11 on-site. When I study such a picture, I recall the saying of an American Zen teacher that I have often cited as a critical motto: All we really have in this life is what we notice. By the way he makes it and by dint of what it records, Foster’s art offers us instruction in noticing what there is to be seen. His practice of attaching “sou- venirs”—found bits of organic, mineral, or cultural matter—as collage addenda to paintings reasserts the works’ implicit advice that we pay attention, wherever we are, to tangible details of the enveloping reality. The traditional character of Foster’s style and sub- ject matter may lead us to overlook one of his art’s most significant effects: the way it shuttles our atten- tion unendingly between local and panoptic focus. At historical moments less urgent than our own, less bur- dened by systems that magnify inestimably the impact of small, seemingly private acts, his guidance in con- necting and reconnecting details to overviews might carry less weight than it does. Only by a willful aversion of attention, for exam- ple, can I keep out of mind linkages between the prodi- gious convenience of the computer on which I’m writ- ing and the social and environmental tolls its existence takes through resource extraction, potentially toxic waste, and their associated economic injustices. Such bad faith, itself a by-product of the information age, discourages me, as it must nearly everyone, from thinking too much about the ecological, ultimately planetary implications of actions taken in my private sphere. Yet to become sensitized to that pressure— even if only in bafflement over what to do about it—has become an ethical imperative of our era. Much contem- porary art ostensibly more adventurous in style and tactics than Foster’s has far less pertinence to this inescapable dimension of our daily experience. A contemporary critical prejudice regards aes- thetic and activist impulses in art as adversary values. This attitude echoes distantly an old debate about the authenticity of art for art’s sake as against art for the sake of persuasion: of saving souls, of flattering power or patronage, or otherwise awakening malleable senti- ments. Consider the great lineages of devotional art, of court and aristocratic portraiture, or the more artful inventions of pictorial propaganda, which every modern war has spawned in one form or another. In the late twentieth century a deepening suspicion of mass media and of new imaging technologies recast and reignited the long-running critical debate. Can any mode of representation claim to function uncorrupted by the allure of tendentious distortion available to the master of darkroom technique, to the montage maker, and to the dark arts of digital manipulation? Then again, can any primarily aesthetic pursuit, such as abstract painting, claim for itself the moral force or psychological traction to provoke morally even the most engaged audience? The critique of con- temporary image making’s dependence on institutional resources has cut deep. It has given a discomfiting torque of skepticism to all sophisticated artistic recep- tion. So to say today that imagery can proceed untainted by its past and its potential for abuse has become a profession of faith best made by rare practi- tioners such as Foster, who can show, not merely say—though he says very well—what such a profes- sion entails. Since the late twentieth century there has been a revival of critical interest in the work of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), for whom Cézanne was a great exemplar. This bespeaks hunger for a distinctly modern mode of authenticity capable of allaying the concern that ulterior, perhaps unconscious motives haunt even handmade depiction. Cézanne and Morandi evolved distinct styles informed by shifting allocations of attention between descrip- tion and construction: touch, palette, subject matter, and surface design. Their vacillations stir a sort of affirmative restlessness in attentive viewers of their works—not the unquellable appetite for the next thing aroused by kinetic media and the Internet’s superabun- dance—but felt recognition of a deep link between the summoned energy of scrutiny and a tolerance, even an appetite, for ambiguity in perception. Foster has inherited that restlessness as an artis- tic value and a creative problem. But against a twen- ty-first-century background it has meanings different from those given it by the twentieth. Tensions between subject and style, registered in ambiguities of descrip- tion, preoccupied Cézanne and Morandi as quavers of temperament. But each artist also recognized those tensions as instabilities that had to be mastered to cer- tify painting’s continued relevance to accelerated modern experience. We live out that acceleration today at a tempo that people a century ago would have found simply shattering. “It’s partly about time passing,” Foster said, refer- ring both to his practice of sustained observation and to his work’s mode of concerned address. By dint of his peculiar approach to subject matter and image making, he knows the texture of his era’s time passing with an intimacy few of us share, through a search and advo- cacy for environments not yet compromised though threatened by what Edward O. Wilson calls “the social conquest of earth.” “The beauty thing has been at the back of my mind for a long time,” Foster said. “I realize that what I’ve been doing is to demonstrate to people, to persuade them that these are extraordinary untouched places, many of which are extremely fragile. It should be a mark of whether we’re capable of civilization in our society to leave these places alone because they are so exquisite.”
