informs us. Eroticism
in Yarbers world is always phantasmal, and its organs,
phallus or lips, are prosthetic or projective, like art
itself. In the cadaverously vernal Artist and Model,
the original of the pink lips the artist has just painted
hover in the air before the models skeletal face.
Internalized and reconstituted as a sign in the eye of
the painter with his pink-tipped phallic brush, the lips
are an emblem not just of the erotic but of gnostic art,
which appears in the space between subject and object,
not as a mimesis or elegiac evocation of what is or is
past, but as a liminal projection of what is not. If art is
essentially embodiment, the very idea of a gnostic art is
paradoxical and self-defeating.
A contrarian by nature, as bored by the
National Academy of the Avant-Garde as by the
modernist dogma of aesthetic autonomy, Yarber loads
his drawings with meanings that need to be read. His
images are not merely psychological incidents but
thoughts, and like all complex allegories, they point both
to and beyond themselves. In most modern art, this
allegorical dimension is subdued or suppressed; instead
the image becomes autotelic. The emphasis shifts from
the message (the presentation of reality, natural or
supernatural) to the medium (the manifestation of the
conditions of realitys appearance). The modern image
is no longer an embodiment, a material manifestation
of an idea, but a site of the appearing of appearance,
where the phenomenal nature of reality, insofar as it
may be known, offers itself to reflection. Yarber wants
to go behind this shift; for him the task of the image is
paradoxically to show not the appearance of reality but
its disappearance, to embody disembodiment. He has
no interest in making drawings that are purely about
drawing, but neither is he content with mimeses or acts
of formal incarnation. To appreciate his work, one must
be willing to commit the modernist heresy of not simply
viewing the work but reading it interpretively. And, as in
traditional allegoresis, the interpreter needs to work on
more than one level.
In The Painter and Modern Life, Baudelaire
insisted that every work of art was double in nature
--on the one hand, relative, circumstantial,
and transitory; on the other hand, eternal and
immutable--a theory that, in effect, recalls the
doctrine of Christs two natures. The contingent is
synonymous, for Baudelaire, with the modern; it
provides the formal vocabulary in which the artist (of
any era, however ancient) dresses his vision. It is the
particularity (lidiotisme) of art, specific to its time,
the envelope of the divin gteau, without which the
cake would be indigestible. The terms of this antithesis
(eternal versus contingent) do not refer to opposing
subjects or themes, but to two hermeneutic levels
or orders of reading. Speculative and lurid, Yarbers
imagery, considered in its modernity, is a vehicle of
political satire, a cross between the distortions and
visual crowding of comic-book art and the theosophical
claptrap of New Age spirituality. His targets are what
he has called the big stories of the past decade:
global warming, the increasingly alarming pace of
technological innovation, economic market irrationality.
But the same images, if read for their immutable
meaning, become more personal or metaphysical. They
touch on themes of religious disappointment, cosmic
catastrophe, and the transformed or transfigured body.
At this level, images become, if not exactly arbitrary,
at least interchangeable. They work as placeholders
or structural vehicles, since the deeper, metaphysical
themes are conveyed spatially and kinetically. If we
imagine the artist or the viewer dropped into a different
time and place, the political meanings would be new;
the metaphysical meanings--focused on religiously
significant transformations of the body--would be the
same.
A good way to appreciate the importance of the
two levels is to see how Yarber handles the symbolism
of gold, the most conspicuous dramatic prop in the
large set of drawings that revolve around the figure of
the skeletal trickster. Dense, ductile, conductive, and
heavier than lead, gold is at once the most stable and
the most pliable of elements, resistant to corrosive
reagents but easily worked--a paradox that corresponds
to its ambiguity as an alchemical figure and a poetic
trope. In the drawings it appears most prominently as
59
 a solid bar of bullion stamped with the letters AUX, the
traders symbol for gold on the commodity exchange
(and the root of the tricksters byname, Auxiliary Jack)
or with a large 79, its number in the periodic table and
the key to its atomic properties as the incorruptible king
of metals. As the non-reactive and so indestructible
element--whether solid (in forms from bars to buttons),
liquid (pumped through labyrinthine pipes or poured out
of bottles to animate a recumbent corpse), or gaseous
(the particulate vapor dubbed auxzone that irradiates
the sky like a sunset seen through heavy smog)--it is
the vestige that carries over from one world to the next,
the talisman known to the Aztecs as the excrement of
the gods.
In Yarbers drawings gold figures most often
in its contingent character as a false idol: worshiped or
purloined in the two gnostic quest stories (WWWWW?
and Are We There Yet?), or swinging on a string
from the sinister Finger of Index (Its Not Our Fault).
And yet even as a symbol of Mammon it is subject to
transvaluation. In Void, the drawing from Calaveras that
shows the emptied slinger in his post-transfiguration
phase, the setting sun on the horizon has become a
giant gold bar, gleaming in place of the temple on the
mount of revelation, while instead of the river of life,
which should be flowing from beneath the threshold, a
river of liquid mercury runs across the desert and into
the pushers pail. We may take this as simultaneously a
satire on worldly addiction and an exemplary image of
gnostic disembodiment. Likewise, in an early drawing
containing the legend Et in Arcadia Ego, the giant bar
appears, suspended from a fraying cord, in place of
the iconic tomb--a graven idol in an American version
of the sacred wilderness--yet what the trickster has
just finished engraving is the formula for Schrdigers
cat paradox, according to which the true state (psi) of
a cat that has been placed in a closed box together
with a slowly decaying source of radioactivity is a
function of both its two possible states, that is, the
cat is simultaneously dead and alive (the title of the
drawing), at least until an observer opens the box.
As the symbol of Mammon and target of greed
for those who do not know the inner alchemy of light,
gold is the embodiment of the earthly. At the same
time, under its eternal aspect, gold is the sign of the
anti-natural, the stable element that will not corrode or
mutate or bond--properties exploited by the Byzantine
60
image-makers, who aspired to write in gold as the
Gospel writers had written in words, and by a poetic
tradition that culminates in Yeats, whose Sailing to
Byzantium, divested of its neo-Platonic veneer, reads
like a script for a Yarber drawing. Yeatss version of
the gnostic quester, a tattered coat upon a stick,
has turned away from the natural world (whatever
is begotten, born, and dies) and now yearns to be
gathered into the artifice of eternity, where, renouncing
the frenzy of copulation for the ecstasy of song, he will
exchange his sensual body for the form of an enameled
golden bird.
The Byzantium toward which Yarber sails in
his various leaky boats (oil tankers, galleys, speed
boats, and dories) also has its golden bird. We hear
him singing in the upper right corner of Its the Sublime,
where, set upon a golden bough, he tries to assure
the would-be amorist who has lost his erection that
the romantic urge is just a thing, and he sings again that were, in one case, as venerable and authoritative
at the end of each of the two quest narratives, which
even while mocking modern forms of idolatry play on
the gnostic themes of transformation, enlightenment,
and escape. In the first, WWWWW? (what, where,
when, who, why: the stammer at the start of every
quest for knowledge), the hero weaves his way through
a honeycombed labyrinth of nine comic-book caves,
imbibing, transmuting, worshiping, and projecting gold
in various iconic forms until, surgically relieved of his
golden heart, he emerges into an ersatz Elysium,
where the golden bird sings, perched on his finger. The
second, Are We There Yet?, is a continuous-action
variant of the same serpentine ascent in which the
compulsion to hoard is defeated by an ethos of strong
or irrational spending. The hero, a skeletal Siegfried
cum Phileas Fogg, deplaning from his flying saucer with
his space-bunny Passepartout, makes his way past a
guardian dragon, overwhelms his wan alter-ego, and
seizes the golden hoard. Dragging his sack behind
him, he circumvents the rites of masonic initiation,
whereupon the physical bar is transformed into a gold
ring. Laboring on, he succeeds in passing out into an
elysian meadow, where the treasure assumes its final
form as a golden bird. The bird is neither substance
(bar) nor symbol (ring); it is, in fact, not a thing at all
but the pure act of singing, art as a way of eluding the
archons, of defying all forms of material entrapment-
but only on condition that one never stop. Here the
religious has nearly eliminated the political, for the quest
parodies nothing except perhaps itself. Art, Yarber has
written, doesnt deal with this theme anymore. I do.
II. Not Made with Hands
The history of Christian iconography has two
rival starting points. According to one view, the first
images were taken from life: the evangelist Luke,
patron saint of painters, gave us the first image of the
Virgin; Nicodemus, the first image of the crucifixion;
and a court artist retained by the Magi, the first image
of the adoration. According to the second view,
iconography begins with the Mandylion or Image of
Edessa, a miraculous image of the face of Christ that
made its way to Constantinople and then, following the
fourth crusade, to the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, only
to disappear in the French Revolution. Both legends
played a role in refuting the iconoclastic reading of
the Second Commandment as prohibiting all forms of
religious representation. Here were material images
without the myth of divine authorship, the original image
as the Gospels, and, in the other, not fabricated but
rather left by Christ himself as an aid and comfort to the
faithful. The Mandylion especially was not just a divine
image but an original or divinely created divine image,
qualitatively different from all secondary imitations
obtained through copying or modifying or combining
previously embodied forms.
The West also had its miraculous images, most
notably the suidarium or Veil of Veronica (whose name
means true icon), imprinted with Christs likeness
when Veronica dried his face on the Via Dolorosa; or
the Shroud of Turin, supposed to have been recovered
from the empty tomb. But these relics preserved the
physical imprint of the features they had touched. A
better Western equivalent to the acheiropoieton or
image not made with hands is the stigmata of St.
Francis, the five wounds that appeared miraculously
as the climactic episode in his lifelong imitation of
Christ. In a famous fresco cycle, probably painted by
pupils of Giotto in the Upper Basilica of S. Francesco
in Assisi, the saint in his brown cassock is shown
kneeling on the rocks beside his cell on Mount Verna,
his eyes fixed on an apparition of the crucified Christ
in the form of a winged seraph, who hovers like an
extraterrestrial visitor, returning his gaze. There is no
bodily communion, no communicatio idiomatum as
in the representation of the wizened Christ-child. The
two figures, one familiar, the other uncannily strange,
remain in their separate worlds, but besides their
reciprocal gazes, they bear identical wounds, united by
five pencil-thin lines. Signifying without representing, the
picture shows the power of an idea to stamp itself on
the human body.
Like the Mandylion, the stigmata of Francis
are an original image in the strong sense of original. By
contrast, images of the image of the stigmata can be
at most original in the weak sense of innovative. The
now canonical representation of the event in Assisi was
in fact not the first, an honor that probably belongs to
a panel painting by Bonaventura Berlinghieri in Pescia
(1235). But even Bonaventura did not create an original
image, for he was illustrating a text, the Vita of Francis
by Thomas of Celano, who, borrowing from Isaiahs
vision of the heavenly throne (Isa 6:2), had described
a man-like seraph affixed to a cross. Like the originality
of Scripture, which devolves into an endless palimpsest
or true icon lies beyond reach.
Yarber has singled out the image of the
transformed, or transfigured, body as the focus of his
own mystical yearnings, and allusions to the stigmata
are scattered throughout the current collection, where
apparitions hover (Corpus Resurrectum Est, The End
of Time is Over, Fire and Ice), supernatural rays pierce
(Sins of the Scopo-Captain, Theyre Using Iridology),
and various questers have holes in their heads and
limbs (Skinny Come Back, A Cigar Is Never Just a
Cigar). His most explicit homage to the image not
made with hands is Veil 79, the last of the series of
translucent skulls included in Calaveras Gnosticos.
Darker in tone than the others and bearing the legend
acheiropoetos, it is a drawing of more than common
ugliness, projecting a brooding, Satanic malevolence
rather than the explosive zaniness of its companions.
Although the image appears to be three dimensional,
with cavernous eye sockets framing protuberant eyes
and a phantom cigar projecting from the simian jaw,
what it represents is in fact a two dimensional cloth,
as we can see from the crab-like fingers holding it
up beneath the costume hat. The visual joke is an
elaborate one, as though it were the fact of perspective
itself--the illusionists trick of rendering an absent
dimension--that was mysterious and unfathomable. (At
the same time, a second, vestigial set of fingers is just
visible clutching a second, more luminous cigar--source
61
 of the golden smoke on which the skull seems to float
--a redundancy of hands being ironically apt in an image
of an image not made with hands.)
For all its hilarity, there is a hidden fury behind
such an image. It seems to reflect the rage of an artist
unable to escape inherited forms, compelled to compile,
combine, distort, but always to repeat. Unable to match
the authenticity of an image not made with hands, his
imagination keeps fighting against its limitations, trying
to atone for its inability to create anything original.
Perhaps this accounts for the multiplicity of the forms
that populate his fictional world, no two of which speak
the same language. Not only are they individually
monstrous, but they participate in a promiscuous orgy of
misalliances, a general assault on decorum, as one can
see from a rapid census. Leading the parade is Auxiliary
Jack, the grinning trickster--a kind of dclass Baron
Samedi--compounded from dancing skeletons, Tibetan
cipati, and other personifications of death, high and
low. Yarber has written that he was inspired by Mexican
images of death, particularly the satirical calaveras
(skulls) of Jos Guadaloupe Posada and the translucent
skull ornaments of the Aztecs. Nattily dressed in top hat,
bow tie, and spats, and sporting a gold tooth, he seems
a cross between an undertaker and a macabre master
of ceremonies. In addition to two bulging telescopic
eyes, the epistemological correlative of the hypertrophic
phallus, he often has an apotropaic third eye set in his
forehead, though sometimes the hole is bored through
his temples instead, perhaps to permit the voiding of
mind. A figure of license and riot, he indulges in various
forms of modern greed, while at the same time acting
as mystagogue in the gnostic cult of disembodiment. An
eclectic cast of mutants support him in his adventures:
his soul companion the Space Bunny; the exploding
phallic cigar; the tautological Finger of Index
(manifestation of the invisible hand that governs the
capitalist market, whence the gold bar attached by a
string); the fishing pole (bucolic echo of the finger); the
cowboy (avatar and proteg of the skeletal quester);
and a small menagerie of Aesopian animals--barnyard,
wild, domestic, and fabulous--who animate the erotic
circus and serve as cosmic witnesses. Along with one
or two revenants from earlier works, who appear in a
few of the most recent drawings (hotel bellhops, the
Hindu elephant god Ganesha, patron of artists), the
most significant additions to the troupe were recruited
for the gnostic quest comic, Irrational Exuberance,
62
which reappears in synoptic form as WWWWW? They
include the beturbaned magus, the magna mater or
virgin goddess (the space-bunny puella as seen by
a Catholic), the bespectacled nurse (perhaps the
Space Bunny as spouse), the oracular Old Salt (later
the Scopo-Captain, a portrait, or self-portrait, of the
artist as an old man), the golden molar (an alchemical
idol), and most significantly the miniature, skeletal
homunculus, icon of tautological, recursive generativity
(although one could say that the trickster himself, given
his oversized hands, feet, genitals, and prosthetic
lips, was always already a cortical homunculus). Most
recently the Scopo-Captain series has spawned two
new figures of transition: the anamorphic skull, a
concealed deaths head visible only from the proper
angle of vision; and ballistic gel, a laboratory concoction
with the consistency of human flesh, devised by the
military to test the lethal force of bullets and warheads.
The two debut together in Why Flesh? Use Gel, where
they are presented by a gnostic angel, dressed like
a cocktail hostess in a spangled sarong, who strides
barefoot out of the desert with a tray in each hand: on
one sits a lump of melting flesh, while hovering above
the other is a cube of ballistic gel through which an
anamorphic head has just been launched.
All these figures participate in recognizable
dramas, borrowed from disparate but identifiable
sources (Hollywood Westerns, Wagners Ring, the Book
of Revelation, Tibetan tankas, Mesoamerican masks,
Porphyrys Cave of the Nymphs). Certain figures
owe their existence to verbal puns: the dashboard
glove compartment in which a hand gropes for pills
in Auto-medicate; the contest between the drumming
native and the drum of oil in The End of Time is Over;
the bathchair chariot, embodiment of the (sex) drive;
the golden alchemical Molar; the City Taxidermy taxi
company. Even the skeletal hero gets his cover name,
Auxiliary Jack, thanks to an audio system that makes
aux the symbol both for the supernumerary connection
on electronic devices and for the gold he sports in his
tooth.
The scenic backdrops, of which there are five
kinds, are equally incongruous, though by a kind of
Blakean logic each of the first four corresponds to a
season and a cardinal direction: spring, the eastern
garden of eros with its bucolic lawns, romantic lakes,
and notional roses (Its the Sublime; The Hidden Hand;
Dead and Alive); summer, the southern ocean of
strife with its cosmic, sexual, and generational battles
(Squall Line and the Scopo-Captain series); fall, the
western desert of spiritual awakening with its mesas
and canyons beneath the vast inane (The Collapse of
the Now; Its Not Our Fault; the cowboy series); and
winter, the northern mountains of insentience (Thing
Country and the two precipice drawings in Calaveras).
The final setting, the subterranean cave that is the site
of regeneration, is seasonless and directionless, both
tomb and womb (The End of Time Is Over; Fire and Ice;
Tunnel of Rub; and the two quest narratives).
For Yarber, the realm of the mothers, the matrix
of art, is a world of shapes, of lines and colors. His
images emerge, often to his own amazement, in the
process of drawing, but certain words and slogans are
integral to their conception. Among them, a number
of paradoxical sayings have a special relation to the
problem of originality. They can generally be sorted into
one of two categories. The first, which corresponds to
the myth of endless return, is circular, a variation on the
serpent swallowing its tail, or in Yarbers iconography
the cigar smoking the skull that smokes the cigar (see
Its Not Our Fault). A simple if imperfect rhetorical
example is the title Always Already, which pins us to a
kind of logical wheel. In the drawing a bullet approaches
the rear of a gunslingers head, where it will pass
through the hole already gaping in the center of his
brow. The second pattern is linear and corresponds to
a kind of infinite regress manifest in all reflexive forms
through the intercalation known as mise en abyme
(the Quaker Oats box with Gabby Hayes holding up a
Quaker Oats box). It differs from circularity in that the
movement always runs in a single direction so that the
repetitions, though endless, are never identical.
Its visual representative is the mannikin or homunculus,
a kind of notional clone, formerly associated with the
preformationist belief that each drop of sperm contains
an entire miniature human, who naturally produces
sperm of his own containing further homunculi, ad
infinitum. A simple verbal example of the infinite regress
would be the phrase The Thing from the Other Thing
exploding across the sky in Thing Country.
The two most interesting slogans in the
book each turn on a temporal paradox that again
demonstrates the limitations on the artist. The Collapse
of the Now Could Not Have Come at a Better Time
in the drawing of the same name is logically circular,
since the present--the temporal position abolished in
the compound subject--is immediately restored in the
predicate. In the drawing the words are engraved on a
monumental gold bar, suspended from a frayed cord
that is just giving way. The setting is the rim of a canyon
whose cliffs have been shaped by a river whose course
has in turn been shaped by the cliffs. Meanwhile, as
though mocking such circularity, the tricksters cigar,
bound to the other end of the cord, seems to be rising
rather than falling, as by rights it ought to do--provided
the ends belong to the same cord. Our uncertainty
on that score is matched by our uncertainty about the
tricksters plight: Is he about to be crushed beneath the
falling bar or to escape by casting himself into the void?
The End of Time Is Over (also the title of the drawing
in which it appears) has a differently twisted logic. It
begins with a moment, or alternatively an event, that
must meet two grammatical conditions for the statement
to be coherent--it must be set in the future, and it must
exclude duration--and then presents that moment as
temporally extended and already past. The effect of
the inconsequence is to move us beyond the end-time
into a new present from which we look back on the
end of time. Here the recursion is regressive rather
than simply cyclical; it obliges us to keep taking up the
canceled premise but always at a different place.
By contrast, the glosses that Yarber sometimes
writes to accompany his drawings are verbal riffs. At
their best, they mimic the monstrous in another mode,
transposing the theme but making it more accessible.
Like barkers at a freak show, their job is to be clever,
to traffic in provocation, to offer us diversions. Yet by
juxtaposing writing and drawing so that each interprets
and illuminates the other, Yarber is conjoining two
semiotic systems in a second order communicatio
idiomatum, much as the images themselves combine
the popular and the recondite, the colloquial and the
abstruse, the commercial and the spiritual. The gloss
is one degree further removed than the image from the
point of origin. Thus, even as it inaugurates the work
of reading, it illustrates the artists own predicament
--condemned to repeat, combine, transpose--to let
novelty stand in for originality.
For Yarber, the truly new has nothing to do with
novelty. Its attraction is that it promises to put an end to
the present, to be the corpse of the old. The new is not
Studio Harland Miller. Photo: Alex Daniels.
63
 simply the most recent (or late), but what beckons from
the depths of the unknown, the original (or early)--a goal
that constantly recedes as one pursues it. It is like the
Snark that lures on the Bellman and his crew in The
Hunting of the Snark. True originality would require the
hunter to leap out of time, where the Snark might turn
out to be a Boojum. In his gleeful exuberance Yarber
is like the Bellman; there is something crazed in his
madcap parading of images and words, as if he were
afraid that without them he might vanish away before
the tedium of the real. His frantic activity, iconopoetic
and mythopoetic alike, is hilarious without being
joyous. With the acheiropoieton inaccessible, the artist
embraces his false Duessa with the grim insouciance of
a knight of ghosts and shadows.
The horror latent in the image-makers
predicament emerges most clearly in the one drawing
in the book that forgoes figuration entirely. A comment
on the futility of iconography, on the endless round
of images begotten of fresh images, the apocalyptic
legend exploding above the frozen wastes in Thing
Country is, as we noted, an infinite regress: The
Thing from the Other Thing. The drawing is thus a
commentary on the mock-iconic Veil 79 and the set
of skulls that precede it. There is no original creation;
everything always imitates something else. For all the
shimmering color of the northern lights, the landscape in
the drawing is glacial. The snow-covered precipices are
inimical to life. The tongue of ice that extends between
them, which we mistake at first for falling water, gives
the scene the look of a monstrous face--perhaps the
blind face of Demogorgon proclaiming to the daughters
of memory that the deep truth is imageless.
III. The Self-constituting Gaze
In the depths of my eye the picture is painted.
Though five hundred years older than Lacans gnomic
pronouncement on the reflexivity of the gaze, Piero
della Francescas Flagellation in the Ducal Palace in
Urbino might, with its temporal and spacial disjunctions,
be taken as its vatic commentary. The curved wooden
panel, divided horizontally, shows two distinct scenes:
to the left, in the background, the flagellation of Christ,
who stands bound to a pillar at the center of a deep
portico, flanked by two soldiers with raised whips; to the
right, in the foreground, three similarly grouped figures
in an idealized urban setting are all staring intensely,
as though seeing in their minds eye the remote scene
64
behind them. The blond youth in the center, barefoot
and dressed in a simple robe, is gazing into space with
an otherworldly expression, while the eyes of the two
men to either side of him--one bearded, one balding,
both richly attired in contemporary dress--seem to be
locked in silent recognition. Like the entranced figures
in the foreground, the actors in the background are
perfectly immobile, as though frozen in time.
The subject of Pieros enigmatic painting
remains a topic of speculation. It has been read as a
memorial to the young prince Oddantonio, half-brother
of Federigo da Montefeltro, assassinated with the
connivance of his counselors; as an allegory of the
churchs tribulations following the fall of Constantinople;
and as a visual letter of consolation following the death
of the son of the court astrologer, Ottavio Ubaldini, and
the nearly contemporary disfiguration of the adopted
son of his friend Ludovico Gonzaga. As a point of
reference for Yarbers work, however, what matters
is how Piero, by focusing our attention on the eyes of
the figures, has transformed the pictorial space into
a metaphor of time, and how, as a result, past and
present, background and foreground, left and right,
constantly oscillate. The biblical event, relegated to the
background and illumined from within by its own source
of light, has been translated into a piece of mental
theater. Lifting the fourth wall from Pilates Praetorium,
we are confronted (like Joseph K stumbling on the
flogger) with our own fantasies of cruelty and bondage.
Yarbers dramas are likewise scenes of mental
theater with the crucial distinction that in his drawings
the contemporary witness and the mythic event are
conflated. What we see are hybrid figures--half myth,
half real--reflexive monsters of vision, transfigured by
their own projections. Each has the vivid immediacy
of hallucination, but a self-conscious hallucination,
which emerges from the page shadowed by its protean
allegorical doubles. As in The Flagellation, the principal
action is ocular. The focus is on the eyes, which in the
case of the skeletal quester are on stalks or replicating
themselves in exploded view. The protuberant eye
not only perceives, it also shows. Apprehending and
recreating itself in the image, the artistic self emerges in
that movement beyond perception. The artist constitutes
himself in his own alienated gaze as the object that is
seen.
Thing Country - 98 x 62 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2012
65
 We may read a good number of Yarbers
drawings as metaphysical self-portraits, though his
idea of representation has little to do with physical
resemblance. True, certain of his own features, certain
eccentricities of posture and gait, reappear in his
characters--in the face of the sea captain, or in the
dispraxic articulations of the lanky trickster--and the
whole fixation on abnormal vision and binocular rivalry
is presumably rooted in personal history (his being
cross-eyed as a boy, for instance, and needing to wear
even now double lenses plus a monocle when doing
detailed work). Nevertheless, the drawings are not self-
portraits in the usual sense, but universalized portraits
of the hidden or pneumatic self, images of the artist as
antihero or gnostic visionary. Thus, in More Bath Salts,
Please--the last drawing in the group, which serves as
a signature--a goggle-eyed Yarber caricature and his
skeletal personae, all with detachable screw-on heads,
flounder together in the bath, as he tries with a scrub
brush, negation of the paintbrush and cigar, to rub off
the deposits of surface color obscuring his inner light.
Committed to sudsy oblivion, he pursues his gnostic
program of radical hygiene and self-erasure with the
help of imaginary figures, like the Nurse and the Space
Bunny, that he himself has created.
In the drawings from 2013, the trickster yields
his place as fictive alter-ego to a version of the Old
Salt called the Scopo-Captain. Sins of the Scopo-
Captain translates the song of the sirens heard by
Odysseus from an audition to a vision. A quester on
the seas of becoming, the Captain has lashed himself
to the mast and is gazing at the sirens scaffold, a
kind of auditory lighthouse, where, in answer to the
five perennial questions (What? Where? When?. the memory. Squall Line (Perturbation Wave), with its
. .) from WWWWW?, girls are flashing five words of
denial (No, Never, Nada. . .) while setting fire to simple rowboat in which a strange son and his father
the loudspeakers (electrical sirens), broadcasting
the advantages of gel over flesh (Its soft! Its lost youth, it is an intimate picture, which stands apart
permeable!). Instead of earwax, the men at the oars
wear blindfolds, though one rebel has freed himself
and, abandoning his companions, is rising into the sky
where angelic speedboats are roaming. But the Captain
resists that consummation. It is the tension represented
by his lashings--the determination to remain in one
world while gazing at or projecting another--that enables
him to resist the X of the siren queen, standing on the
edge of the lighthouse deck, legs spread and cutlass
raised, and to focus instead on the vision in his own
66
eye--an abstract X, figure of the unknown, molded in
ballistic gel. His gaze, no longer captivated by the X
of origin, is fixed, not on the sex of the siren, but on
the reciprocating gaze of a severed head--perhaps
belonging to the superseded trickster--which, held aloft
by the queen, stares back through its own 3D goggles.
Having seen his fate, the Captain becomes a
prophet. In a drawing aptly entitled Oracle, he hovers
in the night sky above the lights of a modern coastal
metropolis, proclaiming doom on his spirit horn, as a
tsunami rolls in from the sea. He hovers again, with a
more anxious expression, in Theyre Using Iridology!,
an episode in the apocalyptic war of Gog and Magog
that presages the end of the Age. It is a latter-day battle
of the ancients and the moderns: one side fighting with
flying skulls rendered invisible by anamorphosis (the
invention of Leonardo, for whom the eye was a window
into the soul); the other with nuclear fireballs (generated
by the quack science of iridology, for which the eye is a
window into the body).
Avatars of Hucks raft and Noahs ark, carrying
the seeker as well as the survivor, boats appear
everywhere in Yarbers recent work. In addition to the
Scopo-Captains galley and the steel dreadnoughts
of the apocalypse, they range from the air-mattress
of the naked starlet to the sternwheeler of the handy
deckhand who eyes her, and from the idle Chris-Craft
drifting through in its post-apocalyptic dreamscape to
the transatlantic steamer burning at full-throttle with the
Scopo-Captain ever watchful at the bow. Ultimately,
however, these drunken boats all lead us back to a
single vision, a vestige of childhood stored deep in
small change at one point in a system--say, a butterfly
seemingly redundant title, begins with the image of a
a remote point in time and space--say, a hurricane or
sit silently fishing. An idealized vision of every boys a rogue wave of titanic proportions. Squall Line thus
sets us on deeper waters than we first realized. It is not
from the other images in the book by its restraint and its
elegiac resonance. It seems to capture a nostalgia, an
intensely human longing, we do not usually associate
with Yarbers work. Under the fathers proud or watchful
eye, the son, whose expression we can only fathom,
gazes up at the rainbow overhead and the flying fish
that follow its arc. Man and boy sit side by side in an
archetypal scene of instruction, protected by the fragile
shell of the boat. Oedipal rivalry is suspended; except
for the sea itself there is no third.
The two rods point in complementary curves toward a
single vanishing point.
As Yarber renders it, however, the scene is
more complex. To begin with, the boy is a skeleton,
which, under the spell of our own longing, we may
read as an expression of his vulnerability. The plot
then becomes more tragic or sinister. The fragile sons
effort to please his virile, suntanned father will never be
acknowledged. The god he had endowed with a pranic
golden crown assumes the pitiless face of Moloch.
Reflected in the water, the bulging muscles beneath
his shirt have the form of a clenched fist. Squall Line
is unusual among Yarbers drawings in affording no
purchase for a circumstantial or political reading, yet it
still supports two levels of interpretation: on one hand,
the emotional fantasy, with its ambivalent longing and
fear of rejection; on the other, a gnostic counterplot
driven by mystical yearnings, which looks beyond
the vagaries of personal psychology to a less mutable
order of reality. This entails a crucial revision. Read
in the context of Yarbers other work, the terms of the
drawing shift, and the pneumatically disembodied son
represents a higher stage of enlightenment than his
glowingly carnal progenitor.
What finally brings us to this second, gnostic
reading is the squall line itself, which, as the title tells
us, is a perturbation wave. Perturbation is a term
borrowed from chaos theory, where it is a feature of
non-linear deterministic systems, which show both
a sensitive dependence on initial conditions and the
kind of endless recurrence we have described as
recursiveness. A perturbation wave occurs when a
with its violent coupling of the human and the demonic,
flapping his wings--leads to a tumultuous change at
that troubled Freud, but it is the Resurrection of the
only an attempt to defend against personal memory; it
is also an episode in an ongoing cosmic speculation.
The squall line of the title, advancing with its curtain of
flying arrows, signals not simply a storm but something
more like a war in heaven. The rainbow, which we
took for a sign of the covenant, reverts to the celestial
weapon with which the new gods destroy the old.
Like the psychological plot, with its ambivalent
confession of sustaining love and crippling fear,
the gnostic plot is double. When the artists gaze is
turned inward, he creates parables of disembodiment
and spiritual quest; when he gazes at the world, the
governing myths are cosmic. If we look again now at
the gaze of the father, we find that it is not, after all,
fixed on his son but on us, the viewers, and the look is
anything but encouraging. It might be a cross between
a snarl and a leer, but, as reflected in the water, it is a
grimace of pure terror. Like the more overt battles at
sea, Squall Line, though the most personal of images,
foreshadows the apocalyptic drawings to which we turn
next. Conflating the mythical theophany with its allegory
of personal vision, it superimposes the two dramas that
Piero placed side by side, presenting them in a single
mental theater in continuous projection, or casting them
adrift to make their way in the same open boat.
IV. The End of Time Is Over
Many of Yarbers early works, with their bodies
rising and falling through space, could be taken as
studies from Pieros pupil Luca Signorelli, whose
frescos depicting the end of the world cover the walls
of the San Brizio Chapel in the cathedral in Orvieto.
In particular, the central couple in Signorellis vision of
the damned--the naked woman clutching the back of
a winged demon, who, radically foreshortened, seem
about to escape from the picture into the chapel itself-
appear to be figures borrowed before the fact from
Yarbers work. The six principal scenes, based on
passages from The Golden Legend and The Vision
of St. Bridget, belong to a line of Apocalyptic Last
Judgments that begins with Nicola Pisanos pulpit in
Siena and culminates with Michelangelos wall in the
Sistine Chapel. Signorellis Torments of the Damned,
was the occasion for the famous Signorelli Parapraxis
Dead, which plays with the boundary between death
and life, between skeletal corpses and radiantly fleshed
figures, that seems to foreshadow Yarbers recent work.
The third scene, moving counterclockwise in imitation
of the heavens, shows bodies recently risen as well as
bodies in transition, straining to lift themselves up out of
the ground as two angels on high blow silver trumpets.
The straining figures are not rising from tombs; they
simply break through the earth, so that what we see are
torsi or limbs sawn clean. Eerier yet, some of the dead,
both those emerging and those already emerged, are
not yet enfleshed, but have risen as skeletons.
67
 Fleshed or boned, they sit or stand, exhausted and
relieved, or else continue to struggle like the central
figures straining to liberate their companions.
What is most shocking about the fresco is not
the promiscuous mixing of the nude with the nakedly
fleshless, but the way Signorelli has arrested and so
effectively abolished the passage between death and
life. He takes the idea of transfiguration, a temporal
process implying succession, and freezes the action at
a moment in time. His use of a static image to represent
transition gives us an uncomfortable awareness of
how uncanny the concept is. This, in many ways, is
Yarbers ambition as well, but in his work the desired
change is not from bone to flesh but from the prison
of embodiment to the freedom of privation. Bliss, for
the gnostic, is aligned with emptiness; the call is not to
renewed corporeality but to the pneumatic repudiation
of the flesh. Beyond that, all of Yarbers images
(beginning with the two quest narratives, sequential
by definition) seem to incorporate motion rather than
arrest it. Though representations of three-dimensional
space, they manage to imply a fourth dimension, not by
suspending movement in the manner of Signorelli, but
by depicting or, in some cases, enacting it. His acts of
auto-medication, as he calls one of his drawings, are
strangely mobile.
Yarbers skeletal trickster could be one
of Signorellis unfleshed corpses, who, having
slept through the angelic reveille and missed the
renaissance, has wandered off in the wrong direction
and instead of a human body has been given the dated
swags of a carnival tout. There is a certain poignancy to
this portrait of the artist as confidence man. Unlike the
figures in the fresco, who tend to gather like dancers in
clusters, Auxiliary Jack wanders companionless. The
three skeletons cavorting above the radioactive gold
skull in Pay to Play are not separate beings but the
triune form of a single nature, and the skeletal double
who tries to bar the way in Are We There Yet? is no
more than a projection of the questers own doubts
and scruples. Once, in Artist and Model, he seems to
have found a helpmeet, but in a drawing that plays
with the priority of image to model, she too is only
constituted by the reflexive act of drawing, so that the
only real companion is the purely notional Space Bunny,
whom the quester chooses from a lineup of identical
candidates in WWWWW?.
68
When we approach Yarbers work, however,
not as self-portraiture but as cosmic eschatology, such
human preoccupations recede. The Last Judgment is a
unique event, an eruption of the supernatural that brings
time to an end, but in Yarbers gnostic cosmology,
apocalypse is an episode in an endlessly repeating
cycle. Endzeit is Urzeit; catastrophe is creation; the
parousia is a moment of cosmic rebirth. Apocalyptic
shadows appear throughout Yarbers work, and the
Scopo-Captain series in particular features oracles of
doom and scenes of eschatological war, but there are
four late drawings that seem generically distinct: Its
Not Our Fault, The End of Time is Over, Fire and Ice,
and All or Nothing at All. Each is large and dazzlingly
complex, its madness diffused through minute
details that reward careful reading. In contrast to the
subjective or autobiographical drawings, which are
episodes in a larger narrative, each apocalyptic drawing
is complete in itself. Together they raise the authority of
the collection to a higher level.
Its Not Our Fault, the earliest, is a hybrid
work, straddling the threshold between subjective and
objective, self and world. The iconography is largely
that of the trickster series, and important elements
have been borrowed intact from Prospect: the gold bar
tied by a string to the Finger of fate, launched from the
horizon, as well as the tricksters bandaged eyes and
spread-eagled pose, as he balances precariously on
the rim of a precipice. But the scale and point of view
have shifted, and the tricksters ordeal is no longer
the focus of the picture, but one of three secondary
events arranged about a massive column, which has
the oxymoronic appearance of a petrified geyser.
The drawing shows Yarbers signature mastery of
spatial tricks--orthogonal convergence, masking and
overlapping, relative scale, atmospheric perspective--as
well as his skill at manipulating the viewer, who looks
down on the hat of the diminutive trickster but up toward
the top of the column, which thus appears enlarged.
Because of the columns form and the surrounding
tumult, it looks at first glance like a seismic eruption,
perhaps a supervolcano or the cloud from a nuclear
explosion; yet a more deliberate examination suggests
a carved mesa in a visionary Death Valley, so high that
its top is covered in snow, or perhaps a flamboyant
telluric pillar supporting a cap of polar ice above an
equatorial mantel of igneous rock.
It is clear from the landscape that global
warming has accelerated. On high, a Mountie (or
Canadian pig) texts while sledding, as his panicked
huskies, breaking through the ice, protest, Its not our
fault. Below, the blindfolded trickster recoils, unable to
elude the accusatory Finger. He has thrown away his
exploding cigar, but a ring of smoke still betrays him.
Meanwhile, the liberated cigar has rebelled and is now
smoking the tricksters own phantom skull, which, afraid
of being detected, reminds itself it is anamorphic, to
no avail. The laser beam emitted by its ash-crowned
hat is caught and directed back to earth by the floating
speculum, emblem of reflexivity and back-shaping (the
literal meaning of anamorphosis). Only the dogs seem
to have broken through the prison of reflective forms
and are morphing not back but forward into ghost
dogs, disembodied wraiths leading the way toward
a new immateriality. Its Not Our Fault is a threshold
drawing. It still reflects the plight of the artist-trickster,
but it arraigns him, even as art itself continues without
him. What insight the artist has is in proportion to his
blindness, and his deconstruction foreshadows the end
of his ocular career. Once the apocalypse begins, he is
no longer the master but a corpse like any other.
In The End of Time is Over the theme of
cosmic rebirth is more central. Once again, the political
target is ecological devastation, and the topical images
are the easiest to gloss: at the top of the drawing, oil
poured from a drum bores a hole in the ice cap (or ten-
gallon hat when seen from below), while more oil spills
from a puncture in the raft of the naked starlet sunning
herself in the apocalyptic glow. Further down the chain,
an atavistic trickster wearing a divers bell drums as
his native island is swallowed by the ocean. With time
nearly up, the Everlast anchor (one of several plays on
the drawings title) reaches for a sunken treasure chest
of Rolex watches, while the capitalist octopus, a Rolex
on each tentacle, picks the pocket of an obsequious
steward. These and other details play on the excesses
of a consumer culture that seems to be accelerating as
it destroys itself and the planet. At their center stands
a Plotinian fountain mounted on a wounded human
heart. Behind it rises a babelian tower, from the top of
which a showering mullah intones an ambiguous oracle
(The End of Time is Over). By a recursive logic that
matches the towers spirals, it suggests that the coming
apocalypse will not be the last. Meanwhile, the melting
ice that flows through the shower feeds the regenerative
fountain of forms, where a virgin goddess with the look
of a space bunny lactates streams of excito-toxins as
a new ugly baby teethes on its golden wafer. Beneath
them two bathmates frolic, while in the cavernous
depths a uniformed Aryan Mdchen performs her task
of inflicting pain, firing bullets into the heart that drives
the cosmic turbine.
As in all Yarbers work, imaginative exuberance
is controlled by the rigor of the overall composition.
Bilateral symmetries and diagonal axes sustain a grid of
circles pitched and foreshortened at carefully calculated
angles. The green crown of the oceanic hat, reinforced
by its watery brim, is balanced tonally by the blood red
maelstrom--descending and ascending spirals reflecting
one another, like purgatory and hell. Encountering such
a picture is like walking into a Borromini church and
not knowing whether to read the elements as layers or
sections. Conceptually, no less than rhetorically, The
End of Time is Over combines the eternal return with
the infinite regress. It is crucial that Yarbers apocalyptic
scenes are always simultaneously scenes of creation.
His infinite recursions move entropically outward with
ever accelerating speed as though in defiance of
gravity; his apocalyptic vortices are exploding novas
generating new worlds. Like All or Nothing at All and
Its Not Our Fault, the objective apocalypse in The
End of Time Is Over is ultimately reflexive, for beneath
their hat the rising waters are vaguely craniomorphic.
Apocalypse explodes within the contour of a giant head,
in which the two figures frisking in the bath double as
eyes, while the wound in the heart is a leering mouth.
All or Nothing at All, the title of a Frank Sinatra
hit from 1939, is the poor cousin in the family of para-
doxical titles. With no temporal or spatial-causal
framework, its borrowed motto is stuck in tautology,
where, like a scratched record or a quarreling couple,
it can only repeat itself (all or nothing at all or nothing
at all or nothing at all). All or nothing sets out the
options, while the intensive, but semantically redundant,
at all (absolutely) establishes a verbal chiasm--a kind
of phonic ouroboros. For his show, Yarber takes the
theme of American Idol and enlarges it to cosmic
proportions. This time, instead of a landscape setting,
he mines his own work from the late 1980s, with its
divinization of West Coast glitz. The verbal chiasm of
the title is reflected in the breaking of the picture into
two matching stories.
69
 The hotel in the upper story is a kind of glass ark,
where on stage in the main lounge a zombie Frank
doles out small change with his left hand while clinging
to the mike with his right. Meanwhile, in the lower
story, the cellar or hold, a Satanic bell captain and his
ring of Hells Angels exact retribution from a pool of
poor tippers shackled to the wall. They also judge and
discipline would-be performers like the Old Salt (another
artists self-portrait) who, beset by a bellhop attack
monkey, keeps playing his concertina.
What makes this gala so memorable is that
it promises to be the last of its kind. As in traditional
illustrations of the Last Judgment, the picture is in fact
divided into three stories not just two. The same division
with roughly the same proportions appears in the
identically sized The End of Time Is Over, but the Last
Judgment analogy is now more explicit. In the center
of the upper tier, traditional seat of God the Father, a
gold molar--the phony idol trooth once worshiped by
the quester on his way through the caves of becoming
(see WWWWW?)--radiates its false lux et veritas, as
the fountains of the great deep break into the leaky ark.
At the idols right hand, a shiftless Europa, astride her
ruttish bull, escapes to the paradise of carnal excess,
while to the idols left, her surf-bum brother pursues
the White Drop of emptiness and bliss on the curl of
a tongue wave while coolly trying to extract the virtual
tooth (and hold off the breaking tsunami) with the old
slammed-door maneuver. Below them the cellars
are roiled by the rising flood, and the breaking wave,
shaped like the pelvis of a ghostly Leviathan, gives birth
to the irredeemable Sinatra, fugleman for the walking
dead.
All or Nothing at All is the darkest of the
apocalypses. The red-gold of the idol flares against
the greens and blues and purples, giving the picture
an infernal sheen. The attack on the Old Salt, who has
washed aboard from another time and place where
he may have dreamt it all, is the stuff of nightmare. An
old-time performer, whose concertina has the same
relation to the floor show upstairs as the artist who
draws by hand to the world of computer graphics, he
is overwhelmed by his own vision. His images have
judged him obsolete and are about to dispense with him
entirely. As the paranoid trickster in Its Not our Fault
was decapitated and smoked by his own cigar, so the
Captain is here choked with his own mental spawn.
70
Self-reflection (now conceptual rather than ocular) ends
as it begins in arraignment and judgment.
V. The Triumph of Death
Some fifty years before Luca Signorelli began
painting his resurrected skeletons on the walls of the
San Brizio Chapel, an anonymous painter in Palermo
decorated a wall of the Palazzo Sclafani with a late
Gothic vision of The Triumph of Death. Now displayed
in the Regional Museum in the Palazzo Abatellis, it
depicts Death in the conventional guise of a mounted
skeleton striking down the living with shots from his
bow. A microcosm of the world with its classes and
kinds, the garden through which he rides contains a
variety of habitats. In the upper right quarter, dedicated
to the arts, musicians and poets encircle a flowing
fountain. In the upper left, figuring the active life, a
young man with a dog on a leash is hunting. In the
lower right, displaying the vanity of beauty and love, a
lady exchanges rings with her maids while a courtier,
pierced by Deaths arrow, expires on his knees before
her. And in the lower left, the quarter of penitence,
the poor and the lame huddle together praying for
an early end to their suffering. Uniting them all, the
pale horse tramples down the corpses of prelates
and nobles, while the skeletal rider, his face turned
toward the viewer, chooses his unsuspecting targets
one by one. The triumph of Death, galloping through
the entire garden, not only unifies the various groups
(clerical, courtly, contemplative, active), it also animates
them, lending them what precious life they have, yet
making that life a dream. Without his dynamism, the
world would be eternally static. Piero gives us a world
in marble, forever fixed; Signorelli paints transitions
artificially frozen; but the Sclafani fresco gives us a
world enlivened by Death, where the flowing fountain
and the galloping horse, depend on one another.
In his great drawing Fire and Ice, Yarber too
celebrates transition, but he conflates the rider and
the fountain. His central image, an assemblage of
tricephalic skulls stacked vertically in infinite regress
above a floating birthday cake, is a version of the
Plotinian fountain of emanation from The End of Time is
Over, and the three consubstantial skulls are a parody
of the triune godhead (Holy Trinity or Buddhist Trikaya).
Instead of a cigar, each skull clamps in its teeth what
seems to be a bubble pipe composed of a tube and an
ocular ball--a prosthetic extension of its pineal eye--on
which it indifferently draws in or blows out. A wild circus
of flying figures swarm about the upper stories of the
fountain. The curved rim of the backdrop lends their
motion a centrifugal torque, and this rotary movement
produces a second, more troubling illusion: a sense
that the entire image is moving forward, emerging from
the picture plane and advancing toward us like the still
eye of a dark tornado. Like the Sicilian fresco, Yarbers
last apocalypse is organized about a central figure, but
unlike the mounted figure of Death, the triplex specter is
not crossing the picture plane but escaping out of it.
Fire and Ice is one of Yarbers masterpieces,
the culmination of the work that began with the
Calaveras drawings and an extension of the series of
monumental trinitarian images that go back to the great
Clifton Chenier painting of 1974 and the epiphanic Mao
Enters a Chinese Restaurant (1972), whose antithetical
embodiments of suspension and explosive projection--the
naked Mao hovering in beatific meditation, attended by
angelic acupuncturists, and the ghostly waiter careering
toward us with his tray of boiled rice on his shoulder--are
here uncannily joined in a single figure. Sign of divinity,
the conflation encompasses the familiar opposites of on
and off, yes and no, sublated in a negative Trinity, the contraries fire and ice are more like mental than
though unlike Dantes three-headed Satan at the bottom
of Hell, Yarbers tricephalic juggernaut is not bound in the
ice but potently mobile. If Solar Chariot was an image
of the erotic drive, Fire and Ice presents a fantastical
image of the death drive, a spirit moving on the face of
the waters attended by anarchy and chaos.
In the trinitarian conception of history, the
end-time gives birth to a Third Age, the reign of the
spirit, whence the half-melted birthday cake with its
three toppling candles. Above the cake rises the multi-
storied fountain, a replacement for the babelian tower
or skyscraper, a fragment of which lies broken in the
foreground. Composed of stacked top hats receding in
an infinite mise en abyme, the fountain is capped by a
winged homunculus, himself an embodiment of infinite
regress, who is blasting off for the world to come. His
vertical trajectory, pitched slightly backward, follows one
of the major axes that define the represented space.
Two other axes, which cross the picture diagonally, are
likewise canted so that their vertical sections follow
the angles of the two lateral skulls. One is defined by
the Scopo-Captains flaming ship, plunging from the
upper left corner toward the disembodied heart, which
celebrates its liberation from the body by smoking a cigar
and juggling White Drops of emptiness and bliss on each
of its three tongues. The second diagonal begins in the
upper right corner, where a polar bear spins ecstatically
as it clutches a bar of Yukon gold, and then follows the
path of the erotic missiles the Space Bunny is firing
at the Hindu god Ganesha--remover of obstacles and
patron of wisdom, technology, and the arts--jubilant in
his 3D glasses. But the most important axis, a fourth
coordinate, is the orthogonal that begins in the depths
of the cave and, passing through the eyes of the central
skull, pierces the eye of the viewer. Figures in Yarbers
drawings rarely return our gaze. Rather than captivate
by their physical presence, they ask to be read. But
the central figure in Fire and Ice, like the rider in The
Triumph of Death, stares at us directly, implicating
us in its estranged otherness, its pursuit of an elusive
emptiness free from the constraints of time and space.
Gaze long enough into an abyss, as Nietzsche wrote, the
abyss will gaze into thee.
Thanks in part to a difference in scale, the
fictive forms cavorting in the upper stories seem almost
to be phantoms of the tricksters triple mind. Even
meteorological projections. They radiate from the two
sides of the fountain in complementary red and green,
which correspond to the expressions on the two lateral
skulls. The lidless, maniacally bulging red eyes of the
skull to the left are watching the world end in fire, while
the heavy-lidded green eyes of the skull to the right
are watching the world end in ice. Having been voided,
the triplex mind is the fountain or first source of its
own visionary world, through which, thanks to the
delicate transparency of the medium, the white of the
paper shines like a purer blankness from behind its
colored veil.
Yarber has been a master of movement and
of suspended movement from the very beginning.
The falling figures in his great tondo Skyjob (1969)
float even as they fall. The pilot angel of Purgatory
in the Dante illustrations (1970) seems propelled by
a mysterious inner momentum, though his body and
wings are rigid. In the recent work, this ability has been
raised to a new level. It exploits the eyes tendency to
deduce a third dimension from the rotation of lines and
corners on a two-dimensional plane and is perhaps
Yarbers most distinctive gift as a draftsman.
71
 Like the heart centrifuge in The End of Time Is Over,
the troupe of figures whirling about the skulls in Fire
and Ice create a vortex, which in turn propels the entire
structure forward. The uncanny image both hovers and
moves, fixing us with its stare.
Following the paroxysm of Fire and Ice, all
passion subsides in the post-apocalyptic dream-space
Yarber calls the Tunnel of Rub, an undiscovered
country where the traveler, having shuffled off his mortal
coil, can find his quiescence. A rub, as Hamlet uses
the word (To die, to sleep . . . perhaps to dream-ay,
theres the rub), is an obstacle, and Yarbers latter- their abstractions, transcend the allegorical meanings
day Prince, navigating his Chris-Craft down the cloacal
channels or up the amniotic stream, must deal with an
obstacle course of gargantuan breasts and sphincter-
rimmed orifices in his twilit voyage. One of the latest
drawings in the book, Tunnel of Rub is also one of the
most hallucinatory--a final attempt to pass beyond the
realm of the mothers, the more disturbing for the sense
of timeless calm. It is also the last installment in the
sequence of caves that have figured so prominently in
Yarbers repertoire of archetypes, grottos giving rise to
grotesques. Homologous with the hollow of the skull
and the socket of the eye, the cave is the seasonless
place of rebirth, at once the symbol of the sensible
world, which Plato likened to the habitation of a
prison, and of the intelligible world, from which souls,
according to Porphyry, proceed into generation in the
form of naiads or nymphs. The drawing ushers us into
a vast maternal cavity subject to random penetrations-
digital, phallic, mnemonic--all somehow absorbed like
the fragments of a former world. In this case that world
is the book we have just been reading, relics of which
(bullion, toothbrush, starlet) float along beside us.
In the eerie red stillness of the tunnel, these once potent
fragments, together with primal memories and symbols,
begin to compose the post-apocalyptic receptacle out of
which a new world will emerge.
the idols of modern materialism, but it is no less ef-
fective at the more personal level he has called the
religious, where it turns back on itself, mocking the
belief in representation in favor of a dematerialized or
gnostic vision of translucency and constant change. And
yet the kinetic effect of the central figures that seem to
move toward us as if liberated from their pictures does
not depend on irony or on rhetorical interventions of any
kind. Its embodiment of gnostic alienation and quest
is not conceptual but purely visual, an effect of Yarbers
uncanny ability to draw figures that simultaneously float
and move. Apocalyptic images of this caliber transcend
demanded by the iconography and by the theatrical
frames we have been exploring. The interpretive im-
perative is still active, but the full power of the pictures
is independent of their interpretation, or rather, so fully
integrated with it, such an inevitable manifestation of the
works cognitive dimension, as to eclipse it. The gro-
tesque offspring of two states of mind, simultaneously
dead and alive, disembodied and mobile, a source of
consternation and a source of wonder, the drawings of
Panic Pending are above all a comic performance, a
burlesque of mortification and rebirth; but the laughter
they evoke is the laughter of a funhouse lined with dis-
torting mirrors.

We began these reflections on Yarbers recent

work by taking repulsiveness as a visual-conceptual
conceit, a historically sanctioned way of configuring the
divine. Like the ugly baby, the actors in his hallucinatory
dramas--the priapic corpse, the de-creative finger, the
anamorphic projectile, the isometric exploding cigar
are not just grotesque; they compel and confound us
by their ironically double nature. Yarbers irony is most
apparent at the circumstantial level, where it targets

72 WWWWW?- 96,5 x 61 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2010 73

74 Are We There Yet? - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2010 75
76 Its Not Our Fault - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 77
78 Detail: Its Not Our Fault - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 79
80 More Bath salts Please - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 81
82 Detail: More Bath Salts Please - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 83
84 All or Nothing at All - 203 x 114 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 85
86 Detail: All or Nothing at All - 203 x 114 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 87
88 Tunnel of Rub - 152 x 107 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 89
90 Detail: Tunnel of Rub - 152 x 107 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 91
92 The End of Time is Over - 203 x 114 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 93
94 Detail: The End of Time is Over - 203 x 114 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 95
96 Detail: The End of Time is Over - 203 x 114 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 97
98 Detail: The End of Time is Over - 203 x 114 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 99
100 Sins of the Scopo-Captain - 101 x 66 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 101
102 No! Not That! - 152 x 122 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 103
104 Theyre Using Iridology! - 147 x 121 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 105
106 Fire and Ice - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 107
108 Detail: Fire and Ice - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 109
110 Detail: Fire and Ice - 203 x 152 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 111
 Robert Yarber
Distinguished Professor of Art
Penn State School of Visual Art
Penn State University

Born: 1948, Dallas, Texas

Distinguished Professor of Art, Pennsylvania State University

Education
1974 Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, M.F.A.

1967-71 Cooper Union College, New York, New York, B.F.A.

Awards
2006 Pollock Krasner Foundation Artist Grant

1995 Distinguished Alumni Award, Cooper Union, New York

1985 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant

1983 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant

Teaching
1994- Pennsylvania State University, Distinguished Professor of Art

1993 New York University, Drawing Instructor

1990 New York University, Painting Instructor

1987 University of California at Santa Barbara, Visiting Artist

1983-4 University of Texas, Austin, Texas, Senior Lecturer

1983 University of California, Berkeley, California, Visiting Lecturer

1982 University of California, Berkeley, California, Visiting Painting Instructor

University of Texas, Austin, Texas, Senior Lecturer

112 Oracle - 68,5 x 51 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 113
 Selected One-Person Exhibitions
2013 Panic Pending, (Recent Large Scale Drawings,) Alex Danils, Reflex Gallery, Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Publication.) December 7, 2013-January 2014

2010 Irrational Exuberance, (Recent Drawings), Sonnabend Gallery, New York, Oct. 30- Dec.18

2009 Calavera Gnosticos,(Recent Drawings), Sonnabend Gallery, New York, Oct. 17-December 19

2007 Sortie: The Demonological Survey, Kyungpook National University Art Museum, Daegu, Korea

1999 Modernism, San Francisco, California

1998 Sonnabend Gallery, New York, NY

1996-97 Sergio Tossi Arte Contemporanea, Prato, Italy

1996 Marella Arte Contemporanea, Sarnico, Italy

1995 Sonnabend Gallery, New York, NY Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas,
NV Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, Ca.

1994 Galerie Lehmann, Lausanne, Switzerland

1993 Sonnabend Gallery, New York, NY Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY

1992 Casino de Knokke, Knokke-Heist, Belgium

Galleria in Arco, Torino, Italy

1991 Galerie Faust, Geneva Robert Yarber: Photographs, Lieberman & Saul, New York Robert Yarber:
Artifice and Escapes, The Frank Martin Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA

1990 Climax of the Commonplace, Sonnabend Gallery, New York

Galerie Langer, Fain, Paris

1989 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA Robert Yarber Paintings: 1980-1988,
Palmer Museum of Art, PennState University, University Park, PA
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

1987 Asher/Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Greene Gallery, Coconut Grove, FL
Thomas Cohn Arte Contemporanea, Rio de Janieiro, Brazil
Sonnabend Gallery, NY

1985Vollum College Center Gallery, Reed College, Portland Oregon

Sonnabend Gallery, NY

1984 Mattingly Baker Gallery, Dallas, TX

Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX
Asher Faure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

114 Squall Line, (Perturbation Wave.) - 98 x 62 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 115
 Selected Group Exhibitions
2013 Miniature Museum of Contemporary Art, Ria en Lex Daniels, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag

2011 25 Years-25 Artists, Group Photography Exhibit, Julie Saul Gallery, New York, NY
Ileana Sonnabend. An Italian Portrait,Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice, Italy

2009 Image and (Re)presentation, Art of the Eighties, Magasin, Centre National
dArt Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, France

2008 Digitalia, Intimacy in the Hyperreal. Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas
Piot Brehmer, Robert Yarber, Samuel Freeman Gallery, Santa Monica

2007 Fall Season, Jack the Pelican Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

2006 Feast, HUB-Robeson Center, Penn State University, University Park, Pa.
The Hedonistic Imperative, Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas

2005 A More Better Tomorrow, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

PSU SoVA Faculty Exhibit, Palmer Museum, University Park, Pa.

2004  Art and Illusion: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman ArtFoundation, Frederick R. Weisman
Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA. 25th Anniversary Exhibit, Modernism Gallery,
San Francisco, California. Dream or Nightmare: Images of Air and Space in Contemporary Art.
Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina

2002 Visions: The First Ten Years. Selections from the Galleria ValentinaMoncada.
Acanto Blu, Palermo, Sicily Arte a Palazzo. Oraziana, Licenza, Italy
From Pop to Now: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection, The Tang Teaching Museum
and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Sarasota Springs, New York.
2001 Visions: The First Ten Years, Photography, Galleria Valentina Moncada. Rome, Italy

1999 View from the Edge of the World, Marlborough Gallery, Chelsea. New York, N.Y.
G-Force: Art and Gravity Whitney Museum at Stamford, Conn

1998 Frightful Paint, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam

1997 Sex Industry, Stux Gallery, New York

Aerial Perspectives, D.C. Moore Gallery, New York
Shot, Galleria Valentina Moncada, Rome, Italy The Illeana Sonnabend Collection,
Deichtor Halle, Hamburg, Germany
Fifteen Artists, Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, California

1994 The World of Tomorrow, Thomas Solomon gallery, Los Angeles, Ca.
Love in the Ruins, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach Ca.

1993 Wake-up Call, Performance Space 122, NY

The Florescent Conscience, Galerie Pfefferle, Munich

1992 American Art of the 80s, Museo dArte Moderna e Contemporanea

di Trento e Robereto, Trento, Italy

1989 Horn of Plenty, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

116 Why Flesh? Use Gel - 35,5x 28 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2013 117
118 Auto-Medicate - 101,5 x 66 cm - Colored pencil, pastel, ink on paper - 2012 119
 COLOPHON

Robert Yarber
Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Panic Pending

at Galerie Alex Daniels, Amsterdam

December 7 - January 21, 2014

All artworks by Robert Yarber

Introduction by Robert Yarber

Text by Herbert Marks

Book and cover design: Alex Danils

Published by Alex Daniels, Reflex Editions, Amsterdam, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or

reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written

permission from the copyright holders and publishers.

All images courtesy of Robert Yarber, Sonnabend Gallery, New York

and Alex Daniels / Reflex Amsterdam.

This book is dedicated to Lulu Labelle Yarber.

The artist would like to thank Paul Chidester, Bonnie Collura,

Graham Cupit, Rich Doyle, Ghislaine Fremaux, Antonio Homem,

Alex Danils, and the artists colleagues at Penn States SoVA.

Print: Meco Offset BV Zwaag, The Netherlands

Printed and finished in The Netherlands

ISBN 978-90-71848-18-6

Galerie Alex Daniels - Reflex Amsterdam Sonnabend Gallery

Weteringschans 79a 536 West 22nd Street
1017 RX Amsterdam New York, NY 10011
P. 020 - 627 28 32 P. 212-627-1018
F. 020 - 620 25 90 F. 212-627-0489
info@reflexamsterdam.com info@sonnabendgallery.com
www.reflexamsterdam.com www.sonnabendgallery.com

120