The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World: The Art Object and the Object of Art 9781350154735, 9781350154766, 9781350154742

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

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Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Series Editors: Tiziana Andina and David Carrier Philosophers and cultural historians typically discuss works of art in abstract terms. But the true significance of art for philosophy, and philosophy for art, can only be established through close analysis of specific examples. Art is increasingly being used to introduce and discuss problems in philosophy. And many works of art raise important philosophical issues of their own. But the resources available have been limited. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, the first series of its kind, will provide a productive context for that indispensable enterprise. The series promotes philosophy as a framework for understanding the study of contemporary arts and artists, showcasing researches that exemplifies cuttingedge and socially engaged scholarship, bridging theory and practice, academic rigour and insight of the contemporary world. Editorial Board: Alessandro Arbo (University of Strasbourg, France), Carla Bagnoli (University of Modena and Reggio, Italy), Leeza Chebotarev (Private Art Advisor), Paolo D’Angelo (University of Roma Tre, Italy), Noël Carroll (CUNY, USA), Diarmuid Costello (University of Warwick, UK), Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin, Italy), Cynthia Freeland (University of Houston, USA), Peter Lamarque (University of York, UK), Jonathan Gilmore (CUNY, USA), Luca Illetterati (University of Padova, Italy), Gao Jianping (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China), Birte Kleemann (Michael Werner Gallery), Joachim Pissarro (CUNY, USA), Sara Protasi (University of Puget Sound, USA), Shen-yi Liao (University of Puget Sound, USA), Ken-Ichi Sasaki (Nihon University), Elisabeth Schellekens (University of Uppsala, Sweden), Vincenzo Trione (IULM, International University of Language and Communication, Milan, Italy). Titles in the Series Include: Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll, by David Carrier Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili, by Paul Gladston The Philosophy and Art of Wang Guangyi, edited by Tiziana Andina and Erica Onnis

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World The Art Object and the Object of Art Richard Kalina

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This edition published in 2023 Copyright © Richard Kalina, 2021 Richard Kalina has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Dan Flavin’s installation at the Munich Museum of Art and Design © Goncalo Diniz / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Waugh, Patricia, editor. | Botha, Marc, editor. Title: Future theory : a handbook to critical concepts / edited by Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020051014 (print) | LCCN 2020051015 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472567352 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472567369 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472567376 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social change–Philosophy. | Future, The–Philosophy. | Progress–Philosophy. | Change. Classification: LCC HM831 .F88 2021 (print) | LCC HM831 (ebook) | DDC 303.401—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051014 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051015 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3501-5473-5 978-1-3502-3835-0 978-1-3501-5474-2 978-1-3501-5475-9

Series: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Copyright Credits

vii ix x

Introduction

1

Figures

7

1

Real Dead

19

2

Al Held

27

3

In Another Light

29

4

The Reality of Abstraction

35

5

The Uncomfortable Armchair: Abstraction and Decoration

37

6

Wandering Color: Arbitrariness, Disjunction, and Decoration in American Art of the Sixties

45

7

The Rutgers Group: Garden State Avant-Garde

51

8

Expressing the Abstract

59

9

Gees Bend Modern

71

10 Excerpts from Imagining the Present: Context, Content and the Role of the Critic

81

11 Ab-Ex Confidential: The Way They Were

89

12 Martín Ramírez: Narratives of Displacement and Memory

97

13 The Dream of Aboriginal Art

107

14 Guardians of the Avant-Garde

119

15 Robert Morris: The Order of Disorder

139

v

vi

Contents

16 West of Eden

143

17 Harmony and Discord

147

18 The Four Corners of Painting

151

19 Talk/Show: Language and the Resistant Artwork

159

20 Stop, Look and Listen! Mel Bochner Strong Language

161

21 Through Color

165

22 Hold Still: Looking at Photo-Realism

171

23 The Here and Then

181

24 Art Between Form and Anti-Form

191

25 Frames and Personas

195

26 Inside Outsider

199

27 “The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction”

207

Index

213

List of Figures 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

10 11

Polly Apfelbaum, Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians, 1992. Crushed stretch velvet and dye, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of Polly Apfelbaum. Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvas, 36 × 66 inches (91.4 × 167.6 cm). © Robert Bechtle. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent, 1970. Chalk on paint on wall, 72 × 48 inches. Collection Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist. Grace Hartigan, New England, October, 1957. Oil on canvas, support: 68 ¼ × 83 inches (173.355 × 210.82 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1958. © Estate of Grace Hartigan. Image courtesy of Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Shirley Jaffe, The Chinese Mountain, 2004–05. Oil on canvas, 57 ½ × 44 ⅞ inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Shirley Jaffe and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joyce Kozloff, Cincinnati Fireplace, 1980. Glazed tiles/board, 60 × 114.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. Jonathan Lasker, Spiritual Etiquette, 1991. Oil on linen, 72 × 54 inches (183 × 137 cm) Courtesy of the artist. Norman Lewis, Multitudes, 1946. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 × 26 ½ inches © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Norman Lewis, Street Musicians, 1948. Oil on canvas, 49 3/4 × 40 inches © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Allan Kaprow, 1961. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 1/16 inches (61 × 51 cm) © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Ivan Karp, 1961. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 1/16 inches (61 × 51 cm) © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

7

7

8

8

9

9 10

10

11 11 12 vii

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12

13 14 15

16

17

18

19

20 21 22

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List of Figures

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Still Life VII , 1996. Oil and Magna on canvas, 30 5/16 × 30 5/16 inches (77 × 77 cm) © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. 12 Joan Mitchell, Noon, c. 1969. Oil on canvas, 102 3/8 × 78 5/8 inches (260 × 199.7 cm). Private collection © Estate of Joan Mitchell. 13 Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1966. 11 × 8 ½ inches. Ink and typewriter on electrocardiograph form. Courtesy of the artist. 13 Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Train and Tunnel), ca. 1960–63. Gouache and graphite on pieced paper. 16 1/2 × 32 inches (41.9 × 81.3 cm). © Estate of Martín Ramírez. Courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NY. 14 Martín Ramírez. Untitled (Abstraction with Arches), ca. 1960–63. Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on paper. 22 ½ × 20 inches (57.2 × 50.8 cm). © Estate of Martín Ramírez. Courtesy of Ricco/ Maresca Gallery, NY. 14 George Segal, The Dancers, 1971, plaster. All works by George Segal © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, NY, NY. 15 Keith Sonnier, “Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI,” 1968 (“Neon Wrapping Incandescent” series). Argon and neon tubes, porcelain fixtures, incandescent bulbs, transformer and electrical wire. 5' 7" × 8' 9-1/8" × 9-1/8" (170.2 cm × 267 cm × 23.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist © Artists Rights Society (ARS) Copyright: ARS New York. Photograph © Caterina Verde. 15 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument, 1902. Gilded bronze and granite. Photograph courtesy of Joseph Lawton. 16 Barbara Takenaga, Black Holes Silver, 2017. Acrylic on linen, 24 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. 16 Alma Thomas, Phantasmagoria, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 50 inches. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 17 Cy Twombly, Panorama, 1955. 100 × 134 inches (254 × 340.4 cm). Oil based house paint, wax crayon, chalk on canvas. © Cy Twombly Foundation. 17 Jack Youngerman, Zoneblack, 2019. Oil on Baltic birch plywood, 46 × 46 × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist. 18

Acknowledgments The essays in this volume were published over the last thirty years, a good many of them in Art in America, but also in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Arts Magazine, as well as in publications by the Parrish Art Museum, DC Moore Gallery, the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, and the École Regionale des Beaux-Arts de Valence (now École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Grenoble, Valence). I am especially grateful to Routledge for permission to republish an excerpt from Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic. Needless to say, over the years I have benefitted from the help, stimulation, and friendship of many people, and to list them all would be impossible. I would however like to give special thanks to Elizabeth Baker, the former Editor-in-Chief of Art in America and to Richard Vine, the longtime Managing Editor of the magazine, as well as to the late critic and art historian, Irving Sandler. Thanks too to David Carrier, Tiziana Andina, Pepe Karmel, Jill Weinberg Adams, Bridget Moore, and to the artist friends who graciously allowed their work to be reproduced  – Polly Apfelbaum, Robert Bechtle (and Whitney Chadwick), Mel Bochner, Joyce Kozloff, Jonathan Lasker, Brian O’Doherty, Keith Sonnier, Barbara Takenaga, and Jack Youngerman. For those artists no longer living, I am deeply indebted to Andrew Arnot for permission to reproduce the painting of my friend Shirley Jaffe, to Carroll Janis, Jeanie Deans, and Rena Segal for their help with George Segal’s sculpture, and to Nicola Del Roscio of the Cy Twombly Foundation for his advice and assistance. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was invariably generous and accommodating, as were the estates of Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, as well as Douglas Dreishpoon, Holly Hughes, and Brenda Bieger of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The Michael Rosenfeld Gallery was extremely helpful with the work of Alma Thomas and Norman Lewis, and the Ricco/Maresca Gallery with the work of Martín Ramírez. Also, my sincerest thanks to Joe Lawton for his photograph of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture in Central Park. As for text permissions, thanks to all those who aided me, among them Terrie Sultan and Alicia Longwell of the Parrish Art Museum and Olivier Gourvil, the editor of Tableau : Territoires actuels / New Territories in Painting. And finally, this book is dedicated to my wife, Valerie Jaudon, for her unstinting support and encouragement. ix

Copyright Credits Texts “Real Dead,” originally published in Arts Magazine, December 1991, pp. 48–53. “Al Held,” originally published in Arts Magazine, February 1991, p. 79. “In Another Light,” originally published in Art in America, June 1996, pp. 68–73. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “The Reality of Abstraction,” originally published in the collection of essays accompanying the 1997 exhibition, “After the Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting Since 1970.” At the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, NY. “The Uncomfortable Armchair: Abstraction and Decoration,” originally published in Tableau : Territoires actuels / New Territories in Painting, co-edited by ERBA Valence (now É SAD•Grenoble •Valence) with Le Quartier, Centre d’art de Quimper, in 1997. Publication edited by Olivier Gourvil. “Wandering Color: Arbitrariness, Disjunction, and Decoration in American Art of the Sixties,” was a paper presented at College Art Association Conference, Toronto, February 1998. “The Rutgers Group: Garden State Avant-Garde,” originally published in Art in America December 1999, pp.  54–59. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Expressing the Abstract,” originally published in Art in America, December 2002, pp. 88–97. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Gee’s Bend Modern,” originally published in Art in America, October 2003, pp.  104–109, 148-149. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from Imagining the Present: Context, Content and the Role of the Critic, published by Routledge, 2006. x

Copyright Credits

xi

“Ab-Ex Confidential: The Way They Were,” originally published in Art in America, November 2007, pp.  53–55 Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Martin Ramirez: Narratives of Displacement and Memory,” originally published in Art in America, October 2007, 184–189, 245. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “The Dream of Aboriginal Art,” originally published in Art in America, April 2007, pp.  986–103. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Guardians of the Avant-Garde,” originally published in Art in America, September 2008, pp.  47–54. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Robert Morris: The Order of Disorder,” originally published in Art in America, May 2010, pp.  65–68. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “West of Eden,” originally published in Art in America, November 2014, pp. 47– 49. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Harmony and Discord,” originally published in Art in America, May 2012, pp. 45–50. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “The Four Corners of Painting,” originally published in The Brooklyn Rail, December 2012/January 2013. “Talk/Show: Language and the Resistant Artwork,” originally published in the The Brooklyn Rail, March 2013. “Stop, Look, and Listen! Mel Bochner Strong Language,” originally published in the The Brooklyn Rail, June 2014. “Through Color,” originally published in Art in America, May 2016, pp. 118–127. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Hold Still: Looking at Photo-Realism,” originally published by the Parrish Art Museum in the book From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism 1969 to Today (2017). “The Here and Then,” originally published in Art in America, April 2017 pp. 72– 81. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission.

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Copyright Credits

“Art Between Form and Anti-Form,” originally published in Hyperallergic, August 2018. “Frames and Personas” originally published in Art in America, February 2019, pp. 45–47. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “Inside Outsider” originally published in Art in America, April 2019, pp. 44–51. Copyright © Artnews Media, LLC. Reprinted by permission. “The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction,” accompanied the exhibition of the same name, curated by Richard Kalina, DC Moore Gallery, New York June 2019.

Photographs Polly Apfelbaum, Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians 1992. Crushed stretch velvet and dye, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of Polly Apfelbaum. Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvas. 36 × 66 inches (91.4 × 167.6 cm) 37 1/4 × 67 1/4 × 1 3/4 inches (94.6 × 170.8 × 4.4 cm) framed. © Robert Bechtle. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Mel Bochner. Language Is Not Transparent, 1970. Chalk on paint on wall, 72 × 48 inches. Collection Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist. Grace Hartigan (American, 1922–2008). New England, October, 1957. Oil on canvas, support: 68 1/4 × 83 inches (173.355 × 210.82 cm). Collection AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1958 (K1958:2). © Estate of Grace Hartigan. Image courtesy of Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Shirley Jaffe, The Chinese Mountain, 2004–05, oil on canvas, 57 ½ × 44 7/8 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Shirley Jaffe and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joyce Kozloff, Cincinnati Fireplace, 1980, glazed tiles/board, 60 × 114.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. Jonathan Lasker Spiritual Etiquette, 1991, Oil on linen, 72 × 54 inches (183 × 137cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Copyright Credits

xiii

Norman Lewis (1909–1979), Multitudes, 1946, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 × 26 ½ inches, signed; © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Norman Lewis (1909–1979), Street Musicians, 1948, oil on canvas, 49 3/4 × 40 inches, signed; © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Ivan Karp, 1961. Oil on canvas/ 24 × 20 1/16 inches (61 × 51 cm). © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Allan Kaprow, 1961. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 1/16 inches (61 × 51 cm). © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Still Life VII , 1996. Oil and magna on canvas, 30 5/16 × 30 5/16 inches (77 × 77 cm). © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Joan Mitchell, Noon, c. 1969. Oil on canvas, 102 3/8 × 78 5/8 inches (260 × 199.7 cm) Private collection. © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1966. 11 × 8 ½ inches. Ink and typewriter on electrocardiograph form. Courtesy of the artist. Martín Ramírez. Untitled (Train and Tunnel), ca. 1960–63. Gouache and graphite on pieced paper. 16 1/2 × 32 inches (41.9 × 81.3 cm). © Estate of Martín Ramírez. Courtesy of Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NY. Martín Ramírez. Untitled (Abstraction with Arches), ca. 1960–63. Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on paper. 22 ½ × 20 inches (57.2 × 50.8 cm). © Estate of Martín Ramírez. Courtesy of Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NY. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument, 1902. Gilded bronze and granite. Photograph courtesy of Joseph Lawton. George Segal, The Dancers, 1971, plaster. All works by George Segal © The George and Helen Segal Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, NY, NY. Keith Sonnier, “Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI,” 1968 (“Neon Wrapping Incandescent” series). Argon and neon tubes, porcelain fixtures, incandescent bulbs, transformer and electrical wire, 5' 7" × 8' 9-1/83" × 9-1/8" (170.2 cm × 267 cm × 23.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist © Artists Rights Society (ARS) Copyright: ARS New York. Photograph © Caterina Verde.

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Copyright Credits

Barbara Takenaga, Black Holes Silver 2017. Acrylic on linen, 24 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. Alma Thomas (1891–1978), Phantasmagoria, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 50 inches, signed; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Cy Twombly, Panorama 1955. 100 × 134 inches (254 × 340.4 cm). Oil based house paint, wax crayon, chalk on canvas. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Jack Youngerman, Zoneblack, 2019. Oil on Baltic birch plywood, 46 × 46 × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Introduction

We are poised at a particularly interesting and fraught point in the understanding and making of art. Basic questions arise: how do we examine artistic intention and practice, the object nature of the work of art, the qualities of specific media (such as painting), as well as the relevance of history, interpretation, and aesthetic judgment? How do we view the ongoing development of concepts and the changing nature of art worlds and the social matrices in which they are set? Powered by the worldwide communications network – an increasingly pervasive presence from the postwar years on – art’s global, digitally enhanced reach has been amplified, immersing us in a flood of art and its attendant images. Along with this, and engendered by the same forces, comes a widening skein of language, either extrinsic (discursive, interpretative, or promotional), or more subtly, language hovering around or embedded in the work itself. How does art deal with the inherent slipperiness of language and its uneasy fit with the visual? Language when applied to art is rarely neutral, and rarely without an agenda. How does art site itself in relation to those agendas, and how does it accommodate or challenge them? What seems to be taken for granted is the visual object’s condition as art. The increasingly unstructured forms and formulations of art rather than leading us to examine its status as art instead devolve into matters of utility and intent. Underneath this all, however, is the obdurate, resistant work of art itself – a thing surrounded by discourse, but in significant ways mute. An ongoing concern in these essays is the exploration of the shifting boundaries (and thus the definition) of art – a goal made more pressing by a world that for the last thirty or more years has abandoned the classifying rubrics of art movements and the attendant expectation of lineage, generational difference, and the preeminence of invention, while all along upping the production of visual objects. The loss of these historical organizing principles and what has come to replace them is the subject of a number of essays in this volume. We might be surrounded by various Postminimal, hybrid, conceptuallyinflected art forms and the cloud of rhetoric and commerce that accompanies 1

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

them, but standing as markers – ostensibly peripheral – but in fact central to a large number of contemporary artists of all generations, are painting and that key subset of painting, abstraction. Bounded yet multitudinous, inherently metaphorical yet materially literal, both practices offer a variety of case studies for the location, demarcation and definition of art. Both demand the contemplation of larger philosophical, social, and historical constructs while simultaneously requiring focused, granular analysis of the works themselves. A number of essays in this book deal with the condition of contemporary painting and the state of abstraction. Painting in general and abstract painting in particular are practices that embody the essential instability of artistic definition. They are objects that are morphologically and materially static and yet continually changing in terms of signification. How do we analyze what is in many ways a closed system, yet one in which subtle gradients of change take on unexpected weight and conviction? How do certain traditionally integrated formal elements such as color, or referential arenas like the decorative become mapped onto a contemporary work of art in a misregistered, destabilizing way, but one that still advances the overall project of painting? How can we understand the complex signification in work where that signification can be both hidden and at the same time, tantalizingly but misleadingly overt? To examine this is to explore the current condition and identity of painting as an art. In the fluid world that we inhabit, notions of centrality are continually shifting. While a more amorphous general approach to art making such as Postminimalism remains influential, it does so because its existence as a specific means of ordering has been subsumed into considerations of the artists themselves, who are considered relevant individually. However, artists and art-making practices that in a more linear artworld had been thought retrograde or marginal are now under reconsideration, particularly in their relation to the modernist mainstream. I have included essays on work normally associated with craft  – the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; work that springs from indigenous cultural production – Aboriginal Australian painting; and work that is made by someone outside the agreed-upon artworld – the paintings and drawings of Martín Ramírez, held in mental institutions in California virtually his entire adult life. The artistic productions of these makers are complex (especially in terms of gendering), culturally charged, and yet revelatory in their relation to the modernist tradition. Advanced art since the late nineteenth century has paid considerable heed to visual production outside of the normal boundaries of the accepted artworld, both as objects to be aesthetically appreciated and collected, and as a trove of inspiration and source material. We are familiar with the historical connection

Introduction

3

of cubism with African art, surrealism with the art of Oceania, Art Brut with naïve, untutored or folk art, and Pop Art with the world of popular and media culture. What is important to note is that these outside sources, valued as they might be, were seen primarily as channels of rawness, vitality, and aesthetic disruption, as well as connections to deeper psychological structures. They functioned, in practical terms, as storehouses of loosely bound stylistic or formal motifs readily accessible to any interested fine arts practitioner. Admired and used, yes, but actually brought inside the aesthetic boundaries of fine art, no. In fact, to do that  – especially with the visual work of non-Western cultures (or marginalized people in Western cultures) – has been considered politically and morally suspect for quite some time, an act of patronizing insensitivity and a fundamental misconstruing of context. While separating the art of those outside of the mainstream – and at times not even calling it art (as in “this culture does not have a separate word for art”) might seem to be sensitive and morally upstanding, but what it does is to reinforce a bounded, linear view. The artworld of today is considerably more fluid, and to cocoon off what had been considered the advanced art of the modern period, ultimately devalues it, reducing it to a relatively narrow temporal manifestation, instead of accepting the continued relevance of its goals, formulations, and methods. Just because practitioners from different geographical, psychological, or cultural arenas might not be in an overt dialogue with that art and its history does not mean that their work is not part of it. Affinity is every bit as powerful as influence. In exploring the edges and margins of modernism I have been interested in practices considered commercially viable but insufficiently engaged with aesthetic and conceptual complexity to be taken entirely seriously by critics. Since they appeared in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s Photorealism and its sculptural cognate, Hyper-real cast sculpture have been repeatedly (and unfairly) slotted into this category. We are perfectly accustomed, after a century’s worth of exposure, to the artless look of the artful, the calculated casualness of execution, and the abjuring of what appears to be technical virtuosity. Technical virtuosity is acceptable in a factory-ordered product  – a crisply machined Donald Judd box, for example, but cleanness and the look of perfection is what factories are supposed to do, and if artists avail themselves of that resource then it fits in perfectly well with the common understanding of the engagement of modern art and the machine. But when that degree of mechanical-looking exactitude is applied to personally executed mimesis, to the creation of a likeness, then the warning lights start to flash. Photorealism and Hyper-real sculpture are art forms

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

that are inherently paradoxical; all the more abstract for being so close to the observable and recognizable. This is work that goes beyond mere style or subject matter. These paintings and sculptures are more than secondary manifestations of Pop Art, or indices of quotidian mid-century Americana. In the case of Photorealism what is in play is an essentially abstract, self-contained, materially dependent information system, a strategy that relates to its culture obliquely. Commenting not on the overall sign, it functions as a disquisition on the atomized photographic model and the accretion of small, evenly weighted detail, an art form whose apparent ease of comprehension and difficulty of execution are profoundly misleading. Running parallel to Photorealist painting was the work of sculptors, whose Hyper-real painted castings were at heart disturbing, morbid and evocative, often in ways the artists did not expect. By coming too close to the model (but not directly appropriating it, a la Duchamp), they pushed up against the border of life and non-life, and in the process created something that materially encapsulated our fear of death and revulsion at its proximity. The boundaries of the modern artworld have historically been set not just by artists but also by critics. The critical framework for contemporary art regularly shifts and adjusts. The first evaluator is of course the artist him or herself, followed by the artist’s family, friends, and social circle (who are often fellow artists.) Radiating out from that are dealers, collectors, curators, art and cultural historians, and the general interested public. Each circle adds a voice and helps shape the form and expectations of the art of the time and place. Set at varying points in this diagram is that peculiar profession, the art critic. Of particular interest has been the influence on American art (and to a lesser extent, British art) of Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Lawrence Alloway from the 1940s through the 1970s. These rival and outspoken critics were not art historians, artists, or philosophers, but rather free-floating intellectuals deeply engaged with the artworld and with artists. They set up an ongoing dialectical debate between inclusion and exclusion that was a fascinating mélange of philosophy, rhetoric, taste, formal analysis, and sociological musings. Their influence, along with a number of other critics, who taught but did not see themselves primarily as academics, such as the New York-based Irish polymath Brian O’Doherty, helped set in place a reasonably coherent early to mid-postwar artworld. This has changed, and a more protean and changeable artworld has been paralleled by the diminution of traditional critical influence and persuasiveness. As contemporary artworlds have grown in size and economic power the direction and fate of art rests more in the hands of museums, auction houses, dealers, and collectors than with artists and critics. To understand this situation, and possibly remedy it, it is

Introduction

5

helpful to explore the circumstances that have led to the creation of the artworlds that nurtured these critics and the artists about whom they wrote. Artworlds  – the examination of which has been an ongoing concern of aesthetics – function as physical, temporal, and aesthetic boundaries. They are formed by critical and art-making concerns, but also by proximity, fortuity, discourse, geography, patronage, politics, and culture. When we speak of the creation of an artworld we are implying that this emerging social entity is a relatively small one, populated by participants who know and regularly interact with each other. It is clear that an artworld in its early stages is a quite different framing device than one that is fully developed. Artworlds in formation are powerful generators of aesthetic change and the creation of movements that arise from that change. Proximity  – the necessary condition of an artworld – amplifies the power of new ideas and the allure of innovation. But it also compounds the inevitable personal rivalries and the dissatisfactions engendered by competition, and creates tensions that can lead to that artworld’s transformation or dissipation. This volume contains an essay that addresses the formation of the world of the New York Abstract Expressionists in the late ’40s and early ’50s; a second that deals with the expanded New York artworld of the early ’60s, as reflected in the unexpected outpost of a nearby public educational institution – Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, where nascent Pop Art, Fluxus, and performance art flourished; and a third essay that discusses the new Popinflected artworld of Los Angeles in the ’60s – one that paralleled New York, but with its own distinctive West Coast sensibility. In looking at the condition of contemporary art, it is important to merge an examination of animating philosophies and context  – political, social, and personal  – with a sharply focused look at the works of art themselves. An understanding of their materiality, form, development, signification, and conceptual underpinnings throws light on the shifting landscape of postwar art. This volume contains both extended and compact monographic essays on Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Dan Flavin, Al Held, Alma Thomas, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Keith Sonnier, and Franz West. These are all artists who in their ongoing projects questioned, explicitly or implicitly, the aesthetic assumptions of their times. Their work, sited in familiar areas of contemporary art – Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, Conceptual art, Colorfield painting, and Hardedge Abstraction, while visually accessible and often pleasurable, was at heart, obdurate and elusive. It was art directed, for the most part, toward untangling complex aesthetic issues, rather than addressing personal or social concerns. The work might have social implications – Franz

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

West’s or Alma Thomas’ for example  – but its quirkiness and individuality consistently undermined any easy uplift. Largely abstract (in the expanded way we see abstraction now) their art made it clear that how the works were made, how they look, and how they mean are interconnected inquiries. I have organized the essays, published over the last thirty years, in chronological order, trusting that the reader will follow their evolving and interweaving themes. I hope that these writings will serve as a useful addition to the study of aesthetics and contemporary art.

Figure 1 Polly Apfelbaum, Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians, 1992. Crushed stretch velvet and dye, dimensions variable. Photograph courtesy of Polly Apfelbaum.

Figure 2 Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvas, 36 × 66 inches (91.4 × 167.6 cm). © Robert Bechtle. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

7

Figure 3 Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent, 1970. Chalk on paint on wall, 72 × 48 inches. Collection Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4 Grace Hartigan, New England, October, 1957. Oil on canvas, support: 68 1/4 × 83 inches (173.355 × 210.82 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1958. © Estate of Grace Hartigan. Image courtesy of Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 8

Figure 5 Shirley Jaffe, The Chinese Mountain, 2004–05. Oil on canvas, 57 ½ × 44 7/8 inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of the Estate of Shirley Jaffe and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

Figure 6 Joyce Kozloff, Cincinnati Fireplace, 1980. Glazed tiles/board, 60 × 114.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. 9

Figure 7 Jonathan Lasker, Spiritual Etiquette, 1991. Oil on linen, 72 × 54 inches (183 × 137 cm) Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 8 Norman Lewis, Multitudes, 1946. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 × 26 ½ inches © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 10

Figure 9 Norman Lewis, Street Musicians, 1948. Oil on canvas, 49 3/4 × 40 inches © Estate of Norman Lewis; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Figure 10 Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Allan Kaprow, 1961. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 1/16 inches (61 × 51 cm) © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. 11

Figure 11 Roy Lichtenstein, Portrait of Ivan Karp, 1961. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 1/16 inches (61 × 51 cm) © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

Figure 12 Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Still Life VII , 1996. Oil and Magna on canvas, 30 5/16 × 30 5/16 inches (77 × 77 cm) © the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein.

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Figure 13 Joan Mitchell, Noon, c. 1969. Oil on canvas, 102 3/8 × 78 5/8 inches (260 × 199.7 cm). Private collection © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

Figure 14 Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1966. 11 × 8 ½ inches. Ink and typewriter on electrocardiograph form. Courtesy of the artist. 13

Figure 15 Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Train and Tunnel), ca. 1960–63. Gouache and graphite on pieced paper. 16 1/2 × 32 inches (41.9 × 81.3 cm). © Estate of Martín Ramírez. Courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NY.

Figure 16 Martín Ramírez. Untitled (Abstraction with Arches), ca. 1960–63. Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on paper. 22 ½ × 20 inches (57.2 × 50.8 cm). © Estate of Martín Ramírez. Courtesy of Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NY. 14

Figure 17 George Segal, The Dancers, 1971, plaster. All works by George Segal © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, NY, NY.

Figure 18 Keith Sonnier, “Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI,” 1968 (“Neon Wrapping Incandescent” series). Argon and neon tubes, porcelain fixtures, incandescent bulbs, transformer and electrical wire. 5' 7" × 8' 9-1/8" × 9-1/8" (170.2 cm × 267 cm × 23.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist ©Artists Rights Society (ARS) Copyright: ARS New York. Photograph © Caterina Verde. 15

Figure 19 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument, 1902. Gilded bronze and granite. Photograph courtesy of Joseph Lawton.

Figure 20 Barbara Takenaga, Black Holes Silver, 2017. Acrylic on linen, 24 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. 16

Figure 21 Alma Thomas, Phantasmagoria, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 50 inches. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

Figure 22 Cy Twombly, Panorama, 1955. 100 × 134 inches (254 × 340.4 cm). Oil based house paint, wax crayon, chalk on canvas. © Cy Twombly Foundation. 17

Figure 23 Jack Youngerman, Zoneblack, 2019. Oil on Baltic birch plywood, 46 × 46 × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

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1

Real Dead

In eastern Serbia, the newly moneyed peasants, beneficiaries of economic reform, but without any serious investment opportunities, have begun sinking their cash into upgraded cemetery arrangements. A plain grave, especially for a young person, is considered unseemly, cloddishly Communist. Much more elegant, much more caring (and safer, since neglecting the dead tends to make them angry and vengeful) is the mini-chalet with a comfortable living room, a television, a VCR, a refrigerator, and of course a well-stocked liquor cabinet. The deceased can then entertain properly; and when the family is gone, catch up on his viewing while having a small schnapps or two. There is, needless to say, something grotesque about this conjunction of the modern, alienated world of late-capitalist consumption and the bedrock animistic mind. But the place where they meet, an arena that both enshrines and denies death, is a place where art seems naturally to operate. We don’t have to travel to remote corners of Eastern Europe to be similarly amused and distressed. Looking around the galleries and museums today it is hard to avoid the complicated dance of seduction and repulsion that artists are trying, consciously or unconsciously, to engage us in. We sense a higher vulgarity at work here, not the easy vulgarity of the reproduction of the artifacts of popular culture, but a more devious one, one involved with mimesis, with the production of resemblance. It is common enough, and very acceptable, for an artist to appropriate resemblance. If you want something to look real, go out and get a real object. This is historically legitimate and entirely comfortable. But to craft something that appears to be real is highly suspect, and when the resemblance is very close, doubly so. Disturbing things begin to happen. By radically compressing the distance between the model and the work of art, that distance becomes more highly charged, more impossible to penetrate. The notion of transition, of manageable increment, comes undone. We are confronted with abruptness, with boundaries that cannot be crossed no matter what, or how strong, our desires may 19

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

be. We are in the presence of a sort of death, an elementary binary situation: on or off, dead or alive. The essential unresolvability of the situation, its incongruity, can only be bridged by what is, for a sophisticated viewer, an inappropriate art response. We feel uncomfortable and manipulated. The denial of death – estheticized, fetishized, eroticized – is given classic form in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea. In it, the sculptor Pygmalion kisses his statue of Galatea, and in doing so, brings her to life. Of particular interest in this painting is the modeling of light, color, and form. Galatea is flesh on the top and marble below, the two areas seamlessly joined yet rendered separate by the body’s torsion, its extreme contrapposto. The ability to create the proper finish, to lay in smoothly flowing transitions was an important aspect of the nineteenth century academic painter’s craft. The social implications of this sort of modeling – the evocation of order, management, and predictability –are clear, just as the Impressionists’ perceived inability to model properly, their harsh and jarring transitions, seemed at the time to reflect the discontinuity and disturbance that the modern world so unpleasantly offered up. Gérôme’s virtuoso effort is an attempt – coy, perverse, and compulsive – to resolve a paradox that cannot be resolved. The imposition of power and will in such a situation can only turn in on itself and become that which it disclaims: it is not life that is embraced, but death, frustration, and sterility. A recent exhibition of sculpture by John De Andrea put these concerns in a new light. The sculptures are cast from life and painted with obsessive attention to the nuances of skin tone. The skill involved is astounding, and, more than ever, the sculptures seem alive. They are so convincing that a friend told me that recently she hesitated going into a group exhibition that had a De Andrea sculpture in it because she thought there was a performance piece in progress and she didn’t have time to see it through. De Andrea is addressing in a patently successful way one of art’s oldest problem, getting a likeness, and yet the sculpture is overarchingly, chillingly vulgar – much more so than Jeff Koons’s ham-handed attempts to be naughty. This is work that borders on the truly unacceptable. De Andrea does so many things that are wrong. The figures are, with a single exception, female, and they are all nude. Their eyes are downcast, and the poses they assume are submissive. To compound matters, many of them are Asian, and one, the model for American Polynesia, even gave up her hair so that it could be used in the sculpture. They are – not surprisingly – young and beautiful, with lovely, clear faces and taut, aerobically tuned bodies. Seeing them is, for a man at least, a discomfiting experience. You feel voyeuristic, intrusive. Bending down to get a better look, you

Real Dead

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hope that people aren’t getting the wrong idea. Women apparently take this more in stride. Many visitors to the show were middle-aged women, and according to the gallery staff, the standard comment was, “Look at that body. That was me before I had children.” Although not explicitly sexual, the sculptures carry a strong erotic charge. The frustration that hangs around them is palpable. They are sexy and dead, completely closed off to contact. Large photos put up during the exhibition show the sculptor at work, animating his figures, so to speak – playing Pygmalion, but without the payoff. There is more than a light whiff of death about this work. The skin tones, lovingly painted as they are, are still oil paint stroked onto an inert plastic surface. They have that waxy, not-quite-right look of the embalmer’s art. This is especially true of the bust of Theresa, a piece no doubt classical in intent, but one that feels horribly like a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph of a severed head. The funerary reference is made explicit in American Icon, the most tasteless and in many ways the most interesting piece in the show. A long roll of white photographer’s paper is suspended from ceiling. A half dozen or so yards are pulled out and, kneeling on it, photo-session style, is a grief-stricken woman with her hands in the air. Before her, lying on his stomach is a male figure, clearly dead. We recognize the reference. It is the famous photograph taken during the shootings at Kent State. To underscore the connection to photography, the sculpture is done entirely in black and white. This is both emotionally and perceptually jarring. The artist’s desire to classicize and distance –to be asexually intellectual – come up against his equally strong desire to be direct, involving, and sexual, and the results are truly bizarre. It is worth comparing this sculpture with another dealing with the same subject, George Segal’s In Memory of May 4, 1970-Kent State: Abraham and Isaac. The Segal sculpture employs a range of distancing devices that keeps it well within the bounds of art. Rather than showing us anything of what actually happened that day, Segal has chosen to universalize his subject by using a readily comprehensible pose and a Biblical story, the sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham. By moving from the particular to the general he is able to create a recognizable image, but one with a weak enough charge so that the sculpture can invoke faith, duty, submission, violence, and redemption without seeming overburdened. Segal, like De Andrea, casts from life but Segal’s rough plaster surface, apparent even when the sculpture is cast in bronze, blurs and deemphasizes the individual features, and gives his subject the dignity of the Common Man. They are images of people, not simulations  – which is all well and good, but of course it’s the

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

simulated that we find interesting nowadays. The Segal work is solemn and moving – in command of itself – and it is no wonder that after being rejected by Kent State it has found a suitable institutional setting, at Princeton University. (The President of Kent State, in turning the sculpture down suggested  – one would hope in all innocence – another sculptural grouping, a nude girl putting a flower down a soldier’s rifle barrel.) But what of the De Andrea? This is a memorial sculpture that is incapable of creating a clearly defined distance between the event and its representation. It is too strange, too agitated, altogether too necrophilic to ever rest easily on a university lawn. Resting, but resting uneasily, seems to be the trademark of Robert Gober. The static symmetry and repetition inherent in bathroom fixtures, tomb stones, wallpaper, dresses, and candles is always undermined by disturbing psychological content, by the implication of something missing, by the absent figure – by death. The candle sprouts hair at its base, becoming a penis ready for burning, the dress is stiffened but empty, the wallpaper depicts a lynching. In an untitled work of 1990, shown at this year’s Whitney Biennial, the bottom half of a man’s recumbent torso, its nakedness and submission emphasized by the shoes and socks it is wearing, is positioned so that it appears as if the figure has had its chest and head pushed through the wall, that it has disappeared into some other realm. The realism of the figure, pale, waxy, and moribund, each hair carefully implanted, is not denied, but is in fact made more insistent by the musical score inscribed into its upper thighs and buttocks. The music – no piece in particular, just generalized notation – is gratuitously elegiac, a coolly passionate scrim that allows us a clear read through to the unresisting, acquiescent body. In Gober’s Untitled Leg, a human body is again put through a disappearing (or maybe reappearing) act. This time, emerging from the wall is a single leg, from the knee down. The only flesh we see is a small strip between the sock and the pants leg, but that is enough to convince us. This is a sculpture that vividly brings to mind the horror of dismemberment, and that horror is made all the more distressing by the accurate observation and carefully controlled pathos – the untied lace, the cheap sock, the serviceable shoe. We sense here a fascination not just with the body, but with that dead (yet bravely functional) appendage to the body, the prosthetic device. Gober is a blackly funny artist, a Kienholz without the corn, but the humor of this sculpture only underscores its seriousness, its understanding of loss. We know that which is dead is gone. It can be approximated – by memory, by desire, by art – but no matter how hard we try, it can never be retrieved. Death, although universal, is also horribly specific. One doesn’t die, you die. The artistic urge to generalize, to use the allegorical and symbolic in place of the personal,

Real Dead

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is to deny death’s reality, to deny its absolute claim on us. We can see this clearly in sculpture that commemorates war. Most war memorials are there precisely to deny death. War is viewed as a matter of higher national purpose, and in achieving its goals the state demands the sacrifice of the individual. The frightfulness of this sacrifice must be masked by the commonplace, the high-mindedly banal. It must be cast in terms that are expected and therefore innocuous. A work that transcends the usual run of military monuments is Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial. What makes it so powerful is the way it upsets our expectations. The Memorial is on one hand an abstract configuration of mass and plane, a sophisticated reworking of the theoretical conventions of site-specific and minimal sculpture, and on the other, a polished and inscribed surface that both reflects the living and names the country’s dead in that war – not a representative example, an abstraction, but all of them. Many small towns have a war memorial, inscribed with the names of the local dead, names that the townspeople know. What Lin did was to cast the whole country as a small town, and to do it in a way that is absolutely devoid of sentimentality. Another monument to war that operates in a forceful and unexpected way is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman Monument of 1903. This equestrian statue, located at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street in New York, occupies as prime and visible a piece of Manhattan space as one could hope for, and yet, dark and weathered, it was for years virtually unnoticeable. It looked the way art of that sort was supposed to look, and it was relegated, like the wars of the past, to peripheral recognition, to a nodding acquaintance. Recently, however, the Art Commission of the City of New York undertook to restore it to its original state, to make it more real. They had it gold-leafed. This has not been a popular decision. The restraint and propriety that the sculpture had before is gone. The statue is no longer invisible, and we can see it for what it is. It is brash and importuning, a disturbing blend of the symbolic and the specific, a beautifully wrought example of Victorian vulgarity and strangeness. In it, an allegorical figure of Victory is paired with a very real William Tecumseh Sherman. Wearing a simple field uniform, Sherman looks battered, determined, and old. When this statue was sculpted the Civil War was not much further back than the Vietnam War is for us now. Its veterans were aging, but the memories were still fresh and painful. There is a pine branch under the horse’s left rear foot. A contemporary audience would see it for what it was, not some generalized ode to the fallen, but a clear reference to Sherman’s bloody march through Georgia to the sea. This work was Saint-Gaudens’s last major commission, finished a few years before he died, and it is hard not to view it as a comment on death. It is a memorial

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

to a war and also to a specific person, a man who was interesting and complicated, yet an extremely effective and brutal agent of destruction. There is glittery defiance and subtle resignation in the sculpture, a sense of simultaneously leading and being led. The new gold leaf does its job. It telescopes history and forces the sculpture back into our view. It presents us with a surface that appears to our latetwentieth-century eyes at odds with the form it covers. It feels disjunctive, out of place, and yet we cannot help being attracted to it. This sense of attraction and repulsion, this fundamental uncertainty, seems to thrive on the margins; it seems to call forth eccentricity. An exemplar of quirkiness was Paul Thek, selections of whose work have been shown recently at the Brooke Alexander Gallery. Born in 1933, he came to artistic maturity during the counter-culture sixties, lived on and off in Europe for many years, and died in obscurity in New York in 1988. His talent was recognized, but he was by all accounts an extremely difficult person, and he never had the career that his ability warranted. Although his later work mostly centered around highly idiosyncratic large-scale installations, Thek is best known in this country for the sculptures he did in the mid-sixties. These pieces, which he called Technological Reliquaries, were obsessively realistic wax renderings of bloody chunks of flesh, enclosed in pristine, custom-made Plexiglas boxes. Thek always had a strong ceremonial and religious streak, and it manifested itself clearly in this series. By referring to the sculptures as reliquaries – as containers for the relics (usually body parts) of dead saints – he emphasized their lifelessness and their incompleteness, while at the same time invoking the miraculous, the desire to be reborn, to be made whole. Thek also shared the political sensibilities and experiences of the age. The assassinations and the Vietnam War were all there on television  – fear and revulsion encased in the glowing box planted in every American living room. In Warrior’s Leg (1966–67), done at the height of the war, Thek sculpted with utter realism and neoclassical restraint the bare, lightly armored leg of a gladiator. The leg however has been severed and its top is red and frothy with gore. Its placement inside a clear vitrine gives it a distance, a quasi-scientific detachment (both literal and figurative) that only adds to the fascination and repugnance. The moment of dismemberment, of loss, is preserved forever. It is permanent, and yet because of its freshness the injury seems to be waiting to be undone, for time to be reversed. Another work from this period that is of particular interest is Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box, a 1965 collaboration with Andy Warhol. For the piece, Thek took a Warhol Brillo Box, opened it up, inserted one of his raw sections of flesh, and glassed it over, leaving a small breathing tube as a connection to the outside.

Real Dead

25

The Warhol and the Thek seem perfectly matched. The Brillo Boxes were (like Johns’s Ale Cans) fabrications, not ready-mades. Both the Thek and the Warhol are extremely accurate representations of reality, and their conjunction sets up a strange reverberation – a pairing of the industrial and the personal, the pure and the sullied, the clean and the unclean, the affectless and the overwrought. The piece also underscores the terror and the fear of death that is implicit in so much of Warhol’s work. We can see that underneath the vacuous Marilyns, pouty Elvises, and colorful Electric Chairs, there is not just blankness. There is something else – something threatening and grotesque, something monstrous. Thek’s preoccupation with death and dismemberment came to full fruition in a work from 1967, The Tomb-Death of a Hippie. Shown at the Stable Gallery and at the Whitney Museum’s 1967 exhibition, “Human Concern/Personal Torment,” the piece is Thek’s first major installation. Inside an eight-foot-high pink mastaba (a reference both to early temples and to the Minimalist sculpture of the day) lay a full-sized wax effigy of the artist surrounded by an assortment of ceremonial paraphernalia. The figure was dressed in a pink suit and wore a long Dynel wig. His tongue was extended in an equivocal sexual gesture, and the fingers of his right hand were cut off. The dead hippie is on one hand a portrait of the artist as a mutilated, ineffectual, entirely marginal character – someone truly lost to the world, and on the other as an expectant, eroticized candidate for rebirth. The pink mastaba with its single, open door could be read as a womb as easily as a tomb, and the gear circling the figure recalls ancient burial rites with their explicit promise of regeneration and resurrection. Resurrection would at first glance have little to do with the two impaled wax figures, one male, the other female, that Kiki Smith showed at the 1991 Whitney Biennial. Bruised, naked, and stained with what looks like breast milk and semen, they seem to be the nameless, universal victims of police-state brutality, two more figures fresh from the morgue. And yet there is, thanks to the clarity of the casting process, a specificity, a tenderness to them that calls to mind the passion of the Crucifixion. They are dead, but for how long? Smith is not only reluctant to have them function as clear-cut political symbols, but she seems equally disinclined to have them remain corpses. Their sexuality is too evident, their death has a feeling not just of simple cessation but of debilitating desire, of post-coital tristesse in extremis. How hard it is to leave the dead alone. Attachments once made resist breaking, and we are all subject to the belief that if we want something badly enough, if we really try for it, our wishes will be granted. This is evident in popular entertainment, in the spate of life-after-death movies that have appeared in recent years. Our world is too bright and shiny, too full of wonderful, sexy things to have people

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

leave it for good. Especially before their time. The grave-houses of Serbia are built mainly for those who have died young, who have not yet had their fill of VCRs and compact discs. War memorials commemorate those snatched out of life fifty years too soon. And then there is AIDS – thousands gone every year, Paul Thek among them, and it seems inconceivable that it can’t be stopped. How deep must the wish go for it all to be reversed, for our lost friends to be found, for the dead to come back to rightful life. Art is transformation. Artists take dead materials, things that relate only to themselves – bags of plaster, cakes of wax, tubes of paint – and turn them into something coherent, rational, interdependent, something that in its organization, if not in its outward form, mimics life. This transformative power does not come without reservations. Just as Frankenstein reflected the ambivalence of the nineteenth century toward the power of science to imitate life, so too has this century felt ambivalence toward the imitative power of art. The way we live in the world is worthy of being documented, but to craft extreme resemblance is to appropriate the photographer’s mechanical world, to deny life. Duchamp’s readymades are powerful precisely because of this transgression. Duchamp uses the essential methods of a photographer. He selects and frames objects from the undifferentiated world; he chooses rather than makes. Time has burnished the readymades, their snug place in art history has closed our eyes to their cold vulgarity. These are dysfunctional things, dead items, little corpses. An object that looks too much like an object in the real world hampers the power of the symbolic, crowds it out. The symbolic needs room to maneuver, it needs a series of graded increments, moving clearly, humanistically, from the specific to the general. The overly mimetic object radically contracts the distance between the depicted and the depiction; it confronts us with its muteness, its essential otherness. This in no way prevents it from being a vehicle of desire. Its closeness to reality only reinforces our wish to possess what we do not have, what we cannot get. We live in a profoundly secular age, an age without the comforting reassurance that there is something past the grave. We know this, consciously or unconsciously, and yet our desire to cheat and deny death, to array the power of the symbolic, the power of art, against it, is as strong as ever. To encounter a work of art that is unable to do this, and yet whose needs are so intense, is to be made deeply uncomfortable. To call art like this crass, easy, or in poor form misses the point. We are being shown something that at a very basic level we don’t want to see. Bad taste just comes along for the ride. Arts Magazine, December 1991

2

Al Held

The paintings of Al Held continue, in their quirky way, simultaneously to fascinate, seduce, and rebuff us. Intensely colored cylinders, disks, boxes and triangular forms float in a maniacally articulated three-dimensional space, a draftsman’s nightmare, a perspectival construct dominated at every point by excess. There is too much color, too much form, too much cleverness, too much work. The sheer labor involved in such perfect rendering and perfect surface is staggering. Held’s paintings approach Photorealism in the amount of time lavished on essentially banal effects. And yet, like Photorealism, their oddity and power resides in that excess. Photorealism, in its endless recapitulation of the momentary, subverts the authority of the photograph. Likewise, Held, by subjecting the rational space of perspective to incomprehensible permutation and elaboration, subverts the authority of the diagram. Held is a modern Piranesi, constructing fictive spaces that hover somewhere between the prison and the stage set. There is, as in Piranesi, a sense of anticipation, a sense that something momentous, uncanny, and not particularly pleasant is about to happen. This anticipation is heightened by Held’s light, a light that sharply defines shape and yet is profoundly unnatural. It is a light with no consistent source, a light that permits no gradations along a surface, and a light that while properly articulating individual facets of a form, casts no shadows. It is a light formed entirely by the conventions of Held’s pictorial theater. There is looming and attendant menace here. One has the feeling of being inside a geometric gothic novel. Hollow shapes rise up to engulf you, dark corridors and partially hidden rooms beckon. Large shapes seem larger because of small shapes next to them and the presence of bright colors further darkens already somber ones. The paintings assemble their imagery, address themselves to an imagined viewer outside the picture plane, to a stationary eye. This distance is reinforced by the physically impenetrable surface, the thick, sanded uninflected acrylic coat. And yet at the same time, there is the sense of being forcibly transported into the painting, of being pulled through its space. The combination 27

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World

of action and passivity produces a visceral unease, a disembodied feeling that is as disturbing as it is powerful. All of this leads us to question Held’s geometry. What exactly does it stand for? What does it portray? Is it the geometry of mystery and initiation? Is it the sign of order and utopia? Is it a depiction of predictability and social control? Or could it be a vision of the infinitely ramifying and receding face of chaos? The paintings provide no obvious answers, nor are they meant to. The elements in them float in more ways than one. They are unanchored, shuffled, distanced, and interchangeable. Perspective, when used as a primary pictorial strategy, demands a strong and recognizable iconography. It was true in the Renaissance and it is true now, although, in the twentieth century, this iconography can tend toward the simplistic and retrograde. A Dalí Crucifixion, an ominous De Chirico piazza, or a recasting by Kiefer of Third Reich neo-classical architecture are all strongly emotional paintings because they are clear vehicles for sentiment and narration. They speak of power. Perspective is inherently hierarchical. Certain objects are bigger, closer, more important. They dominate and obscure those behind them. It is instructive to think of Mondrian in this context. Although he predicated a philosophy based on geometry, his notions were universalist, idealistic, and at heart, egalitarian. There was no need for perspective’s manipulative iconography of order. What then is Held’s iconography? Is it perhaps the adaptive, chameleon iconography of the international corporation? Although his art predated the widespread appearance of computer graphics, there are distinct parallels. It is not a question of influence but, more interestingly, of similarity. Computer graphics are intensely compelling yet essentially weightless conveyors of information. They are protean, shaping and reshaping themselves at will. They operate in an airless, utilitarian, electronic space, a space whose assumed neutrality is the neutrality of open access, no borders, and instant recognizability. There is, in Held, also a sense of the logo, of the free-floating, scaleless symbol. A logo can be any size and still retain its meaning. Held’s pictures operate that way as well. An eight-by-twelve foot painting or a four-by-five give us the same sort of information. It hardly matters at what distance we stand, either. Up close or across the room, our reading stays constant. These paintings are problematic, provocative, and deeply interesting. They are hermetic and self-involved, and yet they tell us unexpected things about the world. Al Held, despite his success, despite his assured position in postwar art history, is not a painter people have been thinking much about. Maybe they should. Arts Magazine, February 1991

3

In Another Light

Dan Flavin was the subject this season of three major exhibitions in New York, and with that kind of high-profile exposure, it really should have been Flavin’s year. Yet it didn’t seem to be. Flavin is, unfortunately, taken a bit for granted. His work is familiar both historically (as a still-unfolding instance of classic Minimalism) and materially (fluorescent bulbs remain irreducibly what they are). But this familiarity is misleading, for familiarity implies a certain stasis, and Flavin’s art has evolved – both the work itself and our perception of it. Its forms, means and associations seem to grow richer and more complex as time passes. New meanings accrue, the frame of reference widens. Of the recent exhibitions, two were museum shows of older work. The Guggenheim Museum SoHo showed 26 pieces dating from 1963 to 1987, while the Dia Center for the Arts exhibited 15 works from 1964 to 1978 in a show titled “European Couples, and Others”. (Dia has also installed in its stairwell the first of a matched pair of permanent site-specific works – a line of blue and green tubes four stories high, visible from the street day and night. An identical piece will be installed on the stairwell’s other side.) The third exhibition was a gallery show at PaceWildenstein in SoHo – a carefully modulated series of 12 horizontal wall pieces in colored fluorescents. What struck me most forcibly after seeing all three shows was the clarity of the work, the inherent logic, order and legibility, all riding in tandem with the most visceral and emotional of effects. Flavin’s art seems to comprise four lines of understanding and intention, operating separately but simultaneously. I see these as: appropriation from the outside world, structure, color and architecture. This multiplicity provides many entrances into the work. It increases accessibility, but it also sets up ambiguous metaphorical situations, readings operating at evocative cross-purposes to each other. The four dominant lines mentioned above all deal in some way with problems of perception, naming and reference  – the kind of applied epistemology that Flavin is most comfortable with. But there is another aspect to his investigations, consistently denied by him 29

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but hard to ignore – that of the spiritual or transcendent. As time goes by, these more metaphysical associations continue to hover over Flavin’s work, giving another dimension to the overtly factual. Are the similarities to Newman’s zips or Rothko’s floods of suffused color purely incidental? Is the cathedral-like feeling of an installation of the cool white “monuments” for Vladimir Tatlin just intelligently ironic? And what about the sense of blood and mystery in monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death), a deep-red corner piece looming out at us from the darkness of the Dia installation? The very nature of Flavin’s artistic approach ensures he can have it both ways. The interpretive arena is wide open, and moreover it is the artist himself who has cleared the field, so to speak, by making art that, while full of ambiguity, has no built-in doubt. The work is always in focus: you can see it clearly at whatever level of attention you want to give it. By the nature of its materials, Flavin’s art invites a reconsideration of the neoDuchampian readymade, the object that has been plucked from the world and installed in the context of the art gallery. Lately, readymades or their near relatives have been enjoying something of a vogue. On a recent short walk in SoHo I came across exhibitions featuring fire hoses, beds and mattresses, plastic soda bottles, and in one case an entire section of rusted fire-escape cut off a building and hung by cables from the gallery’s ceiling. The effects were all very grittily poetic, but such work seems to operate in a quite different esthetic mode from Duchamp’s and Flavin’s. It feels arbitrary and strained, the object’s removal from the world, an underlining not of artfulness or of a presiding indifference, but of its dysfunction, its pathos. Flavin’s borrowings from the quotidian world are of another order. He takes a humble object, all right, but he knows just what he wants. It’s only one class of object, the commercially available fluorescent light fixture. There are a set number of colors and a set number of shapes and sizes. There is the circular fixture and the straight tube in 2-,4, 6, and 8-foot lengths. Flavin forms these mass-produced utility products into art objects, but they also do what they were meant to do – light up a room. Consequently, Flavin’s work is untouched by the sense of profligacy that attends much recent art involving readymades, the feeling that there is an inexhaustible trove of stuff out there that one can art up, empty of logic and function, and turn into something that looks tough-minded but is at heart easy and sentimental. Flavin’s tubes carry with them not only the generalized atmosphere of the industrial, but also the quite specific aura of the milieus they most often illuminate – the supermarket, the office, the factory, the hardware store, the lighting shop, the

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building supply house. Fluorescent lights are cheap, impersonal, replaceable, modular. They are cool, simple in shape, and they radiate virtually without shadow, emitting only a low hum. They are industrial artifacts poised midway between the old idea of a machine and the new one. The classical machine was active, warm, metallic and noisy  – a thing of wheels, gears, crankshafts and pistons. The postmechanical device, with its software and microchips, its optical fibres and smooth plastic, is small, silent and boxed in, but capable of the most complex interconnections. Flavin presents the industrial in a low-keyed, appreciative way, as a condition of modern existence. Fluorescent light fixtures, like International Style skyscrapers, are made of metal and glass. They are opaque and transparent, strong yet fragile. Flavin’s approach to material is straightforward in an essentially Miesian manner. Form follows function. Material embellishments are strictly excluded from Flavin’s artistic vocabulary: no customizing, no special bending, no timers, no dimmers, no gestural drawing in space, no mixed media, no text. The second line of Flavin’s practice is the structural. Despite the seemingly limited nature of his materials, he has produced art works in a remarkable number of formal permutations. Flavin’s work can be freestanding or wall-based. It can bridge corners or nestle into them, be hung from the ceiling or laid out on the floor. The tubes can face forwards or backwards. They can be oriented horizontally, vertically or diagonally, in a grid or not. There can be single tubes or multiple tubes arrayed in varying symmetries or asymmetries. The tubes can also be placed parallel and next to each other to form solid color fields. In addition, Flavin uses color not just perceptually but as a structural variant, a differentiator. Some of Flavin’s pieces have the planar, graphic clarity of a drawing on gridded paper. For example, untitled (to a man, George McGovern), from 1972, is a triangular, wall-hung work made with cool-white, circular tubes. Ten fixtures run up the wall, abutting a corner, and ten run perpendicularly to the first set, along the same wall and abutting the floor. From each of these two baselines another eight gradually diminishing rows are generated (the second row getting nine fixtures, the third eight and so on) so as to form a right isosceles triangle. The perceptual results, of course, are not at all straightforward, but the structure is. On the other hand, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) is a freestanding piece of great architectural complexity (and spooky emotional effect). A green post-and-lintel unit is reiterated to form two bridge-like structures, one made of small tubes in square translucent sheathing and the other of bigger ones, that cross each other at an angle, carving up the room’s space in ways hard to quantify.

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“Hard to quantify” does not, however, mean impossible. Look at any Flavin for a while and the plan starts to unfold. His work, like that of many other Minimalists or Conceptualists  – Judd, Andre, Stella, Bochner or Smithson  – employs simple counting, measuring and distributing strategies. The “ ‘monument’ for V. Tatlin” series, for example, begun in the mid-’60s, parallels Frank Stella’s various pinstripe series of the same decade. The fluorescent tubes and the stripes function similarly, and the symmetrical external shape is configured by the outcome of a set of logical placement decisions. Flavin’s comprehensibility is helped by the modular quality of his materials. Quantities of two, four, six and eight have sets of potentially complicated, but always graspable relationships. The serial format works particularly well for Flavin. It invites the viewer to compare and contrast. The 12 colorful horizontal sculptures in the PaceWildenstein show are a good example. They are spaced out around the large room at eye level with enough distance between them so that the hues reflected on the wall don’t mix. The sculptures all have the same shape – consisting of two 4-foot tubes with a 2-foot tube centered and sandwiched in between them. But you must stop and pay attention before the color structure becomes clear. In six of the works, the short middle tube is red and the bottom tube is green. In the other six, the colors of the bottom two elements are reversed. The top tube is one of six colors: light blue, green, pink, yellow, red and deep ultraviolet, in that order. This six-color progression for the top tubes is the same for both the red-green group and the green-red group. It sounds simple, but it takes a while to see – which is, I believe, part of the point. Color is an area where Flavin has made a major, but insufficiently understood, contribution. Along with Judd he has used color as a sensual and emotional counterpoint to the austere structural rigor of his enterprise. While Flavin by necessity has a limited palette, in practice the range of colors is enormous. It can wash and mix along the walls, in the corners and on the floor. A corner grid piece such as untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery), exhibited at the Guggenheim, consists of five 8-foot horizontal tubes in red, pink, yellow, blue and green spanning the corner and facing us directly, and five similar vertical tubes turned the other way, bathing the corner in a ravishing peachy glow. The pieces in the 1966–71 “European Couples” series at Dia are also 8-foot corner squares, with each sculpture done in a single color. The structure, too, is simpler. They are composed of four tubes – two verticals turned to the wall and two horizontals facing the room. The effect is startling. The corner dissolves, the edges are elegantly demarcated, and the square space turns into a subtly modulated, glowing Color Field painting – an Olitski you could walk through. There is something equally painterly going on in the new works at PaceWildenstein.

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The horizontal format casts soft-edged rectangles of colors both above and below the fixtures, and Mark Rothko’s paintings inevitably come to mind. Flavin puts his color through all its formal paces as well. He takes advantage of advancing and receding hues, of pure and mixed tones, of direct and reflected light, and of sharp contrast and subtle tonal interplay. Also brought into play are more esoteric color properties, such as the phenomenon of afterimage. The tubes – especially when set in banks, as in untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg), with its wall of yellow backed by a wall of green – are chromatically intense. If the viewer looks at them for any length of time, shimmering ghosts of their complementary colors appear. Flavin uses color in a consciously referential way too – the red and white of the “untitled (to the citizens of the Swiss cantons)” series, or the pink, yellow, blue and green of “untitled (to Henri Matisse)”  – but his color also has strong emotional and even physiological effects, though it is hard to say how much of this is intended. It is color you just don’t look at; it is color you feel – the blood reds, the antiseptic whites, the warm pinks, the sky blues, the eerie science-fiction greens. One night I sat under a big red corner piece (at Max’s Kansas City), eating a steak. The food looked weird, and I had an awful headache that seemed to pulse in time to the sculpture’s hum. Detached contemplating is not the term I would use to describe the experience. The movement out into physical and optical space – the architectural side of Flavin’s work – is seen to greatest effect in larger-scale installations. (In contrast, the single diagonal tube in the uptown Guggenheim’s big abstraction show looked rather forlorn, as it if were fighting a losing battle against the slope of the museum’s ramp.) In a big Flavin installation the air seems suffused with light and color, almost as if one could breathe it. You have a sense of anticipation and of being led along as light spills out the doorway of an adjacent room. Shadows cut floors and walls, corners dissolve; forms are blurred and doubled on polished floors; ceiling beams seem spray painted; and small architectural details – the space between two radiator strips, for example – are highlighted with the most complex blend of colors. As you look, the sculptures expand. How big are they really – their listed dimensions or the area encompassed by their throw of light? Does the room have other sources of illumination? In that case things are different again. At Dia, the new permanent installation gives a starkly utilitarian stairwell a sense of drama and mystery. Tubes running up the corner (blue on the two lower floors, green on the two upper) turn brick walls craggy and painted walls glassy, functioning as a radiant armature for the turnings of the stairs. In Flavin’s

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installations the entire space that houses them is subtly reconfigured. The modifications feel as permanent as any architectural renovation, but to undo them, all you have to do is throw a switch. Minimalism has had great staying power. In sculpture, especially, it has been something that artists (and critics) have had to deal with in their practice. You may be for or against it, but it is difficult indeed not to take it into account. The best of classic Minimalism has continued to present a very good case for itself. Dan Flavin’s work is in many ways paradigmatic. While remaining true to its principles, it has continued to grow in complexity, both of effect and interpretation. In the process, somehow, it has taken on a richer, almost affective character. Classic Minimalism depends upon – and, in a sense, embodies  – built-in rigidity, a stubborn insistence on the factual and the phenomenological. Implicit in this esthetic is a desire for control that has led most Minimalist artists (Stella is an exception) to keep strict rein on their work’s formal variables. While this rectitude might seem to be an impediment to long-term development – certainly it would be anathema to Picasso or Matisse  – it has for the most part served the Minimalists well. By maintaining a built-in link to formal variation, the Minimalists have preempted temptation, particularly the temptation to devolve to the overtly personal. The result is an unusually firm grasp of the rules, the better (sometimes) to break them. In fact, the analytic quality of Minimalist art, its seeming clarity of method and intention, actually increases its potential for ambiguity. Minimalism’s facets have been sharply defined from the outset, and, over time, inherent contradictions and instabilities establish themselves as reliable generators of interpretational and perceptual complexity. Flavin’s work continues to have deep resonance. It still “is what it is” – in the proper Minimalist sense – but then “to be” is, after all, a very tricky verb. Art in America, June 1996

4

The Reality of Abstraction

In the traditional view, abstraction has been seen as something possibly drawn from, but at heart opposed to, representation. There is, so to speak, the world of the abstract, and the world of the real. While this distinction may appeal to the general public (and often to realist painters), abstract artists tend to look at things differently: they consider their work to be perfectly real. If this is so, if they are truly representing reality, then why do abstract paintings tend to look so different from one another, while landscape paintings, for example, seem to have a great deal in common (particularly those painted in this century)? Or, to take it one step further, if abstract paintings do appear to be similar  – a Kazimir Malevich and a Robert Ryman, let’s say – why are we able to distinguish them so readily? Why is this similarity clearly superficial? The answer would seem to be that while painting in general stands in a metaphorical relation to reality – it is both a distillation of and a discursion on, it – that which is deemed reality by abstract artists varies widely. Wassily Kandinsky, Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other abstract painters of their ilk saw the quotidian world as unreal and untrue in the deeper sense. They were aiming for a higher, spiritual reality; seeking to paint formal propositions and sets of relations which echoed the eternal. Limning the true in this way would help to banish confusion and would do its part to awaken and ennoble humankind. Their art was real: it was both a clear, scientific expression of metaphysical truth and a blueprint for the improvement of the world. The abstract expressionists, for their part, also tried to separate themselves from the banalities of everyday life and the visual forms that populated it. They consciously strove for newness, originality, and unacceptability. It may be difficult for us to understand, with the work of these artists so firmly placed in the canon, how an artist like Mark Rothko could believe that his paintings had an innate offensiveness, that they could never sit still, as it were, and behave in polite company. It makes more sense if we see abstract expressionist painting as a stand-in for the self: a self removed from the social matrix. To create a personal 35

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imagery and a personal format was to create a truth, a proposition that was so patently authentic and inventive that it could not be disputed. It was to establish the condition of reality, not merely to depict it. (As Jackson Pollock famously said, “I am nature.”) An important exhibition of contemporary abstract painting and sculpture was held at the end of the 1960s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. Titled “The Art of the Real,” it featured works by leading and second-rung minimal and colorfield artists, paintings by the non-de Kooning wing of the abstract expressionists, and a painting each by Jasper Johns and Georgia O’Keeffe. (The O’Keeffe – Lake George Window – was put in the show to be seen as explicitly linked in appearance, spirit, and intent with Ellsworth Kelly’s 1949 painting Window.) In the catalogue essay (and on the cover) the exhibition’s curator, E.C. Goossen, clearly stated its formalist premise: “Today’s ‘real’ makes no direct appeal to the emotions, nor it is involved in uplift, but instead offers itself in the form of the simple, irreducible irrefutable object.” A Kelly, Frank Stella, or Morris Louis was real, and ultimately realistic (two quite different terms) because it was a self-evident entity, located firmly in a conceptual and perceptual field. In the three sets of examples cited above, the reality painting depicts was, respectively, higher or spiritual reality, inner reality, and material reality. What about painting today? If abstract painting takes on reality, what reality is it choosing? Or to put it another way, what reality do the times force upon the artist? Mondrian, Pollock, and Stella were products of particular social fields and responded to them. Those fields are especially complex today. Painters operate in and with a shifting slew of signs, signifiers, reproductions, methodologies, interpretive models, societal representations, historical references, personal ideologies, high- and low-end technologies, and audiences. This reality is fluid, transparent, overlaid, susceptible to change. It is more weakly bound, less unified. To come to grips with this complicated social reality, abstract artists today are making art that might look neither traditionally abstract nor traditionally realistic. What is interesting to note is that this renewed engagement with the real, rather than subverting abstraction, serves, to quote Clement Greenberg (and with only partial irony).“to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, NY, 1997

5

The Uncomfortable Armchair: Abstraction and Decoration The loss of wholeness is a common modern complaint. From the Haussmannization of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century to the dizzying proliferation of computer networks in the late twentieth, the old unities and certainties seem to be in a state of continual unraveling. But where there is a force there is generally a counterforce. There is of course the force of political rhetoric: the desire to return to what is perceived of as the completeness and stability of the past is a feature of both the conservative and the various Arcadian positions. Culture too acts to replace unstable social rationales with ones that appear to be more enduring. An example was the popular reaction to Freudian psychology. It was embraced (in varying degrees) as the new explanation for the irrational behavior that seemed to animate so much of modern life. In the common imagination there seemed to be a one-to-one mapping of the conscious onto the unconscious. Discontent and dismay were redefined as illnesses and illness could, in the mechanistic modern worldview, be cured. A psychoanalytic guide might be needed, but with enough work one could find the right correspondences and be made whole again. Instead of being lost and outmoded, irrelevant to the difficulties of today, the past (and particularly childhood – that repository of remembered oneness) was lifted out of nostalgia and given a causal, meaningful place in life. The past had, so to speak, a job. In art, modernism, especially abstraction, served a similar stabilizing function. At first glance this would seem odd. Wasn’t modernism a paradigm of the chaotic modern world, a form always in revolt, the presenter of the distressingly novel? Modernism may have been radical, but “radical” comes from the Latin, “radix” or root, and there is in the radical a desire to cut through the thickets of irrelevance and return to the basics: to be pure. The search for purity in modernism is something not restricted to the Platonic reductiveness of Suprematism or Minimalism. Even Futurism, the noisiest of early modern movements, was in search of the delirious, visceral clarity of the perpetually new, of speed absolute and uncorrupted. 37

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Purity implies control, and abstraction has been especially susceptible to the self-imposition of governing strategies, theories, and explanations. Other than art historical positioning, and in the absence of a comprehensible, and thus ordering subject matter, abstraction was left to order itself. No matter how seemingly arbitrary the painting was, its parts had to subordinate themselves to a unified central vision. That vision might be in varying degrees, formal, psychological, spiritual, epistemological, phenomenological, or perceptual; but no matter what the ordering was, the totality and unity of the painting was maintained – there might be subtexts, but essentially the work of art told one story. Stories are interesting for what they don’t say as well as for what they do, and the thread that has been notably missing for most of this century has been that of beauty. What of course has not been lacking has been the other side of the traditional coin, the Sublime. It is not that twentieth century art is unattractive – far from it – but Beauty with a capital B, the Apollonian, has seemed too weak a binding agent for the modernist work of art. The Dionysian Sublime has been the force designed to carry painting away from the depiction of awe-inspiring subject matter into more self-contained but equally powerful realms. The invocation and evocation of the primitive, of the transcendent self, of mystery, scale and dissonance has given modernist art a gravitas it did not have by right. Beauty was, if anything, an afterthought – an attribute that might be appended after time, but not something that one actively strove for. Picasso’s paradigmatically modernist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon might seem beautiful to us, but its beauty comes from the completeness and daring of the concept; it is an aspect integral to the entire picture, a function of its harshness and audacity, of its power. Compared to the Rose Period paintings of a few years earlier this is clearly the case. Those mal-de-siècle paintings with their elongated Mannerist figures, their self-conscious technical virtuosity, and their air of illness and melancholy eroticism are another thing altogether. Beauty seems very much the point here. There is a hothouse feeling to them, and the term is apt, for a hothouse is a area where plants can be taken aside, grown out of season, examined. The beauty in a Rose Period Picasso is excessive. It stands apart, sign-like, from the painting. This sense of separation, analysis, and excess lies at the heart of what I believe the decorative means in late twentieth century art. The loss of wholeness is still being felt, but the response is now different. The binding unity of abstraction, nearly a century in the making, is no longer viable, and with it has gone the Sublime; for the Sublime is ultimately an abstracted expression of will, of the individual. “Form follows function” is not just an overworn phrase – it is a key to modernism. “Form follows function” implies necessity: the work of art is that which is needed

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and nothing more. There is no excess baggage. There is, instead, unity, wholeness, hierarchy, centrality, originality, and the integrated ego of the least reducible of social units – the individual. But what has come in its place? For abstraction there has developed a new form of pictorial organization, a syntactical order. The cohesiveness of the painting has been disrupted: its various parts have achieved an independence. They operate in relation to each other not by necessity but by contingency. Things move and shift: the painting becomes a screen, a flattened arena where things provisionally coalesce, held in place by their function in a fugitive grammatical schema. In this sort of painting, beauty is not some vaguely intuited harmony which knits the work together; rather it is a separate entity, something that has achieved the same self-sufficiency as, say, line, color, texture, gesture, or historical reference. This autonomous beauty, this independent and clearly recognizable quality is that which we may call the decorative. What has been created is content freed from containment. The syntactical parts of the painting have become information, and a painting the representation of that information. There is an analogue to this in the larger culture  – the Internet. Earlier self-contained informational structures have been fragmented. Their wholeness has been broken, but instead of chaos and weakness, a new dispersed structure of a different and greater strength has been created. It is loose, transparent, overlapping, able to be summoned up from the outside, and then returned. There are narrative possibilities, but for a free-floating, unpredictable hypertext narration, narration separated from the mechanistic structures of cause and effect. (This dispersed narrative has a connection to classical notions of the decorative – that is the flattened disposition of color over the surface of the painting to create pictorial unity; as opposed to the creation of logical, hierarchical space through the use of perspectival systems and tonal modeling.) Narration of a particular sort has long been an important aspect of the decorative arts  – the decorative arts, not the decorative in painting. Things however are changing. The narration I am referring to is a displaced narration, for in an ornamented object the ornament is always telling a different story than the object. The ornamentation painted on a Greek vase or incised into a Chinese pot, for example, has only a tenuous connection to the shape of that vase or pot, and virtually none to its use. These various stories become mapped onto each other, but in doubled, misregistered, hybrid ways. The object is, in a deep sense, operating at cross-purposes to itself. This is why decorative objects lack the traditional unity of what we call high art. Parenthetically, this is the quality which

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separates Frank Stella’s early black, silver, and copper series paintings from the decorative forms that they recall: there is no disjunction between the internal and external formats – only one story is being told. The structural discordance of decoration can be seen clearly in architectural ornamentation. Traditionally such ornamentation is a correction of scale  – it counters the large mass of the building and echoes the size and the human activity of its inhabitants. Ornamented buildings, a Louis Sullivan skyscraper from the early twentieth century, and Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera from the nineteenth, for example, share this characteristic. Ornament, by its nature, separates itself from that which is being ornamented. In recent architecture this separation and attendant excess has been underlined. In postmodern buildings by Robert Venturi and Michael Graves – the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia and the Portland Building in Portland, Oregon, for example  – reasonably simple structures have been embellished by self-consciously complex decoration, creating, in Venturi’s words, “decorated sheds.” In Paris, Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art symbolically detaches the great glass facade, putting it in front of the garden; thus breaking the building’s unity, turning outside into inside, structure into ornament, and in the process giving us, as decoration does, a finely tuned pleasure. Pleasure of this nature is a key element of the decorative. Since the decorative is founded on disjunction, it is particularly susceptible to wit and irony, forms of humor based on subtly disruptive situations. Thus Venturi and Frank Gehry are witty architects, and Mies van der Rohe and Rietveld are not; just as Philip Taaffe is a witty painter and Anselm Kiefer the farthest from one. The pleasure of decoration comes not just from controlled discordance but from controlled excess as well. The classic Mondrians of the twenties are finely honed unities: nothing more is needed. But in the thirties and forties, when lines became doubled, when unbounded color blocks were added years after the paintings were finished, and when the jazzy, sensual Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie were painted, even Mondrian became decorative. Minimalism too, in spite of its courting of the Sublime and its desire for wholeness and totality, has often operated in the realm of the decorative. The strictness of Minimalism sets up a situation that begs for transgression, for the unified read to be broken. When Donald Judd inserts a liner of lustrous purple Plexiglas into an open brass cube or when Dan Flavin bathes a room with washes of glowing, subtly colored light, rigid logic and unity are overturned and beauty separates itself out to stand alongside structure, material, and concept. Minimalism is also given to the decorative impulse because of its repudiation of the overtly personal. In abstraction the personal untempered by irony has

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devolved into a sign for the self, for the individual – a metaphor for the autonomy and unity of the painting. Brice Marden’s earlier minimal paintings, for example, with their slow, sensual wax surfaces are more decorative (and to my mind, successful) than his later gestural work. That work is earnest, elegant (yet clumsy enough to read as “authentic”) and basically says nothing that was not said forty years before. For abstraction to be a stand-in for the artist, a one-to-one mapping of consciousness onto canvas, implies a dated romanticism, a sense of the heroic (usually male) artist pitted in struggle (usually doomed) against a resistant world or that metaphor for the world, the canvas. When stated this way, this construct appears obvious and trite, the stuff of movies. Artists aren’t really like that, and yet this rhetorical stance, modified to be a bit more believable, is still one that commands attention. Pleasure, wit, playfulness, and beauty  – more feminine characteristics, and more indicative of the decorative – are harder sells. They are elements of course of the “personal”, but the personal of a lesser order. They do not set the proper example. What has not been dealt with overtly in recent years is the ostensible moral nature of abstraction: a subject previously held in great regard. If abstraction represents the individual, then that abstraction presumably shares the same moral and ethical attributes as its creator (as well as its ideal viewer). A great moral virtue in America is masculine self-reliance. Is it so strange then that Clement Greenberg’s prescription for painting should be one of formal autonomy and self-determination? (The high moral tone of abstraction is not entirely gone  – the title of last spring’s large abstraction show at the Guggenheim Museum was “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline”; a phrase taken from a woman, Eva Hesse, but still in the holier-thanthou, existentialist tough guy mode.) To move away from supposed independence and singularity, to create painting which is layered, and complex  – doubled and blurred by irony, misregistration, calculation, repetition, and reference – is to court dependence, to be caught up and potentially lost in the wider web of information and interrelations. It is to court the feminine, the non-rigid, the adaptive, the decorative: it is to look for a different sort of strength. This search is bound to produce uneasiness, for abstraction, particularly after the Second World War, has been given a large weight to carry. To disperse its energies, to lose focus and seriousness, would be, ostensibly, to lose its integrity and relevance. The problem is, it is already doing just that. Traditional abstraction has forfeited the high ground, if there is such a thing anymore. It seems clear

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enough that if “important” issues are supposedly being addressed, then the public is likely to look to someone on the order of Damien Hirst, a showman able to package simple-minded ideas with cinematic panache. It is, however, very difficult to let go of the expected, of business as usual. The academic, after all, only seems academic in retrospect. A new formulation of the decorative abstract requires not just reconfiguration of present art, but also a re-examination of the past. Recent large-scale exhibitions of Matisse, Mondrian, and the Fauves cannot fail to have a subtle but real effect on current practice – to present in a contemporary context and en masse, work of such undeniable intellectual and visceral appeal, inevitably changes both the viewer and that which is being viewed. The more recent past calls for a new examination as well. The decorative and disjunctive aspects of Minimalism should be explored, as well as areas where an obsessive methodology creates a longing for wholeness and congruity that is impossible to achieve and where the gap between desire and execution creates a highly charged zone of both anxiety and pleasure. In this regard I am thinking of the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Roman Opalka and his numberings to infinity, Al Held’s proto-cyberspace perspectival excesses, and the paintings of Photorealists like Ralph Goings, Richard Estes, and Robert Bechtle – paintings which are, despite their overt subject matter, ontologically abstract. It is also important to re-evaluate movements that combined the decorative, the syntactical and the referential; particularly Supports/Surfaces in France and Pattern and Decoration in America. The work of Claude Viallat and Noël Dolla, Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff looks even more to the point today then it did in the late ’60s and ’70s. In addition, older painters who have continued Matisse’s line of inquiry should be given their due. In this regard there is a FrenchAmerican connection. Two of the best such painters are Shirley Jaffe and Jack Youngerman. Youngerman spent his formative artistic years in Paris and Jaffe lives there still. As for now, there are many artists working in the complex arena I have described. They are, among others: Polly Apfelbaum, Christian Bonnefoi, Stephen Ellis, Shirley Kaneda, David Reed, and Philip Taaffe. In my painting I too am involved with these issues. Certainty and wholeness are qualities that have been traditionally longed for. The desire however is less important than the means taken to satisfy it. Simply because something has worked before is no reason to keep trying it over and over again. The culture has reconfigured itself, and although the fit is never easy, it is up to painting to adapt itself to current conditions. Things are now both more interconnected and more dispersed than ever. It seems to me that the

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decorative abstract provides the sort of flexible structure needed to make sense, and more importantly to make art out of the world that we live in now. Tableau : Territoires actuels / New Territories in Painting, co-edited by ERBA Valence (now É SAD•Grenoble •Valence) with Le Quartier, Centre d’art de Quimper, 1997

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Wandering Color: Arbitrariness, Disjunction, and Decoration in American Art of the Sixties Art and culture reflected each other in complex ways in the 1960s. That decade was, on the surface, a time of great confidence in America. Logic and order, planning, analysis, and balance were traits high on the list of the country’s values, both in art and the society at large. The United States was at the height of its power and prestige. The “best and the brightest” moved easily between corporations, universities, and government, structuring production, mergers, research, social and economic problems, and war with an astounding self-confidence and distance. The same attitudes prevailed in art. The earlier preoccupation with expressionist soul-searching seemed to devolve into a tired second and third generation academy, and the new art turned instead to a hardened, unsentimental empiricism. The great moral virtue in America has been masculine self-reliance. Was it so strange then that Clement Greenberg’s prescription for art, articulated most clearly in the sixties, should have been one of formal autonomy and selfdetermination? The compelling aesthetic model was the late industrial one, where everything fit together coolly, sleekly, seamlessly. No flamboyant tail fins and tropical twotone paint jobs, but the monochromatically aerodynamic and efficient; no messy downtowns or hodge-podge commercial districts, but “urban renewal” and rows of barely articulated glass office buildings. It was so modern: the big blue and beige lBM computers whirring away in their hushed air-conditioned rooms, astronauts stowed neatly in shiny silver capsules, and on our bed tables compact transistor radios with mysterious, inaccessible, and un-repairable parts. And in art, no messy junk sculpture or hysterical space frames, but open, unadorned grids, clean, machine-crafted boxes, softly humming industrial lighting fixtures, and arrays of precisely ordered, straight-from-the-factory metal plates. No struggle-laden, when-do-we-know-when-the-painting-is-finished gestural excesses – but simple grids, slabs, stripes, shapes, and fields. No realism that said, in effect “I’m really a beautifully nuanced abstract expressionist painting, but 45

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with subject matter”; instead, affectless, ironic presentations of the stunningly quotidian. Or so it seemed. But the era was full of contradictions and portents: doubt was in the air. Sensuality and mystery, unraveling, arbitrariness and failure presented themselves as real possibilities. These things affected art, tugging at artists in different ways. So what was one to do? For the most part it was considered rather corny to make social statements in your art. Especially if they were heartfelt. And artists weren’t necessarily on the outside either. Since in the ’60s it was beginning to be possible to make a living at art, to have a shot at the Bohemian end of the middle class. Still, artists were scarcely unaffected by events. How then did these contradictions present themselves in their art? One important area is color. It is an aspect of art that is maddeningly elusive, all the more so for being ostensibly rational. As we know, there is no shortage of color theory, and no color theory that seems to explain things adequately. At least in practice. In the logically ordered work of the Minimalists, Colorfield painters, and Pop Artists, color often operated at cross purposes to structure, introducing a kind of open-ended irrationality and disjunction, and generating in the process a decorativeness and beauty at odds with what might be considered a suitably tough minded attitude. In certain works I believe we can observe a pronounced (but I stress, not necessarily intended or acknowledged) discordance between formal structure and color structure, most often characterized by complex and arbitrary color grafted onto simplified armatures. Frank Stella is most interesting to look at in this regard. Stella’s work through the ’60s followed an arc which took it from the simplicity of the black paintings up through the complexity of the “Protractor” series. Color moved from the basic and rationalized – largely monochrome or two color pairings or spectrum-like systems – to the shriller tones of the Moroccan pictures of 1964–65 and the Irregular Polygons of 1966, culminating in the riotously chromatic Protractors beginning in 1967. Stella seemed to throw every possible color and saturation he could imagine – from pale pastels to screaming fluorescents – into the paintings. To quote Robert Rosenblum, Stella would “. . . embrace instead a chromatic vocabulary which always produces the sensuous shock of the unexpected – a piercing cerise, a burning orange, a brackish turquoise or, no less startling in these unpredictable chords, an inert, cardboard grey.”1 As Stella went from systematic color to arbitrary color, the structure increased in complexity, the better to hold things together, to make for unity, to control the implicit sensuality. However, there was a most interesting lapse. The “Protractor” series was to have consisted of 93 paintings. There were to be thirty-one canvas

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formats, each executed in three manners: “interlaces,” “rainbows,” and “fans”. It is the interlaces with which we are most familiar. The fans and rainbows are altogether more problematical. In them we find the same complex, arbitrary, and intuitive color. But the structure isn’t up to containing them. They feel nervous and unresolved, spatially ambiguous, and probably a lot more decorative than Stella had in mind when he said, “My main interest has been to make what is popularly called decorative painting truly viable in unequivocal abstract terms. Decorative, that is, in a good sense, in the sense that it is applied to Matisse.”2 William Rubin in his 1970 monograph, while not exactly dismissing the rainbows and fans, pushed them politely but firmly off the main path, ostensibly for formal reasons, and Robert Rosenblum’s monograph, published a year later, while lavishing great praise on the interlaces doesn’t even mention the other two formats. Looking at the work now, the interlaces seem boring – too clever, and for all their ostensible energy, rather static. The fans and the rainbows, on the other hand, are strange and unsettling. The color feels sweeter, nastier, and more discordant. It seems to work against the form, pushing the edges, deforming them, wanting to get out. These paintings also connect more to the general culture. They bring to mind, both in their color and their forms, the clothes and the psychedelic paraphernalia one saw nearly everywhere. Kenneth Noland is another interesting case. His compositions of the earlier ’60s, while bold, were always tasteful: the shapes were simple and the colors wellmodulated and reasonably few in number. But around the time that Stella was producing his “Protractor” series, Noland began a series of striped paintings, which imposed upon a simple horizontal rectangular format a wild profusion of color. These paintings seem torn between a desire for order and simplicity and an urge just to let go and make the most luxuriant and beautiful object possible. (As an aside, their strong decorative quality – a component of which is the ability of the part to function as a stand-in for the whole  – was evidenced by an interesting use one of the paintings was put to. An image of Via Blues wrapped around and formed the cover of Barbara Rose’s 1969 American Painting: The Twentieth Century. The visible portion of the painting activated the book’s spine beautifully: it stood out on anybody’s bookshelf.) But as good as these paintings were, Noland obviously felt that he should move on. He began to make the striped paintings more decorous and less decorative by limiting the colors and restricting chromatic variation to the top and bottom edges, and followed that with a series of not particularly inspired plaid paintings. Noland’s work after this tended toward simplified palettes often

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balanced against mildly eccentric formats, and never again achieved the freedom and verve of the stripe series. Another Colorfield painter whose work demonstrates similar tensions was Morris Louis. I am thinking of his striped paintings – his last important series. These tall, thin paintings have always seemed the most difficult, psychological, and in many ways, the most intriguing of his works. By squeezing multiple color into minimally softened bands, he abandoned the complexity and luminosity of the Veils, and the loose springiness of the Unfurleds. They seem like straightened – in both senses of the word – versions of the human form, simultaneously upside down and right side up, trying to please, but also remote and withholding. In the 1960s, before it took on its role as an often-ironic signifier for high modernism, the stripe seemed to demand chromatic excess as a compensation for its intrinsic lack of formal interest. Gene Davis was a Colorfield artist who consistently pushed the boundaries, creating pulsating, almost stroboscopic fields of equal-sized vertical bands. They are harsh paintings, uneasily balancing the rigidly regimented and open-endedly intuitive. At a time when Albers’s carefully modulated color investigations were still much on people’s minds, these paintings raised the question: can you be a proper “color” painter if you use color willy-nilly? Through an act of aesthetic will power you could bring together three or four colors into perfect harmony, but thirty or forty? How could you fail? Or more to the point, how could you succeed? If failure was, in a way, structurally imposed on work like Davis’s, what about Andy Warhol? The inability to get it right, to come up with the perfectly integrated, non-arbitrary painting is part of Warhol’s aesthetic of variation and interchangeability. In the ‘60s it was explored in four ways: by varying the image, the number of images, the painting’s format, and its color. These versions all pointed towards a kind of anarchic ambiguity and emotional leveling. With color, however, these manipulations went beyond the largely formal aspects of the other variables. Warhol’s use of color represents the most blatant aestheticizing of the political, historical, and social, as well as the campiest and often the cruelest approach to his subject matter. Ostensibly to see an electric chair, a fatal car crash, or the aftermath of a political assassination as a neutral vehicle for the presentation of pastel color swatches, as a variant of décor, is to deal with death at a distance that cannot be maintained: the membrane of metaphor must be pierced, the horror confronted in equal proportion to its desire to be avoided. The decorative, evidenced by repetition, symmetry, and most of all color, has become a scrim, a veil of insouciance and arbitrariness gingerly placed over highly charged subject matter.

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Looking at Minimalism, seemingly the exemplar of the perfectly consolidated form, we can see that color has been the wedge which has forced both referential content and decorative lushness into works of art that ostensibly resisted it, particularly in the sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. This tendency, which started in the ‘60s, only grew more evident as time passed. Judd, for example, would take simple box forms in, say, a rich yellow brass, and insert liners and panels of lusciously colored translucent Plexiglas, creating a disjuncture which yielded both pleasure and surprise. Flavin used color, cast by simple arrangements of ordinary commercial fluorescent lighting fixtures in ways that shade his work with mystery, interconnection, and an eerie, immaterial loveliness. In an early work, Primary Picture from 1964, red, yellow, and blue bulbs are placed in a simple rectangular configuration, but one which generates the most subtle, complex, and gentle chromatic effects. In later sculptures, like the corner piece, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery), an eight foot grid of red, pink, yellow, blue and green fixtures, facing both back and front, simultaneously dematerializes the physical architecture of the corner, and activates its space with a ravishing peachy glow. The color in a Flavin exhibition often mixes from one piece to another, dissolving boundaries, creating a sense of mingling and connection. He also uses color in starkly emotional ways, as in the blood red of the corner-mounted monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) from 1966. Flavin always resisted mystical or literary interpretations of his work, but in pieces like this, it becomes inescapable, and it seems to me that the work is all the more emotionally revealing for its ostensible avoidance of feeling. These examples are only a very few of the many available, but I think they speak to the issue. For art to address the culture, particularly the contradictions in that culture, it must in some way embody them, and American art in the ‘60s did that admirably. When we talk of the artist’s diminished control of the meaning of the work, it is tempting to see it as a function of multiple interpretive modes, of a kind of concatenation of exegesis. Might it not also be a result of the embedding of the art object and the artist in an unresolved cultural matrix? We tend to see our own cultural attitudes as transparent, our ideologies as selfevident. It is hard for us to accept that we, intelligent and aware as we are, are in the grip of forces rife with paradox and incongruity – that we don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it anyway. Were the artists of the ‘60s on to the telling things they were accomplishing with color? Probably not. But as we know, intention often has unintended consequences. Presented at the College Art Association Conference, Toronto February 1998

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Notes and References 1 Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 45. 2 William Rubin, Frank Stella, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 149. From conversations with Rubin, June and September, 1969.

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The Rutgers Group: Garden State Avant-Garde

Taking the wide view, we can look at advanced American art of the 1960s (particularly if we think of how the issues were seen by the artists and critics of the time) as a large-scale investigation into the kinds of boundaries or framing devices possible in a work of art. However the question was couched, whether in terms of the nonrelational objectness of Minimalist sculpture, the “what does a painting do that nothing else does” approach of Greenbergian formalism, Conceptualism’s radical dematerialization of the art work, Earth Art’s projection of the art work onto the landscape, Pop’s aggressive appropriation of hitherto inadmissible images from popular culture or the move of Fluxus and performance art into the arena of ordinary activity, the new art of the ’60s was engaged in a project of self-definition that was most remarkable for its cooled-down objectivity. Younger artists of the time expressed relatively little interest in transcendence, archetype, the unconscious, gesture, social identity, self-exploration, politics or many of the other subjects that have preoccupied artists before and since. The drive to wrench art away from its normal subject matter and materials so as to bring it closer to the chaotic vitality of everyday life figured prominently in this new approach. Some of the most interesting and influential art of the period was formed and furthered in what might seem the unlikely crucible of New Brunswick, N.J., home to Rutgers University. The Newark Museum’s recent exhibition, “Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963,” charted the progress of eight artists living in the area and associated with the university during this fruitful time: George Brecht, Geoffrey Hendricks, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Robert Watts and Robert Whitman. These artists taught, studied, exhibited and brainstormed together, and in the process they developed some of the basic strategies of Pop art, Fluxus, Happenings, environments and performance art. Of the group, Kaprow seems to have wielded the greatest influence. Hired by the university to teach studio art and art history in 1953, Kaprow, a critic as well as an artist and teacher, was passionate, articulate and in touch with the advanced 51

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work of the time. In 1952 he had co-founded the Hansa Gallery, an important artists’ cooperative, and thereafter showed regularly in New York. Under the inspiration of John Cage, whose New School class in music composition he took and retook, Kaprow was ready by 1958 to move away from his early environments and Rauschenbergian assemblages towards more complex performance events, which came, not entirely to his liking, to be called Happenings. These activities generally required spectator participation, and although they seemed to be freeform and certainly employed throwaway materials, they were, in fact, carefully structured in both time and space. Kaprow’s Beauty Parlor IV , originally from 1958, was re-created for the Newark show. A series of interconnected spaces made of wood, lights, polyfilm and roofing paper, the piece offered up costumes, masks and drugstore photo booths for the audience to interact with. Kaprow allowed for the operation of chance here, and in similar pieces, such as the 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (the score of which was in the show) and the better-known Yard (1961), in which the enclosed backyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York was stuffed with an assortment of tires, tarpaper mounds and barrels. For Kaprow, though, chance was not chaos, but rather something to be bracketed and framed; the artist remained in control, however unobtrusively. Kaprow’s activities and the freewheeling ethos they represented inspired his students, Robert Whitman and Lucas Samaras, to explore their own idiosyncratic paths. Whitman’s early performance pieces, like American Moon and E.G. (both 1960), coaxed complex effects out of the most casual materials; they remain classics of the genre. Shower, a simpler but highly effective 1962 installation, consists of a seedy-looking metal shower stall complete with running water and plastic curtain; inside, a film loop of a nude woman taking a shower is rearprojected into place, completing the tableau. The effect is creepy, voyeuristic and startling. When I told the guard that it reminded me of Psycho, he patiently replied, “That’s what everybody says.” Shower, owned by Robert Rauschenberg, is one of six contemporaneous pieces by Whitman that combine real objects and film loops. Others (none of them in the exhibition) include an actual dressing table in whose mirror can be seen the filmed image of a woman using makeup to alter the color of her face, while the scene behind her changes; a dinner table onto whose mirrored surface is projected a film of people both spitting food out and having it poured on them; an open garbage bag with a film projection of trash floating down a river; and a multi-paned window showing a filmed scene of trees and a woman undressing.

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Samaras began his characteristically disturbing work when he was an undergraduate. He experimented with offbeat materials, and by 1959, the year he received his degree, he was making untitled works like the 15-by-9-inch printing plate, covered with wadded toilet paper and garnished with a grid of razor blades that was included in this show. A number of the Samaras pieces in the exhibition had never been shown before or were appearing for the first time in 30 or 40 years. Of these, possibly the most interesting was a three-part folding screen, done in 1958, while Samaras was still an undergraduate. The bottom quarter of each panel is clad in aluminum foil, and the remainder painted in a stepped concentric pattern of freely brushed but tidy blue stripes – a configuration that calls to mind Frank Stella’s paintings from the same period. (The two artists share a propensity for decorative strategies obsessively carried out.) After leaving Rutgers, Samaras stayed closely connected with his New Brunswick friends, exhibiting with them, appearing in their performance pieces and, in the case of George Segal, letting himself be cast in plaster for sculptural tableaux. Samaras Appears (along with Allan Kaprow and his wife, Vaughan; Jill Johnston; and George and Helen Segal) as one of the seated figures in Segal’s 1962 The Dinner Table, among the earliest of the artist’s fully realized large-scale works. Segal, who still lives on a farm in the area, was a neighbor of Kaprow’s, and showed with him at Hansa. He taught an extracurricular drawing class for the Rutgers Sketch Club, and in 1962 enrolled in the university’s M.F.A. program. He and Kaprow had impassioned discussions about the shape of future art – an art that they saw as both popular in character and encompassing in its means, a “total” experience. By the late ’50s Segal was placing roughly modeled plaster figures in front of his paintings and, soon after, into environmental settings of found objects. In 1961 he discovered that improved plaster bandages were being made at the nearby Johnson & Johnson plant, and, using them, he was able to cast figures of greater finesse and detail than previously possible. While Segal did not create Happenings himself, major performance events, such as Kaprow’s 1963 Tree, were held on his farm, and the theatrical qualities characteristic of Happenings and environments became an important aspect of his work. The exhibition’s organizers, Joseph Jacobs and Joan Marter, were fortunate in having access to some of Segal’s least-seen early sculptures. Three of them  – Woman on a Chicken Crate (1958), Man in Elevator (ca. 1958) and Man with Folded Arms (ca. 1958), all plaster on burlap on wire armatures set against foundobject backgrounds – were, when the organizers began their work, residing in a back barn on Segal’s property, along with a tractor and assorted farm tools.

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Cleaned up and placed in the exhibition, these sculptures, simultaneously mute and direct, exerted a powerful visual and emotional pull. Roy Lichtenstein came to teach at Douglass College (the women’s division of Rutgers, and the school with the more innovative art program) in 1960, after a three-year stint at the State University of New York at Oswego, an upstate school far removed from New York City. The change of scene proved fortuitous. Lichtenstein was painting somewhat humdrum Abstract-Expressionist paintings at the time, and although he had experience in commercial art and an interest in both American themes and cartoon imagery, they had not yet found a solid place in his work. lt was Kaprow who, in a 1961 studio visit, responded enthusiastically to the recently painted Look Mickey, Lichtenstein’s first painting directly taken from a cartoon or comic strip. Kaprow had previously arranged exhibition opportunities for other artists in the group, and in the fall of ’61 he did Lichtenstein a singularly good turn. He made an appointment for him to see Ivan Karp, formerly the director of Hansa Gallery and subsequently the director of Castelli Gallery. Karp responded favorably, arranged for Leo Castelli to see the work, and a few weeks later Lichtenstein was taken into the gallery’s stable. He was given a $400-a-month stipend and by November was selling his work to high-end collectors like Philip Johnson, Richard Brown Baker and Burton Tremaine. Lichtenstein was much taken with Kaprow’s belief that art doesn’t have to look like art, a seemingly simple assertion with powerful implications. Among those qualities that did make art look like art were quite a number that Lichtenstein realized he could do without  – touch, surface, nuanced color, psychological depth and accepted notions of seriousness and originality, for instance. Consider Portrait of Allan Kaprow and Portrait of Ivan Karp, two small, identically sized black, white and red paintings from 1961. The surface in each is flat and uninflected, the color straight-from-the-tube banal, and, most importantly, the male figure, a snappy tuxedo-clad character looking a bit like Frank Sinatra, is the same in each painting. Needless to say, this personage bears not the slightest resemblance to either Kaprow or Karp. These paintings, the only two realized in a projected series portraying friends of the artist, had been out of public circulation for at least 20 years prior to this show, residing first in Italy, then in Chicago, and their whereabouts had been unknown even to the Lichtenstein estate. Like the other Lichtenstein works in the show, these portraits display the artist’s more conceptual side, connecting him directly to the other Rutgers artists. The curators surely had this in mind when they placed In (1962),a large-scale sign-like rendering of that word, at the

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entrance to Kaprow’s Beauty Parlor IV , undercutting the canonical reverence usually accorded Lichtenstein these days and bringing him neatly into the show’s intellectually playful spirit. Pop art’s depiction of the artifacts of everyday life was paralleled, in an often less structured but more performative and interactive way, by the early activities of artists who would come to be associated with Fluxus, as George Maciunas named the movement in 1961. Geoffrey Hendricks, Robert Watts and George Brecht of the New Brunswick group contributed significantly to this expanding, conceptually oriented dialogue. Geoffrey Hendricks is the only artist in the exhibition who remains part of the visual-arts program at Rutgers. He was influential in developing the program, basing it on the progressive pedagogical model of Black Mountain College, the educational home of several important members of the postwar American avantgarde. During the time covered by this exhibition, Hendricks’s most interesting work was in the area of found-object constructions, such as the evocative Picturesque America (1962), with its nineteenth-century steel engravings, sheep’s skull, magazine illustrations and old book cover. Hendricks later played a significant role in Fluxus activities. Robert Watts was hired by Rutgers in 1952 to teach engineering, but switched to the art department at Douglass the following year and stayed there until he retired in 1984. Through the mid-’50s he made and exhibited paintings that were safely expressionistic, but, caught up in the general creative excitement of the New Brunswick group, he began to incorporate into his work such unexpected quotidian objects as lights, motorized elements, live plants and hot wires. In the early ’60s Watts, along with Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, created works that used food as their subject matter. Watts made a series of life-sized, chromeplated sculptures of Swiss cheese, lollipops, ice-cream sodas, chocolates, bread, butter, eggs and other ordinary grocery store and soda-fountain items. These sculptures are funny and elegant, a send-up of the self-satisfied, chrome-plated glitziness of postwar American prosperity. Watts grew interested in mail art as well – a cheap, democratic and subversive way of disseminating art. He designed and printed his own stamps, featuring suitably inappropriate subjects  – wanted criminals, pinups, W.C. Fields as a patently untrustworthy card player and the like. These he then put into official government stamp machines that he had somehow appropriated. Of particular interest is Goya’s Box (1958), a small but conceptually dense work recently acquired by the Newark Museum. In it are displayed real stamps depicting Goya’s Naked Maja and Whistler’s portrait of his mother. This piece, an early take on

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appropriation and strategies of reproduction, contemplates what happens when the aura of a painting is erased by mass reproduction and then reconstituted, at least partly, by contextualization within another work of art. While Watts was connected with all the artists in the group, his long-lasting association with George Brecht proved particularly productive. The two frequently collaborated on projects  – notably the Yam Festival, a month-long series of activities and performances in May (which, spelled backwards, is “Yam”) 1963. Brecht, the only one of the group who neither taught nor studied at Rutgers, had, like Watts, trained in the sciences and was employed in the ’50s as an engineer at Johnson & Johnson. He soon switched his attention to art, and his work, often the sparest and most overtly conceptual of anyone’s in the group, showed an analytic bent that reflected his scientific background. Brecht, who possessed a firm understanding of mathematics, was extremely interested in the workings of chance, and his attendance at Cage’s New School class pushed him more firmly in that direction. Some of Brecht’s most innovative works are his “Events,” the enigmatic scores of which he called “Event Cards.” The information presented in these cards is stripped down and minimal but may be acted upon in a surprisingly large number of ways. Consider the score of Three Aqueous Events (1961). A 4-by-3inch card is inscribed with the heading “THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS,” under which are printed three words – “ice,” “water,” “steam” – set in a column, each with a printer’s bullet beside it. Simple enough, but how exactly does one perform or present these instructions? With thought and some imagination, the possibilities proliferate, as they do in the even sparer Event Card(Exit) of 1961, a similar piece with the one-word instruction announced in the title. Works like these blur the distinction between object and action, artist and viewer – a goal, in one way or another, of all of the artists of the group. The desire to shake art out of its complacency and artiness, to take it into the arena of the real world (and in doing so, possibly bring it down a peg) motivated many young artists of that time. The artists in this show, while important, were part of a larger restiveness then manifesting itself in the artworld. Clearly, the main action was in Manhattan, and the New Brunswick group went to shows, lectures, performances and parties in the city. They took classes – often at Columbia or the New School – and exhibited their work in New York venues whenever they could. But while they made ample use of New York’s resources, New Brunswick was the haven to which they returned. It was far enough away to provide them with a sense of seclusion, and there they could work out ideas in a congenial and less pressured atmosphere. Of course, the same could be said for many outlying

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areas. That such a radical, limit-testing art could be found in New Brunswick (or in Bennington, Vermont, where Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Anthony Caro et al. held sway beginning at about the same time) is a testament to the art-historical moment, the talent of the artists involved and, not least, to fortuity. Art in America, December 1999

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8

Expressing the Abstract

There used to be much made of the difference between content and subject matter. This was, of course, a telling argument for abstraction: you could be saying something important without directly depicting it. In fact, many mid-twentieth century American artists were convinced that getting too close to a subject was a pretty sure way of emptying it of any real meaning, a descent into naming rather than an ascent into embodiment. Today, in an artistic age that seems to place a particularly high value on the act of communication, it’s not surprising to find enthusiasm for accessibility and unabashedly comprehensible subject matter. Confronted with works by Damien Hirst or Andres Serrano you may not like what you see, but you certainly know what you are looking at. Joan Mitchell’s paintings, 69 of which were shown in her recent retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art make a strong case for the validity of that older paradigm, but returning to that frame of mind is not so simple. The tilt toward referentiality is widespread and subtle, and it has become a part (both in the making and interpreting) of much of today’s art, abstraction included. It’s also affected the way we view the recent past. While it is not difficult to see that Minimalism changed the way we regard Barnett Newman’s work, or that the installation art of the last decade or so has heightened the emotional aura of many of Dan Flavin’s ostensibly dispassionate pieces, the interpretive status of Mitchell’s paintings – and, for that matter, much of the gestural abstraction of her time – occupies a far more ambiguous territory. Mitchell’s work both resists and courts referentiality. How can we, for example, not see the architectural underpinnings of the earliest painting in the show, Cross Section of a Bridge (1951), or avoid dealing with landscape when she titles paintings Blue Tree, My Landscape II or Low Water, and makes repeated statements on the order of, “It comes from and is about landscape, not about me”? 1 Yet notwithstanding the clues scattered through the paintings and titles, there is, at heart, something stubbornly self-contained about these works. Paint and gesture operate on their own, engendering a visual language specific to those paintings and to that artist. 59

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Approaching Mitchell’s oeuvre from a historical point of view can be tricky. We’ve seen work like this before, and, as such, we can fit it into a stylistic, chronological schema. Mitchell’s paintings fall right in the center of gestural Abstract Expressionism. We can chart the influences and affinities – Gorky, de Kooning, Kline, Guston, Hofmann, Sam Francis, and back to Mondrian, Monet, Cézanne and van Gogh. In addition, over the years many of us have spent time with Mitchell’s work in museums and galleries. History then gives us a region of familiarity in which to locate her art, but familiarity and understanding can often run on parallel tracks. The accumulation of fact and contextual knowledge makes for a particular sort of uncertainty, an overly precise knowing. History is an unstable entity, and large-scale exhibitions such as this form something new. Having these works – all but six of them of imposing scale – together, watching them speak to each other, changes them. The work that we thought we knew becomes less familiar, less categorizable, less historicized. Mitchell, who died of lung cancer in 1992 at the age of 66, was a central and lively figure in the artworld. There has been much made of her difficult personality: her anger, alcoholism, sharp tongue and general orneriness. While she might have been more aggressively outspoken than others, in my experience a good many artists, successful or not, are excessively self-involved, irritable, insecure and demanding, and alcoholism is hardly unknown in the artworld, especially among Mitchell’s generation. But the issue of bad behavior rarely comes up, except in pathologically theatrical cases, like Jackson Pollock’s. One wonders, would Mitchell’s personality be such a popular topic for discussion if she had been a man? Mitchell may have been successful, but for much of her life she had to function in a professional environment where being a woman didn’t exactly help a person’s career. Something that did help was that she was rich and well connected. She was raised in Chicago by a father who was a leading dermatologist and a mother who, in addition to being heir to a considerable fortune, was coeditor of the influential literary monthly Poetry. Mitchell grew up in comfortable circumstances, honed her competitive instincts in sports, winning junior championships in tennis and figure skating, and lived in a home where people on the order of Thornton Wilder (who read poems to her and her sister), Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot came to visit. She studied at Smith and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she familiarized herself with the museum’s firstrate collection of nineteenth-and twentieth-century French paintings. Although as an adult she lived modestly, having money meant avoiding certain time and energy-draining compromises. Granted that life, especially bohemian life, was

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cheaper in her heyday, Mitchell never had to work at a job, could travel when she wished, was able to live in France and still keep a place in New York, could afford good quality art supplies and did not have to be financially dependent on a man. This sort of autonomy was not insignificant, particularly for a woman of her generation. The default setting, so to speak, was that a woman artist was not really serious. This expectation had to be resisted, and the way to do that was to work without interruption. Mitchell was also a beneficiary of Abstract Expressionism’s success. Arriving in New York toward the end of the 1940s, Mitchell, then in her early 20s, sought out de Kooning and Kline, and deepened her friendship with Guston, whom she had met previously during a trip to Paris. The art scene in New York was small, and soon she knew virtually everyone. A hard-drinking, hard-swearing tough cookie, she hung out at the Cedar Street tavern with the boys, became a member of the Artists’ Club, and in 1951 was invited to participate in the important Ninth Street exhibition organized by the Artists’ Club with the assistance of the art dealer Leo Castelli. That same year she was included in the Whitney Annual and, within a reasonably short time, began her solo exhibition career. By 1953 was a member of the highly regarded Stable Gallery. That she was prodigiously talented is clear – no amount of money in the bank or determination to befriend the right people would have carried the day without the requisite artistic ability and the commitment to producing work not only in quantity, but at the proper heroic Abstract Expressionist scale. Although she disliked being thought of as a member of the Second Generation of Abstract Expressionism – a rather arbitrary distinction2 – she gained important advantages by arriving on the scene when she did. Not only was there an established avantgarde milieu in which to ground herself, but the esthetic parameters had already been set – parameters that she accepted and within whose bounds she remained throughout her life. That she was one of the few who was able to keep gestural Abstract Expressionism vital through the early ’90s, deepening and expanding it, is a testament both to her ability as an artist and to the ongoing challenges offered by that particular approach to painting. Having an esthetic in place meant that the young Mitchell could hit the ground running. Although Cross Section of a Bridge, with its mix of tumbling planes and torqued, partially bounded biomorphic passages, brings to mind a number of earlier European sources, the painting seems to take its real inspiration from Arshile Gorky’s work, as does a 6-by-6 ½ foot untitled painting of the same year. Gorky, who began his career in the 1920s, fought his way through and clear of Cubism and Surrealism, arriving at his mature output only in the early 1940s.

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With Mitchell, that struggle for stylistic identity remained at a remove, and her paintings are none the worse for having had others do some of the groundwork. While sweating Picasso out of one’s system, as Gorky did, proved for him and many others to be a cathartic experience, it was the quieter influence of Mondrian, in particular his plus-and-minus series that seemed to prevail for Mitchell. At the Whitney, this was evident in an early untitled work dated 1953–54, which employs the muted, silvery-tan palette Mondrian favored in the teens, as well as his overall rhythmic patterning. In the early Cubist manner, the composition avoids activity at the corners, contracting into a rough oval with the suggestion of centered axes. The short marks, both stroked and dripped, emphatically accent the horizontal and vertical. The painting displays little tonal variation but a considerable sense of shimmering atmosphere. There is also a relation to Guston’s work of the 1950s, but Mitchell’s paintings from the period feel more deliberate and structured. Although Mitchell soon began making paintings that were closer to de Kooning’s and the Action-painting wing of Abstract Expressionism, the considered, even planned quality evident in these early paintings persisted throughout her career. Mitchell’s tamped-down, self-contained quality is, I believe, one of the great strengths of her paintings and may have helped her sustain her gestural approach much longer than expressionist colleagues such as Jack Tworkov and Alfred Leslie. Mitchell’s production is remarkable for its consistency. From the very beginning of her professional career, she painted with assurance, vigor and grace. Her works from 1956, however, cemented her stylistic ties to de Kooning. Paintings like Hemlock or King of Spades share de Kooning’s roughed-in structural lattice, energetic brushwork, and also, importantly, the use of larger, neutral color areas (white, in these two paintings) that function simultaneously as ground, space-defining curved plane and a means of erasure. The colored brushstrokes are not simply placed on a backdrop, but are embedded – sometimes obscured, sometimes emerging  – in an active field. This material as well as perceptual interchange between figure and ground is a feature of not only de Kooning’s black-and-white work (especially late ’40s and early ’50s paintings like Excavation and Attic) but also Kline’s paintings, which Mitchell greatly admired. The year 1957 was a particularly good one for Mitchell. She had her fourth solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery and was included in the Whitney Annual, the Corcoran Biennial and important exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Jewish Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In October, Art News published Irving Sandler’s article “Mitchell paints a picture” (to be chosen for one of that magazine’s “paints a picture” features was a sure sign that you had

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made it the artworld of the 1950s). The picture in question was George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1957), a painting that was bought by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo the following year. “George” was a standard black poodle she had owned (dogs figured prominently in Mitchell’s life) and Barnes Hole is a bay beach in East Hampton, N.Y., a town where she summered in the early ’50s. Those summers, often spent in the company of the painter Michael Goldberg, were emotionally tumultuous but important to her artistic development. George Went Swimming, executed in her studio on St. Mark’s Place in New York, seems to reflect a mix of turmoil and pleasure. Sandler felt, based on his discussions with Mitchell, that this painting was, in part, an attempt to capture the experience of a storm on water. She had already painted four canvases in response to a hurricane that had hit East Hampton in 1954,and Sandler believed that this painting was a return to that theme. Mitchell had grown up in Chicago in an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, and, as Sandler wrote, “It seemed that the hurricane . . . invaded the picture. Since her early childhood lake storms have been a frightening symbol both of devastation and attraction, and the sense of tempestuous waters appears frequently in her work.”3 While George Went Swimming is scarcely a literal depiction of water, it recapitulates a remembrance of, and a reaction to, nature. Sandler says of her work in general, “She appears to have been driven to recapture in her abstractions, the intensity of emotions associated with certain scenes in the past. As she once said about a work: ‘I’m trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree.’ ”4 The exhibition’s curator, Jane Livingston, in her catalogue essay, speaks of Mitchell’s “strange inarticulateness” when it came to talking about her work. “She kept insisting that feeling a place, transforming a memory, recording something specifically recalled from experience, with all its intense light and joy and perhaps anguish, was what she was doing. She seemed to assume that everyone would understand what she meant.” 5 Mitchell’s rhetoric may seem imprecise, but it speaks to the very distance that abstraction establishes between the painting and the subject, and reflects the multiplicity or blurring of intentions around which her work is structured. In Mitchell’s hands, landscape elements, however stylized, can convey feeling, form, memory and a depiction simultaneously. George Went Swimming, a vertical painting approximately 7 feet by 6 ½ feet, is divided roughly into two sections, with the larger one occupying the top twothirds of the canvas, and the other the bottom third. Centered in each of these sections is a welter of straight brushstrokes placed on opposing diagonals, giving

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the composition a kind of two-point perspective, a sense of being anchored in space. The strokes are, for the most part, brightly colored, with reds, yellows, turquoises and cobalt blues predominating, although slashes of darker tones are woven in. The colored areas are set in a brushy and cool white field, which intensifies their chromatic impact. A zone of smeared blue pushes in from the upper right corner, destabilizing the composition, giving the brushwork it impinges on a frenetic quality. The painting alternates markedly between warm and cool, evoking heated air and frigid water, the weather’s changeability and, by implication, restlessness and uncertainty. Ladybug (1957), long a fixture of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection (it was acquired in 1961), shares elements with George Went Swimming. Its format, however, is a pronounced horizontal, as opposed to a squarish vertical, and its organization is allover. There is a landscape feel to this painting as well, but in comparison to George Went Swimming, the strokes are more on the horizontal, particularly at the top, where they tend to be more densely compacted, in the way that the distance between objects seems to decrease the farther away they are from the viewer. The painting expands and loosens up at the bottom, with thicker marks, larger white areas, and strokes that release cascades of delicate drips. Ladybug feels calmer than George Went Swimming, its allover quality neutralizing opposing compositional vectors, its tonal range more subdued. This is not to say that Ladybug is anything but a tough, gritty New York painting. Its raw edges are there, but it teeters and tips rather than lurches. This is the calm after the storm. Mitchell had been visiting France regularly since 1955, but by 1959, she had, to all intents and purposes, relocated, and her work from then on was mostly created there. She found a studio on the rue Frémincourt, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, and painted in it for the next nine years. She kept that studio until the 1970s, even though by 1968 she lived in Vetheuil, in the countryside north of Paris, overlooking the Seine. It was a beautiful house and property with an artistic history: a smaller house on the grounds, later to serve as the gardener’s cottage, was where Claude Monet had lived and worked from 1878 to 1881. The earlier Abstract Expressionists made much of their artistic identity as Americans. Although some of them were European by birth, as mature artists they tended to stay clear of the continent. Their reluctance or inability to travel there was due in part to the Depression and World War II, but it was also a function of their belief that they were doing something that had not been done before, something that flourished on American soil. Europe, and France in particular, was the competition, and they did not expect to be received there with

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open arms. Second Generation artists were considerably more relaxed on that score, and postwar Paris hosted a large and lively American contingent. Mitchell, difficult as she might have been, had a real talent for friendship. Among those she was especially close to in Paris were the American abstractionists Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis and Shirley Jaffe. She also began a long and stormy relationship with the Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, which lasted until 1979. Mitchell was close with many writers there as well, and Samuel Beckett became a lifelong friend. Living in France, as might be expected, changed Mitchell’s work. She was now resident in a country with a long and deep painting tradition. She was also a foreigner, with all the potential for alienation that creates. While welcoming creative people from outside it, especially those who can pay their own way, French society, rarely grants them bona fide French status. Many of the paintings in the Whitney exhibition that date from the early to the mid-’60s show a noticeable change in approach from the earlier New York work. They seem to be constructed neither as evenly weighted allover compositions, nor as tensely structured sums of opposing forces, but as more traditional figure-ground arrangements. They feature visually heavy accretions of mass, placed somewhat awkwardly off center, cradled by often tenuously stroked marks and blurred atmospheric passages. The compositions feel as if they are simultaneously clumping up and unraveling. In Calvi (1964), for example, a bulky near-rectangle of scraped and clotted dark cypress-green floats in the upper portion of the 8 by 7 ½ foot canvas. Surrounded by a veil of smudged and sullied pale pinks and yellows that darken it even more, the hovering form  – derived from groupings of dark trees seen while Mitchell was sailing in the Mediterranean – appears to have drifted to the right, pulled off its tangled sticklike green moorings. There is a sense of difficulties stated but not solved. Calvi, somewhat mournfully, stares you down. The painting displays certain formal similarities to Rothko’s work, but it has none of his politesse. Both painters float their shapes, but Rothko’s are held firmly in check, both structurally and emotionally. Rothko has the air of permanence achieved; Mitchell, of permanence longed for. At the end of the ’60s, Mitchell’s paintings took another turn. They became lighter in visual weight and considerably more elegant. Where her earlier paintings seemed in large part to be composed of distinct brushstrokes, and much of the work of the early to mid-’60s consisted of big, congealed forms set against disordered fields, her new work took groups of more or less rectangular shapes of varying sizes and jostled them up against each other in brushed and

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dripped fields. Her palette grew more complex and sophisticated – replete with lavenders, juicy oranges, translucent celadons, glowing viridians, wine reds and a range of blues from deep ultramarine to pale sky. Although she denied it, Hans Hofmann’s influence seems evident in this work. As great as Hofmann’s achievement may be, in these paintings I believe that Mitchell outdoes him. Hofmann carries with him the authority of the European Cubist apparatus – it gives his expressionism a kind of gravity (in both senses of the term), but Mitchell’s paintings of this period, like Low Water (1969) or Salut Sally (1970), bring something else to bear  – the pleasure-oriented, intimate, color-driven, French landscape tradition of Matisse and Bonnard. This allows her to do something very un-Hofmann-like – to let her forms be dissolved by light and space. The dark blue rectangle at the top of Salut Sally, for example, seems to crumble into a lake of finely and actively brushed lighter blue, and simultaneously to be submerged and reflected in its surface. Wedges of dark blue emphasize the bottom left of the canvas, and a lighter, green-blue section hugs the left edge of the painting just above those wedges. These blues anchor the painting and set up a charged, perspectivally deep arena that allows for an airy play of yellows, pinks, whites, oranges and a few greens within its precincts. The stepped rectilinear structuring of its planar components further adds to the painting’s sense of depth, as does the carefully modulated advance and recession of the colored planes. In these works, Mitchell is able to convey intimacy even when she dramatically ups the scale. In Wet Orange (1971–72), a triptych measuring 9 ½’ x 20 feet, the canvas is filled, edge to edge, with a jumble of loosely rectangular forms. Brushwork, primarily in orange, at once vigorous and delicate, plays itself out in those forms– sometimes making the rectangle, sometimes indicating its edge, and at other times obscuring it in a soft thicket of strokes. Your eye may move freely around the general design of the painting, but the brushwork draws you close to it, physically and emotionally. It holds you and slows you down. Because of practical studio considerations Mitchell could not manage really large works painted on a single stretcher. Her solution was to use multi-panel formats; diptychs, triptychs, and even on occasion, four-panel paintings. These grand, horizontal works (the biggest in the show, Salut Tom [1979] is slightly over 26 feet in length) make a virtue out of what could be a limitation. Rather than acting as if the canvas division were nonexistent, Mitchell plays off interruption against continuity. Sometimes a mark effortlessly jumps the border, while at other times forms stop at one canvas’s edge and a new passage begins at the next. This can be done boldly or with extreme subtlety, as in La Vie en Rose

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(1979), where the painted white ground of the far left panel butts up against the slightly grayer and duller white of the primed but unpainted ground of the adjacent canvas – the dissonance all the more telling for being played so softly. In Mitchell’s multi-part paintings the panels were worked separately, but were meant to be seen together. Each panel has a visual autonomy that, paradoxically, enhances the painting’s sense of unity. The painting has come together, like states voluntarily joining to form a country, rather than being unified a priori. Vertical panels link up to form a larger horizontal, but they still retain their compositional verticality; not just in terms of the panels’ configuration, but in the largely upright orientation of the internal forms and strokes within each panel. A contrapuntal musicality abounds. Themes are stated, varied and played off each other, increasing the paintings’ feeling of wholeness and rightness, but diminishing the sense of allat-once perception that gives Pollock’s similarly scaled paintings their urgency. These are slower, more carpentered works than Pollock’s, with an increased partto-whole read; and what Mitchell’s paintings may lose in immediacy they gain in reflectiveness. Panoramic and abstractly narrative, canvases of this scale can’t help but bring to mind Monet’s mural-sized Waterlilies, although Monet’s muted tonal contrast in those works is at odds with Mitchell’s more full-blown use of color. Mitchell rejected comparisons to Monet  – that they had lived in the same place only seemed to increase Mitchell’s desire to disassociate herself – but to my way of thinking, there is an especially strong connection to Monet in her “La Grande Vallée” cycle, a suite of 21 paintings executed from 1983 to 1984. The inspiration for the group was a beautiful hidden valley in Brittany that had served as a childhood refuge of a close friend, Gisèle Barreau. Mitchell’s only sister, Sally, died in 1982, as did Barreau’s young cousin, with whom she had played in the valley. Mitchell was preoccupied with and quite afraid of death (and abandonment – even in social situations she had an aversion to prolonged goodbyes). She threw herself into this suite of paintings, almost as if this re-creation of an Eden, imagined but unseen, would keep death at bay. The “Grande Vallée” paintings are particularly lush, even at times suffocatingly so. Defined forms have disappeared and paint fills the canvas from edge to edge, with little of the white breathing space of Mitchell’s other works. The brushstrokes are compact and overlaid. In many of the paintings (La Grande Vallée XIII , 1983, for example), a rich, cobalt blue predominates, serving as a foil for massings of floral yellows and leaf greens. While I admire the intensity of these paintings, they seem, in a way, too sure of themselves, “resolutions of the resolved,” as Clement Greenberg said of certain late Monets.6

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The “Grande Vallée” group was quite well received. Although Mitchell had two significant museum shows in the ’70s – at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in 1972 and at the Whitney in 1974 – and was showing at the Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York and at the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris (both prestigious venues), the reception of her work of that period was somewhat muted. Whether this was a result of a general lessening of interest in the art of her generation or a response to the work itself is debatable. It should be remembered that at the time Greenberg exerted a powerful influence in the artworld, especially in regard to painting, and Greenberg was not a supporter of hers. In any case, by the time that the “Grande Vallée” group appeared, her accomplishment had been gaining greater recognition. A 1980 show at Fourcade, “Joan Mitchell: The Fifties, Important Paintings,” brought back into view some of her most powerful early works. These included King of Spades (1956) and Evenings at Seventy-third Street (1956–57), both of which were in the Whitney show, and the very important To the Harbormaster (1957), based on a poem by her friend, Frank O’Hara, which was not shown. The early ‘80s were also the time of a renewed interest in large-scale gestural painting. The works of artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel lent Mitchell’s a renewed credence. Their emotive, subject-driven and often series-based work also helped attune viewers and critics to Mitchell’s sense of referentiality in ways that earlier figurative Abstract-Expressionist work like Elaine de Kooning’s or Fairfield Porter’s had not. Mitchell was no longer an exponent of a previous style, but an experienced practitioner of a current mode of expression. It is of interest to note that although styles have been recapitulated often enough in the last 20 years, conceivably well-intentioned but ultimately pejorative terms like “Second Generation” have not been used. Modifiers like “Neo” or “Post” carry far less negative weight. It is also encouraging to see that the work of Mitchell’s contemporaries Goldberg and Bluhm has received more recognition in recent years. As Mitchell moved into what would be the last phase of her career, she was able to bring all of her skills into play, and, despite serious illness and loss, her ambition, inventiveness, and productivity did not slacken. Mitchell’s health problems were severe and would no doubt have stopped a less indomitable type. But her late paintings are as determinedly physical as anything she did before. Her strokes, always rigorous, took on a looser, more wristy feel. Sometimes her marks formed themselves into crumpled, ball-like shapes, as in Sunflowers (1990–91), and sometimes into centrally massed but still airy agglomerations, as in the “Chord” group, represented in the Whitney show by Chord VII (1987). At

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other times they seemed to exist as flurries of energy, shaking themselves loose of any readily evident structure, as in Faded Air I ( 1985). Her color became, if anything, more daring. Sunflowers for instance, is shot through with hot pink and tangerine orange, an insinuation of tropical warmth into an otherwise chromatically sedate atmosphere. The last painting in the show, an untitled diptych from 1992, the year of her death, feels emblematic of the arc of Mitchell’s work. In this roughly 9-by-12-foot painting, two loosely tangled skeins of glowing golden yellow oppose each other, one per panel. They are set in a white, nearly empty field and trail delicate, almost calligraphic streamers of color. The painting, full of tough wistfulness, evokes Cy Twombly’s later work and seems to suggest, at the very end of her career, a new direction. Mitchell knew what she knew, but within that arena of competence, she was never afraid to push it. Abstract Expressionism was full of talk of risk, of how a painting could go wrong in an instant, where one untrue move could lose it all for you. Much of that rhetoric was ’50s bravado  – the artist as matador, not bricklayer. Things changed in the ’60s, and the equating of Action painting and authenticity became less and less tenable. In 1966, Lawrence Alloway pointed out that repetitive geometric painting could be at least as personal and expressive as gestural painting: “A system is as human as a splash of paint, more so when the splash gets routinized.”7 Alloway’s view proved to be a useful corrective. Robert Mangold’s conceptually generated paintings could be seen as fully expressive, and a lot of essentially academic paint splattering and esthetic heavy breathing was unmasked. Mitchell, however, was the real thing. She never let her marks become “routinized,” she never merely went through the motions. But then, she rarely failed – a sign to her detractors that she had not pushed herself hard enough. This argument can only be countered by recourse to the works themselves. In a career that spanned over 40 years, she was amazingly prolific and consistent. She aimed high and she sought compelling content in her work – but with Mitchell we don’t get the conflation of the self with the sublime or the transcendent, that sense of overweening (and so often male) singularity. I wouldn’t be surprised if spending the bulk of her working life in France didn’t enforce a little esthetic humility. Abstract Expressionism didn’t reinvent painting, it reconfigured it. Reconfiguration implies a past and a future subject to change. It also implies the idea of a practitioner, an effector of that change from within. Mitchell was the practitioner par excellence. This beautiful exhibition, thoughtfully and boldly organized by independent curator Livingston with the assistance of the Whitney’s assistant curator for special projects Yvette Y. Lee, should give Mitchell her due.

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While it grounds the artist in her time, the show loosens the paintings from the grip of art history and its preoccupation with matters of precedence and influence, its relentless contextualizing. The paintings, which Livingston presents unbolstered by works on paper or documentary materials, are emphatically there. Subject matter may have grabbed the spotlight these days, but if this retrospective is any indication, the question of content has been asked and answered. Abstract painting can still speak to us, even if its language is, perforce, indirect. These paintings address us with strength and conviction, and they make the best argument of all that Joan Mitchell must be ranked as one of the finest painters of the second half of the twentieth century. Art in America, December 2002

Notes and References 1 Quoted in Tucker, Marcia, Joan Mitchell (exhibition catalogue). New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1974, p 8. 2 In a recent exhibition catalog, Mitchell’s old friend, the poet, Hal Fondren, recalls in that in the mid-’50s Mitchell firmly rejected Second Generation status. “Joan would have none of this. Her line was that the movement had only begun around 1950 and that she was in on the start.” From “Sunday Afternoons with Joan.” In Joan Mitchell: Paintings 1950 to 1955, New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 1998. 3 Sandler, Irving. “Mitchell paints a picture.” Art News 56 (October, 1957), p. 70 4 Sandler, Irving. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. New York, Icon Editions, 1978, p. 69. 5 Livingston, Jane. The Paintings Joan Mitchell (exhibition catalogue). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2002 p. 38. 6 Greenberg, Clement. “The Later Monet,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, vol. 4, p.9. 7 Alloway, Lawrence, “Systemic Painting.” The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966. In Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York: Norton, 1975) pp. 80, 84.

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Gee’s Bend Modern

It is a given that most museum shows of recent art serve to ratify accepted tastes and standards. A Johns or Flavin retrospective, or a survey of Fluxus art, while certainly deepening our knowledge of the subject, is not about to change perceptions significantly. It is rare to find an exhibition that throws something totally unexpected our way, that forces us to carve out a meaningful chunk of historical space to make room for a new body of work. ‘The Quilts of Gee’s Bend’, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and shown last winter at the Whitney Museum, does just that. The sixty quilts in the exhibition were made by a group of women in a small, isolated farming community in central Alabama, southwest of Selma. Gee’s Bend was and is an almost exclusively African-American hamlet. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, it is virtually an island; after the residents began to assert their civil rights in the 1960s, its ferry service was terminated (probably not coincidentally), and its one access road, some 15 miles from the nearest highway, remained unpaved until 1967. Today the area is starting to become more connected with the outside world, and is at the same time losing its quilting tradition. The town’s isolation during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s – the period when most of the quilts in the exhibition were done – made it nearly impossible for the quilters to have been exposed in any contextualized or coherent way to modern art, although images of abstract art or design may have crossed their paths via magazines and newspapers.1 And yet these works seem to resonate harmonically with many strands of geometrically-based and materially innovative postwar American abstraction, as well as with that abstraction’s European antecedents. Although the Gee’s Bend quilters were not part of the mainstream art world, it is important to understand that they formed an art world of their own, that is, a coherent social grouping dedicated to the construction of a visual language. They shared a sense of aesthetic lineage (patterns and ways of working were handed down through extended families and known to the rest of the community), a recognized means of display (the quilts were hung out on clotheslines not just to 71

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dry, but to be seen), a concern with the interplay of individual and collaborative work and, importantly, a set of common limits. The women knew each other and were often related – of the 41 artists in the show, 18 belong to the Pettway family, which took its name from the area’s principal slave-owner. Religion also played a vital, unifying role in the lives of Gee’s Benders. The Baptist church was the place where people not only prayed but organized their community and exchanged information, including ideas about sewing and quilting.2 It is clear that Gee’s Bend quilters were neither insular visionaries pursuing idiosyncratic personal paths, nor were they simply the skilled passers-on of traditional forms. Instead, they were like other artists of their time, adept, committed practitioners engaged in a measured and ongoing aesthetic give-and-take. The quilts of Gee’s Bend are quite unlike the quilts we are used to seeing – either the traditional or contemporary high-end ones, or the homey items readily available in stores or yard sales. Bold and declarative in design, material and format, they looked perfectly at ease on the Whitney’s tall, white walls. While it is possible to understand the Gee’s Bend quilts in the context of vernacular art, outsider art or craft, they are more than that. Their innovative power, combined with the restraints imposed by material, time and a compressed local tradition, argue for their examination as culturally informed and emotionally formal objects. To do so might seem like treading on dangerous ground. The history of twentieth century art is rife with attempts to rev up the contemporary and cosmopolitan with the raw power of the art of Africa, Oceania or the Americas, to infuse sophisticated studio products with the artlessness of children or the skewed sensibilities of the insane. In this way, ‘high art’ can be bolstered by the art of the Other and the transaction rendered morally frictionless by decontextualization in the ostensibly neutral space of a museum or gallery. The classic example of this was the 1984 exhibition ‘Primitivism in TwentiethCentury Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’ at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The polemics occasioned by that show, most notably Thomas McEvilley’s article ‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief ’ (Artforum, November 1984), made the art world considerably more aware of its ethnocentrism. It seems, as if to compensate for past errors, that we moved in the other direction  – towards an over-contextualization (marked by the proliferation of wall text and supplementary material) that serves to cocoon the objects in question and can, in its own way, be every bit as condescending. I am scarcely advocating cultural insensitivity, but rather noting that too much stage-setting and explanation can reinforce the dichotomy of centrality and marginality.

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Things, however, may have changed again, and this exhibition can be seen as one element of an expanded frame of reference for both the making and viewing of art. The art we look at now comes from far more places physically, conceptually and emotionally than it did before. This decentralization, evident in the diversity of image-based art, applies to abstraction as well; for abstraction, by virtue of its looser mimetic anchoring to the world around it, is particularly able to cast itself in a variety of forms, to entertain multiple readings. The Gee’s Bend quilts are exemplars of that broadened approach to abstraction. Their allusive complexity – their scale, their reference to the body, to physical work, to social structures and to the land – greatly enriches our perception of them. But there is something else. The quilts are remarkably powerful and compelling visual statements. They declare themselves viscerally, directly. I believe that they are entitled, every bit as much as a Frank Stella or a Kenneth Noland painting of that period, to lay claim to an unfettered optical reading as well, in other words, to participate fully in the aesthetics of modernism. One of the things that makes ordinary quilts so likeable is the way that they typically frame a wealth of detail in smallish, repeating patterns. You can look at a part of them and easily deduce the whole. There may be some framing devices, but essentially the pattern could repeat endlessly. The Gee’s Bend quilts don’t do that. They are bounded, unique and rarely symmetrical. Even when symmetry is there, it is given savvy, destabilizing push. In Gloria Hoppins’ Housetop pattern quilt (c. 1975), for example, she inserts one thin vertical red stripe on the lefthand side of the orange center portion of a set of off-kilter nestled squares.3 That stripe snaps the quilt into place, as does the dark vertical denim band balanced by three smaller, similarly colored edge pieces in Lorraine Pettway’s light grey medallion patterned quilt of 1974. Identified by three alternate pattern names, Loretta Pettway’s Log Cabin – Courthouse Steps – Bricklayer (c. 1970) juxtaposes a stepped series of vertical dark blue pieces edged in white with similarly sized light blue pieces on the horizontal. The pieces get smaller as they approach the center, creating the look of one-point perspective. The however, warp, and their thickness is never uniform. So instead of being locked-in and static, the composition opens up and moves. It displays the wit and whimsical variation of a Paul Klee architectural fantasy, with logic used, paradoxically, to subvert order. It is almost as if symmetry in the Gee’s Bend quilts is a condition established precisely so that it may be creatively violated. If symmetry is important in traditional quilts, a more or less evenly weighted display or detail seems equally essential. Detail in the Gee’s Bend quilts functions differently. Rather than being the substance of the quilt, it is, more often than not,

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an accent, a fillip or a formal destabilizer. Simple vertical and horizontal forms tend to predominate, and since quilting is an additive process, a reasonably straightforward design can be given piquancy and personality by sewing in something small and unexpected. In Arlonzia Pettway’s Lazy Gal (Bars) (c. 1975), a motif of bold green and white vertical stripes is bordered at the top and bottom by just a hint of a delicate floral pattern. The change in formal and emotional scale is finely calibrated and tremendously satisfying. Irene Williams’ Bars (c. 1965) features a composition of four thick vertical bars in solid cream and black, topped with a similarly sized horizontal in deep blue-green This architectonic structure is offset by a flower-patterned border on both sides and the bottom. It is, however, the narrow top border that gives the quilt its kick. The right-hand half of the border is the same blue-green as the horizontal bar directly below it, while the lefthand half is divided into three sections – grey and cream, a small light-blue grid and a slice of vibrant red completely out of chromatic character with the rest of the quilt. That foot or so of crimson makes the quilt. It’s a formal move that incorporates a sure sense of scale with a use of off-complementaries worthy of Josef Albers. Simple, forceful design, unencumbered by fussiness, is a hallmark of the Gee’s Bend quilts. The quilts speak of a work ethic, not a ‘make-work’ one. Quilting was often a social activity, particularly during the labor-intensive stage of sewing the designed front onto the backing and thus sandwiching in the cotton filler. But it was not a hobby, a way of whiling away the hours. The women quilters were vital parts of a barely self-sustaining agricultural society, and their labor was needed in the fields during the day. The field work was tiring, and there were household duties on top of that – chores not assisted by the time- and labor-saving devices so common in the rest of American society. One reason for the quilts’ relative simplicity is purely practical: the quilters wanted to finish them reasonably quickly so that they could be used for their intended purpose – to keep warm. Gee’s Bend was a very poor community that could ill afford luxuries like storebought blankets and bed coverings. Even if, like Loretta Pettway, one of the most talented of the Gee’s Bend quilters, you didn’t like to sew, there wasn’t much choice in the matter. As she said, ‘I had a lot of work to do. Feed hogs, work in the field, take care of my handicapped brother. Had to go to the field. Had to walk about fifty miles in the field every day. Get home too tired to do no sewing. My grandmama, Prissy Pettway, told me, “You better make quilts. You going to need them.” I said, “I ain’t going to need no quilts”, but when I got me a house, a raggly old house, then I needed them to keep warm.’4 The Gee’s Bend quilts embody a moral as well as a formal economy. In contrast to the larger culture of obsolescence, waste and disposability, in Gee’s Bend

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nothing usable was thrown away (although not everything was worn; some polyester leisure suits sent down from the north were so out of style that they could only be recycled into bedding). Scraps of cloth were saved up for quilting – any sort of cotton, corduroy, knit or synthetic fabric was fine. Clothing was worn until it was worn out, and then ripped up into quilt material rather than being discarded. Used clothing is scarcely a neutral art material. Not only does it embrace a range of social signs, but it can also carry the physical imprint of the wearer, the trace of his or her body. We could see the pressure of elbows and knees, feel the stretch of fabric under the neatly applied patches. Denim clothing shows this to particular advantage, and some of the most emotionally affecting quilts were made from sun- and wash-faded work clothes. Missouri Pettway’s daughter, Arlonzia, spoke of her late mother’s quilt, a blue, white, reddish-brown and grey block-and-strip design made in 1942. ‘It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, “I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.’ ”5 In these work-clothes quilts the quietness of the colors – blues, grays, creams, browns – allows for an extremely subtle interplay of hue and value, and also for the counterpoint of darker passages: sewn-on patches, the unfaded area under removed pants pockets, or seams that had, prior to ripping, been unexposed. The clothes, by virtue of their hard use, were sometimes stained with earth, rust and sweat. That discoloration, rather than diminishing the power of the quilts, gives them a psychic and emotional patina. This can be clearly seen in Rachel Carey George’s quilt from around 1935, made of denim, wool trousers, mattress ticking and cotton. In it, a large horizontal rectangle of stained blue-and-white ticking is contrasted with wide strips of oval-patched pants legs and another large rectangle of white-stitched grey wool. The staining of the mattress ticking is echoed by similar brown areas in other parts of the quilt, particularly in the pants legs. The sense of time’s passage, of difficulties endured and overcome, is palpable. Something similar can be felt in Loretta Pettways Lazy Gal (Bars), (c. 1905). One of the seemingly simplest works on view, it consists solely of vertical bars. There is a border on the left and right of dark navy (edged with a hint of pattern), a field of quiet blue-violet, and left of center, two equal-sized white bands. Measuring a bit under seven by six feet, this quilt cannot help recalling, for today’s viewer, Barnett Newman’s paintings. As with Newman, it carries with it the air of the spiritual. Indeed, the current of faith runs deep in Gee’s Bend, and while the quilts are not part of a specific spiritual practice in their making or

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their iconography, it is not unreasonable to assume that the effects of such a religiously inflected life are to be seen in the community’s art. Probably the most viscerally powerful work-clothes quilt in the show is Lutisha Petway’s Bars (c. 1950). Composed entirely of faded and patched denim pant legs laid out in vertical bands, the heavy quilt sags, bends and buckles. Edging it on the right are a pair of pants legs, wide at the waist and narrow at the ankles. They are sewn together at the small ends, and their symmetrical mirroring gives the right edge a sharp bow inwards, in clear contrast to the relatively straight bottom, top, and left sides. While other quilts use cut-up clothing in small enough pieces so that we are often forced to infer its original use, this quilt uses pants legs in virtually their entirety, and as such, the sense of the body underneath the clothing remains particularly strong. Color, too, makes a major contribution – its monochrome quality adding purposefulness, consistency and intensity. Denim, while heavy and hard to work with, brings with it a coloristic bonus. Its fading creates a wide variety of blues, from deep indigo to the palest pinked azure, a color range naturally suggestive of sky and atmosphere. That property is used to marvelous effect in a 1976 work by Annie Mae Young, an artist whose originality and compositional bravado stand out in this remarkably talented group. The quilt floats a central vertically striped portion against a field of variously faded denim bars. The striped area is divided in half horizontally. The top portion alternates red and yellow stripes, the bottom red and brown. The two sections don’t quite match up – the stripes are of different widths and are drawn (there is no other word for it) with a loose, expressive line. The center striped section has an emblematic, flaglike quality that seems both to embed the stripes in the atmospheric blue field and suspend them above it. One gets the sense of a flag or a heraldic banner in Young’s 1975 corduroy quilt as well. This large horizontally displayed piece, a bit under eight by nine feet, is one of the high points of the exhibition. A series of thin horizontal stripes – alternating red and brown on the top half, reds, browns, greens, blues and oranges on the bottom half – marks off the right-hand quarter of the quilt. On the left edge is a thin column of vertical multicolored stripes divided roughly into thirds horizontally. The remainder, approximately two-thirds of the area of the entire quilt, is an astonishingly rich cerulean. Composed of horizontal strips of closely valued fabric, this section allows for a complex visual interplay between its subtlety and the boldness of the stripes flanking it, and also for an interchange between the horizontality and verticality of the two striped sections. Words can hardly do justice to the sophisticated and satisfying play of visual elements – the

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way the same blue as the center sneaks into the stripes on the sides, or how the heft of the horizontally striped area perfectly balances the narrower verticals or why the alternating of red and brown stripes on the upper portion of the right hand section puts just the right amount of weight and pressure on the slightly thinner multicolored stripes below them. The use of corduroy by Young and a number of other Gee’s Benders is a study in fortuity. In 1972, Sears, Roebuck and Company contracted with the local quilting cooperative to produce low priced corduroy pillow shams. They sent down bolts of the material, and while the shams were mechanical piecework, the corduroy was soon incorporated into the area’s quilt making style. Corduroy has real limitations – it works best when cut at right angles; it tends to pull, distort and fray when cut on the diagonal. These constraints are offset by the cloth’s rich color, sensual light-reflecting qualities and softness. In practical terms, the material was virtually free, and it was very warm. The fabric posed challenges, but art often thrives when the variables are reduced. In any case, boldness of design and rectilinearity are characteristics of the Gee’s Bend quilts; and for some quilters, corduroy called forth their best efforts. China Pettway’s block quilt (c. 1975), for example, is Bauhausian in its asymmetrical simplicity and elegance. There are only six color areas, each in a rich but muted earth tone. Small and large, vertical and horizontal, dark and light are blended in a composition, classical in its form and balance. Arcola Pettway’s Lazy Gal (Bars) variation from 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, has the rough composition of an American flag, with 13 more or less equal horizontal stripes and a small square area in the upper left where the stars go – except in this case the ‘stars’ are three additional vertical stripes, and the colors, instead of red, white and blue, are apple green, tan, corn yellow, rusty brown, slate blue, crimson and orange red. Color and form work together to artfully undermine expectations, and the quilt is both delightful and moving. The Gee’s Bend quilts are so evocative, so emotionally and aesthetically fulfilling, as well as so individual, that it feels unfair not to mention more artists and describe more quilts. Fortunately, many more people around the country will now get the chance to see them. The exhibition was to have stopped with the Whitney, but it has generated such a groundswell of interest that eight other museums have signed on to take the show, and it will travel for three years. This seems like the perfect moment for this exhibition, even though Gee’s Bend has been known to the wider art world for decades. Interest in the quilts over the years has been sporadic – there was a spike in New York in the late ’60s, and in 1967 an appreciative Lee Krasner visited Gee’s Bend with her dealer and bought

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a number of them. This was the time, too, when artists were entranced by Navajo blankets. These enthusiasms faded, quite possibly because quilts and blankets, although resembling the art being made then, shared few of its stated premises. Now, however, the Gee’s Bend quilts have a deeper connection to current concerns. They speak to the widening base of art production, as well as to an interest in ethnicity and identity. This interest seems to thrive in the exploration of the territory which lies between cultural sign and individuality, that is, between the more easily chartable products of a bounded group identity and the openended activities of the individual. The quilts are very much of a time, place, gender and ethnic group; but they are also intensely personal and inventive. Patterns are often not used at all, or when they are, they are freely adapted to the artist’s own interests and history. There is also an interest, these days, in the use of non-traditional materials in abstraction. This often leads to an investigation of the inherent threedimensionality of ‘flat’ work. A Gee’s Bend quilt is not, as is a stretched rectangular canvas, a historically given depictive arena that also happens to be made of cloth and whose materiality might be tacitly acknowledged by, for example, staining the canvas. A quilt is both an image and a constructed, pliable physical object. The shape of the quilt  – the irregularity of its edge and the waviness of its surface  – is a natural product of its making, and its use creates an inherent ambiguity of orientation. Its two-dimensionality is also conditional since it can just as easily be flat or draped. Another artistic concern today is layering. Multiplicity of purpose and form is a given in these quilts. Not only are they, at heart, assemblages (with all the complexity of facture and reference that implies), but the rhythmic, patterned stitching or the gridded yarn ties that hold the front to the back are aspects of the quilt that function semi-independently. Frequently done by more than one person, the stitching sets up a quiet but complex counterpoint to the larger design. Finally, the growing interest in craftlike methodologies among artists also speaks to the lessened authority of the brush. No longer valorized as an extension of the artist’s persona, a guarantor of painterly, gestural (and often male) authenticity, it has become another tool, an option in a wide menu of artmaking procedures. Piecing and stitching have proven to be as sensitive, energetic and direct a means of expression as the most adept brushwork. Painting in general, and abstract painting in particular, seems to have lost its centrality. That does not mean that the two-dimensional abstract object has surrendered its power or allure. Imbued with art-historical reference, inherently metaphorical and capable of great focus it still exerts a strong pull on our

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imaginations. If great art can be found in this arena today, the question becomes, why shouldn’t it be in the form of a quilt and, more specifically, why not these quilts? I found myself unexpectedly moved and excited by this exhibition, and that feeling has been shared by many others. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” has turned out, rather surprisingly, to be one of the most talked about shows in recent years. I expect and hope that its influence will be deep and long-lasting. Art in America, October 2003

Notes and References 1 In terms of influences, it has been noted that there are certain similarities between the Gee’s Bend quilts and West and Central African textiles, but given the lack of historical evidence, this connection can only be speculative. 2 A double CD of gospel music recorded in Gee’s Bend in 1941 and 2002, How We Got Over: The Sacred Songs of Gee’s Bend, is available in conjunction with the show. A number of quilters in the exhibition sing on these CDs. 3 It should be noted that indications of vertical or horizontal refer to the orientation of the quilts as displayed. Since they were intended as bed coverings, not wall hangings, distinctions between left and right and up and down are somewhat arbitrary. 4 From the exhibition catalogue, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (Atlanta and Houston: Tinwood Books in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2002) 72. 5 Ibid., 67.

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Excerpts from Imagining the Present: Context, Content and the Role of the Critic

Lawrence Alloway was born in London in 1923 and died in New York in 1990. Assistant, then Deputy Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London from 1954 to 1960, he left England, where he was considered to be the most influential young critic and curator, and took up permanent residence in the United States in 1961. From 1962 to 1966 he was Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He taught at Bennington College, Columbia University, the School of Visual Arts, and other institutions, and was a Professor in the Department of Art at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1968 to 1981. Over the years he held editorial positions at various journals, most importantly at Artforum in the 1970’s  – a notably lively period in the magazine’s history. But Alloway was, above all, an art critic, a vocation he took very seriously, and about which he gave much thought. His writing appeared in a variety of publications – from major art magazines like Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Arts, and Art International; to the politically-flavored weekly, The Nation, where he was the magazine’s art critic from 1968–1981; to a host of small art and literary magazines, specialty journals (Product Design Engineering, for example); and wider circulation general interest publications. In the years since his death, his work has unfortunately become harder to find  – his books are no longer in print, and the few essays that are currently anthologized deal, for the most part, with the early manifestations of Pop Art. Alloway’s identification with Pop Art is certainly a valid one: it was he, after all, who named it – its first use was in “The Arts and the Mass Media,” an essay published in England in 1958. His artistic and cultural interests, however, were much broader. One of the earliest and most vocal proponents of American Abstract Expressionism in Britain – particularly of the Newman, Rothko, Still, and Pollock wing of the movement  – he supported the efforts of the young

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British abstract painters and sculptors of the day, and carried his enthusiasm over to the United States, where, under his tenure at the Guggenheim, a number of important shows of abstraction  – both European and American  – were organized, with perhaps the most influential being the 1966 exhibition, “Systemic Painting.” While Alloway was a functioning member of the critical establishment, he did not just go about his work with his eyes shut, as it were. He examined with thoroughness and care the distribution of information and power in the artworld, and the semiotics of cultural institutions – the museums, galleries, international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, as well as the world of art magazines and critical journals. Alloway’s primary goal was the search for meaning in art, and for him, that meaning was to be found as much in art’s context as it was in its formal content. A predilection for cultural analysis showed itself early on his writings. Starting in the mid-’50s, he wrote prescient pieces about the interactions of the fine arts with commercial art, science fiction, cybernetics, film, the mass media, and urban structures. Alloway clearly aimed for an expanded critical approach to the arts. This wideness of reach was a result of both conscious intention – the social, political, and aesthetic rationale for his broadened view is clearly and repeatedly articulated in these essays – and the turns of a career that spanned some thirty-five years and which forced him, as was very much his desire, to make sense of a continually evolving present. While he was capable of finely nuanced historical and formal critique, an ability particularly evident in his writings on Newman and Pollock, he was deeply opposed to any exclusionary ethos, no matter how intellectually or politically appealing. He reserved, over the years, a special enmity for aestheticism and formalism in their various manifestations: he disapproved of the literary criticism of T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom for much the same reasons as he did the art criticism of Whistler, Fry, and Greenberg. Clement Greenberg was a key figure in Alloway’s critical world, and Alloway was one of the earliest art writers in Britain to seriously consider his ideas. He knew and liked Greenberg. He respected him, especially in the late ’50s and early ’60s, for his visual discrimination and analytical ability. But Alloway felt, and he expressed this opinion on numerous occasions, that Greenberg’s approach isolated art, setting it at the top of a pyramid of taste and value, rather than allowing it to find its place in a more complex and viable cultural continuum – to function in and with the world. For him, Greenberg’s methods smacked of a belief in fixed opinions, universal principles, aura, and artistic purity; all of which Alloway thought vitiated not just the power of art to

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affect the world around it, but limited the critic’s ability to interpret the work of art accurately and fully. Fixed ideas, philosophical, aesthetic, or political, were of little interest to Alloway, especially when they required the art they purported to explain to be molded to fit a preconceived form, or for that art to be rejected or deemed a failure if it did not properly correspond to theoretical expectations. For Alloway, to understand a work of art one had to explore its iconography, its complex levels of reference and display, as well as its formal architecture. To avoid what a work of art was saying in favor of how it was saying it or to overemphasize “. . . the syntactics of art at the expense of its semantics”1 was to deprive art, and especially abstract art  – realistic art had a natural iconographic bent  – of its richness and its place in the wider visual culture. But while Alloway did not see iconographical and object-oriented readings as mutually exclusive, neither did he see them as naturally supportive. Art could mean many things at once, and conceptual consistency was not required in either art’s creation or interpretation. Instead, the construction of meaning was an ongoing and active affair. The work of art, both in its internal structure and its relations with its viewers, existed in a state of antagonistic cooperation, a creative jostling that echoed the dynamics of the real, not the utopian, world. This sort of clear-eyed assessment marked Alloway’s criticism from the beginning. He was disdainful or dismissive of anything that felt like cozy amateurism, snobbery, angry young man whining, tweedy pastoral yearnings, or donnish aestheticizing. American culture, noisy, vital and grounded in popular experience seemed to Alloway to be the proper antidote to a wan yet arrogant Britain. What was important for Alloway early on was that British art, and by extension British culture, be liberated from established aesthetic norms, and from that cultural elite which set and monitored them. America provided a model, and Alloway didn’t care if his aggressively pro-American stand alienated his countrymen. This cheeky attitude certainly indicated cultural disaffection, but it was not couched in cynical or nihilistic terms. A powerful strain of optimism ran through Britain during those crucial postwar years, and throughout his career Alloway’s critical thinking stayed intellectually and emotionally grounded in it. He spoke with confidence for a generation of British artists and critics trying to come to grips with a world that presented a host of cultural and aesthetic challenges – a world that seemed to require a different set of models both for creating new work and for dealing with the art of the past. Alloway, through his position at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), as well as in his critical activities, was in touch with the range of new art in Britain. He was not a partisan of any particular

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style: as long as the work was well-done, transgressive, and suitably professional, he could support it. Alloway’s involvement in the “Situation” show of 1960 – surely one of most influential large-scale exhibitions of British abstract painting in the postwar years – illustrated both his commitment to abstract painting and the wideness of his taste. While differing in their stylistic approach, what the young British artists in “Situation” had in common – at least in Alloway’s view – was their indebtedness to American painting. While American painting may have provided a model for British abstract painting, it was the broader range of American popular culture – its movies, cars, music, and advertising; its plethora of consumer goods and its charged urban life – that either excited or angered those involved in the arts in Britain. This fascination with what appeared to be a virtually unlimited vein of source material  – as opposed to an engagement with an admired painting style  – contributed to the development of British pop in its many manifestations, and created a body of painting, sculpture, film, music, and design that was original and innovative. As might be expected, American culture was scarcely welcomed across the board in Britain. Its pragmatism, assertiveness, and ostensible vulgarity went against not only accepted notions of British reserve and subtlety, but also against a widely held belief in the superiority of French visual culture. The reactions against American culture could be vehement, but their effect was, as Dick Hebdige noted, “to produce an ‘America’ which could function for British pop artists in the fifties (as the unconscious had for the surrealists in the thirties and forties) as a repressed, potentially fertile realm invoked against the grain.”2 America was, of course, a construct for these artists and critics  – they approached it not as a subject for critique or deeper understanding, but rather as a comprehensible anti-Britain, a template for the future. The admirable social mobility of America was but one facet of a culture of permeable boundaries, of loosely drawn categories. These boundaries could be semiotic, aesthetic, or physical. Industrial standardization and the growth in communications facilitated a democratic spread of information and in the process blurred the distinction between places – one locale could slide easily into another. Alloway writes appreciatively after a 1958 trip to the US (well before Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas) of the jazzy environment of Times Square and other downtown commercial areas, and of that environment’s extension and replication throughout the country. He speaks of the “lighted street which runs across America. It starts in New York, runs with only marginal differentiation across the continent for 3,000 miles, and ends in

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San Francisco’s Market Street.”3 Not surprisingly, Alloway was taken with Los Angeles, seeing it as an exemplar of “the symbol-thick environment of American cities and highways,”4 with its car culture, mass communications, open architecture, and the sort of low density building that creates “diffuse suburban space with metropolitan occupants.”5 If America’s demotic culture was dynamic, mobile and dispersed, then elements of it could be picked out and used as one wished. There was no need to see the larger picture. These stripped-down, portable elements, by being divorced from their culturally complex and ambiguous settings, functioned all the more effectively as signs, and when placed in disjunctive combinations, became the generators of appealingly jangly modern metaphors. America was the prime source of frictionless but highly evocative popular culture motifs, usable in Britain by industry and the media, as well as by artists and designers. Thomas Crow, in discussing the social reading of a 1952 proposal for a housing project by the architectural team of Alison and Peter Smithson, notes that their perspectival drawing contains a collaged photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and her husband, Joe DiMaggio. While a representation of Marilyn Monroe in something like an architectural plan now would suggest a Pop Art that we are familiar with, it is important to note that Alloway’s term, Pop Art, referred initially to the visual manifestations and artifacts of popular culture rather than to the fine art that was based on them. For Pop Art, as we now know it, to have evolved, popular culture had to be recognized, examined and intellectually validated. Alloway’s involvement with that culture was based partially on his own predilections – he was a lifelong film fan and an avid reader of science fiction and comic books – and partially on the interests of his circle of friends and colleagues. Alloway was a member of the Independent Group, an informal association of restive artists, critics, architects, and others based at the ICA in the early and mid-’50s. Others in the group were the Smithsons, the architectural historian, Reyner Banham, who would, some years later, turn his attentions to the analysis of Los Angeles, and the artists Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, and Richard Hamilton. Brian Wallis says of the Independent Group, “From the start it was conceived of as a rather informal seminar or study group in which the members could meet to discuss issues of relevance to contemporary art and culture. As a result, the formation of the ideas and positions of the group emerged as part of a dialectical process, rather than in the assertion of position papers or manifestoes. . .The discourse engaged in by the group is as important as the artworks they produced and is of critical importance for understanding their contribution to cultural studies.”6

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The Independent Group focused on the cultural impact of science and technology, and increasingly, on the semiotics of popular culture. The lectures and exhibitions organized by members of the group were visually complex and overloaded with information – mixing categories, scales, and references into an approximation of the clangorous life of the contemporary (or even the future) world. Among the most important of these were Paolozzi’s 1952 lecture cum demonstration, “Bunk,” in which he overwhelmed his audience with a flood of projected images of American popular culture; the 1953 exhibition at the ICA, “Parallel of Art and Life,” arranged by Eduardo Paolozzi, the Smithsons, and Nigel Henderson  – a compendium of primitive art, children’s drawings, hieroglyphs, photographs of paintings (Picasso, Kandinsky and Dubuffet), as well as scientific and press photos, all attached at odd angles from walls, ceilings, and the floor; and Richard Hamilton’s 1955 exhibition, also at the ICA, titled “Man, Machine and Motion.”7 But perhaps the high point in the group’s history was their participation in the 1956 “This is Tomorrow” exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery8 The exhibition was designed to show the collaborative efforts of three or four person design teams of painters, sculptors and architects. There were a dozen constructed environments, but the one that made the biggest splash was the effort of Hamilton, John McHale, and the architect, John Voelcke. Alloway (who was a member of one of the other collaborative teams) describes it as “a piece of funfair architecture: false perspective, soft floor, and black light within; the exterior covered with quotations from popular culture, including Marilyn Monroe, a giant beer bottle, a seventeen-foot-high cut-out robot with a girl from a movie marquee advertising Forbidden Planet.”9 The catalogue included Hamilton’s famous and iconographically provocative collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? – a work that has appeared in virtually every account of Pop Art since. Alloway’s interest in technology showed itself early on in his critical career. He came to intellectual maturity in England during a time of intense rebuilding following the devastation of wartime bombing. To be part, in one way or another, of the reconstruction of the modern urban fabric – and in London this work lasted quite some time – challenged and stimulated a wide range of planners, architects, designers, artists, critics, and thinkers. Their responses could be practical, or like the architectural collaborative, Archigram, with its plans for wearable housing, stackable, plug-in cities, and walking buildings, purely visionary. The Independent Group’s intellectual involvement with technological issues was not happening in a vacuum. Investment, both in Europe and the

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United States, in domestic infrastructure after the stagnation of the Depression and the military focus of the war years, served to satisfy and stimulate the public’s long-frustrated desire for consumer goods and services. Technology was seen as the means by which these products were to be developed, delivered, and, not unimportantly, protected from covetous Cold War adversaries. Alloway was certainly pro-technology, but he and others in the Independent Group were less concerned with extolling the products and benefits of technology than they were in trying to formulate its iconography; in other words, what did technology mean to society and how was it represented? Technology wears its history lightly, with the technological past expressing itself, for the most part, as an amalgam of obsolescence and quaintness. Detached from history, technology functions instead as a measure of the present and a harbinger of the future – and makes a suitable field of interest for a critic wary of being circumscribed by a cultural establishment with an institutional lock on the past. Technology’s logic creates a steady ground tone over which a discursive sensibility, like Alloway’s, can play. In his 1956 article “The Robot & the Arts,” for example, Alloway can jump from Karel Capek (the Czech writer who coined the term), to the film, Forbidden Planet and its character, Robby the Robot, and onward to Frankenstein, Rococo clockwork automatons, toys, comic books, Fernand Léger, Wyndham Lewis, Constructivism, the scholarly publications of the Warburg Institute, and thoughts on the robot as helper, monster, and sexual being. The representation of technology is elastic: what it resists is easy categorization . . .

Notes and References 1 Alloway, “Anthropology and Art Criticism.” Arts Magazine, New York, vol 45, no. 4 (February, 1971) p. 22. 2 Dick Hebdige, “In Poor Taste: Notes on Pop,” in Modern Dreams: the Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop (New York: Institute for Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988) p. 81. 3 Alloway “City Notes.” Architectural Design, London, vol. 29, no. 1 (January, 1959) p. 35. 4 18. Ibid. pp. 34–35. 5 Ibid. p. 35. 6 Brian Wallis, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: the Independent Group and Popular Culture,” in Modern Dreams: the Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop, p. 10. 7 Favorite books of the group were Ozenfant’s Foundations of Modern Art, Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, and Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion; less for the texts, which were thought rather cliched, than for the illustrations, which were

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abundant and free-ranging, capturing, they believed, the vivid imagery and visual explosion of the twentieth century. 8 Strictly speaking the group had broken up by this time, but strong personal and professional affinities still remained. 9 Alloway, “The Development of British Pop,” p. 40. Routledge, 2006

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Ab-Ex Confidential: The Way They Were

The three books under review, if metaphorically held up to the light, would project a well-rounded picture of the New York artworld of the 1940s and ’50s, encompassing both the advent and the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. In some ways, these volumes present conflicting accounts; in other ways, they are complementary—something to be expected from the writings of people who knew each other (in the case of Motherwell and Rothko, very well) over many years and who moved, if not in the same circles, then in overlapping ones. Philip Pavia, the least familiar of the three artist-writers, died in 2005 at age 94. He was a versatile sculptor who worked both abstractly and figuratively in stone, terracotta and metal. Pavia was best known for his classically flavored stacked marble pieces and his forceful geometrically based metal work, particularly the four-part Ides of March, which stood on Sixth Avenue for some 40 years. He exhibited right to the end, and his final OK Harris show of terracotta heads, executed in 2003 and 2004, was well received. In addition to making art, Pavia played a founding role in the Club, the preeminent artists’ organization of the late ’40s to the mid-’50s. Virtually all the artists, critics and dealers connected with Abstract Expressionism showed up at one point or another at the loft at 39 E. 8th Street. Some, like Willem de Kooning, came almost every day to argue (which the Abstract Expressionists did incessantly), drink, dance or attend the twice-weekly panels. After he stopped being active in the Club in 1955, Pavia edited and published the influential It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art. The periodical was a showcase for Abstract Expressionism, featuring numerous reproductions of paintings and sculptures and a full range of polemical artists’ statements, Pavia’s own fervent pronouncements foremost among them. Pavia long intended to write a book on the Club and obsessively arranged and rearranged relevant journal entries and notes for some 20 years. Club Without Walls, which also includes a few previously published pieces and interviews, was compiled by his wife, painter Natalie Edgar, in consultation with the artist. 89

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Pavia’s journals concentrate in detail on the Club’s activities and structure. The compendium contains several reproductions of multiply revised, handwritten membership lists complete with addresses, mostly in Greenwich Village (Franz Kline lived at 52 E. 9th Street and de Kooning a block up at 88 E. 10th), along with a catalogue of the subject and composition of every Club panel between 1950 and 1955. One of the most interesting (and heated) issues that came up in numerous formal discussions was what name, if any, the members might apply to their movement. The artists were split, roughly, between the Abstractionists, like Ad Reinhardt, and the Expressionists, like de Kooning. The term Abstract Expressionism was decided on as a compromise, although nobody really wanted it because, as Pavia says, “It was always half wrong.” The journals also detail the war years and those immediately following. Before they had the Club, New York’s avant-garde artists spent much of their non-studio time at the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue quarreling and expounding on favorite themes. Pavia gives us the pecking order and seating arrangements of the various tables as well as the outlying areas. (Gorky, for example, would never come in; he would walk by the window with his two wolfhounds and wave.) The regulars would also stroll around the neighborhood on various set routes—Pavia calls his the Gulf Stream—and stop for further talk in Washington Square Park. While the conversations on art and culture were animated and deeply fulfilling, the times were dark. Civilization was under attack, and a sense of peril and momentousness accounted in good measure for the utter seriousness with which Pavia and his colleagues approached their art. The American artists were not alone. The war had impelled many European artists and writers to seek refuge in the U.S., and the presence of a large contingent of French Surrealists and other European modernists on the New Yorkers’ home ground complicated things enormously. On this Pavia and Motherwell diverge. For Pavia and his friends, who were primarily (but not exclusively) on the gestural side of Abstract Expressionism, the Surrealists were a big problem. They were famous names—maybe not to the general public but certainly to the artists—and they carried a lot of artworld clout. If not for the war, how could artists in America rub elbows, albeit only occasionally, with the likes of André Breton or Max Ernst? But many of the Europeans couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English, and they attracted a coterie of American artists who then felt empowered to claim the mantle of the avant-garde for themselves, to the extreme annoyance of those left out. Of course some Europeans were completely welcome. Mondrian was idolized, and more respectful attention was paid to his mysticism and idealism than is the case now. Hans Hofmann was also a figure of great importance. His school on 8th Street

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became a laboratory for younger artists, and his concept of a pushed and pulled space influenced many. Pavia writes: It was not only an art school, but a citadel against the French and American Surrealist art network. It took years before we arrived at the conclusion that Hofmann gave us the moral fiber, in an indirect way, for the great confrontation with the brilliant and accomplished refugees and their art. Hofmann gave everyone fertilizer to help the seeds grow stronger. Ask Pollock, ask Lee Krasner, ask anybody—Hofmann was the unnamed hero of the emerging Abstract Expressionists.

For Motherwell, the coming of the Surrealists marked the beginning of his own life as an artist. Born in 1915 (which made him a good 10 years younger than most of the first generation Abstract Expressionists) and raised in California, the son of a prosperous banker, he was the valedictorian of his prep school class, went to Stanford and then on to graduate school in philosophy at Harvard. Later, after a year in France, he enrolled at Columbia to study art history under Meyer Schapiro. It was Schapiro who, sensitive to Motherwell’s artistic inclinations, introduced him to a number of the European émigré artists. Through them he met Matta, the young Chilean Surrealist, who in turn led him to William Baziotes. Baziotes was friends with Pollock, de Kooning and Hofmann, and Motherwell soon became involved with the new American artists, while retaining his ties with the Europeans. Pavia characterizes him this way: We all thought Motherwell was the chief avant-gardist. He made you feel that he was the chosen one. He was roundly hated by the Marxists and Trotskyites. It was pure aristocracy of the mind, as Delacroix would say, when he met a brainy Frenchman.

Motherwell, in contrast to those who felt that Abstract Expressionism was a completely American form, insisted on its international character and its French roots. In a 1950 College Art Association paper titled “The New York School” (marking the first public use of that name), Motherwell says: But I must make one generalization: I believe that the School of New York, like the other schools in what is vulgarly called modernistic art, has as its background of thought those fragments of theory, which, taken as a whole, we call the Symbolist aesthetic in French poetry, whose formulation reached a climax in France in the decade 1885–95.

Motherwell was both a graceful and incisive writer and a noted editor. He founded the Documents of Modern Art series (now called the Documents of

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Twentieth Century Art) and his The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, first published in 1951, remains an essential volume for anyone interested in the subject. His writings in the present collection have been culled from myriad sources—catalogues, book prefaces and introductions, lecture texts, magazine articles, reviews, artist’s statements and journal entries. Also included are some touching eulogies and a particularly interesting syllabus for a course titled the Artist and Modern Society, given in the fall semester of 1955 at New York’s Hunter College. The editors made a decision, I would assume for the sake of brevity, to select very little in the way of interviews or letters. Compared with the other Abstract Expressionists, who tended to be fairly rough-hewn, Motherwell was a highly cultivated man. His peers regarded him as well-educated, well-behaved and well-connected. He painted and taught. The history of the famous but short-lived school, called Subjects of the Artist, which he, along with Rothko, Baziotes, Barnett Newman and David Hare founded in 1948, is dealt with in all three books. But key to his eminence was that he wrote. Often called upon for critical commentary, he became the artist-theorist of the movement—something that did not sit entirely well with a number of his contemporaries, who saw his assumption of this role as arrogant and presumptuous. He had, however, a knack for close friendship, and his essays on Rothko, Bradley Walker Tomlin and especially David Smith are notable for their warmth of personal feeling. While sniped at, Motherwell seemed to be able avoid the fullscale feuds so relished by other Abstract Expressionists. For the cozy world of the Club, which Pavia so lovingly evokes, was full of nastiness, too. Newman sued Reinhardt for libel; Newman and Clyfford Still both wrote extremely mean-spirited letters to Sidney Janis, Rothko’s dealer, belittling their (soon to be ex-) friend; Reinhardt voted to deny Rothko tenure at Brooklyn College; Newman wept at a Club party given after his first solo show at Betty Parsons in 1950 because he thought that he was being made fun of (his fellow Club members, under the direction of Elaine de Kooning, leaned folding tables against the wall and ran “zips” of colored tape down the surfaces); de Kooning and Kline viciously baited Pollock; and Rothko cut off his best friend, the sculptor Herbert Ferber, because Ferber had left his wife—not long before Rothko left his own. And that’s just a small sample. If the artists were unkind to each other, they also extended such conduct to nonartists. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the person who seems to have attracted the greatest degree of loathing is the critic Clement Greenberg, who prompted Motherwell to make the only really negative remark in the 90 pieces reprinted here. He refers to Greenberg’s formalism as “an aesthetic detested by the Abstract

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Expressionists, for whom Greenberg arrogantly became a self-appointed and completely misleading spokesman.” Greenberg himself was no sweetheart. As James Breslin notes in Mark Rothko: A Biography (1993): Rothko was not the only painter-victim of Greenberg’s crushing pronouncements. “To be an artist is to be pompous,” [Greenberg] said. He was fond of the phrase, “as stupid as a painter,” and frequently lamented that “all artists are bores.” Rothko was “a clinical paranoid  . . . pompous and dumb,” Gottlieb “a pantspresser,” Kline “a bore,” Still “pretentious,” Newman “boring,” and de Kooning “tedious beyond belief.”

Feuding and arguing aside, the Abstract Expressionists from the beginning were unanimous in believing that they were on to something major. In a 1943 letter to New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell, Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb contend: It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.

Despite the fact that Reinhardt later mocked Rothko and Gottlieb by quoting them and writing in response, “There is no such thing as a good painting about something,” their statement points to something basic in the Abstract Expressionist credo. While subject matter might not be readily seen, it was nonetheless there—embodied in the deep structures, the subtle internal relations, the unspoken language of our collective and individual human experience. The goal was not merely well managed form but, indeed, profound content. Though it might seem a bit strange to us that work as patently beautiful as Rothko’s would be seen as unpalatable, that was what he and others felt. The current book includes a conversational article by John Fischer in which Rothko confides his thoughts regarding the canvases (now at the Tate) he had been commissioned to paint for the luxurious Four Seasons restaurant in New York: In fact, I’ve come to believe that no painting should ever be displayed in a public place. I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.

Or consider this passage from a 1956 interview with Selden Rodman: “You are an abstractionist to me,” [Rodman] said. “You’re a master of color harmonies and relationships on a monumental scale. Do you deny that?”

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The Changing Boundaries and Nature of the Modern Art World “I do. I’m not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else.” “Then what is it you’re expressing?” “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic emotions. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

A similar seriousness of purpose runs through Motherwell’s book, although it is lightened by polished writing and understated erudition. Rothko’s prose is heavier—considerably more polemical and solemn—except when he is writing letters to his friends or to a sympathetic curator like Katherine Kuh, who organized a Rothko exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. Many of the writings in this collection were never intended for publication, and so lack the smoother finish of edited work. They were private musings on art, and some of the most interesting (and surprising) ones were about art education for children, a topic that particularly engaged Rothko at the beginning of his artistic career. He may have been gruff, touchy, angry and suspicious (all of which were exacerbated by alcoholism and major depression), as well as notoriously finicky about how and where his paintings were hung, but he was a soulful guy (Motherwell comments on the enormous range of Rothko’s Yiddish “oy”) and a generous friend. His letters are fresh and delightful. He corresponded with, among others, Newman (their relationship did not survive Newman’s denunciation), with Clay Spohn, the California artist and teacher, with the poet Stanley Kunitz, and with Ferber (they patched things up, although not to the extent—most unfortunately, as it turned out—of Ferber being named as one of Rothko’s executors in his 1968 will, as he had been in 1959). Rothko’s letters, often written while he was traveling, are full of interest in and concern for his contemporaries. Although Rothko assiduously pursued the mythic, he nevertheless greatly relished gossip, continually asking his friends for the latest. A letter to Newman and his wife, Annalee, written from Rome on June 30, 1950, is typical. It begins: Day after day I have gone to the Express office certain that there would be a letter from Newmans. Ah perfidious ones! So I beg without delay you send us some news of what has really been going in both of you, about Clyff ’s show, Bradley’s, the irascibles and above all the inner and outer state of both of you. I beg you.

Rothko continues in this vein, and signs the letter with deepest love. There is a postscript congratulating the Newmans on their anniversary, and inquiring

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about Tony (Smith) and his wife, Jane. In addition to traveling in Europe, Rothko also secured a number of out-of-town teaching appointments. The sense I get from the letters is that he had a fine time when he was away but didn’t let it show. Instead, he made a habit of missing New York and then, when the job was finished, being flooded with nostalgia for the place he had just gladly left. While that might be a little neurotic, it’s certainly a common enough response, and it makes Rothko much more human and likable. History focuses things. As John Ashbery, a writer closely connected to the New York School, observes in his poem “Pyrography,” it gives coherent form to “not just the major events but the whole incredible/ Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off.” The New York-centered world of the Abstract Expressionists was a concentrated milieu, certainly compared to the dispersed artworld of today. The problem, I fear, is that our view of it will become even more condensed as time passes. It is the great virtue of these books to show an Abstract Expressionism that is both wide and deep. While Pavia adds to our appreciation of the major players, he gives equal time to lesser-known figures—good artists like Perle Fine, Conrad Marca-Relli, Milton Resnick, Jack Tworkov, Mercedes Matter and John Ferren, as well as influential but now largely forgotten painters such as Landes Lewitin and Aristodimos Kaldis. He pictures them in the round—assertive, argumentative, totally committed to their esthetic vision, and adamantly nondeferential to those fellow artists, such as Pollock and de Kooning, who would later command the attention of art history and reap the rewards of fame. The Rothko and Motherwell books, on the other hand, deepen our appreciation of artists who are already in the forefront of postwar art. Rothko said in a 1958 talk at Pratt Institute that “there is more power in telling little than in telling all,” and reading him today is like pulling aside a scrim to glimpse the man behind the work. Although some of Rothko’s writings have been available, notably The Artist’s Reality, a 1940–41 manuscript discovered accidentally in 1988 and published in 2004, he was thought to have written little. Writings on Art, the result of Spanish scholar Miguel López-Remiro’s dogged pursuit of both published and unpublished material, is a needed corrective. As for Motherwell, one can only be impressed by his accomplishment. For over 40 years, in addition to painting and teaching, he compiled a body of written work that is theoretical without being stuffy, historically informed, elegantly and engagingly written, and, above all, influential. His writing as well as his painting helped shape the perception of an art movement that only continues to grow in stature.

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Art in America, November 2007

Notes and References Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, edited by Natalie Edgar, New York, Midmarch Arts Press, 2007. The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2007. Writings on Art, by Mark Rothko, edited by Miguel López-Remiro, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006.

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Martín Ramírez: Narratives of Displacement and Memory Martín Ramírez’s marvelously expressive and formally inventive drawings of horseback riders, animals, landscapes, trains and tunnels, as well as the Madonna and other religious subjects, have been known to the art public since the 1970s. That was when Chicago artists Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, along with dealer Phyllis Kind, bought nearly 300 works (virtually all of Ramírez’s existing oeuvre) from Tarmo Pasto, a Finnish-American artist and psychology professor who had discovered Ramírez in a California mental hospital in the early 1950s. Ramírez’s drawings, with their complex yet orderly topographies measured out in cascades of meticulously rendered parallel lines, their vertiginous perspectives, their engaging recurrent themes, their beautiful facture and lush but low-keyed materiality, are immediately engaging. Although scarcely a household name, Ramírez has had his ardent supporters over the years. The American Folk Art Museum and its curator, Brooke Davis Anderson, have done a great service by presenting what is on all counts the most thorough exhibition to date of this extraordinary yet often misunderstood artist. Ramírez’s work has fallen under the general descriptive category of Outsider Art, and the consensus seems to be that he, Henry Darger (1892–1973) and Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) are the three greatest artists of this ilk. (There is fine line between Outsider Art and the many varieties of folk art and the art of the untutored. Ramírez, Darger and Wölfli are telling examples of artists who would seem to be classic Outsiders, if one judged them by their isolated circumstances and mental states.) Outsider Art, however, is a term with which I, like increasing numbers of other observers, have considerable difficulty, particularly when applied to artists like Ramírez. It is, I believe, a sloppy categorizing tool, and tends to be both patronizing and prescriptive. If you are an Outsider Artist then you are quite likely to be excluded from the normal channels of research, critique and analysis (although not of commerce). Rather, the meaning of your work resides in some kind of odd cul-de-sac. Cut off from anything other than simple 97

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biography and psychology, the work becomes an inexplicable expression of personal genius, of the untethered (and generally tormented) self given coherence only in the work of art. While this might be the man in the street’s perception of van Gogh, any beginning art history student knows that van Gogh, unhappy though he was, was thoroughly connected to the art of his time and must be seen in that context to be properly understood. This contextualizing is more difficult in the case of Ramírez but just as important. The American Folk Art Museum, however, has not only brought together approximately 100 of Ramírez’s drawings, but has managed to look at the artist’s work and life in new depth, and show how it was shaped by his social context. The exemplary catalogue and wall texts (from five different scholarly perspectives) bring the artist into much sharper focus than he had been in the past. There have been numbers of exhibitions of Ramírez’s work over the years (I first saw it many years ago at Kind’s New York gallery) but it has not been until recently that the facts of Ramírez’s life have been fully gathered and interpreted in relation to his times and origins. Much of this is due to the work of the sociologists Víctor and Kristin Espinosa, who have contributed considerably to this exhibition. Our esthetic and emotional connection to the work of a great artist (and I believe Ramírez is one) can be sustained in the absence of supporting material. But with Ramírez, it is easy to get fundamental things wrong and miss out on much of his art’s complexity and depth. Martín Ramírez was born in 1895 in Rincón de Velázquez, a small, rural farming and ranching community about forty miles east of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, and died in 1963 at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, Calif., in the northern part of the state, near Sacramento. He had been a mental patient since 1931, first at Stockton State Hospital, located in approximately the same area as DeWitt, and from 1948 until he died at DeWitt. Except for several early escapes, once committed he never lived outside of those two institutions, and spent nearly half his life categorized as a victim of incurable psychosis. The diagnoses varied over the years—manic-depression, catatonia, paranoid schizophrenia—but practically speaking the results were the same, incarceration and lack of real medical care for his psychiatric condition. As a long-term ward of the state mental health system, in the days before anti-psychotic drugs emptied out the large state hospitals, Ramírez fared no differently from thousands of other warehoused mental patients, except of course for his artistic brilliance. He never took art courses, nor, as the son of a poor sharecropper in Mexico, had he any formal education, although he did know the basics of reading and writing. From early on in his hospitalization he made drawings, but it wasn’t until he was

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transferred to DeWitt, a less crowded and more congenial institution, that his art flowered. Early reception of his work, promoted by Tarmo Pasto, who admired both the man and his art, centered around its status as “art of the insane.” Misconceptions abounded—about Ramírez’s age, his mental and physical condition (was he mute, for example?), and certainly the meaning of his art. Much of the interest in such art was well-intentioned and seems to have had at its base greater interest in psychology than in esthetics. Ramírez’s work led people in this direction. Rearing horses and serene Madonnas had an archetypal ring, and there was not much difficulty in seeing the trains he frequently drew as phallic and tunnels as vaginal or womblike, or his repeated linear patterns as evidence of compulsiveness and rigid thinking. Once his work began to circulate in the wider artworld the interpretation of it broadened, but it still tended to be viewed as something that operated in an isolated psychological-esthetic space. It was wonderful, to be sure, but more related to the sharply focused detaildependent work of other naïve artists than to a particular historical and cultural matrix. It would of course be wrong to downplay the work’s beauty and energy, or, I think, its formal sophistication. Ramírez’s mastery of linear rhythm, his controlled spatial warping, along with carefully constructed shading and a spare but powerful use of color, imbue his work with the draftsmanly dazzle of a Saul Steinberg or a Paul Klee—artists who knew how to tap into the essential economy and springiness of the cartoon’s line. This feel for line can be seen, for example, in Ramírez’s Untitled (Alamentosa), ca. 1953, which is nearly 7 feet high by 3 feet wide. There are two trains in the picture. The bottom one leaves a tunnel and runs downward in a chasm-like but straight-walled space that vertically bisects the lower two thirds of the drawing. In a witty and elegant touch, its locomotive contains the sole bit of color, a cherry red headlamp located on the drawing’s midline, a few inches from the bottom. The top third of the image houses a horizontally-oriented and rather large locomotive which emerges from one tunnel and is about to enter another, and hand-written block letters that runs across the entire top of the drawing that reads “Alamentosa.” The linear patterns that compose the bulk of the drawing are even more emphatic than the trains they frame. They suggest a series of regulated but dizzying three-dimensional spaces whose sense of depth is augmented by carefully applied shading—even the sign’s lettering is shaded. The essentially symmetrical composition is artfully destabilized by the upper train, which runs from right to left and is in turn counterbalanced by our left-to-right reading of the sign.

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Formal considerations aside—and all of the drawings warrant complex formal readings—our appreciation of Ramírez’s work is made even deeper by an understanding of its historical, cultural and emotional context. Of overwhelming importance in Ramírez’s life and art was something that he did not personally participate in, but that changed his life completely: the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico. Ramírez had married, fathered four children and managed to purchase a small ranch in his home area. It was a barely self-sustaining operation, but he had a pistol and a horse (which he loved), and a number of other animals. He and his family led a traditional rural life that was satisfying and emotionally rewarding. Ramírez came from a part of Jalisco that was proud of its Spanish heritage, and where the local Spanish people tended not to intermarry with the indigenous population. They were deeply religious and conservative in their beliefs, as was Ramírez. All would have been fine, except that his property was bought on credit, and it became clear that if things continued as they were he would never be able to pay off his loan. So in 1925, he took the path followed by so many of his countrymen, leaving his family and going north to the U.S. to make the money he could not earn in Mexico. He believed his absence would be temporary. Unfortunately, at the beginning of 1927 his family and his region became ensnared in the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29). This armed revolt by Catholic partisans—Cristeros, or soldiers of Christ—was directed at the federal government, which had aimed to break the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The federal government used extremely cruel and violent tactics against the population of areas thought to be sympathetic to the Cristeros. Persons suspected of aiding them were summarily executed, whole towns were evacuated, crops were torched and animals shot. Needless to say, the religious life of the people in the affected areas was upended. (The classic 1940 Graham Greene novel of faith tested, The Power and the Glory, was set in this period.) Ramírez’s property was destroyed, his brother Atanacio almost hanged, and, saddest of all, he completely misinterpreted a letter from the essentially illiterate Atanacio and thought that his wife had left her family, run off with a friend of his and joined the Federal army to fight against the Cristeros (a delusion he apparently could never fully shake). He vowed not to return to Mexico, and never did. Except for a visit by a nephew in 1952, he did not see his family again. During that visit he was asked if he would like to go back to his home. He replied that he would rather stay where he was. As if the sense of loss, upheaval and betrayal engendered by the Cristero Rebellion was not enough to unsettle Ramírez’s life and mind, the Great Depression soon followed. The uncertain status of Mexican immigrant workers, who had been

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needed but barely tolerated during the prosperous ‘20s, was rendered even more tenuous during the high unemployment years of the Depression. Ramírez worked on the railroads and in the mines of northern California from 1925 to 1930, but by the following year (the records are not entirely clear on the matter) it appears that he was unemployed, wandering, confused and incoherent. He was picked up by the San Joaquin county police and committed to Stockton State Hospital, where he began his long institutionalization. It is important to keep in mind that for Ramírez institutionalization, particularly at DeWitt, where he arrived 17 years later, was a complex experience. He was, to all intents and purposes, imprisoned. His sense of longing and loss, of dislocation and homesickness, was keen. On the other hand, DeWitt was his home, too. He was safe there, and something of a celebrity, with special privileges like his own desk. There were movies in the hospital theater as well as books and numerous magazines (which he could use for collages). Once his art began to get out in the world, he had visitors. Artists and art students were particularly drawn to him; the young Wayne Thiebaud, for example, spent many hours in his company watching him work. Tarmo Pasto, while he had his own agenda, was a great help, bringing him paper and art supplies, even though Ramírez liked to make his own large paper supports using odd scraps of paper glued together with oatmeal and his own saliva. Most important, while he was at DeWitt Ramírez could make art all the time. His circumstances were indeed straitened, but boundaries and limits can often produce great art. Even taking into account the effects of prolonged institutionalization, as well as the dubiousness of cultural norms for deciding what exactly constitutes insanity, the fact remains that Ramírez was scarcely an ordinary man. He clearly suffered from some form of mental illness. But it is entirely possible that he could more easily deal with cultural displacement and emotional loss at a distance, through art and memory. This did not make the loss any less real. In fact, having the time to imagine and re-imagine his experiences allowed for a sharpening of their depiction, an increase in both metaphorical subtlety and formal clarity. To fully appreciate Ramírez’s art it is necessary to take into account his connection to the wider world, not only to a recalled past and to his particular Mexican (and Mexican-American) cultural identity but also, through magazines and movies, to the American life around him. Trains and tunnels, for example, are frequent subjects. Rather than seeing them as something vaguely pathological welling up from the collective unconscious, might it not be more reasonable to view those trains and tunnels (which were necessary in the mountainous regions of both Mexico and California) as signs of travel and migration, markers of

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distance both literal and cultural? The train was the modern machine that brought him to the U.S., and that could but never would—except in his imagination—take him home to Mexico. In the days before air travel became popular and affordable, the railroad figured much more prominently in the culture, both symbolically and as a fact of everyday life. In Untitled (Man at Desk), ca. 1950, a man, presumably the artist, is sitting at a desk, which is set, as are most of Ramírez’s horse and rider drawings, in a complex stagelike environment, rendered in a highly detailed pattern of vertical and diagonal tile and board forms. The high walls that enclose the seated man recede sharply and frame a tall dark space where a locomotive moves from left to right. What seems depicted is an act of memory and imagination—a fusing of inside and outside, movement and stasis, past and present, rather than some kind of universal sexual psychodrama. As for tunnels, to experience one was to go from light to dark and back to light, to enter from one place and emerge into another. Barriers are passed, difficulties mastered. It is an ideal symbol of passage, a link from one world to another. Going into the dark is also frightening. Will you in fact come out the other side? Ramírez’s experiences in an alien world must have scared him. It is understandable that he used his art, deliberately or not, to express those fears and to overcome them. It is interesting to note how often his tunnels are shown in reverse perspective—that is, the parallel lines which describe their contours trace wider arcs as they recede. This is used to powerful effect in Untitled (Train and Tunnel), ca. 1950, now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In this vertical drawing the tunnel occupies almost the entirety of the page. The front part of a locomotive, brightly colored in red, yellow, green and blue and tilted a bit to the right, is shown just about to emerge from the tunnel’s mouth. The tunnel itself (seen as usual from the outside, its hill-like form indicated by a series of arched, evenly spaced parallel lines) expands upward in a pronounced V and fills the whole sheet. This of course runs contrary to our normal spatial experience, in which receding lines seem to converge. As in Picasso’s and Braque’s early Cubist landscapes, where a variant of this technique is employed, reverse perspective flattens the space and pushes it toward us. For Ramírez, this technique not only makes for a more formally compelling picture but also serves as an emotional intensifier. If physical distance can be equated with temporal and psychological distance, then its collapse by perspectival manipulation brings the past closer to the present, and old pain closer to the surface. Religion figured prominently in Ramírez’s personal background and artistic world, and his remembered connection to his Mexican past comes through most

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clearly in his drawings of the Madonna. The Espinosas’ research has shown that these Madonnas are based on Ramírez’s recollections of an oil painting and a small statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in the church in his home parish of Capilla de Milpillas. Ramírez’s Madonnas feature a crowned woman with her hands raised, wearing a robe and Mexican sandals. She stands on a blue globe, with a snake writhing at her feet. The Madonnas are an amalgam of traditional Spanish colonial religious art and Ramírez’s personal symbols and themes. In a lovely drawing, Untitled (Madonna), 1950–1953, the Madonna is portrayed in what appears to be a curtained, stagelike alcove. Snake at her feet, she stands on her globe, which rests in turn on a three-legged altar which recalls the molcajete, the traditional basalt mortar used for grinding corn and chilies. Flanking her are two tall, extravagantly flowering lilies, and at the base of the picture are four drumlike pedestals each holding a seated and vaguely human-faced cat (the ones on the left half of the drawing facing left, the ones on the right facing right). The composition is elegant, airy and open, and the coloring and shading subtle. These qualities imbue the drawing with a sense of quiet and contemplation that is enlivened by the unexpected presence of the wittily rendered and rather odd cats. One of Ramírez’s favorite motifs is the horse and rider, or the jinete. The rider is most often a man, although at times it can be a woman. He (or she) is usually armed with a pistol, and sports bandoliers crossed over the chest. The horse is poised in action—head raised, neck and body twisted. Similarly energized, the rider’s torso is turned in the saddle, pistol pointed. These jinetes are generally centered in carefully articulated stage sets, sometimes realistic prosceniums with what appear to be footlights, curtains and the kind of ornamentation often found above the stages in movie theaters. The jinetes are evocative and somewhat mysterious figures. Ramírez was an accomplished horseman, and the riders must have recalled for him his younger days, when he could control a powerful animal and had a pistol of his own. The horse was an important means of travel in the Mexico of his youth, and Ramírez was clearly interested in modes of transportation. In one drawing, Untitled (Horse and Rider), ca. 1950, automobiles and equestrians are mixed: the top of the drawing contains the rider, and underneath the stage set in which he is enclosed, Ramírez has collaged five colored pictures of General Motors cars and partially obscured them by rainbows of crayoned lines. Untitled (Collage), ca. 1952, puts together collaged images of a young woman on horseback waving to an approaching Rock Island Line train (Ramírez has skillfully “completed” the photograph where it was cropped) and a view of San Francisco’s boat-filled harbor, as well as other upbeat scenes of American life clipped from copies of the Saturday Evening Post.

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Besides bringing to mind images from Ramírez’s own life, these riders also recall the Cristero rebels and the heroic figures of the Mexican Revolution (although quite possibly some riders might be associated with the Federal Army that repressed the Cristeros). It is thought as well that some of the female figures, such as the one (ca. 1948–63) in which the face of a woman from a magazine is collaged onto a linear drawing of a pistol-wielding rider, could represent his wife, who, he thought, had joined forces with the enemy. These figures call forth complex references, including (if we consider the stages in which they are set) not just players in his theater of memory, but characters out of the movie Westerns he saw in the hospital. In any case, the horse and rider motif meant a great deal to the artist, for of the roughly 300 drawings in his oeuvre over 80 deal with this subject. Ramírez also drew the landscape, and this subject—often executed in very large formats—allowed for a mixing of many of his motifs, and an extended use of collage. The extraordinary Untitled (Landscape), ca. 1948–1963, stretches out horizontally almost 9 feet and contains a wealth of original and collaged images. There are beautifully rendered Mexican churches he had known, houses, riders, trains, tunnels, religious figures, magazine pictures of Amish people at work, animals, plants, a complex calligraphic “R” (a signature?) picked out in flowers, and, running along the entire top of the drawing and down the right side, a veritable automotive parade (both drawn and collaged). In addition to its iconographic mix, this drawing is materially varied. It is pieced together from numerous sheets of paper, and the different shades of white and beige of the support, as well as its irregular rectangular shape, lend the drawing great textural and tactile interest. In all his work, Ramírez’s mastery of materials is evident. He turned his practical limits (he was scarcely in a position to drive over to the art supply store) to his advantage, making the most of what was at hand. He drew with ordinary pencils, colored pencils and crayons, and used the wooden tongue depressors common in hospitals and doctors’ offices as straight edges. The odd papers that he glued together made a richer working surface than a simple store-bought sheet, and he devised a method of applying color with matchsticks (his pigments were mixed from crayons, charcoal, fruit juice, shoe polish and his own saliva) that ideally suited his purposes. As this exhibition unmistakably shows, Ramírez was an artist who transcended simple ideas of Outsider (or insider) art. The fact is that once art is labeled Outsider (or indigenous or folk or craft) it is somehow narrowed. It becomes, for all intents and purposes, critically and curatorially (although not necessarily commercially) devalued – a specialized taste. Sympathetic people might respond enthusiastically to Ramírez, but there is still a good deal of institutional resistance.

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While the three museums that have hosted this exhibition are fine ones, we can’t help but notice the absence of the bigger and more powerful mainstream venues. It is my belief that Ramírez is a mainstream artist. Granted that his illness, relative isolation and lack of formal art education put him nearer to the margins. But a significant number of modern artists were also essentially self-trained, and if we look at the art before us it is hard to see how it differs from that of other artists with more conventional lives and careers. It is formally and materially complex, nuanced, and inventive; it reflects the artist’s development of coherent themes and iconographies over man years, and his thorough exploration of them; and it sustains a style that is original and unique: Ramírez’s art cannot be mistaken for anybody else’s: Ramírez’s art cannot be mistaken for anybody else’s. In a critical environment that values cultural observation, the exploration of memory, fantasy and identity, and the invocation of complex social, historical and psychological signifiers, how can we judge Ramírez’s art to be peripheral? But, most important, Ramírez’s work is animated by necessity. This is art that had to be made. In our highly professionalized artworld today, how invigorating it is to see art that comes not just from academic skill sets and a keen eye for the market’s needs, but from inspiration and invention coupled with utter conviction and perseverance in the face of true adversity. Art in America, October 2007

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The Dream of Aboriginal Art

Who’s that bugger who paints like me?” asked Rover Thomas, one of Australia’s greatest Aboriginal painters, when, in 1990, he first encountered Mark Rothko’s 1957 #20 at the National Gallery of Australia. The question is a revealing inversion of the often Eurocentric view of Aboriginal art. Thomas, an artist from the Western Desert, painted seemingly simple, often blocky forms using a range of natural ocher pigments. Like Rothko’s, his work is spare yet symbolic and emotionally resonant, and though he lived in a very remote area and came to art late in his life, he achieved great acclaim in a relatively short time. When he visited the National Gallery in Canberra, Thomas was on his way to Venice – it was to be the first time he would leave the country – to represent Australia in the Biennale. He was genuinely surprised to see a piece of modern Western art that seemed to be in synch with his own practice. Thomas’s Aboriginal-centric view of Western art makes sense, for Aboriginal art comprises a worldview every bit as complex (and contained) as ours. But what about the other side of the coin? What preconceptions do we bring to Aboriginal art? Unfortunately, all too often that art is diminished or patronized; viewed as a bastardized modernism, a marginally interesting branch of folk art or simply a subject for cultural anthropology. In fact, the week before I visited “Dreaming Their Way,” a magnificent exhibition of art by 33 Aboriginal women, at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum in New Hampshire (it originated at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.), I mentioned my interest in Aboriginal art, and this show in particular, to a very senior American critic. He dismissed it all out of hand. I don’t remember the exact words, but “third-rate lyrical abstraction” would certainly convey his judgment. The best-known form of modern Aboriginal art, characterized by allover dotting and associated with desert communities, didn’t get started until 1971. That was when a nonindigenous art teacher named Geoffrey Bardon began to encourage the men of Papunya, a small settlement about 100 miles from Alice Springs, in Central Australia, to channel their artistic energies and experience 107

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into painting murals on the local school walls using Aboriginal motifs. The final project was a 10-by-33-foot mural of the Honey Ant Dreaming, its form the result of complex negotiations between tribal elders and the painters. The mural was a great success, and soon the men were painting traditional stories and motifs on board and canvas. It should be noted that Papunya was essentially a place of exile officially opened in 1961, its inhabitants trucked in by the government from the outlying deserts so that they might be “civilized.” The development of the Aboriginal art we know now thus grew from a decision by the elders to reassert, in circumstances of forced assimilation, an Aboriginal identity, especially for the younger generation. The story of the movement is long, complex and fraught, but complexity and mystery seem to go along with an art whose interpretation is rarely clear, at least for outsiders. The iconography of any particular painting can be very difficult to decode. Even a painting’s facture may encapsulate mysteries: many people feel that the dotting technique has been used to overlay and hide secret information, a response possibly to what was deemed the overly accessible work of the early years. (In fact, a strong desire has been expressed by some senior artists and elders that certain early and important works currently in museums be removed from public display.) Its complicated history has led some critics to judge Aboriginal painting even more harshly from a political point of view than a formal one. While sympathizing with the artists, some writers have seen the whole enterprise as flawed (and onesided) from its very conception – a nexus of complicity, arrogance, insensitivity, greed and naivete. To these skeptics, the very idea that an outsider could even begin to approach Aboriginal art with anything other than cultural bias is absurd, yet another example of the arrogance of the powerful. As Tony Fry and AnneMarie Willis wrote in this magazine, the “drift towards cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) can be seen not so much as enlightened accommodation of other world views but as a violent ripping of signs from the sites of their primary significance.”1 It can, to their way of thinking, only lead to cultural erasure: far better to encourage politically engaged activities, such as Aboriginal radio and television stations. Certainly Aboriginal art has not gained all that much traction outside Australia (although the opening this past June of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, with its collection of Aboriginal art, might help). I was told by Brian Kennedy, director of the Hood, and formerly the director of the National Gallery of Australia, that” Dreaming Their Way” had been offered to 50 other museums in the United States. It was turned down by them all.2

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Discovering the riches of Aboriginal art was the great surprise of my trip to Australia and New Zealand a couple of years ago. I wrote about the art of both countries,3 but Aboriginal art was too complex a subject: it demands an examination of its own. In today’s Australia,Aboriginal art is displayed prominently in museums, galleries and private and corporate collections, as well as in public buildings, tourist shops, airport lounges and street stalls. In fact, it is almost the first thing you see of the country – at least if you fly in by Qantas. Their planes are emblazoned with Aboriginal motifs, and the patterns of the ties and scarves their flight attendants wear are in the colors and designs of classic desert dot painting. Aboriginal art seems to have stepped into a design void and has become, for all intents and purposes, Australia’s national visual brand  – ironic and rather sad, considering the overall invisibility of Aboriginal people themselves in the society. The generic material is on the whole pretty good, at least from a design perspective, but it wasn’t until I encountered first-rate work in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne at the beginning of my trip that the real power of the art hit me. My interest has continued, and the exhibition at the Hood only strengthened it. It should be noted that not all art by Aboriginal people looks like what we might expect. There are quite a few art-school-trained urban Aboriginal artists who, like Tracey Moffatt, make multimedia, installation or photo-based work. While their art might touch on Aboriginal themes, it looks perfectly at home in a Chelsea gallery or a European biennial. “Dreaming Their Way” contains work by several artists who have roots in both worlds. Brisbane-based Judy Watson (b.1959), for example, paints elegantly stained abstractions, such as waterline (2001), that juxtapose washes of intense color with carefully calibrated linear elements – in this case a thornlike branch and a large symmetrical shape outlined in white that evokes (to me) an animal head, a shell or possibly a water vessel. Watson is very much aware of the Aboriginal content of her work, but these paintings also sit quite comfortably in the center of late modernist abstraction. Some of the traditionally oriented artists in “Dreaming Their Way,” like Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1916–1996), Queenie McKenzie (ca. 1930–1998), Gloria Temarre Petyarre (b.1948) and Dorothy Napangardi Robinson (b.1956), are relatively well-known and command high prices on the international market. Kngwarreye’s work is the most valuable of them all. Highly prolific – she is thought to have produced some 3,000 works of art in eight years’ time  – she was also, particularly in her later years, the freest and most overtly expressive of the major Aboriginal artists. A painting like Anooralya (Wild Yam Dreaming), 1995, with its rootlike intermeshings of gestural red and pink lines, displays a force and immediacy that is both abrasive and viscerally appealing

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Work like this stands on its own in any setting, but it should be made clear that, at heart, her art and Aboriginal art in general are Australian and are best seen on native ground. Aboriginal art is intrinsically local. It is about places, people, myths and activities that belong to discrete environs. Whether for artists in the Western desert or museum-goers in Adelaide, the outback is alive in the Australian consciousness – the particular colors, the dryness, the emptiness, the sense that human presence makes a small and often shifting mark on the land. Art that embodies a place, not just depicts it, carries with it an aura that is strongest either in that place or in another that is in some sort of dialogue with it. It is also important to note that in Australia, Aboriginal art is seen as a vital school of contemporary art by museums, collectors, critics and other artists. Depending on curatorial preference, it is either shown in relation to other stylistic groups (as Constructivism, for example, is positioned next to Cubism and de Stijl) or placed in a general regional, genre, thematic or chronological ordering, like any other art. Nonindigenous Australian artists, however, seem to have a particular attitude toward Aboriginal art. Even though they appear uniformly to like and respect it, they give it a wide berth in their own practice. Aboriginal art has some very distinct and appealing formal and semiotic characteristics, and in a world where the borrowed or sampled motif is altogether common, you might think that nonindigenous artists might wish to avail themselves of something so potentially useful. But artists like Tim Johnson, who do borrow from Aboriginal art on occasion, are rare. This is in marked contrast to the way that New Zealand artists deal with Maori motifs. Those are seen more as common cultural property, not surprising really in a society much more at ease with its indigenous people. The history of the Aboriginal people and their relation to the rest of Australia lend support to those who see the Aboriginal art phenomenon as a contemporary example of cultural and economic exploitation. White Australia’s treatment of its native people is perhaps the culture’s most shameful mark (not that the treatment of the indigenous peoples of North America was much better). Australian Aboriginal culture is the world’s oldest. Traditionally a nomadic people, the Aborigines have been on the continent for some 40,000 years and have managed to survive quite well in some of the harshest natural conditions in the world. But unlike the Maoris, they proved to be little match for the colonists, and over the years were pushed off their lands, forcibly assimilated, stripped of their culture and, often enough, simply killed. The prejudice and disdain they were shown (and in some quarters still are) is astounding, and not surprisingly the depredations have taken their toll. The levels of poverty, illness of all sorts,

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lowered life expectancy, family disintegration and incarceration – almost every marker of social breakdown  – far outstrip those of the rest of the Australian population. Even now, in a society marked by wealth and a relaxed egalitarianism, Aboriginals reside at the bottom of the social order. That an extraordinary art should be able to spring up under such conditions speaks volumes about resistance, resilience and the transformative power of art. “Dreaming Their Way” is, as has been noted, a show of women artists. This focus does not arise from quite the same impulses as do other exhibitions that feature only women. It is not as if special attention is being paid to women because of historical underrepresentation or because, as with the Gee’s Bend quilters, this is an art made only by women. Women in the desert of central Australia were little involved with painting in the beginning, not really coming into their own until the ’80s, whereas women in the Northern Territory began making art in the ’60s when their painter fathers included them in the process. In both cases, women have now been an integral part of the history of Aboriginal art for a good many years, and, if anything, are becoming more central to it. I can scarcely think, for example, of a Western woman artist who occupies the same position in her sphere as Emily Kngwarreye now does in the world of Aboriginal art. But Aboriginal art is certainly not exclusively a woman’s domain. What is true is that Aboriginal art and life are highly compartmentalized. Women do different things than men do, and that division shows itself in the use of different subject matter. It is a given that modern Western artists are free to choose whatever subject or style they wish. This is not true for Aboriginal artists – or, at least, traditional Aboriginal artists, for whom a particular subject is something that one has the right to depict by virtue of family, tribal grouping and level of initiation. Central to the meaning of virtually all Aboriginal art is its relation to the cosmological structure of the Dreaming. This is a topic much too complex to detail here, but a crucial concern is topographical variation, which looms large in the spiritual life of a people who traverse and occupy a desert land of large vistas and vast, forbidding empty spaces. Finding food and water is key to survival, and the stories of the ancestors and mythic beings of the Dreaming are connected to important sites and pathways. Aboriginal art tells these stories, but not directly, and certainly not directly to us. Aboriginal society holds its multilevel secrets closely – from non-Aboriginals of course, but also from other tribes and family groupings and, within those groupings, from noninitiated members. Men have their private information, duties and tools, as do women. The paintings, while done at the highest levels by both sexes, have quite separate motifs. For example, in the Aboriginal hunter-gatherer society, women are the gatherers, although

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they do hunt smaller game, while men hunt larger animals, like kangaroos. Paintings that depict, say, the gathering of berries are done by women, as are paintings that either feature parts of women’s bodies (mostly breasts) or use the ceremonial body markings that are the province of women. Gaining the right to depict certain information is very often a function of age. The longer you have lived and the more ceremonies you have participated in, the greater the honor you are likely to have in your family, provided, of course, that you have led an exemplary life.4 Old age is highly respected in Aboriginal society, and thus elders like Kngwarreye and Queenie McKenzie5 have not only wielded considerable power in their communities and served either directly or indirectly as spokespersons for land-rights issues, but have had the prerogative to be more experimental in their range of visual motifs  – in Kngwarreye’s case, painting richer and more complex versions of the Wild Yam Dreaming. A younger artist like Abie Loy Kemarre (b.1972) has less to work with. Her Body Painting (2004), with its sinuously deformed white grid on a black ground, is stunning, but tells, to knowing eyes, a much simpler tale. Its power comes largely from its formal character, its masterful play of space and line. But even in that regard, Kngwarreye’s paintings are stronger, and grew more so over the years. Alhalkere (My Country), 1991, a 4-by-10-foot softly dotted expanse of yellows, oranges and reds, seems to breathe as you look at it, pulsing with light, heat and air. Soakage Bore (1995), executed four years later, is composed of 12 15-by-20-inch canvases arranged in a grid, each separated by an inch or so of bare wall; its palette has been simplified to white on black, and the dots have given way to a series of tangled, quickly brushed lines. The early generation of artists from the vast deserts of the central and western portions of Australia, including Rover Thomas, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, as well as Kngwarreye, began painting for the wider world in their later years. This is scarcely surprising, since there was no desert dot Aboriginal painting as we know it until the 1970s. The other major school of Aboriginal art, the natural pigment on bark paintings from Arnhem Land in the north, well represented in “Dreaming Their Way” by artists such as Dorothy Djukulul (b.1942) and Galuma Maymuru (b.1951), began earlier; the women of the region started painting in the 1960s. In a land with plentiful trees, bark was an available commodity with which to make art objects. Th desert offered nothing comparable. In any case, the idea of durable, portable works of art for public display was not something that figured in the traditional Aboriginal worldview. The art (although there wasn’t a separate word for it) of the desert Aboriginal people was body, sand and rock painting. All were closely tied to

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ceremony and ritual. Body and sand paintings were made for specific ceremonies, then cleaned away or obliterated. Rock painting marked sacred sites – the focus and locus of tribal rites. Something that has seemed to particularly annoy Aboriginal art’s detractors is that the modern paintings are done, for the most part, in acrylics. The use of that quintessentially postwar painting material has been deemed a marker of inauthenticity. Acrylics can have a plastic look, and they tend by their material nature to evoke some aspects of Western postwar art, particularly Color-Field painting and the lyrical abstraction of the ’70s. Needless to say, the inhabitants of the remote deserts of Australia had no idea how the nuances of Greenbergian formalism were playing out in New York. They used acrylics because that was what was provided them at the community centers in which most nonurban Aboriginal artists have worked, and because the medium manifestly suited their needs. (They are also often provided with primed and underpainted canvases; in remote areas a trip to the art supply store is scarcely feasible.) Acrylics dry fast, decrease the possibility of unwanted smearing and allow for easy over-painting. Importantly, the flexibility of acrylics makes it possible for the completed paintings to be quickly rolled for storage and transportation without cracking. Acrylics are also the best paints for working on unstretched canvas laid out on the ground, and easily lend themselves to a dotting technique (using Q-tips or brushes) that values clear, clean edges and a smooth, low-relief texture. Finally, these paints are also highly pigmented (an advantage when working on the customary dark grounds), and the colors, even the earth tones, are crisp and declarative. One might speculate on the use of the dark grounds – mostly reds, browns and black. Since the paintings are derived from sand, rock and body art, and the land is red and brown and the bodies are dark, it stands to reason that the paintings would reflect those underlying hues. The use of modern materials and the assimilation of contemporary Aboriginal art into the larger Western cultural and economic field lend this art a certain hybridity. Rather than seeing that breach of purity as a qualitative (even moral) impediment, it is far more rewarding to value it for the complexity, multiplicity of reference, and ambiguity it yields. Alice Nampitjinpa’s (b.1943) Tali at Talaalpi (Sand Hills at Talaalpi), 2001, for example, with (in one version) undulating yellow, red and white vertical stripes made up of fat, overlapping dots, can bring to mind a number of Western and non-Western craft and fine-art references, from weaving to Color-Field painting. It also relates to body painting and obliquely narrates the Dreamtime story of Tjilkamata, the echidna ancestor (the echidna or spiny anteater is a native burrowing nocturnal mammal) which is

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said to have traveled through the sand hills near Walungurru and passed close to two carpet snakes that lived in the waters of the nearby swamp. Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi (b.1967), the daughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, makes densely dotted paintings that combine more abstracted motifs with recognizable ones. In the bottom part of Goanna Dreaming (1991), a complex, maplike composition in muted ochers and browns, the camouflaged but clearly identifiable form of a large lizard can be seen crawling along. Her blue, white and red Milky Way Seven Sisters Dreaming (1998) can read as an allover pattern, or as a map – in this case a star map. It also gives us the story of the seven Napaltjarri sisters, who were pursued, to their dismay, by a man named Jilbi Tjakamarra. Resisting his advances, they ran away and transformed themselves into stars (those known in the West as the Pleiades), while Jilbi became the Morning Star in Orion’s belt). He continued to chase after them. The eight red and pink targetlike forms in the painting, set among the blue-and-white-dotted heavens, represent the participants in the story. Over the years a number of Aboriginal artists have developed their art in ways that seem to parallel the stylistic evolution of Western artists. Style may change, but there is always an underlying Dreaming story. This “development” is a complicated business. Kngwarreye’s art, for example, certainly changed in response to the great enthusiasm it generated, and she told new stories with increased inventiveness. There is disagreement, however, about whether the looseness of her late work is a result of freedom and exuberance, or reflects the effects of aging and the pressure to produce. In addition, it is thought that the larger tendency of Aboriginal art to become more abstract over time reflects community decisions to not reveal information thought too sensitive – to move certain stories, by means of what we might see as a stylistic shift, further from the public eye. For whatever reasons change has occurred, the result is an art that is rarely static. That can be seen in the paintings of Dorothy Napangardi Robinson. Her early work, such as the colorful and intricate Bush Plum Dreaming (1906) with its scattering of small flowers, is very much in the traditional Papunya manner of setting identifiable icons against a densely dotted background. By 1998, however, she had developed a quite different approach. Based on the story of the Women Ancestors from Mina Mina, which tells of how their digging sticks emerged from the ground and of their travels to sacred sites, her paintings began to feature delicate dotted webs, lines and grids in white on black and black on white. They have an elegant, restrained quality that feels remarkably akin to certain aspects of Minimalist and conceptually oriented art. Indeed, Robinson’s Salt on Mina

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Mina (2002) was lent to the exhibition by Sol LeWitt, who finds, one might assume, affinities with Aboriginal art in his own recent two-dimensional work. Though the precisely delineated, the overtly maplike and the diagrammatic are important aspects of this art, some artists have allowed a greater gestural and compositional freedom to enter their work. This was the case with Kngwarreye, and it is also true of her niece, Gloria Tamerre Petyarre, whose large Leaves (6 by 13 feet; 2002) features white leaf forms that unfurl across a black background, each painted with a single sure brushstroke. There is no preplanning, and the allover patterning creates a richly articulated, sensuous space. The desert school of painting is better known in the West, but artists from Arnhem Land in the tropical north have been making paintings on bark for an outside audience since the 1930s, frequently in its initial stages with the encouragement of the Christian missions. These paintings are executed on bark in matte natural ochers, the patterns laid down with close parallel strokes. Remarkably detailed and technically masterful, these paintings tend to look more like traditional tribal art – they are a bit drier and more ordered than the desert paintings. Often they contain stylized but quite recognizable human or animal figures, such as the rows of upside-down bats in Dorothy Djukulul’s Warrnyu (1989) or the geese and crocodiles in her Magpie Geese (Mutyka) and Crocodile (ca. 1990). Some artists, like Galuma Maymuru, work with clearly delineated figurative elements, as in Djarrakpi Landscape (1996), which refers to a complex Dreaming connected with the area around Lake Djarrakpi, as well as in a seemingly completely abstract mode, as in Yirritja Dhuwa Gopu II (2004), a marvelously compact yet expansive composition of diagonally oriented crosshatched bands. (Again, this tendency toward abstraction, in the North as well as in the desert, has been construed as an act of “hiding”) To eyes accustomed to postwar Western painting, Aboriginal art can seem overly familiar, and its distinctive characteristics therefore easily overlooked. It is true that it is an art of our time, but it is also profoundly an art from another world. Aboriginal art speaks directly to the Western viewer in its formal beauty, and in its very contemporary tendency to layer meaning, to incorporate in a single work a multiplicity of references and modes of representation. An Aboriginal painting is a shifting hybrid site, combining diagram, map, story and time line with pure esthetic appreciation. lt is not clear and straightforward, not even in the sense of setting up orderly dialectical oppositions. Its ambiguity is structural, inherent in the work. While the postwar period has led to certain improvements, Aboriginal society is still under siege. One of the main purposes of this art has been to pass on deep

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cultural information to new generations. Much of Aboriginal art is seen and discussed by people in the community as it is being made. It is also often exhibited in cooperative galleries, and even when potential outside buyers leaf through stacks of paintings, Aboriginal people gather round and talk about the work. Their traditional culture is distinctive with respect to everything from the notion of private property to determinations of familial relationships and the obligations they entail. It is a profoundly conservative culture, one whose greatest wish is to leave no mark on the landscape, to change nothing in a natural world that is, in itself, the timeless expression of the laws and the stories of a people. Writing is not traditional to Aboriginal culture; its connective tissue is instead the web of kinship and the Dreaming stories. Aboriginal art has proven, by and large, to be an extremely positive force, providing money to remote and impoverished settlements, giving purpose and focus to many individuals, and allowing for the transmission of information vital to a stressed culture’s cohesion.6 All of this is valuable in itself, but there is also the fact that the art is of extraordinary quality. Indigenous cultures all over the world produce art and artifacts; few have managed to create a modern art as rich and affecting. Art in America, April 2007

Notes and References 1 Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, “Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?” Art in America, July 1980, pp. 108–17, 159–63. 2 American interest in Aboriginal art is lively if sporadic. A newly dedicated gallery at the Seattle Art Museum largely devoted to Australian Aboriginal art opens May 5th. Probably the most important exhibition in the United States of Aboriginal art “Dreamings, the Art of Aboriginal Australia,” was organized by the Asia Society in 1985. It traveled widely, to considerable acclaim. Other exhibitions in commercial galleries followed in the next few years, notably at the John Weber Gallery in New York in I989. Weber became, for a number of years, an enthusiastic supporter of Aboriginal art. “lcons of the Desert: Early Paintings from Papunya,” organized by the Herbert E. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, is scheduled to open in January 2009. It will travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA in April 2009, and to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in September of that year. 3 Richard Kalina, “Report from Australia: Down Under No More,” Art in America, April 2005, pp. 77–85, and “Report from New Zealand: A Change of Empires,” Art in America, October 2005, pp. 83–89.

The Dream of Aboriginal Art 4 Birth dates for older Aboriginal people can be imprecise, since the sort of official interest that would mandate precise record keeping in their lifetimes was absent. 5 McKenzie, from the Kimberly region in Western Australia, was active in the unsuccessful fight to keep mining interests from disturbing the Barramundi Dreaming Place. 6 The money earned from painting sales tends to be distributed by the artist to members of the community, most often to kin. Kinship is not limited to blood relations, and success in the art market can sometimes lead to unhealthy dependencies and pressure on the artist.

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Abstract Expressionism has engendered its fair share of museum exhibitions, although in recent years those shows have tended to be monographic retrospectives. It would seem difficult to come up with a new approach to an inclusive group show, but “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976” does. Curated by Norman L. Kleeblatt at the Jewish Museum, the exhibition examines the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and its aftermath through the lens of an art–critical rivalry. Harold Rosenberg (1906– 1978) and Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) were the big critical guns of the day. Their opposing influences (we have nothing comparable today) exerted a strong dialectical pull on the artworld. Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s ascendancy also marked the beginning of modern American art criticism. Neither Greenberg nor Rosenberg was an artist, academic or, at least at the beginnings of their careers, affiliated with a widely circulating publication. (Rosenberg became the New Yorker’s art critic in 1967.) Both critics combined an intimate knowledge of artists—and those artists’ beliefs and studio practices—with a set of overriding theoretical principles that were articulated, refined and expanded over time. Greenberg employed an analytic, formalist approach in the service of abstraction. Following in the modernist literary tradition of T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism, his focus was on the object itself. Rosenberg believed in action. He saw the artist’s individuality, creativity, passion, political commitment and existential authenticity expressed less in the work itself than in the arena of its making. While they had certain things in common—age, New York background, assimilated Judaism, Marxist beginnings, publications in small magazines— their views on key issues differed sharply. They quickly came to detest each other, and their rivalry contributed to the polarization of the art community at the time. That polarization was grounded in the general mood of argumentativeness that pervaded the postwar intellectual community: artists as well as writers and critics were engaged in an ongoing tussle over ideas and personalities. Contention surely contributed to Abstract Expressionism’s vitality, and to be reminded of it 119

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undercuts today’s nostalgic view of the times—the boozy camaraderie of the Cedar Bar and earnest talks at the Club, when life was simpler and an artist could show up in New York, paint from the heart and be given a place in a small, supportive community. There’s some truth to that, but the picture is more complicated, and “Action/ Abstraction,” along with its thorough and scholarly accompanying catalogue, presents a balanced account of the art, the artists, the critics and the issues. Much care is taken to set the stage. Historical and cultural context is emphasized, and the exhibition contains a wealth of supporting material—letters, photographs, publications of all sorts and musical excerpts, as well as film and old television clips. (I was particularly taken with a 1957 Today show clip, featuring the chimpanzee, Kokomo Jr., engaged in a rather thoughtful passage of gestural brushwork. Maurice Berger, who curated the exhibition’s context rooms, told me that Kokomo and his Today show predecessor, J. Fred Muggs, also a chimp with artistic leanings, are still alive, although retired.) A word about the exhibition’s title: it’s a bit misleading, put there perhaps as an inducement to the museum-going public. While Pollock and de Kooning do play major roles, the exhibition is scarcely a face-off between two star artists, who, after all, had more in common with each other than they did with, say, Barnett Newman. De Kooning and Pollock were the favored artists of, respectively, Rosenberg and Greenberg (in Greenberg’s case, at least for a time). But the exhibition has a much wider reach. It reflects the fact that critical positions were taken and vigorously defended, not in an academic vacuum, but in the unstable and vital milieu of living artists and their ongoing work. The exhibition is as much about Newman, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still and David Smith as it is about Pollock and de Kooning. It also deals sensitively with other artists of the period who were part of either critic’s circle (or both)—Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston, Saul Steinberg, Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw and David Hare. Distinct curatorial choices were made. There is no work by Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb or William Baziotes, for example; but a number of artists of the next generation are included, imparting the very real sense of an artworld in flux. We see Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and Lee Bontecou as well as Greenberg’s contingent of color field painters and welded-steel sculptors: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro. These younger artists are set in the context of their older colleagues, who were, for the most part, actively working through the ’70s and beyond.

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Greenberg’s object-directed formalism and Rosenberg’s action-oriented existentialism might have been the defining critical strategies of the day, but this did not mean that all artists whose work could be seen in those contexts received the attention they deserved. While establishing the parameters of Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s influences, “Action/Abstraction” also takes a look at artists whose work was given short shrift or only a passing nod by the two critics, and allows us the opportunity to see some neglected but truly excellent work. Women, of course, were barely allowed in the Abstract Expressionist door, and Berger’s extraordinarily informative time line in the catalogue gives us chilling examples of the barriers they faced. In 1946 an unnamed male critic (not Greenberg or Rosenberg) reviewing Louise Nevelson’s first major exhibition wrote, “We learned that the artist was a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among the moderns.” And Lee Krasner speaking of Hans Hofmann, the leading teacher of his day, said, “I can remember very clearly his criticism one day when he came in and said about (my) painting ‘this is so good you would not believe it was done by a woman.’ ” There were exceptions to the general neglect. Rosenberg wrote favorably about Mitchell, and his advocacy of her work served as a counterpart to Greenberg’s endorsement of Frankenthaler’s. (The two women were not friends, and Mitchell, rarely constrained in her negative opinions, often had something cutting to say about her rival.) Rosenberg sited Mitchell firmly in the tradition of gestural Abstract Expressionism, and her painting in the exhibition is an example of that style at its most confident. The untitled work (1957), a complex construction of juicily brushed passages of blue, green and white, sets up a loose perspectival system that, while abstract, manages to evoke a watery landscape. Forceful yet sensitive paintings like these marked Mitchell as one of the strongest of the younger Abstract Expressionists. Rosenberg saw Mitchell as a member of Abstract Expressionism’s Second Generation, but in Frankenthaler, Greenberg discerned something else. The critic and the artist enjoyed a particularly close personal relationship, and he became a strong supporter. He believed that her stained color field paintings, starting with Mountains and Sea (1952), pointed the way past Abstract Expressionism to a new optical, formally-oriented, post-painterly abstraction. This was taken up in due time by painters like Louis, Olitski and Noland, whose work Greenberg championed with great vigor. Greenberg also liked the then Washington-based artist Anne Truitt, a friend of Noland’s, whose subtle columnar pieces, like Essex (1962), hovered between

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painting and sculpture. The critic was, however, of little help to women gestural painters. Krasner, who had introduced him to Pollock (as well as to Hofmann), got virtually nothing from him, and he dismissed Grace Hartigan in 1952 when, in contravention of Greenbergian principles, she introduced figuration into her gestural paintings. Hartigan’s two canvases in the exhibition, Summer Street (1956) and New England, October (1957), show her work to advantage. Summer Street, with its lively jumble of blocky blues, greens, reds and oranges, and its barely suggested figurative and architectural references, balances reference and abstraction while keeping tight control of the pictorial arena. Work like this, backed up of course by de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings (his gritty 1954 Marilyn Monroe, with its billboard yellows and reds and bold frontality, is a fine example) allowed gestural painting to stretch itself beyond pure abstraction, and thus maintain its vitality into later decades. Painters like Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers (none of whom, unfortunately, is in the show) were able to apply the lessons of Abstract Expressionism to overt subject matter and to produce paintings that were lushly chromatic, emotionally direct and compositionally sound. If women were largely excluded from the critical dialogue, African-Americans hardly registered at all. For me, this show’s great surprise was Norman Lewis (1909–1979). Lewis knew many of the Abstract Expressionists and had seven solo shows at the well-respected Willard Gallery, which at the time represented David Smith, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, among others. Lewis taught, was active in the African American art community, saw his work collected by the Museum of Modern Art, received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim grants, and had a retrospective in 1976 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York—a good career by most measures but, given the quality and the dates of his work, nowhere near what he deserved. (As I write, I have on my desk seven books of Greenberg’s writings and eight of Rosenberg’s, plus Florence Rubenfeld’s biography of Greenberg. There is not a single mention, as far as I can tell, of Lewis.) Ironically, in the ’40s, while Lewis and other African-American abstract artists were resisting direct social references in order to avoid having their art ethnically labeled, white painters like Gottlieb and Newman were taking up imagery from non-Western cultures in order to invest their work with mythic resonance. (In a further irony, painters like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, Lewis’s contemporaries, stayed with social imagery and ended up receiving greater recognition.)

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Lewis’s paintings at the time were resolutely abstract, although they possessed a musicality, an improvisational structural interplay that has been likened to jazz. Twilight Sounds (1947) sets a vertically oriented, sinuous scaffolding of thin lines, filled in at strategic points with curved, primary-colored planar elements, against a rich gray-blue ground. The linear skein does not touch the edges of the painting, and at the bottom of the picture the forms are angled in a subtly perspectival manner so as to anchor the ensemble, while still keeping the painting buoyant and light. Lewis’s works then were small (Twilight Sounds measures 23 1/2 by 28 inches), and it would have been wonderful to have another of his paintings to compare it to—perhaps Phantasy II , a work from 1946 in the collection of MoMA. One hesitates to make curatorial suggestions after the fact—who knows the practical considerations involved?—but in this case I really wanted to see more. Having the support of Greenberg or Rosenberg, while not a make-or-break proposition in the days of Abstract Expressionism, certainly helped. In the ’40s it was not all that easy to tell, judging only by the work, which critic would be supportive. By the ’50s, however, the stylistic lines had become more clearly drawn. Greenberg favored allover painters like Still, Newman and Rothko, who employed large, relatively uninflected color areas, while Rosenberg was a partisan of the gestural, action-oriented painting exemplified by de Kooning. Pollock was an odd case. It is well known that Greenberg was an early and enthusiastic supporter—first mentioning Pollock in a review in the Nation in 1943 and declaring that two of the smaller paintings in the show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, “are among the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American.”1 In 1945, again in the Nation, Greenberg called him “the strongest painter of his generation,”2 and posited in 1948 that Pollock would be able to compete with John Marin for “recognition as the greatest American painter of the twentieth century.”3 But Greenberg was never one to give unalloyed praise. Even in the glowing 1948 review, he calls Pollock’s Gothic “inferior to the best of his recent work in style, harmony, and the inevitability of its logic,” refers to other canvases as weaker, expresses severe reservations about his use of aluminum paint and speaks of Pollock’s weakness as a colorist.4 When Pollock began to reintroduce figurative elements in 1954, Greenberg’s enthusiasm cooled considerably. Greenberg’s influential 1955 article “ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” published in the Partisan Review, states of Pollock’s exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, “His most recent show, in 1954, was the first to contain pictures that were forced, pumped, dressed up.”5

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Greenberg’s critiques of Pollock, both positive and negative, focused on the formal and material qualities of the work and on its relation to art history. The painter’s interest in subject matter and his desire to address the mythic and the archetypal were paid little attention. Pollock clearly stood out from the crowd in the ’40s, and it made sense for Greenberg to admire him. But at heart he really wasn’t Greenberg’s type of artist. As Greenberg lost interest in Pollock, and as Pollock slipped deeper into alcoholism and erratic work habits, the incipient personal animosity between the two men deepened. Greenberg turned his attention to younger artists, whose work more closely reflected his formalist ideas and who, he believed (rightly or wrongly), would be more receptive to his suggestions. In many ways, de Kooning’s art should have been the focus of Greenberg’s admiration. It was allover, chromatically sophisticated, compositionally solid and, most importantly, grounded in and extraordinarily cognizant of art history. Initially Greenberg supported the work (with caveats, as one might expect), referring to de Kooning in a review of his first solo show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 as “one of the four or five most important painters in the country,” but saying, essentially, that he was more of a draftsman than a painter. Importantly, he says in this review that “De Kooning is an outright ‘abstract’ painter, and there does not seem to be an identifiable image in any of the ten pictures in his show.”6 De Kooning had started out in the early ’40s doing work with pronounced figurative elements, and it must have gratified Greenberg to see that the artist had bowed to the historical inevitability of abstraction. When de Kooning showed his “Woman” series at Sidney Janis in 1953, however, Greenberg was not pleased, and he began to skewer the painter in subtle but unmistakable ways. Comparing de Kooning to Picasso in “ ‘AmericanType’ Painting,” Greenberg says that de Kooning “hankers after terribilità,” not that he actually achieves this Michelangelesque quality. To further undercut de Kooning, terribilità, with its sense of awe-inspiring and barely held-in-check power, is hardly a desirable trait anyway for the Apollonian Greenberg, especially in a contemporary artist. Most damning, though, is Greenberg’s contention that de Kooning “remains a late Cubist.” (Note the static “remains.”) He states a few sentences later that “De Kooning is, in fact, the only painter I am aware of at this moment who continues Cubism without repeating it.”7 Nice, but not exactly “the greatest American painter of the twentieth century.” It’s important to keep in mind that Cubism was Greenberg’s great negative touchstone. Cubism’s penchant for tonal, light-dark drawing implied the sculptural, something that painting must avoid; but just as significant for Greenberg, its presence in a contemporary

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work of art was an esthetic crutch, a sure indicator of the old-fashioned, the European, the undeveloped, the minor. It scarcely helped that Rosenberg—with whom Greenberg had been at odds with for years—and de Kooning were great friends. Greenberg clearly liked art more than he liked artists, but Rosenberg and the downtown artists got along splendidly. Greenberg and de Kooning grew to loathe each other, even to the point of coming to blows. Nastiness abounded. A pivotal point in the history of Abstract Expressionism came with the 1952 publication of Harold Rosenberg’s Art News article, “The American Action Painters,” an essay that infuriated Pollock’s supporters— particularly Krasner—and sorely vexed Greenberg. Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Debra Bricker Balken recounts the complex history of “The American Action Painters.” Originally intended for publication in Les temps modernes (JeanPaul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existententiallyflavored journal), it was withdrawn by Rosenberg in pique after the magazine did not address his request to respond in print to Sartre, whom Rosenberg (rather strangely) believed had appropriated his ideas on Marxism. Having written the essay for a French journal whose readers might be unfamiliar with the artists he would mention, Rosenberg had decided to leave out all contemporary names. Rosenberg and Art News’s editor, Tom Hess, did not change that feature when the magazine published the essay a few months later. For those in the know, the ideal action painter evoked by Rosenberg was de Kooning, and Pollock was disparaged, although not by name. Rosenberg did not particularly like Pollock or his paintings. He had a low opinion of Pollock’s intelligence, was contemptuous of his drunken behavior and disapproved of his success. In addition, Rosenberg and his wife, May, did not get along with Krasner, Pollock’s wife and his fiercest defender, a woman exceedingly quick to put someone on her enemies list. When “The American Action Painters” came out, Krasner saw it as a major threat and railed with increasing bitterness against both Rosenberg and de Kooning—a bad choice, since de Kooning was immensely popular among his fellow artists. (Despite the feuding of their supporters and detractors, the two principals generally got along with each other—a bit warily perhaps, but at the root of it, Pollock and de Kooning admired each other’s work, and that counted for a lot.) In “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg mocks Pollock’s success. He writes, “The cosmic ‘I’ that turns up to paint pictures, but shudders and departs the moment there is a knock on the studio door, brings to the artist a megalomania which is the opposite of revolutionary. The tremors produced by a few expanses of

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tone or by the juxtaposition of colors and shapes purposely brought to the verge of bad taste in the manner of Park Avenue shop windows are sufficient cataclysms in many of these happy overthrows of Art.” Rosenberg’s conclusion: “The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.” “Apocalyptic wallpaper” is a catchy phrase, and it stung. The attack was also unfair. Pollock might have had the earliest success of the Abstract Expressionists, but he was a contrary and difficult man, scarcely a compliant lapdog of the rich. Rosenberg says a paragraph later, “Here the common phrase, ‘I have bought an O—’ (rather than a painting by O—) becomes literally true. The man who started to remake himself has made himself into a commodity with a trademark.”8 It seems telling that the letter “O” sits in the alphabet right next to “P.” The problem with making a veiled putdown of Pollock was that for many in the wider world, Pollock, the rough and ready Westerner, the artistic taboobreaker, was the archetypal action painter. (Rosenberg’s article appeared in Art News shortly after Pollock’s show at Sidney Janis closed.) The iconic Hans Namuth film and photographs (1951) of Pollock immersed in the processes of painting had only reinforced that perception, and the artist considered himself as someone deeply engaged in just those sorts of issues. According to Pollock’s biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pollock “never doubted that Rosenberg had used him as a model—he later referred to the article routinely as ‘Rosenberg’s piece on me.’ ” In fact, Pollock believed that he had given Rosenberg the idea of action painting on a train trip they took across Long Island, but that Rosenberg had misconstrued it. He said to the painter Conrad Marca-Relli, “How stupid. I talked about the act of painting, exposing the act of painting, not action painting. Harold got it all wrong.”9 In any case, discussion of the mythic importance of the act of painting and its function as a marker of the artist’s resistance to mass culture had been floating around the artworld before Rosenberg’s article. Newman and Still, for example, were particularly insistent on it. In many ways, Pollock’s semi-suicidal death in 1956 made matters simpler for the two critics. Alive, Pollock was troublesome, a wild card: better to see him moved to the safer precincts of history. Greenberg could acknowledge Pollock’s place in art (and his own prescience) without having to worry about any inconvenient new paintings showing up to prove him wrong, and Rosenberg could finally accept Pollock as a proper action painter and lavish him with analysis and praise, as he did in his 1967 New Yorker article, “The Mythic Act.” While the “The American Action Painters” was a putdown of Pollock and a boost for de Kooning, it was also, importantly, an attack on Greenberg. Rosenberg writes:

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The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life. It follows that everything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action— psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero worship. Anything but art criticism. The painter gets away from art through his act of painting; the critic can’t get away from it, the critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form—as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art) instead of living on the canvas—is bound to seem a stranger.10

This might sound abstract and general, but the artworld knew exactly who that critic was. It was the same taste bureaucrat alluded to in this sentence: “Limited to the esthetic, the taste bureaucracies of Modern Art cannot grasp the human experience involved in the new action paintings.”11 Greenberg’s eye was respected and his power acknowledged, but he was widely disliked for his maddeningly judgmental ways and bad studio manners—his habit of dismissing work as failed and for his penchant for telling artists, for all intents and purposes, how to paint. De Kooning was in a position and had the temperament to throw Greenberg out of his studio; few others did. Greenberg did not respond immediately to Rosenberg’s attack (although he did give a passing and mildly dismissive mention to Rosenberg and Action Painting in “ ‘American-Type’ Painting”). But “The American Action Painters” refused to fade away, as no doubt Greenberg fervently hoped it would. Many readers didn’t really understand it—the essay is hardly a model of clarity—and they could make light of its excesses (de Kooning thought that Rosenberg’s theories were “a lot of nonsense”12), but many felt that it essentially validated their lives and their work. Naifeh and Smith write: As with so many of Rosenberg’s other ideas, they knew they liked the sound of it. According to Leslie Fiedler, they reveled in the sheer masculinity of it. To the generation that had come through the Project (the WPA), it justified the years of barroom antics, hard drinking, misogyny, and competitive cocksmanship. To the new generation of younger artists, it exploded the stereotype of the artist as foppish, worthless, and—worst of all in the can-do, postwar culture—ineffectual. At a time when anxiety about ‘making it’ was just beginning to be felt, they took comfort in its defiant anticommercialism.13

Greenberg’s festering anger took printed form in a lengthy 1962 article, published in Encounter, titled, “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name.” In it, he attacks Rosenberg by name, repeatedly and with great vigor, and even fixes the blame for the continued popularity of “The American Action Painters,” writing,

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“That it finally did not get forgotten was mainly the fault of a young English art critic named Lawrence Alloway. Almost two years after its original appearance it was Mr. Alloway who rescued Mr. Rosenberg’s article and set its ideas and terms in effective circulation.”14 Against this background of animosity, it is easy to forget how much the two critics had in common. Born in New York City within a few years of each other, both were Jewish, secular, college-educated but without academic training in art history (Rosenberg graduated from law school). They were brainy, confident, argumentative and extraordinarily articulate. Formidable men, you went up against them at your peril.15 They both started as Marxists, wrote for Partisan Review, and moved in overlapping literary and political circles. And they supported many of the same painters and sculptors, although for different reasons. Greenberg’s take was formal, and few denied that he could look perceptively and clearly. (Even Alloway was an early admirer.) While many Abstract Expressionists had larger ideas about the meaning and scope of their work and were responsive to Rosenberg’s more expansive and romantic view, they were proud of their craftsmanship and formal abilities. They might have been dismissive of School of Paris good taste and the facility and refined sensibility that such art implied, but there was no doubt that they valued a wellmade painting or sculpture: well-made of course on their terms. De Kooning was, for his peers, a model of the deliberative painter, an artist who would spend more time looking than painting, who would obsessively rework a painting like Gotham News (or, famously, Woman I) until it was right. One of the questions artists repeatedly debated was, when is a painting finished? This was a matter of studio practice, not existential disquisition. At the moment the artist raised the question about his or her own work, the painting had obviously come to some sort of end point. Was it the right one? The answer was not arrived at in a frenzy of activity, but through a mindful and tense dance of work and reflection. Rosenberg’s notion of continuous rupture, while important in the larger scheme of things, was not particularly helpful when it came to the nuts and bolts of putting together a successful work of art. When personal issues with artists did not get in the way (and personal issues were always important), Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s theories were sufficiently elastic to allow for a wide range of enthusiasms. Greenberg’s sharply defined theoretical stance, most importantly his insistence on each art discipline abjuring the devices of other disciplines, operated in tandem with his less predictable personal esthetic response; and Rosenberg’s concept of action grew to occupy a much larger stage than that of gestural painting. Clyfford Still makes for an

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interesting example. Still started off close to Rosenberg in the 1940s and urged him to turn his critical skills from literature and politics to art. However, when Rosenberg published “The American Action Painters,” the maniacally prickly and self-righteous artist wrote him a letter (included in the show and reproduced in the catalogue) that was so condescending and vicious that any possibility of continued friendship was crushed. From then on, Still was rarely mentioned in Rosenberg’s writing. After the break with Rosenberg, Still transferred his allegiance to Greenberg, and the critic responded by moving Still to the upper reaches of his pantheon, although from letters we know that Greenberg could be called onto the carpet if Still disapproved of something he wrote. Both critics, however, liked the works of Hofmann, Gorky and Newman. “Action/Abstraction” has excellent examples from all three. Hofmann, the oldest (by a good 25 years) of the first generation Abstract Expressionists, produced a wide variety of paintings—providing, as one might imagine, much grist for Greenberg’s evaluative mill (for how could some fail to be failures?). This variety makes for rewarding comparisons. The exhibition pairs up Hofmann’s Provincetown House (1940) and Fantasia (1943) with two better-known Gorky paintings, Garden in Sochi (1940–1941) and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944). The Hofmann and Gorky works share an intense chromatic presence. Provincetown House and Garden in Sochi, both small, have strong yellow backgrounds—a golden tone in Hofmann’s oil painting and a buttery one in Gorky’s gouache. Fantasia and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb employ a greater range of colors, but each is coloristically structured around the interplay of primaries at different tonal levels. All four paintings are built from biomorphic forms, carefully interwoven with linear elements. Fantasia is notable for its very early use of dripped enamel lines. These white lines sit, optically and physically, on top of the picture plane and serve, not as an overall linear skein, as in Pollock’s paintings, but as a precise drawing element, setting off certain portions of the underlying painting and contributing to its spatial push and pull. A more cubistic Hofmann, Exuberance (1955), pairs up well with de Kooning’s Gotham News, while the former’s magisterial Sanctum Sanctorum (1962), with its thick blocks of acidic blue, yellow-orange, yellow and lime set against an orange and scarlet background (done when the artist was in his 80s), forms a rougher and more material counterweight to Rothko’s hovering rectangles of disembodied color. Newman is represented by a range of work, from one of the early symbolic paintings (Genesis—The Break, 1946) to a small early one-zip painting (Onement IV , 1949) and on to a late, extremely powerful expanse of light red, edged with white (White and Hot, 1967). Also included in the exhibition

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is one of Newman’s best sculptures, Here III (1965–66) a tall stainless steel monolith mounted on small, truncated pyramid of Cor-Ten steel. Sculpture presented a problem for both critics. As Greenberg wrote, speaking of the failure of sculpture to live up to his high expectations, “These hopes have faded. Painting continues to hold the field, by virtue of its greater breadth of statement as well as by its greater energy.”16 For Greenberg, sculpture was too old fashioned. It was tied to figuration and far too susceptible to the baleful influences of Cubism and Surrealism. He reserved a particular animus for the popular British sculptors of the day, like Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, and William Turnbull. The great exception to Greenberg’s disappointment with the medium was David Smith, whom he referred to as “the best sculptor of his generation.”17 He admired Smith for his commitment to abstraction, mastery of materials and ability to “draw” in space in a suitably sculptural way. After Smith’s untimely death in 1965, Greenberg’s sculptural enthusiasm shifted to Smith’s English admirer, Anthony Caro, and then on to the many sculptors of welded steel who followed in Caro’s path. Rosenberg preferred painting as well. It was, after all, more difficult to be action-oriented and spontaneous in a slower medium like wood or stone carving, plaster modeling or welding. He respected the work of the sculptors in his circle, especially Herbert Ferber and Ibram Lassaw, and in the ’60s he supported Tony Smith, whose work was connected in the public mind with Minimalism, a movement greatly disliked by both Rosenberg and Greenberg. Smith, an architect-turned-sculptor-and-painter, was, in fact, from an earlier generation than the Minimalists, a friend of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. What Anne Truitt, with her severe painted wooden columns was for Greenberg, Smith was for Rosenberg: an artist whose work might superficially resemble Minimalism, but which differed from it in significant ways. Elucidate that difference, and Minimalism was made to look shallow. As Rosenberg wrote of Smith in 1967 in “Defining Art,” “Unlike most ‘primary’ [i.e. Minimalist] constructions, the forms often suggest incompleteness; in several a plinthlike section thrusts outward in a gesture of seeking. Smith’s refusal to close his structures may produce a preliminary feeling of frustration, but it has the virtue of communicating, like a sketch or partly unpainted canvas, the openness of the creative act.”18 Politically, esthetically, philosophically and emotionally, Greenberg and Rosenberg were in thorough agreement on one important thing: mass culture and its artistic expression, kitsch, presented a manifest and powerful danger to creativity, freedom and art itself. In this conviction they were in accord with the

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philosophers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. While Walter Benjamin held out a certain degree of hope for the possibility that mass art might bring something of value to the culture at large, Horkheimer and Adorno believed that what they called “the culture industry” served capitalist society and was compromised by its very nature. In such a system, art becomes a mere commodity and people are the manipulated, passive consumers of it. The title of their 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” says it neatly. Greenberg’s early and much remarked-on essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” appeared in Partisan Review in 1939, and even though in later years Greenberg was uncomfortable with aspects of it, he never wavered in his animosity to popular culture. Published in Commentary in 1948, Rosenberg’s “The Herd of Independent Minds” inveighs against the oppressive and alienating qualities of mass culture. Ten years later, he published “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism” in Dissent, an underknown essay that treats the subject in a nuanced, pessimistic and passionate way. In Rosenberg’s view, not only had kitsch thoroughly taken over society in general, but it had wrapped its tentacles around virtually anyone who made it his business to write or think (ostensibly critically) about it. He wrote, “The common argument of the mass-culture intellectuals that they have come not to bathe in the waters but to resister the degree of its pollution does not impress me.”19 He was most distressed by art’s lack of independence, the way its form and content seemed aligned with what was successful, and how rather than challenging its audience, it catered to that audience’s expectations. As might be imagined, both Greenberg and Rosenberg had little patience for Pop Art. Greenberg dismissed it out of hand as being ingratiating and irrevocably minor (to the point of claiming that Grant Wood was better than any Pop artist). But Rosenberg, while disliking work that seemed more polished and impersonal, like Roy Lichtenstein’s, warmed to Claes Oldenburg’s art, particularly his early painted plaster pieces. “Action/Abstraction” includes a good one, Funeral Heart (1961), a green, irregularly shaped, wall-mounted plaque of plaster-impregnated muslin that is emblazoned with a drippily outlined red heart. Rosenberg appreciated Oldenburg’s insouciant urban bohemianism, his engagement with materials and his pricking of social pretention. Peter Saul was another artist associated with Pop whom Rosenberg liked. He sympathized with Saul’s political commitment and anger—expressed with a certain degree of black humor—but anger nonetheless. Rosenberg was for the malcontent, the outsider, the immigrant, the self-inventor, the person who could create what he termed, “the anxious object.” Lee Bontecou made just such objects. Her patched-up, looming canvas-

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and-steel works, such as the untitled wall relief (1962) in the exhibition, were disturbing and palpably threatening artworks that countered the larger society’s sense of satisfaction. Although Rosenberg’s project was serious, humor was not precluded. Thus his admiration for his good friend and Springs, Long Island, neighbor, Saul Steinberg. Steinberg, a witty and urbane immigrant from Romania, remains a difficult artist to slot. Even though his cartoonlike drawings appeared (and years after his death continue to appear) in the New Yorker, his work has long enjoyed the respect of the artworld. Steinberg’s art is accessible—to a point—and makes you smile, rather than laugh. But there is a disquieting edge to it; his send-up of officialdom, provinciality and self-importance leads you wonder if this doesn’t, in some way, apply to you. The institutions of the artworld are perpetually ripe for deflation. Collection (1971) gives us 13 mostly vertical wooden panels, painted with various recognizable subjects, including a classic Mondrian. The panels’ tops and bottoms, however, are sharply angled, and the ensemble arranged to simulate deep, vertigoinducing one-point perspective. The flat, reasonably small piece of wall it actually occupies seems to be at least 50 feet deep, its grand recession an obvious fake. As previously noted, Minimalism was another movement that failed to engage either critic. Although Minimalism, with its strong formalist bent, might have seemed suited to Greenberg’s ideas, it wasn’t to his taste. He wrote: Minimal art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough anything else. Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered. The geometrical and modular simplicity may announce and signify the artistically furthest-out, but the fact that the signals are understood for what they want to mean betrays them artistically. . . . The artistic substance and reality, as distinct from the program, turns out to be in good safe taste.20

Frank Stella is an interesting case, and “Action/Abstraction” includes Stella’s major black painting, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (1959). While much of his work from the ’60s has been put into the Minimalist camp, Stella’s strong Abstract Expressionist proclivities (evident in his paintings from the ’70s on) can be seen in his early production. This was certainly the case with the preblack paintings, but with their subtle surfaces and edges, and their clear traces of the hand, the black paintings, too, can be seen as being, if not gestural, in line with the work of Abstract Expressionists like Newman and Reinhardt. For whatever reason, Greenberg had little use for Frank Stella’s work. If Stella was an artist whom Greenberg should have liked but didn’t, then (to maintain curatorial balance) Allan Kaprow is on hand as an artist whom

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Rosenberg might have been expected to support but failed to. Kaprow’s Happenings and other participatory works would have seemed the very essence of action. Rosenberg, however, had difficulty with open-ended works, where the artist’s creativity was subordinated to the construction of meaning by the audience. The exhibition features Words (1962), a loosely sprung collection of hand-printed, projected and spoken exhortations, commands, sentence fragments and poetical riffs (re-created and rather self-consciously updated for the exhibition by Martha Rosler). As for Greenberg, he had other artists of the ’60s to support—the color field painters on one hand and the welded steel sculptors, heirs to the legacy of David Smith, on the other. Greenberg would not be held to theoretical absolutes. Flatness, for example, was fine, but only up to a point. Medium specificity, too. Anne Truitt’s work—an amalgam of painting and sculpture—would seem to be exactly what he would disdain, but he didn’t. When it came down to it, Greenberg liked what he liked, and he was smart and forceful enough to make a case for whatever he wanted. Greenberg was not artistically conservative in the sense of preferring older, safer art, but like many of the intellectuals of his generation who were said to have substituted culture for religion, his strong, almost theological belief in the sanctity of art predisposed him to a certain rigidity. One can almost read “salvation” into a painting’s “success” and “damnation” into its “failure.” For Greenberg, contemporary art’s place in an art-historical continuum was of the utmost importance. If the art of one’s times was to be taken seriously, it had to be judged against the great art of the past and measure up to it. Modern art was not a series of incoherent ruptures, but an intelligible progression from the past to the present. As Greenberg writes in “Modernist Painting” (1960); And I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant, and does not mean now, anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling, of tradition, but it also means its further evolution. Modernist art continues the past without gap or break, and wherever it may end up, it will never cease being intelligible in terms of the past.21

Greenberg was too savvy to propose inevitability with respect to artistic change, or the permanent relevance of any one style. He was very aware of the potential for stylistic exhaustion and stagnation. It wasn’t that the world had to produce a Morris Louis to reinvigorate Abstract Expressionism, but it did and, by Greenberg’s lights, it did so at the right time. Looking at Louis’s Iris (1954), we can see how the expansive scale; stained, flattened surface; subtly modulated, veiled color, tamped down by successive pourings of thinned, pigmented acrylic

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resin; muted tonal contrast and absence of a Cubist grid (especially a Cubist grid delineated by drawing) would signal to Greenberg the advent of something quite new, as well as the arrival of a worthy successor to Pollock and Still. After 1967, Greenberg’s published writing slowed down; the ’70s yielded a small amount of critical work, the ’80s considerably less. A series of seminars delivered at Bennington College in the spring of 1971 resulted in nine essays, eight of which were published in art journals between 1973 and ’79. A book, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste, which collected all nine essays and included transcriptions of the original seminars, was published by Oxford University Press in 1999. Greenberg’s dwindling number of publications did not mean that he lost interest in the artworld. His power and influence only seemed to increase. Formalist criticism, with its potential for focus and clarity (or as Leo Steinberg put it, “the professionalism of its approach”22) had begun to attract younger art writers and art historians like Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Barbara Rose and Walter Darby Bannard. Museums, galleries and collectors, as well as artists, paid Greenberg a great deal of heed. In the ’70s, especially, art that bore the Greenberg stamp of approval gained a dominant position. Color Field painting and welded abstract sculpture even developed their own version of a Second Generation, with younger practitioners like Joel Perlman, Michael Steiner and Pat Lipsky showing in galleries like the SoHo branch of Andre Emmerich and Tibor de Nagy on 57th Street. But as art’s field expanded and artists began to look past the self-referential object, opposition to Greenbergian formalism increased. Painting, especially abstraction, while still important, lost its sense of inherited and inherent privilege, its automatic place at the head of the table. Krauss and others moved away from Greenberg, and interdisciplinarity in the arts as well as overt subject matter began to seem less like perversions of modern art’s essence, as Greenberg would have it, and more like expressions of its innate potential. Summing up “Modernist Painting,” Steinberg dismissed Greenberg’s neo-Kantian idea of modernist painting’s self-criticality, its progression to greater flatness and purity, writing: Whatever else one may think of Greenberg’s construction, its overwhelming effect is to put all painting in series. The progressive flattening of the pictorial stage since Manet ‘until its backdrop has become the same as its curtain’—the approximation of the depicted field to the plane of its material support—this was the great Kantian process of self-definition in which all serious Modernist

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painting was willy-nilly engaged. The one thing which painting can call its own is color coincident with the flat ground, and its drive towards independence demands withdrawal from anything outside itself and single-minded insistence on its unique property. Even now, two hundred years after Kant, any striving for other goals becomes deviationist. Despite the continual emergence of crossborder disciplines (ecology, cybernetics, psycho-linguistics, biochemical engineering, etc.), the self-definition of advanced painting is still said to require retreat. It is surely cause for suspicion when the drift of third-quarter twentiethcentury American painting is made to depend on eighteenth-century German epistemology.23

Even though by the 1980s Greenberg’s influence was sharply on the wane, he was still on people’s minds. He came to serve as a kind of critical lightning rod, the exemplar of the wrong way to go about things. Negative things were said and written about him, which only kept his name in the discourse. It was not that way for Rosenberg. In contrast to Greenberg, Rosenberg’s written output increased. His position at the New Yorker was certainly a factor. While Greenberg’s predilection was to find fault and exclude, Rosenberg cast a wider net and was capable of greater critical generosity. His concept of action was expansive, and embraced politics and ethics as well as a variety of esthetic stances and strategies. (If Ad Reinhardt could be an action painter, then that left the door pretty wide open.) One might think that Rosenberg’s greater reach would have given his work a continuing relevance, but his death in 1978, 16 years before Greenberg’s, effectively marked the end of his critical influence, although he is now experiencing a belated resurgence. Greenberg’s active involvement with a younger generation of color field painters and welded steel sculptors, while excluding much of the vital art of the period (he disdainfully lumped virtually anything new that he did not like under the category of “Novelty Art”) kept him in the game. One gets the sense that Rosenberg’s heart belonged to the ’50s, and his interest in later developments was, if not perfunctory, then nowhere near as keen. Having worked our way through 25 intense years of art, criticism and contextualization, what are we to make of “Action/Abstraction”? Seen as a purely historical exhibition, it is clearly first-rate. The art is always engaging and often exhilarating, and the curation and catalogue reflect admirable precision, thoroughness and inclusiveness. The show will, I am sure, draw appreciative crowds when it travels to St. Louis and Buffalo. Even the examination of excluded art and artists is unlikely to provoke unease. The deeper question is, does “Action/ Abstraction” have anything to tell us about today? In what way might this not so polite debate between two long-gone critics relate to the problems we face in a

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much larger and more complex artworld? Art now seems to have no boundaries, literally and figuratively. Art is made and displayed virtually anywhere in an exponentially expanding world of art fairs, biennales and other temporary venues, on the Internet, in art-school open houses, in publications and blogs of all sorts, in performances, fleeting events—essentially, in any form conceivable. On one hand, this is liberating; on the other, extraordinarily confusing. There is something, however, that is certain: just as aspects of today’s open situation create more opportunity and freedom for some, in the absence of shared and focused artistic concerns, market interests exert increasing power. The ability of those interests to subvert, divert, tempt, co-opt and preempt is frightening. The artist, despite the comforting illusion of connectedness fostered by the Internet, art schools, gallery districts and artist-friendly neighborhoods, is still, for the most part, an individual practitioner, unable to resist or control the sophisticated economic and political engines of the world at large. This is something that Rosenberg and Greenberg would have certainly understood. To come to grips with this situation, the first step is to regain a sense of proportion and the power to frame the debate. We should have some basis for determining if something is a valid work of art and, more importantly, for assessing, other than by the test of the marketplace, if it is good (or at least suggests the artist is pointed in the right direction.) Clearly there is not a onesize-fits-all standard, but we could do worse than to aim for a combination of the best of that which animated Greenberg and Rosenberg, and which this exhibition illustrates so thoughtfully. Both men possessed a deep understanding of art and culture, and they took art very, very seriously. At the least, a working knowledge of art history, particularly of the modern period, is necessary for evaluating art. An understanding of other contributing elements or disciplines—philosophy, anthropology, politics, current events or anything else germane—is also useful. Times have changed, and the two critics’ strictures and edicts, their enthusiasms and visceral dislikes do not necessarily translate to our day. But from Rosenberg we might borrow certain evaluative standards. We could look hard at a work of art’s newness, its evidence of creative spark. To take it a step further—and at the risk of passing judgment on the intentions and even the character of the artist— we might examine the work of art for signs of authenticity or seriousness of purpose, as well as a sense of commitment. Does it operate in good faith? Is there necessity behind it? Did it have to be done? Following Greenberg’s lead, we could question a work’s historical lineage and the way it holds up in comparison with its predecessors. Formalism seems to be

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a passé method, but there is no getting around a thoughtful examination of the work itself, in whatever medium it is made. How well is it put together, do all the parts work with each other, is everything in it essential, is anything vital missing? No matter how conceptual, does it go beyond mere ideation? As Greenberg writes in “Recentness of Sculpture”: “Aesthetic surprise hangs on forever—it is still there in Raphael as it is in Pollock—and ideas alone cannot achieve it. Aesthetic surprise comes from inspiration and sensibility as well as from being abreast of the artistic times.”24 Great art often springs from unpromising soil. Both Greenberg and Rosenberg valued art that took the risk of failure and pushed deeper rather than wider, that abjuring easy answers, ingratiation, the allure of predictability and the many varieties of slickness. They set high standards—standards that might seem idiosyncratic and exclusionary to our eyes—but standards nonetheless. If artists and those who truly care about art want to take hold of the dialogue once again, they must formulate and apply strenuous critical benchmarks. Some of those might be new, but others might be quite to the liking of Greenberg and Rosenberg. Paying serious attention to the issues raised by “Action/Abstraction” would be a good way to begin. “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976” Jewish Museum, New York, St. Louis Art Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2008–2009) Art in America, September 2008

Notes and References 1 Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Lionel Feininger, and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, Nov. 27, 1943, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brian, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986, vol. 1, p. 166. 2 Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Pollock; of the Annual exhibition of the American Abstract Artists; and of the Exhibition, European Artists in America,” The Nation, Apr. 7, 1945, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, p. 16. 3 Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Worden Day, Carl Holty, and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation, Jan. 24, 1948, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, p. 203. 4 Ibid., p. 202. 5 Greenberg, “ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” Partisan Review, Spring 1955, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3 (1993), p. 226.

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6 Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Willem de Kooning,” The Nation, Apr. 24, 1948, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, pp. 228–29. 7 Greenberg, “ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” pp. 221–222. 8 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, 51, no. 8, December 1952, in Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, 1959, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 34–35. 9 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock; An American Saga, New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1989, p. 708. 10 Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” p. 28. 11 Ibid., p. 38. 12 Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock; An American Saga, p. 711. 13 Ibid., pp. 712–713. 14 Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name,” Encounter, December, 1962, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 (1993), p. 137. 15 Greenberg’s intellectual curiosity and focus are evident in this recollection by his wife, Janice Van Horne, in the preface to The Harold Letters: 1928–1943. The Making of an American Intellectual: “In 1994, on one of Clem’s last visits to the emergency room, barely able to breathe, he sat on the gurney rereading a shredded volume of Heidegger, in German of course, impervious as the tubes and needles invaded.” 16 Greenberg, “David Smith,” Art in America, Winter 1956–1957, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3. p. 276. 17 Ibid., p. 277. 18 Harold Rosenberg, “Defining Art,” in Harold Rosenberg, Artworks and Packages, 1969, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 40. 19 Harold Rosenberg, “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism,” Dissent 5 Winter 1958, in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 259–260. 20 Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” American Sculpture of the Sixties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April–June 1967, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, p. 254. 21 Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Forum Lectures, Washington, D.C., Voice of America, 1960, in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, p. 92. 22 Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (based on a lecture given at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 1968), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with TwentiethCentury Art, New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 66. 23 Ibid., pp. 67–68. 24 Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” p. 254.

15

Robert Morris: The Order of Disorder

Robert Morris has re-created one of the key works of Post-Minimalism, Untitled (Scatter Piece), 1968–69, at Leo Castelli Gallery on 77th Street. First exhibited along with Continuous Project Altered Daily at the Castelli Warehouse on West 108th Street in March 1969, Untitled (Scatter Piece) traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the following November as part of an early Morris retrospective, but was not sent to the exhibition’s next venue, the Detroit Institute of Arts. Instead, it was returned to storage, and subsequently disappeared—curious, since it consisted of 100 hefty pieces of metal and 100 pieces of heavy-duty felt, and weighed about 2 tons. Recreation, with its implication of exact reproduction, is perhaps an imprecise word for the 2010 project. The elements in the new work are indeed the same type as in the original, but their disposition (not rule-bound but arrived at intuitively) responds to the work’s location: Morris maintains that Untitled (Scatter Piece) would exist in a perfectly valid iteration while in storage— presumably neatly stacked rather than strewn about. The rectilinear metal pieces are made of copper, aluminum, zinc, brass, lead or steel, and arrived at their forms by chance operations (coin tosses and numbers randomly taken from the phone book), which determined each element’s length, width and thickness, and whether it was to be left flat or bent at a right angle, either once or twice. The dark gray felt pieces, equal in number to the metal ones, corresponded to the shape of each metal piece before bending. Morris developed and diagrammed his fabrication instructions on sheets of graph paper (nine are included in this show), and he followed them for the work’s re-creation. In the current exhibition, Morris has heaped the felt pieces in the room’s corners and distributed the clean, beautifully crafted metal parts over the polished dark wood floor. A number of the metal pieces also lean against the walls and radiator. In the 1969 installation, the felt and metal mingled together in the rougher brick and concrete warehouse space, both on the floor and 139

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against the walls. Although the artist directed the arrangement of the elements of Untitled (Scatter Piece) in all its incarnations, he says that his hand is not necessary: in fact he told the gallery director, Barbara Castelli, that she could do it herself, and when she demurred, he suggested, perhaps humorously, or perhaps not, that she could ask a couple of eight-year-olds to take on the task. This attitude, insouciant as it might seem, speaks directly to the Duchampian roots of Morris’s enterprise. Morris has always been an intellectually formidable and radical provocateur with a foundation in philosophy (his writings are dense but persuasive) as well as in theater and dance. Even his ostensibly Minimalist sculptures of the mid-’60s relate to performance and movement. Morris’s early task-oriented dance work with Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann and others shows itself in many of his sculptures, but especially in Post-Minimalist works such as Untitled (Scatter Piece) and Continuous Project Altered Daily. In both sculptures, workmanlike activity—at the points of inception and installation in the former, and on a daily basis in the latter—took precedence over final form. These sculptures were produced at approximately the same time as one of Morris’s most influential and contested essays, “Anti Form.”1 Published in Artforum in April 1968, the article argued for an art based on a foregrounding of process and material, and took Jackson Pollock’s dripping and Morris Louis’s pouring as the new sculpture’s immediate antecedents. The lessons of Pollock and Louis, when applied to sculpture, would yield work that was open-ended and non-estheticized. Morris writes: The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms that were not projected in advance. Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied, as replacing will result in another configuration. Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms is a positive assertion. It is part of the work’s refusal to continue estheticizing the form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.2

Untitled (Scatter Piece) and Continuous Project Altered Daily, showing at the warehouse, were paired with two untitled Anti Form pieces by Morris exhibited at the same time at Castelli’s 77th Street gallery. These works, one now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the other destroyed, were composed of thread waste—commonly found bundled on the streets of pregentrified SoHo—and other miscellaneous industrial detritus. The four

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sculptures, which were rooted in Duchamp, John Cage and Fluxus (although Morris disassociated himself from that movement early on), exemplified the new conceptual, loosely sprung performative sensibility taking hold in New York and Europe, a sensibility shared by contemporaries like Barry Le Va, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and other Post-Minimalists, as well as by the Italian Arte Povera artists. Importantly, in its material and spatial freedom, its acceptance of excess and indeterminacy, as well as in its responsiveness to site, Morris’s work prefigured that of a wide range of later sculptors, from Judy Pfaff and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Jason Rhoades, Cady Noland, Jessica Stockholder and Karen Kilimnik. On a personal note, I was delighted to see this work again. As a young artist, I was the person seated at the desk (more like a card table), keeping a watch on things at this lightly attended northern outpost of the New York avant-garde. The Castelli Warehouse was an exhibition space that showed some of the most exciting work around, and it was also a treasure trove, with racks and aisles full of Rauschenbergs, Rosenquists, Chamberlains and Warhols, which I got to look at carefully during my not very strenuous days. That Morris exhibition has stayed with me over the years, not just for its manifest qualities, but also for something that happened midway through its run. As I was reading a book, an imposingly scowling figure came into the empty gallery. I recognized him immediately as Richard Serra, who had participated that past December in the much talked about group show (organized by Morris) at the Warehouse, “9 at Leo Castelli,” and whose work I admired immensely. He walked directly to the room that housed Continuous Project Altered Daily—an agglomeration of earth, water, paper, grease, wood, plastic and seemingly whatever unartful material had been at hand—lifted the rope and strode in. My mild state of alarm ratcheted up when he began kicking things around, very much like a child does to a tempting pile of leaves. I said, in what I am afraid was not a very authoritative voice, “Excuse me, but I don’t think you are supposed to do that.” Serra turned to me and said in a tone of withering scorn, each word equally and forcefully emphasized, “It doesn’t matter.” And evidently it didn’t, since Bob came in later to do his daily labor, and didn’t notice Serra’s alterations, or if he did, kindly didn’t mention them. When the show ended, he gave me the mud-splattered sign by the door—one of the few artifacts, I believe, of the long-destroyed piece—and inscribed it to me. I was, and I am, very grateful. Art in America May 2010

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Notes and References 1 Allan Kaprow, for example, took Morris to task in an article in the Summer 1968 issue of Artforum, “The Shape of the Art Environment: How Anti Form is AntiForm?.” 2 Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum, April 1968, reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993, p. 46.

16

West of Eden

A passion for self-invention has long marked the American psyche, and nowhere has it seemed more pronounced than in California and, in particular, Los Angeles. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s crisp and cogent account of the L.A. art scene of the late ’50s and ’60s, Rebels in Paradise, shows us a town where contemporary artists had the dubious privilege of starting pretty much from scratch. It was no easy matter to create a viable advanced artworld in a city so conservative that in 1963 the trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art rejected Edward G. Robinson’s first-rate collection of Impressionist work because of the actor’s progressive politics. Less than 10 years earlier, the trustees of that same museum allowed the purchase of a small Jackson Pollock painting only if it were to be kept in the curator’s office and shown to the public (presumably on rare occasions) for “educational purposes.” L.A. might have been provincial, but the weather was great, real estate near the beach was cheap, art schools and teaching gigs abounded, and if you played your cards right, you could get a shot at the celebrity and glamour that were such tangible presences in the city. By the late ’50s, young artists were moving there and, importantly, staying. They felt happily (although sometimes defensively) estranged from New York, finding it too cerebral, too rooted in art history and European tastes. They wanted to create something that was legitimately their own, not just a regional variant of a preexisting style. Pop art and Minimalism hit the world in the early ’60s, about the same time that a number of strong Los Angeles artists emerged. These new approaches seemed to suit the L.A. ethos, and the local artists felt as entitled to explore that terrain as anyone in New York or London. One of the advantages of a small artworld, like that of the early Abstract Expressionists on Tenth Street in New York, is that everyone pretty much knows everyone else. Drohojowska-Philp, who previously wrote a life of Georgia O’Keeffe, teases apart the tangled web of connections that bound L.A.’s artists, dealers, curators and collectors. She nicely lays out a shifting landscape of 143

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discovery, cooperation and rivalry, anchoring her story around certain key players and institutions. The Ferus Gallery figures prominently, and Drohojowska-Philp tells us much about its early owners, Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, and its core artists, Ed Kienholz (who founded the gallery in 1957 along with Hopps), Billy Al Bengston, Ken Price, Craig Kauffman, John Altoon, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha. (Joe Goode, Ruscha’s friend from Oklahoma City, was closely associated with the Ferus group but did not show there.) She devotes chapters to the dealers Virginia Dwan and Nicholas Wilder, to the light artists Irwin, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler, and to the conceptually oriented work of John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman. Rebels in Paradise has a light, almost breezy tone, but Drohojowska-Philp delves into thornier social issues as easily as she conveys the excitement of, say, the nearly simultaneous openings of Andy Warhol’s show at Ferus and Marcel Duchamp’s retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum (in 1963, the year that the Robinson collection was rejected by LACMA). Using Judy Chicago as an exemplar, she shows us the difficult time faced by women in an artworld where many players doubted their capacity to be artists at all (and where a 1964 group show at Ferus, featuring Moses, Irwin, Price and Bengston, could be titled “Studs” with no apparent irony). Drohojowska-Philp also explores the increasingly uncloseted gay scene that centered around the English transplants David Hockney and writer Christopher Isherwood, as well as Isherwood’s partner, the portraitist Don Bachardy. She gives due coverage as well to the art that sprang from the political ferment of the 1965 Los Angeles riots and the art community’s early opposition to the Vietnam War. While the L.A. artists may have fashioned a workable milieu for themselves out of very little, they did it with sufficient flair to attract some young hipsters from that crucible of stylish invention and fantasy, Hollywood. Dennis Hopper, who had achieved a measure of fame from his roles in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, was married in the ’60s to Brooke Hayward, the very well connected daughter of actress Margaret Sullavan and producer Leland Hayward. Hopper became a part of the art scene and brought along friends like Dean Stockwell, Peter Fonda, Russ Tamblyn and Troy Donahue. Hopper was a savvy collector, a painter of some skill and, notably, a talented photographer. His photographs of the L.A. artworld, a number of which are reproduced in the book, form an important record of the time. The artists, particularly the Ferus group, were an attractive lot. Tanned and fit (often from surfing), with a coterie of pretty girls around them, they seemed, much like their counterparts in Hollywood, to

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embody a certain relaxed and youthful American glamour. It was a good life and, contrary to the moralizing movies of the day, mostly free of tragic comeuppance. Drohojowska-Philp puts more emphasis on biography and institutional history than she does on an analysis of the art itself—not an unreasonable focus when the institutions were in formation or flux and the people were so interesting. And few were more compelling than Walter Hopps. A fourth-generation Californian, son of an orthopedic surgeon and a mother trained as a Jungian analyst, Hopps was attracted to art early on. As a teenager visiting the Los Angeles home of Walter and Louise Arensberg on a high school trip in 1949, he was so taken with their collection of Duchamps (they were the artist’s main American patrons) that he was invited back and soon became a regular at their house. That early interest paid a dividend 14 years later, when Duchamp was persuaded by the young man’s deep knowledge to let Hopps curate the first museum retrospective of his work, at the then not terribly significant Pasadena Art Museum. Hopps shone as a curator. He was a visionary—passionate, creative, and blessed with an extraordinary visual memory and an uncanny ability to spot talent. Artists loved him. He was, however, a terrible administrator (who nevertheless regularly got appointed to managerial positions.) Impractical in the extreme, Hopps was maddeningly elusive: his staff at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he became director in 1970, had buttons printed up saying “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes,” and his boss at a later job at the Smithsonian was wont to say that if he could ever find Hopps, he’d fire him. At Ferus, Hopps formed an unlikely partnership with Irving Blum. A native New Yorker, Blum was cool-headed, professional and focused. After buying out Kienholz’s share of the gallery in 1958, he persuaded Hopps to reduce the number of artists, found an outside investor and, in the same year, moved the gallery to more impressive quarters on North La Cienega Boulevard. Blum and Hopps thus provided an early and strong commercial base for the L.A. scene to build on. Other dealers were also important, particularly Virginia Dwan, who was able, thanks to her inherited holdings in the 3M Corporation, to present daring but money-losing exhibitions. Drohojowska-Philp charts the increasing cross-fertilization of the Los Angeles artworld by people and works from other places—particularly New York. As the ’60s went on, L.A.’s natural allure was augmented by the presence of forward-thinking museums and a growing group of wealthy and knowledgeable collectors. New York artists wanted to show there, and Blum, Dwan and Wilder helped make that happen. The opening in 1966 of the technologically cuttingedge print workshop Gemini G.E.L. provided an additional incentive for artists

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to visit, and the city’s credentials as a home for serious art were burnished by Artforum’s 1965 move from San Francisco to offices above the Ferus Gallery, where the publication remained for two years before decamping for New York. One of the virtues of Rebels in Paradise is that it puts the art scene in a wider cultural context, taking time, for example, to discuss the interactions of the artists and dealers with architects like Frank Gehry (Drohojowska-Philp gives us a nice snapshot of his early career) and fashion designers like Rudi Gernreich, the inventor of the topless bathing suit. The L.A. cultural world of the time was big enough to be interesting and small enough to get a handle on. (Of particular benefit is the extensive timeline that opens the book.) While Rebels in Paradise doesn’t aspire to scholarly status or aim for the sheer exhaustive heft of so many recent histories, it is still well researched, clearly organized and cleanly written. Drohojowska-Philp gives readers a palpable sense of starting afresh. Los Angeles was an exciting place in the ’60s, and her book makes you wish you had been there. Art in America, October 2011

Notes and References Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s, by Hunter DrohojowskaPhilp, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2011.

17

Harmony and Discord

The quintessential Pop artist, the master of the cartoon figure writ large, the man of whom Life magazine asked in 1964, “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?,” Roy Lichtenstein, nonetheless, produced much work that is abstract in the broad sense of the word. As he said in a 1995 New York Times interview with Michael Kimmelman, “All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I’m always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We’re both saying something we want to be true.” The full-scale traveling museum survey, “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” opening this month at the Art Institute of Chicago, naturally focuses on the artist’s well-known Pop icons. Most of us think of Pop art as representational, but a substantial number of the over 160 pieces in the show fall into the realm of the abstract.Viewing the artist’s achievement through the lens of abstraction—an approach rarely taken—allows us to look at Lichtenstein from a different perspective, and to connect him not just to the wider range of twentieth-century art, but to the ongoing evolution of abstract painting. Lichtenstein (1923–1997) developed a methodology—a toolbox of devices, effects and stylistic moves imbued with a distinctive mix of irony, craft and anxiety—that has had a significant impact on several generations of abstract artists. I am one of them. Having worked early on as his assistant, I absorbed, perhaps inadvertently, many elements of his studio practice and his artistic worldview. De Kooning might seem a more obvious influence on abstract painters, but could Philip Taaffe, for instance, be seen in quite the same light without Lichtenstein’s example? Lichtenstein’s abstractions draw from his well-honed repertory of Pop material. These works, however, may be divided into two prominent categories— one calm, regularized, balanced and easily read, the other perceptually odd and off-putting. Apart from the Surrealist mash-ups and American Indian montages of the late ’70s and the “Reflection” series of 1988–1990, Lichtenstein’s more familiar Pop work generally fits into the balanced and easily identifiable group. However, working abstractly—that is, being less tethered to a unifying real-world 147

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signification—seemed to free him. It allowed him to infuse his work with unease and harshness whenever he wished. This discord is perceptual and direct rather than cerebral and ironic. While these abstractions might seem to be awkward or “off,” they are quite intentionally so, and serve to add depth and emotional shading to Lichtenstein’s body of work as a whole. Discordant abstract paintings appear with regularity in Lichtenstein’s Pop oeuvre. There are, for example, the Mirror Paintings of the early ’70s, the Imperfect Paintings of the mid- to late ’80s, and the Abstract Paintings with Frames from the early ’80s. However, the dichotomy of calm and agitated works is best demonstrated by two themes that Lichtenstein explored in depth—brushstrokes and abstract landscapes. The most familiar brushstroke paintings—those from the mid ’60s, such as Little Big Painting (1965) or Brushstroke with Spatter (1966)—are lively and well ordered, with a tendency toward the baroque. They are famously ironic takes on the sacrosanct Abstract Expressionist brushstroke—that carrier of individuality, existential doubt, improvisation and irreproducibility. Lichtenstein’s brushstroke paintings are painstakingly crafted and defiantly nonspontaneous, with clear color separations and comic book hues. They are smart and witty to be sure, but they are also among Lichtenstein’s most esthetically satisfying and pleasurable paintings. They combine the sensual aspects of both Pop and Abstract Expressionism. In the process they highlight Ab Ex’s formal rather than emotional or transcendent qualities, as well as its underlying elegance and legibility. Lichtenstein returned to the brushstroke theme repeatedly, in painting and in sculpture. Thirty years after the first brushstrokes, he made another 10 modestly scaled paintings of the subject in 1996, three of which are included in the show. They combine Pop and Ab Ex in a much more literal and disturbing way. Here again, the artist goes against his proclivity for harmony, formal cohesion and good taste (even if this is good bad taste). In these never-before-exhibited paintings—Brushstroke Abstraction I, Brushstroke Abstraction II and Brushstroke with Still Life VII —Lichtenstein takes hard-edge shapes and slathers a few chunky “real” brushstrokes over them in thick lines that form loosely delineated enclosures. The brushstrokes, laid down not with a brush but a cloth dipped in paint, are rendered in an especially unattractive shade of ultramarine blue, crudely and unevenly mixed with white. The Kline-like strokes are awkward and inelegant. The hard-edged elements seem designed to set the teeth on edge as well. Brushstroke Abstraction I features a field of thin and very optically active diagonal black and white stripes occupying the upper left corner of the painting and a swath of the bottom edge, a triangle of pale turquoise on the lower left-hand

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edge and a small section of red Benday dots on a yellow field in the lower right corner. The other two paintings, in addition to the blue brushstrokes, give us a collection of planes and textures and some half-formed perspectival elements in a palette of odd tans, browns, grays and pastel yellows. These paintings are studies in immiscibility. Nothing flows or mixes smoothly—not the gestural and the geometric, not flatness and perspectival depth, not one color or texture against another, not even the blue and white paint of the brushstrokes themselves. Lichtenstein referred to the strokes in this group of works as “obliterating brushstrokes,” and we can see a distinct element of destruction and unmaking vying with his normal practice of careful construction. We might also note distinct affinities to the work of younger abstract painters of the ’90s, like Jonathan Lasker or Tom Nozkowski, who broke apart the conventions of well-made abstraction, courting the awkward and the disharmonious, both compositionally and chromatically. A similar dichotomy of affect can be seen in the landscapes of the mid-’60s. During this period Lichtenstein played with the conventions of generic landscape. In addition to creating variations on greeting card-type sunsets, he also took advantage of the extremely simple visual sign or definition of landscape—the straightforward horizontal division of the canvas—to create work that functions less as landscape than as total abstraction. This simplified configuration shares with Minimalism the tendency toward stasis and tranquility. Which is fine, if that’s what you want: often Lichtenstein didn’t, and to alter that tendency and still keep the basic format, he had to do something forceful in another direction. Seascape (1964), for example, consists of an uninflected field of deep blue Benday dots covering more than three quarters of the horizontal canvas, topped with two thin bands of progressively lighter blue dots, standing in for mountains, and a small sector of plain ground that reads as sky. Another 1964 Seascape gives us a more varied set of colors—red, orange, yellow, white and blue—and lays them out in a soothing array of wavy horizontal stripes. These paintings are elegant and a bit bland. They take a potshot at Post-painterly abstraction, though they themselves ultimately read as examples of the style. Lichtenstein eventually moved to destabilize matters. Rather than restructuring the spare schematic composition, perhaps making it more complex, he decided to introduce new and unexpected materials. A favorite of his was Rowlux, a thermoplastic film embedded with thousands of minute parabolic lenses, and used for vending machines, drum kits, business cards and decals, tradeshow exhibits, nightclub interiors and the like. Rowlux, which comes in a variety of patterns and colors, manipulates the pattern of absorption and

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reflection of light and gives the illusion of depth and motion. It is, in a word, cheesy. Lichtenstein takes full advantage of Rowlux’s vertiginous swirling patterns, crummy boudoir pinks and aquarium turquoises to make a series of pieces that are truly unsettling. The minimalist quality of their layout renders works like Pink Seascape and Seascape (both 1965) even more over-the-top: like a highly agitated person trying to be very, very calm. At other times Lichtenstein uses optical manipulation to disturb perception, as in Perforated Seascape #1 (Blue), 1965. In this piece, a plane of perforated blue enameled metal is placed a few inches away from a white background panel painted with clumps of Benday dots. This sets up a pattern of optical interference that disturbs focus and makes the image very hard to locate precisely. This work mixes real space and depicted space, crispness and softness, legibility and blur, yielding an image that seems simultaneously to augment and cancel itself. Lichtenstein also abstracted landscape in the cause of perceptual disruption in his only film installation—Three Landscapes (1969), on view at the Whitney Museum earlier this season [Oct. 6, 2011–Feb. 12, 2012]. In this work, oneminute loops are shown on three screens. Each film features a variant on the simple sea/sky division. Stability is undermined, however, by the hypnotic rocking of the images (the three are never in sync with each other) and the jarring changes in color saturation between screen and screen and between sky and sea within each screen. Lichtenstein was funny, kind, generous and incredibly hard-working. A productive and purposeful artist, he had a keen intelligence linked to a high level of formal skill, particularly in the area of composition. He was also remarkably consistent in terms of quality. The disquiet abstractions are, in essence, the work of an artist with a clearly defined style pushing up against boundaries. He said in the 1995 New York Times interview, “My work is, after all, a kind of straitjacket.” Paintings like these add depth and bite to Lichtenstein’s oeuvre and open an important window into a complex artistic sensibility. A full-scale retrospective, as opposed to a midcareer survey, should ideally allow us to reassess not necessarily our overall view of the artist but rather how the pieces fit together—to tell ourselves the same story in a different way. Looking at Lichtenstein from the point of view of abstraction shows us an artist thoroughly engaged with issues that go beyond the cultural observation at which he was so adept, and allows his work to achieve a deeper and longer-lasting relevance. Art in America May 2012

18

The Four Corners of Painting

Something quite striking has happened in the world of art. It is not, as one might expect, something that has suddenly appeared, but rather something that is no longer there. Modern art in general, and painting specifically, have been characterized by successions of “movements”—often annoying oversimplifications (particularly to the artists), but a fact of life nonetheless. Or at least it was. Strangely (or perhaps not) neither I nor anybody else with whom I have spoken has been able to come up with a widely recognized art movement— in particular, a movement in painting—that emerged after the late 1980s or possibly the early ’90s. (The recent exhibition at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, “Conceptual Abstraction”, a recreation and updating of the 1991 show of the same name at the Sidney Janis Gallery, has brought to our attention possibly the last named painting movement.) What is beyond argument is that in the ensuing years—and earlier too—there has been much dismissal of painting; critically, curatorially, and from the practitioners of other media. Painters seem to be in an habitually defensive crouch. Painting is elitist, commercial and bourgeois; painting is irrelevant; painting fails to address important issues; painting is hopelessly limited and old-fashioned. And yet despite this, painting remains a remarkably vital field. Most artists in the U.S. identify themselves as painters (and they are operating at all stages of career and development); there are painting exhibitions everywhere; and the market for painting flourishes. What has happened? These comments will be a look into the general state of painting, but one that does not take sides nor give priority to any one form of practice. This way of thinking about the problem also—most emphatically—does not suppose a linear view of history. Rather, the task is to create a non-judgmental format for viewing painting, and to allow for growth and expansion in a non-linear—that is in a real world way, not one that supports a market-driven culture of “breakthrough” (and implicitly sequentially ordered) masterpieces. (Although it doesn’t deny the possibility of them.) This approach is synchronous—synchronicity used here in 151

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de Saussure’s sense to indicate a “language state” at a given moment of time. As the critic Lawrence Alloway said, “Synchrony provides cross-sections, arrays of simultaneous information in terms of co-existence rather than succession.” Sequence is addressed in the broader sense that historically things did follow other things and were perceived that way—geometric abstraction did, by and large, come before gestural abstraction, and artists who subsequently combined the two were likely to have been aware of the historical and ideological differences. (Needless to say, sequence and chronology are different animals.) In this schema, painting from the modern period is apportioned into four large but divisible areas. Importantly, all painting today fits into these overall arenas. 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Mimetic The Stylized Mimetic The Abstract-Mimetic Hybrid The Fully Abstract

There is no doubt that people will take issue with these categories—particularly the number of them (four has a nice ring to it, but it is scarcely absolute) and the host of meanings attached to certain terms (“mimetic,” for example, is bound to be contentious). The real point is the dividing up of what is, to all intents and purposes, a limited field. What might vex people the most is the assertion that there are borders to the field—that it is not the wide-open arena of invention that we had supposed it to be—both in terms of practice and criticism. What is not being dealt with in any real detail at this time are specific analyses of individual painters. Some American painters are mentioned, but since all painters fit into this rubric, it is a matter of choosing the right mix to make the points clear. A reader might disagree with where each painter is placed, but that is understandable. Also, since artists change their work, a painter might find himself or herself in a number of different categories at any point in time. In addition, many painters do not just paint, and making different forms of art might very well be key to their project. Nonetheless, when they do paint, their paintings can be put into this system. Why devise a critical rubric like this? Why not allow painting to be what it is? It seems increasingly evident that painting (and the viewing of painting) finds itself at a turning point. We are living in an age where various forces, primarily market-driven, but also critical, curatorial, and educational, are fostering a decidedly ahistorical attitude. A willed loss of historical perspective has a not-sohidden implication—and that is that all work is perforce new and fresh, that it

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springs from the artist’s absolute individuality and therefore should not be questioned from the point of view of history, although it ought to be granted the very prerogatives accorded in the modernist past to “groundbreaking” art. This does us all a disservice. An overall ordering, a taking of stock is needed, for painting is now in a situation that it has not found itself in during the entire period of the modern project. That period (characterized by art made by independent artists concentrating, for the most part, on the demands of the art itself rather than cultural or social utility) was marked by a compulsion for differentiation—a tendency to form movements, to write manifestos, and for artists to talk incessantly amongst themselves. It was rather like the Big Bang. However, not all the mediums evolved at the same pace or at the same time. Painting was first and it has matured the soonest. While the disciplines might have moved together at various points in the modern project’s trajectory, they do not now. Another space metaphor: modern art is like a multistage rocket, and the painting stage has now separated itself out. While other media (sculpture and three dimensional work, photography and video, performance and “life into art” strategies) ostensibly offer more opportunity for overt innovation, painting has now essentially marked off its overall set of boundaries and is engaged in the task of elaboration and infilling. There is much work to be done in painting, but something has changed. Painting has ripened, altering our sense of expected innovation. While new things will happen in painting, that “newness” will be of a different order. (For example, colors can be combined in new ways, but will an entirely new hue be added to the spectrum?) We have (space metaphor number three) lifted off from Earth and can see the shape of the world. The concepts of terra incognita or terra nullius (the unknown and the unclaimed) cannot be the same as they were. But just as a shoreline has an infinite length when measured closely, there is no end to the possibilities inherent in the discipline. That painting is successful in this endeavor is proven by the continual creation of stylistically distinct bodies of work by painters. We can go deeper, make new spaces between existing areas, reference new subject matter as the world around us changes. However, new subject matter does not make new arenas of painting. This marks a key stage in the development of art. If painting is its own continent, how then might it be mapped? The point is to recognize the situation on the ground, to see things for what they are, and importantly not to put a hierarchical order or any kind of historical inevitability on these different approaches, although one must acknowledge the historical arc of which painting is a part. To do so allows for a more clear-eyed vision of the state of the art: focus is maintained on what a painting looks like and what it

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does. Removed from the discussion are confusing and potentially selfaggrandizing issues of intention and subjective or non-evident referential systems. Thus we have a more readily verifiable means of sorting painting—by objective appearance and historical position. This approach does not impose the conditions of one form of painting on other forms and does not impose the conditions of painting on other media: in short, this is non-Greenbergian and non-formalist in the older sense of the term. Painting by its nature tends toward conditions of material separation from the world. It resists (but does not preclude) the interactive and the interdisciplinary— an important part of our culture today and something that other media deal with more naturally. It has remained largely a matter of a certain specific material, paint, applied to flat rectilinear surfaces coincident with a vertical wall. That this surface over the years (both in the time of the modern project and the centuries before) has predominantly been cloth stretched onto a wooden support is significant. If something does not change, there is a good chance that it is necessary to the enterprise. Painting is also (outliers notwithstanding) resolutely two-dimensional. No matter how “realistic” the technique, the fully dimensional outside world is brought into the convention-bound domain of two-dimensional representation and is thus distanced from the world depicted. Granted, there is a significant group of newer painting that has a three dimensional presence, but that three dimensionality is almost invariably placed in a dialectical relationship with the dominant body of two-dimensional work, commenting on that tradition and thus dependent on its existence. Another area of separation: painting is generally more engaged with (and bound by) the history and development of its own medium than are other forms of art. Even in an increasingly ahistorical environment, there is more selfreflection and more analysis of the medium itself among painters—not surprising considering the long history of painting’s preeminence. (This does not deny that many artists in other media, particularly photography, operate consciously within historical parameters.) In the world of art there is a confraternity of painters, joined together by common purpose, educational experience (most often variations on Bauhaus pedagogies), broadly similar techniques and materials, and knowledge and appreciation of the medium’s history. It is clear that today all of the areas of painting are now equally in play. Since one aspect of history—the value-imbued sequential has disappeared for painting, no one model of practice has more historical validity or value than any other. Your practice might be invested in, say, Gestural Abstraction—which is fine— but that manner of painting has no more claim to primacy than, say, the Mimetic.

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This was not the case in the 1950s, but it is today. We ought then to presume that the critical value placed on innovation and being “first” should be proportional to the size of the space that was left to be filled; in the more or less immediate postwar years those large but sparsely populated painting arenas have been Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism. The four categories described in the following pages have an historical arc— they developed in the order listed, but we should note that history is both sequential and recursive; there are ongoing actions and repeating themes. In modern painting, the sequential until relatively recently seemed to be of the greatest significance— one movement followed another, and while the older painting was not tossed out, it felt retardaire and inefficient. There is a technological underpinning to this (not surprising in a world where technology and the machine were both the facts and the metaphors of the world), where newer technologies of necessity replace older ones, and where mixed technologies are often unwieldy. The four main areas of modern painting: (Again, the examples of painters chosen are just a small selection of the possibilities. Readers are invited to supply their own.) 1. The Mimetic. This category consists of straightforward representations of the observable world. The primary generators of difference in this area are subject matter and technique. The perception of stylization has changed with time, so that Seurat’s pointillist landscapes, which were seen as stylized at the time, are now more firmly in the area of the straightforwardly mimetic, whereas La Grande Jatte or La Parade are still in the realm of the Stylized Mimetic. The Mimetic encompasses a range of traditional painting approaches—from portraiture and figure painting to still life and landscape. Impressionism, much of Post-Impressionism, the Surrealism of painters like Magritte (along with contemporary surrealist revivals), the majority of Pop Art painting, Photorealism, and the contemporary varieties of landscape or figure painting belong in this category. Pop Art was (along with Gestural Abstraction), a major infill to the map of painting. Contemporary American painters in this area include: Robert Bechtle, John Currin, Rackstraw Downes, Eric Fischl, Alex Katz, Karen Kilimnik, Philip Pearlstein, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Phillips, Alexis Rockman, Mark Tansey, and Alexi Worth. 2. The Stylized Mimetic. This category pushes Mimesis toward distortion and stylization. There is a nascent tendency toward abstraction in this category, but representation is the

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driving force. Modern historical examples of this range from Matisse and the Fauves, to important sectors of Picasso’s production as well as Léger’s, to German Expressionism, and up through figurative Abstract Expressionists like Grace Hartigan and Fairfield Porter. In recent years this category includes the more straightforwardly representational German and Italian neo-Expressionists, and contemporary American practitioners like Charles Garabedian, Susan Rothenberg, Dana Schutz, Kara Walker, and Trevor Winkfield. 3. The Mimetic-Abstract Hybrid. In the Hybrid Mimetic-Abstract approach, Abstraction and Mimesis meet as more or less equal actors. This is the most historically complex division. The historical arc went from the Mimetic to the Stylized Mimetic to the Hybrid Mimetic-Abstract to the Fully Abstract. Once however the Fully Abstract came into being, artists approached the Mimetic again to add complexity and overt reference to their work, introducing, for example, photographic images and text elements. Earlier examples of this are the many variants of Cubism, the majority of Dada-inspired painting, the surrealism of Miró, and much of the work of the Russian Constructivists. Later American examples include Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; artists who followed in their footsteps, like David Humphrey and David Salle; Cubist-inspired painters like George Condo and David Storey; textbased and collaged-oriented painters like Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, Suzanne McClelland, Christopher Wool; and conceptualists like John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, David Diao, Peter Halley, Byron Kim, Chris Martin; and geometric artists like Al Held who create abstract perspectival spaces. Regarding three-dimensional painting: although examples of this approach are to be found in all four categories, its existence as a real world object along with whatever formal or metaphorical freight it carries tends to put much of it in the Hybrid Mimetic-Abstract category. 4. The Fully Abstract. This is work with no overt reference to the observable world. If the reference is absolutely essential to the painting (for example David Diao’s red dot paintings indicating his art sales over the years, Byron Kim’s skin tone monochromes, or Peter Halley’s prisons and factories) then the painting belongs in the Hybrid-MimeticAbstract category. The Fully Abstract can be divided into four sections, with a.

Gestural (freely brushed) Abstraction.

This is the last truly major addition to the map of painting. While first evident in the early work of Kandinsky, it was left essentially dormant until picked up by

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the Abstract Expressionists and the Tachistes in the 1940s and ’50s. The fact that there was such a big space left open (why is an interesting question) encouraged a large number of young painters to be engaged with it. Critically it fostered the supposition that Abstract Expressionism represented the next logical step in the progression of art. Clement Greenberg’s dismissal of de Kooning’s (and Pollock’s) figurative explorations, and importantly (and perhaps more subtly), his attack on de Kooning’s cubist methodologies made sense in the context of a sequential, progressive reading of history and as a critical tool to understand and evaluate certain newly emerging sectors of the Fully Abstract—Gestural Abstraction and Field or Atmospheric Abstraction. While Greenberg thought of his formulations as universal, they were in fact extremely specific. Contemporary American painters in this area include: Cora Cohen, Louise Fishman, Bill Jensen, Brice Marden (the later work), Melissa Meyer, and Sue Williams. b. Field or Atmospheric Abstraction. Begun essentially by the Rothko, Newman, Still wing of Abstract Expressionism (Pollock’s drip paintings are crossovers between this and gestural abstraction), it continued on in Colorfield painting, and in later large-scale monochrome and minimalist painting (another important addition to the map, although not with as much breadth as the Gestural.) American examples include: Marcia Hafif, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden (the earlier work), Joseph Marioni, and Robert Ryman. c. Geometric Abstraction. This is the earliest branch of the Fully Abstract, starting with Mondrian and Malevich and continuing unabated until today. There are many contemporary examples. American painters include Mark Dagley, Valerie Jaudon, Harriet Korman, Odili Odita, Richard Roth, Don Voisine, and Joan Waltemath. d. The Organized Organic. Historically this is an abstracted distillation of 1930s biomorphic Picasso and Miró. In contemporary painting this presents itself as a form of abstraction characterized by a more distanced and grammatical approach, often borrowing elements from both geometric and gestural abstractions. American examples are Frances Barth, Stephen Ellis, Joanne Greenbaum, Mary Heilmann, Shirley Jaffe, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Jonathan Lasker, Allison Miller, Elizabeth Murray, Tom Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Philip Taaffe, and James Siena.

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As mentioned, modern painting is now in a position it has rarely occupied: all of the forms of painting are being practiced in roughly equal measure. There is no one leading format, and therefore one approach cannot claim the mantle of historical inevitability or a place at the leading edge. This is in some way an extension of the common understanding that painting is no longer the default setting, as it were, for art. A not unimportant question: what was all the talk of painting being dead really about? There was a strong element of hostility and dismissal, and of course it elicited and still elicits a counter-reaction from painters. But perhaps painting’s detractors were on to something: they were sensing not painting’s end, but a change in its methodology of innovation, a quiet transformation of its deepest sense of itself. This change of identity resulted in certain losses: a key one (starting in the 1990s) was the surrendering of the ability to produce the kind of iconic images that painting was accustomed to making. It seemed that those images now came more readily to photography, video or installation. (Shark in a tank?) To strive directly for the overtly “important” statement in painting risked over-determination, pretension, cleverness, self-consciousness, and sententiousness. These are all the hallmarks of academicism, and now firmly reside in those more “interesting” and “relevant” forms of artistic expression. But painting’s limitations are now its advantages—an example of the economic principle of creative destruction. Something is lost, but that loss is a gain as well. (Interestingly, renunciation has been at the heart of avant-garde practice, and the questioning of originality is an intrinsic element of postmodernism.) The unpromising, the uninteresting, the familiar, the modest or the mundane have proven to be especially productive areas for making lasting art. Painters can delve more deeply and push past the merely clever or ostensibly “creative.” Painting’s necessary distancing from the world allows for the mysterious and the inexplicable to take root. A body of painting will be seen as important for what it does rather than what it says it refers to: a change in subject matter or reference is scarcely change at all. Mapping the state of painting today and sensing its boundaries does not imply stasis, but rather a new kind of growth. Painters are, as ever, finding spaces for themselves and creating readily recognizable and unique bodies of work, work that is as capable as ever of emotional power, the giving of deep aesthetic pleasure, and the creation of the visually unexpected and surprising. The Brooklyn Rail, December 2012–January 2013

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Talk/Show: Language and the Resistant Artwork In pondering the condition of art and the flood of associated language made possible by global digital connectivity, a proposition has been floated—one that allows for two aligned readings and two answers to the questions it raises. The first: is there too much talk and writing about art? Has the worldwide communications network unleashed a torrent of language (akin to the image glut of the ’80s) that crowds out art and renders the visual less visible? The second reading (and the more subtle): is there too much language embedded in and hovering around the work of art itself? To answer the first: no—generally speaking, the more talk, and thus the more interest in art, the better. And besides, what can anyone do about it? The world of the Abstract Expressionists was awash with talk: it didn’t seem to hurt the art at all. As for the second—language within the work of art—this is more complicated and will depend in part on how broadly you define language. My feeling is that language will continue to function as a pendant to hybrid and conceptuallydriven art for the foreseeable future. If history is any guide, that language element will fall somewhere along the continuum of justification, commentary, explanation, exegesis, footnotes, quotations, sets of instructions, captions, descriptions, ruminations, and narratives of all sorts; and it will bear either a direct or tangential connection to the more purely visual material it complements. It is important, though, to distinguish between language enmeshed, however loosely, in the work of art itself, and language applied in relation to the work after its creation. To include after-the-fact language (by the artist or by others) as part of the perceptual armature of the work itself—which is what the proposition to all intents and purposes asks us to consider—is to head in a direction that can only diminish the effectiveness and intrinsic coherence of that work. Critical as well as casual discussion of specific artworks is a longstanding, justifiable, unstoppable, and inevitable practice. What is not inevitable is the incorporation of language into all forms of art, either directly as a structural or formal element or indirectly as a compulsory openness to explication by non-visual means. 159

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Text (in the larger sense of the word) aligns itself naturally with hybrid art forms. It is resisted by more media-specific art—particularly painting and sculpture. If we uncouple postproduction language from the artwork itself, then we can see that an insistence on the inherent necessity of that language has an agenda, which is that non-language-based art is essentially irrelevant; at best a function of the marketplace or a recurring nostalgic tic. Contemporary art that doesn’t speak or write, that doesn’t clearly announce its intentions is, according to this way of thinking, mute or willfully solipsistic. This agenda is encapsulated within a larger and highly dubious notion: the idea that a work of art should be compliant and comprehensible, that it should serve a purpose, that it bears a necessary morphological resemblance to other forms of communication. To operate under this assumption is to diminish the resistance of the artwork. I am not speaking of aura, but rather of that quality of mutability and scalelessness that allows something relatively small and localized to assume significance and a free-floating independent existence and yet to continue to be an irreducible thing-in-itself. The idea that art is inherently discourse and thus by its nature attracts discourse is an attractive one, but it is a simplistic formulation and in many ways untrue. Art communicates but it is not necessarily part of the communications network. We live in an instantaneous age, a time, not unlike the nineteenth century, when the multitudinous physical world seemed comprehensible and manageable by virtue of its infinite ability to be broken down and categorized. Now everything feels connectable, discussable, knowable, immediately available—and as before, comprehensible and manageable. If art is just a subset of language, then it too is subject to the cutting and pasting, the up and downloading, the dematerialization, the conventionalizing, and that inexorable movement toward speed, intelligibility, and commonality that characterizes language in its demotic forms. The desire to cocoon art in a nimbus of serious-minded affability, functionality, and explication—to talk to it and have it talk back to us—masks a more sinister goal: to make art just like everything else in the postmodern world; to have it behave, or to encourage it to misbehave in entirely predictable ways. To see the artwork as a partner in an ongoing discussion springs from a desire to master it, to render it anodyne. Surrounded by language though it might be, the work of art fortunately remains a mysterious and resistant still point in a changing sea of perception and interpretation. The Brooklyn Rail, March 2013

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Stop, Look and Listen! Mel Bochner Strong Language Mel Bochner, one of the founders of the Conceptual Art movement of the mid’60s, and quite possibly the most inventive, clear-headed, and thought-provoking artist of that group, is showing his language-based paintings and drawings this spring and summer at the Jewish Museum. The exhibition, titled “Strong Language,” and perceptively curated by Norman Kleeblatt, is Bochner’s first major solo museum show in New York. The paintings, mostly large-scale works, have been done in the last 15 years or so, and were built on the foundation of his austere word drawings of the mid to late ’60s. These paintings and drawings function as an oblique investigation, inspired by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, into the essential slipperiness and ambiguity of language—an ongoing concern of Bochner’s, and one that he has explored in many formats over the course of his 50-year career. The early drawings, a number of them ink-on-graph paper, are word portraits of his friends and contemporaries—Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, or Sol LeWitt, for example—and are small, restrained, and elegant. The paintings— the key ones in the show are from his Thesaurus series—are another story. They are, to put it bluntly, completely in your face: aggressive, negative, vulgar, relentless, and really funny. They tell you (in caps and most often in screaming color) to COOL IT, GAG IT, KNOCK IT OFF, PIPE DOWN, PUT A LID ON IT, JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP, FISH OR CUT BAIT, SHIT OR GET OFF THE POT, GO FUCK YOURSELF. Got a problem with that? Don’t let it trouble you, because you are FUCKED UP AND FAR FROM HOME, UP TO YOUR ASS IN ALLIGATORS, YOUR DICK CAUGHT IN A ZIPPER, ONE TIT IN A WRINGER, GOING OUT OF BUSINESS, CALLING IT QUITS. Will it get better? Not likely. Pretty soon you’ll CASH IN YOUR CHIPS, KICK THE BUCKET, FEED THE WORMS, GIVE UP THE GHOST, GO BELLY UP, BUY THE FARM. Serves you right, you KIBBITZER, KVETCHER, NUDNICK, NEBBISH, GONIF, SCHLEMIEL, SCHLIMAZEL, SCHMO, 161

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MESHUGENER. And language? Language? BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. This is not the stance we would typically expect from a veteran conceptualist, but painting is somehow key to it. (Unless of course we have wandered into a celebrity roast at the Modern Language Association.) Bochner was trained as a painter but stayed away from it during his early professional years. He felt that it was an exhausted form—at least for him—and concentrated his efforts on what might be thought of as less historically binding media. He considered himself a painter who just didn’t happen to paint. But Bochner was never an artist to accept anyone else’s idea of what was possible. And so despite all the “painting is dead” talk roiling the artworld, he came to realize that painting could be every bit as effective a vehicle for launching ideas as anything else. In fact, for certain modes of representation, it was the most efficient and evocative. Rather than limiting options, the historical and stylistic stew of signs inherent in painting provided the artist with a storehouse of meaning (the word “thesaurus” means treasury or treasure) that readily lent itself to the kind of canny manipulation at which Bochner is so adept. You can be straightforward or elliptical; you can mask intention or reveal it. As such, the paintings in this exhibition are anchored by a relatively straightforward display of words and lettering—arranged, in expected fashion, from left to right, working their way from the top of the canvas to the bottom. With that structure as a given (more or less), Bochner allows himself the freedom to exploit and subvert the complete range of postwar painting techniques and styles—from full-throated expressionism, to minimalist restraint and seriality, to Color Field sensuality, Op Art dazzle, or Pop boldness. As sheer text, the paintings are ostensibly straightforward, but perceptually they are far from it. The continual tug of war between the visual and the verbal, the time it takes to untangle the colored letters from each other and from their complex grounds (the striped ones work particularly well in this way), forces a kind of agnosia—an inability to recognize—upon the viewer. We read, but struggle to focus and understand. Bochner’s perceptual “delaying mechanism” has been commented on, and it is interesting to compare it to Duchamp’s description of “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915–23), as a “delay in glass” As Duchamp was wont to do, Bochner pushes up against the resistant core of the quotidian—the unknown and the unknowable residing in the obvious and the ordinary. Language functions as the fundamental form of abstraction we engage with on a daily basis—so fundamental that we hardly see it at all, much less recognize it as an abstract and abstracting entity. It is the mental air we breathe and we ignore it unless it is taken away from us or is, in some sense, poisoned or damaged. In Bochner’s case, the abstraction of language naturally

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allies itself with the abstraction of painting. Art that deals directly with language confronts, of necessity, its essential abstraction, its simultaneous referencing of and removal from physical experience, as well as its tendency to hide in plain sight. Bochner grappled with the difficulties (or maybe impossibilities) of representing the means of representation in an early, canonical work, “Language is Not Transparent,” first executed in 1970 and reinstalled in different configurations over the years. Its most recent incarnation is in the current exhibition. In this apparently clear-cut but ultimately mysterious work, Bochner paints a section of wall with a rectangle of black, clean-edged on three sides, irregular and dripping on the bottom. Chalked in capital letters on the black(board?) is the following: “1. LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT.” Questions arise. Is it a proposition? Is it self-evident? Is it true? To what extent is it paradoxical? If it is not transparent, is it opaque? Does that opacity render it visible and examinable or hidden and incomprehensible? Where and what is number two? Language’s non-transparency suggests that it is culturally delimited, that we see words given form and stripped of neutrality by context. This is clearly in evidence in the language paintings and installations dealing with Jewish concerns. Bochner was born in 1940 and raised in an observant Jewish household where Yiddish was spoken. “The Joys of Yiddish” (2012)—the title is based on Leo Rosten’s popular 1965 book—gives us a series of generally derogatory (and familiar) Yiddish words, but renders them in yellow paint against a black ground—the same colors of the Star of David armbands that the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Bochner reprised this in a 345-foot-long yellow and black strip that ran boldly along the frieze of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the museum Hitler built to celebrate German art. There is a nicely triumphant quality to the Munich piece, but quite the opposite effect is to be seen in a small, scary painting, “Jew” (2008). On a black, but grayed-out background, Bochner has loosely written in transparent yellow paint a litany of mostly hateful synonyms for Jew. Bochner found the list—so similar in general format to his thesaurus sources—on an anti-Semitic Internet site. It was an upsetting experience, and reminded the artist, as he noted in a lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts in 2007 that, “As recent history has painfully taught us, all abuses of power begin with the abuse of language.” Bochner’s work has always displayed admirable rigor and concision. He has never been afraid to tackle big issues, especially philosophical ones. He will do what it takes to get his ideas across, and has given himself the freedom to use whatever tools are at hand. Often the works have been made with ephemeral

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materials: newspaper, masking tape, a soaped up window. But when he has felt it necessary to work in the traditional mediums of the painter’s craft—and it seems that he increasingly has—he will do so without hesitation. Bochner’s art has often been ascetic, even severe—a few lines on a note card, a row of numbers on a length of tape, a handful of matchsticks glued to a board; but it can just as easily be an eight foot painting on luscious velvet, slathered (albeit neatly) with creamy, multicolored oil paint. Painting lends itself not just to historical reference and placement, but also to sensuality, to an immersion in the pleasures—guilty or not—of the visual. A long career allows sets of themes to play out as they wish, for the controlling impulse to be blunted. Bochner has said, “The past takes care of itself.” This exhibition allows us to see both a mind and a sensibility at work—engaged with ideas but willing, in the cause of a higher seriousness, to let it rip whenever the occasion calls for it. After all, how many artists could or would make a painting called “Everybody Is Full of Shit”? And (sort of) mean it. The Brooklyn Rail, June 2014

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Through Color

Alma Thomas (1891–1978) is an artist on the cusp of reexamination. The subject of a retrospective organized by the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891. Her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1907 to escape growing racial tensions in Georgia and to provide Alma and her three younger sisters with a good education. She attended Howard University, where she was the first person to graduate with a degree in fine arts, and later received a master’s in art education from New York’s Columbia University Teachers College and an MFA in painting from American University in Washington. While she continued to paint seriously after graduation and spent summers in New York, studying at Columbia and going to museums and modern galleries like Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place, Thomas focused primarily on teaching art. It was only upon retiring in 1960, at the age of sixty-nine, after working for over thirty-five years in a junior high school, that she committed herself fully to painting. That began her most artistically, critically, and commercially successful period of art-making. Thomas was scarcely an unknown artist during her lifetime, especially in the Washington artworld. She worked if not directly within the circle of the Washington Color School (difficult indeed for an African-American woman in a largely white male environment), then alongside it. Her art was exhibited and well collected; significant examples can be found in the collections of major American museums. In 1972 she was the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and twenty years after her death she was given a retrospective at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana. A painting of hers now hangs in the White House dining room. Even with her success (which in some ways paralleled that of the Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Lewis), Thomas was consistently underappreciated. Like Lewis, she was a thoroughly abstract artist despite the expectation that African-American artists would or should directly address social concerns and issues of identity, an expectation that continues to exert a strong pull. 165

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But Thomas stuck to her premises, saying in 1970, “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”1 Not only did she remain true to abstraction, she remained in Washington, D.C.: Thomas lived in the same attractive Italianate row house in the Logan Circle neighborhood from her arrival in the city until her death in 1978. By staying in Washington, a city where abstraction flourished, she fared better than many other excellent African-American abstract artists, like Herbert Gentry or Ed Clark, both of whom were born in the ’20s and spent considerable time (as did many black writers and musicians) in the more welcoming and congenial atmosphere of France and Scandinavia, thus missing opportunities to consolidate their reputations in the United States. Although African-American abstract artists continue to risk even greater marginalization than their nonabstract fellows, the situation is changing. There are, of course, talented and successful practitioners like Julie Mehretu, Jack Whitten, Mark Bradford, Stanley Whitney, and Odili Donald Odita. The expanded nature of abstraction currently, given an atmosphere of artistic pluralism and attendant loosening of stylistic strictures, figures strongly into this change. A reexamination and potential foregrounding of Thomas’s place in art seems to be part of a larger process of historical reconfiguration. To what extent does abstraction today owe its wider historical and referential range to painters who hadn’t been thought entirely central to the enterprise—not just artists like Thomas, but also previously neglected postwar Europeans like Simon Hantaï, whose work has strong affinities with Thomas’s? While larger forces play into the changing of the historical narrative, an artist’s work, to vie for serious reconsideration, can’t merely check off the right boxes—there has to be that spark of real originality, skill, and passion. The presence of a clearly recognizable style is often telling—a sign of lucidity and invention. This is very much the case with Thomas. Unlike, say, many gestural abstractionists of the ’50s whose work tends to look similar to one another’s, Thomas produced canvases that can hardly be mistaken for anyone else’s. Even though she was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, her artistic maturity coincides with the ending of the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism. She really was an abstract artist of the ’60s and ’70s, and judging by the work itself (in terms of scale, ambition, and sheer verve) you might guess that she was thirty or forty years younger. Her major paintings, for example, are all executed in acrylic, the preferred medium of post-painterly abstraction. They are resolutely flat and organized in a variety of striped or overall mosaiclike configurations.

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A painting like Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses (1969), even though it reveals some adjustment and over-painting, gives a first impression of immediacy, of a glowing chromatic field composed of short, sure strokes of pure color organized in loose stripes laid down directly on a clean, optically intense white ground. The individual marks evoke the vitality and freshness of Fauve painting. You get the feeling of an early Matisse or Derain, broken up and rearranged into a reasonably orderly array of maculated stripes. There is no doubt that Thomas’s work is solidly grounded in twentieth-century art history—especially in terms of color—echoing not just the Fauves, but Kandinsky, Miró, and Albers. Thomas’s striped paintings show considerable variation within a fairly strict set of formal boundaries. While Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses features stripes of quite different widths that at key points break and change color, paintings like Breeze Rustling through Fall Flowers and Wind, Sunshine, and Flowers (both 1968) keep to a more regularized striping and a more tonally consistent palette. Wind, Sunshine, and Flowers does something particularly effective and subtle. Because the strokes—all vertical—are broken and shardlike, the eye tends to read across the tops and bottoms of the small forms and make a visual connection between adjacent rows. Thomas seizes on this optical property and goes in with a small brush and very carefully highlights certain portions of the white spaces, leading the eye to construct—almost subliminally—a series of cascading curls and curves. This increases the feeling of the floral and lends the painting an Art Nouveau or even a Japanese air. With an impressive command of negative space, Thomas pushes at the seemingly straightforward and simple constructions, adding a richness and slowness of read and allowing different modes of perception to be set in counterpoint. This perceptual complexity, along with the fusion of color and structure, lies, I believe, at the core of the renewed interest in the work not just of Thomas, but also of formally oriented Color Field painters of the ’60s and ’70s, like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis. (All spent considerable time in D.C.) With this in mind, it might be time to remove the implicit “merely” from the appellation “formal.” The formal, it turns out, is a house with many rooms. Even though Thomas found sources of inspiration right around her—trees, her garden—she was fascinated by flight and space travel, as were many twentieth-century Americans. (The titles of Thomas’s paintings not only provide a key to the individual work and what inspired it, but reflect a sensibility that is poetic, humorous, and observant.) She lived during a period that saw the invention of the first airplanes right through to moonwalks and satellites sent to other planets. It is easy to forget how much excitement and optimism such events

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created, and Thomas, a woman of her times, shared it. She listened to the regular radio reports of space launches and sketched as the flights progressed. (Radio allowed her imagination fuller play than television.) She tried to picture what scenes and images on earth would look like if viewed from a great distance and at great speed. She said in 1970, “My space paintings are expressed in the same color patterns as my earth paintings with the canvas forming intriguing motifs around and through color composition.” In 1978, the last year of her life, she said, “I began to think about what I would see if I were in an airplane. You look down on things. You streak through the clouds so fast you don’t know whether the flower below is a violet or what. You see only streaks of color.” Thomas made quite a number of works directly inspired by space flight. Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset (1970) places a large circular form in a square canvas. Upon a rich orange background, the circle—executed in the artist’s typical vertical strokes—is divided into a deep cadmium-red section, occupying the left two thirds of the circle, followed by a thin yellow band and then a larger section of dark orange with a bit of ocher peeking in on the perimeter (like back-lighting). The painting seems to burn with an otherworldly intensity. Apollo 12 “Splash Down” (1970) reads more directly as a landscape (or seascape), with its horizontal striping and its division into areas of sea, sky, and sun. Starry Night and the Astronauts (1972), an ambiguous and evocative painting, returns to a more abstract composition, with a field of dark and lighter blue vertical groupings punctuated by a small and rather mysterious vessel-like horizontal shape in the upper-right corner, picked out in a spectrum of red, orange, and yellow horizontal strokes. The gaps between the blue brushstrokes glow with a cool starlike white, and the vessel hovers on the canvas like an apparition. As the ’70s progressed, Thomas’s work became more allover and monochromatic. The Tang show presents three separate developments in the monochrome work. In Arboretum Presents White Dogwood (1972) and Cherry Blossom Symphony (1973), a variegated underpainting executed for the most part in deep blues and greens replaces the white ground of her striped paintings. The overpainted strokes, shades of cool white in the former painting and rosy pinks in the latter, resolve themselves into larger vertical divisions rather than stripes, and the play of darker lines formed by the reveals of the underpainting sets up a spatially complex, fieldlike reading. By limiting her means, Thomas allows us to see greater variation in the shape and touch of her brushstrokes and frees the eye to roam in a more unrestricted way over the canvas. The paintings radiate sumptuousness and pleasure. With their layered quality and elegant

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finish, they feel like the most sensory and French of her paintings, again evoking Matisse, as well as the warm garden-oriented domesticity of late Bonnard. Another type of monochrome work, represented in this exhibition by Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish and White Roses Sing and Sing (both 1976), moves completely away from striping or vertical divisions and gives us arrangements of more or less circular shapes that subtly emerge from an overall field. In earlier paintings, Thomas’s marks were read as brushstrokes; in these, the marks are instead small, carefully delineated forms that lead us through complex pattern variations. Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish places hundreds of bright-red four-sided polygons (with the occasional triangle) against a bright white ground. This painting seems archaic, like something that could have been found in ancient Greece or Rome. White Roses Sing and Sing has a dark greenish background and white and yellow-tinged forms arranged over its surface. Softer and more symmetrical than Scarlet Sage, it brings to mind Jasper Johns’s Crosshatch paintings of the same period. Thomas’s painting feels cellular as opposed to linear, but shares with Johns’s pieces a similar touch, palette, and general organization. Finally there is the work represented by Hydrangeas Spring Song (1976), a blue-and-white painting, which moves away from Thomas’s typical aggregation of more or less uniform brushstrokes that fill the entire canvas. Hydrangeas is instead composed of many distinct, almost hieroglyphic shapes, with some areas of the canvas densely populated and the remaining sectors open but scarcely empty. The Tang show—which also includes three semi-representational paintings from 1964 based on the March on Washington, two small, loosely geometric Hofmannesque oils from 1959 and 1960, and a large group of beautiful and little-known watercolor studies—of course leaves out much of Thomas’s mature production, which reached its full strength in the later ’60s. The exhibition does, however, nicely lay out the general parameters of her project, so that the many works that fall in between or overlap the stylistic categories represented are given a clear formal rationale. Thomas’s star is undeniably rising. There is a strong impulse to widen the historical narrative, to undercut the myth of heroic (and youthful) American self-invention, especially in the arena of abstraction. That an African-American woman, dead nearly forty years, who had both a solid local grounding and a nuanced appreciation of modern European and American art could play a role in today’s dialogue is heartening. That she began a serious career in her seventh decade is even more encouraging and inspiring. Transcending the barriers of race, gender, and age, as well as countering expectations of content and context, is no small feat. Thomas created art and led life on her own terms. This thoughtful

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and well-curated exhibition makes the case for a thorough examination of her art and her place in history. The work is beautiful, optimistic, clear, and, almost more than anything, fresh. I think we will be seeing a good deal more of it. Art in America May 2016

Notes and References 1 All Alma Thomas quotes are from the extensive interpretive exhibition wall texts.

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Hold Still: Looking at Photorealism

From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism 1969 to Today presents nearly fifty years of paintings and watercolors by key Photorealist artists, and provides an opportunity to reexamine the movement’s methodology and underlying structure. Although Photorealism can certainly be seen in connection to the history, style, and semiotics of modern representational painting (and to a lesser extent late-twentieth-century art photography), it is worth noting that those ties are scarcely referred to in the work itself. Photorealism is contained, compressed, and seamless, intent on the creation of an ostensibly logical, self-evident reality, a visual text that relates almost entirely to its own premises: the stressed interplay between the depiction of a slice of unremarkable three-dimensional reality and the meticulous hand-painted reproduction of a two-dimensional photograph. Each Photorealist painting is a single, unambiguous, in-focus image. There are no montages, no obvious distortions, and with a few exceptions, these works avoid the blurring used by Gerhard Richter and other painters as a photographic signifier. The images in a Photorealist painting might be unobtrusively cropped, or constructed as subtly conjoined panoramas, but in every case they are presented straightforwardly. They are facts on the ground, seemingly irrefutable. Even though Photorealism appears to be the blatant antithesis of the critic Clement Greenberg’s dictum that successful painting must religiously abjure the effects of other disciplines, it in fact sticks more resolutely to its own principles and procedures than nearly any other modern painting movement. The Photorealist might expand his or her range of subject matter, or refine or modify some aspect of technique, but the change is almost invariably incremental or of minor qualitative difference. Given this, some might assume that Photorealism as a whole is static—Alexandrianist as opposed to avant-garde, as Greenberg would put it. It is the furthest thing from it. What Photorealism conspicuously lacks is pretention. This is in direct opposition to academic art of all kinds (conservative or avant-garde), the hallmarks of which are grandiosity, self-importance, the unvarnished summoning 171

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of “deep meaning,” tacit agreement with the social and moral norms of the artvalidating class, ostentatiously bravura facture, and its practitioners’ embedment in the academies and schools. Photorealist paintings are generally (with some notable large-scaled exceptions) easel-sized, apolitical, impersonal, deadpan, and (again with a few exceptions—some of Audrey Flack’s work, for example), resolutely non-allegorical. They are cleanly painted, with distinctly delineated forms and a non-impastoed surface that ranges in finish from lightly varnished to semi-matte. While some practitioners have taught, Photorealism has a very low profile in academia—nowhere near that of installation and conceptual art, photography and video, or even abstract painting. As for classic academic art— the embodiment of the Alexandrianist—tired as it might seem to us now, it was interesting and engaging to its contemporary viewers. A Bouguereau or a Gérôme gave Salon visitors and collectors a good deal to talk about and admire— advanced art of the day, on the contrary, was often seen as puzzling, boring, and not to be taken seriously. Photorealism has in some ways suffered the same fate. The elements of Photorealism that have caused knowledgeable people to critically undervalue it—its reliance on what appears to be mere technical virtuosity and its apparent lack of interpretive difficulty—need to be explored. While a Photorealist painting provides us with a quite credible likeness—it really does look like a photograph—achieving that level of verisimilitude is not all that hard for a trained and patient artist (with the emphasis on patient) to accomplish. The drawing is generally taken care of by projecting and tracing a photograph on the canvas, and the actual painting consists of varying degrees (depending on the artist) of standard under- and overpainting, using the photograph as a color reference. The abundance of detail and incident, while reinforcing the impression of demanding skill, actually makes things easier for the artist. Lots of small things yield interesting textures—details reinforce neighboring details and cancel out technical problems. It is the larger, less inflected areas (like skies) that are more trouble, and where the most skilled practitioners shine. While the majority of Photorealist paintings look extremely dense and seem similarly constructed from the ground up, that similarity is most evident either at a normal viewing distance, where the image snaps together, or in the reducing glass of photographic reproduction. A Richard Estes or a Robert Bechtle from the ’70s or ’80s, for instance, which were painted from slides, will on close examination display concentrations of simplified, abstracted marks that resolve themselves a few feet back into coherent, suitably complex forms; while a recent Raphaella Spence or Bertrand Meniel, taken from extraordinarily high-resolution digital

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images, will carry that tightness of articulation into each square inch of the painting. If anything, differences in photographic materials—essentially art supplies—assert themselves perceptually more strongly than do matters of painterly technique. We can see this in the arena of general chromatic feel. Color print and color slide film, as well as different brands and processes (Ektachrome, Kodachrome, Fujichrome), each have their own look. So does digital photography, which tends to pick up and magnify highly saturated tones and hues: there is a good reason why an Estes urban painting taken from an Ektachrome slide has a bluer cast and a more somber look than a digitally-derived Meniel cityscape. The real technical difficulties that Photorealist painters face are considerably more subtle than getting something to look like something else. The ultimate model for the Photorealist is the source photograph. A photograph, though most often based on something in the real world, does not have a strict one-to-one relationship with that reality. Reading a photograph is a convention that we as a culture have absorbed over the span of the modern period. Visually processing a photograph, in an important sense, means overlooking its inherent distortions, notably its spatial squeeze and the collapsed arena it encapsulates. We normalize depth of field variations and disregard, for example, the combination of forms that occurs when objects that are next to each other in the photograph exist in different planes in the real world, although the canny painter is able to create evocative (and subliminally read) formal and psychological hybrids—say, car/ building or head/road. Paintings with the photograph (especially the snapshot) as a model aim for a certain look—a task that can easily be mishandled. Photographs that are in focus (as is the human eye) feel especially crisp. This is particularly the case with the even midday light or the balanced indoor illumination that we see so often in these paintings. But you can be too crisp. That even light serves the Photorealists well. It eliminates overly dramatic chiaroscuro, but increases the possibility of getting a clunky and disjunctive “cut out” appearance, thus breaking the smooth, compressed monocular read of the photograph. These days you can frequently see awkward transitions of this sort in unprofessionally Photoshopped pictures, but the danger has always existed with Photorealist painting. There are ways to deal with it—a slight softening of an edge, the painting of barely registering halation lines paralleling a contour, or the mixing in of the colors of adjacent areas and forms—and with enough care and experience a solid Photorealist painter can negotiate the charged space between what the eye records and what the brain processes. As in any art form, there is a big jump between the pretty good and the extraordinary. This presents a problem for Photorealism, since the average gallery or museumgoer can be

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easily wowed by merely adequate technique, and the negatively inclined viewer will all too readily see the ostensible virtuosity, discounting it as empty razzledazzle, missing the quieter skill that resides in the best work. An interesting problem is Photorealism’s straightforwardness and apparent ease of interpretation—or even the lack of necessity for interpretation at all. Historically, Pop Art and the varieties of realism that flowed from it (Photorealism being perhaps the earliest) were positioned as antidotes to the subjectivity, autographic uniqueness, and attendant “difficulty” of the gestural abstraction of the preceding artistic generation. The gallerist Ivan Karp, one of the original champions of Photorealism, made that clear in his important 1963 Artforum article on Pop Art, “Anti-Sensibility Painting.” Immediately understandable art, combined with boring, commonplace, and non-artistic subject matter, was transgressive in the context of contemporary art world expectations. Photorealism carried the same charge as Pop, but unlike Pop, which in due time added a panoply of artistic flourishes and historical references (their earnestness carefully undercut by irony), Photorealism never abandoned its artless affect, its look of utter comprehensibility. To make matters more complicated, accessibility has now become the norm. It is hard to say precisely why art has grown less opaque, but even abstraction, which had previously perplexed the public, is, after a hundred years of ongoing production, more readily stylistically sortable, and thereby understandable in terms of context and historical placement, if not in subjective intent. If art as a whole presents less of a problem of interpretation these days, then Photorealism’s seemingly open doorway hardly counts as a critical disqualifier. And as far as its quotidian subject matter goes, any unease with that should have been dispelled by a half-century of art’s immersion in the waters of popular and media culture, and its continuing fascination with the Duchampian appropriation of real-world objects. Of course, ostensible accessibility does not tell the whole story. Art just appears easier to understand. You can get in, but only so far. The best art is still tough going, even if it might not look that way at first glance. Photorealism’s apparent ease is tethered to its history; what it is really saying and how it says it is another matter. Its factuality, its ordinariness, is not to be taken lightly. After all, as the photographer Garry Winogrand stated, “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.” Photorealism, slotting itself in with a long line of vernacular American realisms, is an art form primarily of our country, and most of its subject matter reflects the American cultural landscape. In tune with its more immediate Pop origins, Photorealism delights in depicting the humdrum world of cars, trucks, motorcycles,

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storefronts and signs, diners, displays, toys, vending machines, and a host of unmemorable street scenes and semiurban landscapes. People show up, but they are, for the most part, of no more weight and consequence than the objects they are placed among. Individual artists tend to gravitate to specific subject matters: Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes to Bay Area and New York street views respectively, Ralph Goings to pickup trucks and diners, Robert Cottingham to neon signs, Charles Bell to overscaled gumball machines and marbles, Tom Blackwell to motorcycles and store windows, Ron Kleemann to tricked-up racing cars and semi-trailers, Richard McLean to horse shows, John Baeder to diners, John Salt to car wrecking yards, Audrey Flack to dressing table/boudoir still-life setups, and Bertrand Meniel to jam-packed urban spaces like Times Square. The choice of subject matter feels more an arbitrary matter of convenience, in line with, say, a penchant for glittery, reflective things or an interest in the automotive, rather than an ongoing compulsion to get below the surface of the subject in order to plumb its meaning. For the Photorealists, surface is all. They are about the painstaking recording of information, the evenly weighted, small-scaled flood of data that makes up the raw material of perception. Photorealism’s emphasis on the prosaic and densely packed has strong parallels with Impressionism. Looking at that work now, we tend to see it as lovely, and for average museumgoers today, it is pretty and easily understood—their favorite art (much more so than Renaissance paintings with all their complicated symbolism and iconography). At the time of its making, however, people were put off not only by Impressionism’s lack of artfulness, but by its general unwillingness to engage with what were presumed to be important matters or subjects. The dearth of history or religious paintings aside, Impressionist artists didn’t even paint especially compelling scenery or historically significant buildings, although a nice cathedral or château might be handily nearby. A bustling railway station or a crowded dance hall was much more interesting. These artists were after the texture of modern experience, particularly that of the cities and those adjacent countrylike areas, such as Argenteuil, where city dwellers went to relax, bringing their city ways with them. The artists were, in short, documenting changing social norms— subjects at work and leisure, just as the Photorealists have continually done. Impressionist paintings are often as crowded and full of pictorial incident as Photorealist ones, and they record the unspectacular and modern with the same degree of fidelity. What is implicit in Impressionism is explicit in Photorealism— for everything to be equally valued, nothing must be especially important. This emphasis on specificity, process, and repetition sites Photorealism in the larger arena of twentieth-century avant-garde practice in art, literature, film, and

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music. How different is the Photorealist’s unwavering stare from the project of a conceptualist such as Roman Opalka, who painted what was to be an infinite numerical sequence, one number painting followed by another by another, until he died? Or from a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet, composed of an accretion of the most detailed possible description? Or an unfolding set of subtly varied tones by a minimalist composer like Terry Riley or Philip Glass. Or an early Warhol film like Empire, which forces eight hours of continuous slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building on us? With all of these you get the general idea—its overall sign—but the sheer bulk and pressure of similarly weighted detail works to defamiliarize the art, to make it slow, mysterious, and strange. As the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky pointed out in his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” in normal life we see things not in their entirety, but recognize them by a kind of perceptual shorthand, habitually noting only their main characteristics. This is efficient but aesthetically barren. Art exists, says Shklovsky, “that one may recover the sensation of life. . . . The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” We see and quickly comprehend the overall subject matter of a Photorealist work while at the same time realizing that it is a hand-done painting, painstakingly realized, inch by inch, with each portion equally valued. We also know and cannot unknow the fact that the laboriously fabricated painting is the end product of a nearly instantaneous mechanical process—a sixtieth of a second stretched out over months and months. This discontinuity works against the smooth comprehension that we quite rightly apply to normal life and leaves us with the sense that something else is afoot. We are used to the artless look of the artful—the casual drawing and rough painting, the carefully calibrated clumsiness. Beautifully painted banality is a more challenging problem. It is not a coincidence that, with the exception of Chuck Close, none of the painters in this show have worked in the professional arena of photography. The source photographs of the Photorealists are for the most part taken by the artists themselves, and while as a rule they are properly framed and decently composed (and thus removed from self-consciously “bad” photography with its potential for artiness), they are predictable and pedestrian—with the same anonymous look of, as Robert Bechtle put it, “a real estate photograph.” They are nowhere near the same quality as a seemingly offhand photograph by Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand (photographers whose work was criticized for being too much like a snapshot). And yet to scrupulously paint one of those photographers’ images would yield a work that would appear stilted and grating. The perfect

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photographic moment is not the perfect Photorealist moment, because there are no such things as perfect moments in Photorealism, just slightly better ones. The democracy of the point-to-point read, the devaluing of the focus of interest, is echoed in the democracy of the source material. Essentially the photography aspect of Photorealism is balanced on a fine point—it can’t be too bad, but perhaps more subtly, it can’t be too good. We might ask ourselves how the Photorealists fit in with that wide swath of painters who have used photography as source material for their work. Photography has long provided a convenient way to bring a variety of subject matters into the studio. After all, there are only four basic (and combinable) approaches to incorporating the outside world into a painting or drawing: using photographs, direct observation, working from the imagination, or importing material directly into the artwork, as in collage. Not only has photography provided abundant visual information for painters, but the photographic approach—its way of looking and framing—has informed painting and drawing since Degas and Caillebotte, if not before. A host of important postwar artists have relied on photographs for their paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, to name but a few. Many painters have used photography, yet it is clear that the Photorealists do something quite different and more specific with it. It is what they do, but significantly, what they don’t do. They of course painstakingly replicate the twodimensional photograph itself, but they also stay away from the drama inherent in photography’s capacity to stop action. Time and movement are hardly issues at all in Photorealism (except for technical matters like nailing down the constantly changing reflections in glass and chrome). Instead its practitioners focus almost exclusively on another property of photography: its granular capability to gather up a seeming infinity of detail. Absent too from Photorealism is photography’s ease of scalar manipulation, its ability to scour a vast range of cultural information, as well as its affinity for collage- or montage-like juxtaposition. In a montage or collage, there is no limit on what might be pushed together, and often the more unrelated the images, the more evocative are the metaphors generated. The Photorealists, for better or worse, don’t go down that road. Photography is key to their enterprise, but its various potentials and properties are rarely explored. Photorealists make use of its essential spatial uncertainties, but not of its ambiguities of signification, at least not overtly. While Photorealism might seem expansive, that expansiveness echoes the multitudinous nature of the world around us, the structure of complexities within complexities

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that are revealed to the focused gaze of the camera lens. Photorealism, while presenting an ostensibly cluttered and messy world, a maze of reflection, is in itself methodologically pure. Basically, it does one thing and it does it very well indeed—a telling example of Isaiah Berlin’s idea of the hedgehog and the fox (taken from an aphorism of the Greek poet Archilochus): “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one important thing.” Why has Photorealism as an art movement stayed intact and vital for so long? With some small technical differences, primarily the growing use of digital photography, the disappearance from the market of certain films, and a muchdiminished use of the airbrush (largely for health reasons), Photorealism has remained remarkably consistent in style, method, and personnel for nearly fifty years. This is much more atypical than we might think. Modern art movements have a reasonably quick turnover rate. They fall away for a variety of reasons: a broadening and dissipation of practice (Cubism, Surrealism), overspecificity (Orphism, Synchronism, Purism), a move by key artists toward other practices (Fauvism), or a pejorative critical demarcation (first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionism). These explanations apply to earlier movements: we can easily come up with a similar list for art from the ’60s and after. On another note, and for reasons too complex to go into here, new named movements in the traditional sense of the term have almost entirely ceased to come into existence for the last twenty or so years. If anything, movements have evolved into genres. For example, while much art today embodies Pop Art ideas, sources, and practices, that work is never labeled as such, any more than a contemporary landscape would be called neo-Barbizon, post-Divisionist, or second-generation Hudson River School. Making art out of the signs and materials of popular culture is now as unremarkable, undifferentiated, and generalized a practice as painting a portrait or a still life. So what is different about Photorealism, and what might account for its extraordinary cohesion? The key element, I believe, is its highly focused range of practice, its unwillingness to expand (and dilute) its field, especially to move, as so much art has in recent years, toward the interdisciplinary. It is purely a painting movement with ancillary drawings and watercolors, and the lack of blur in Photorealist paintings is emblematic of its programmatic clarity. As Frank Stella said of his early minimal paintings, “I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.” We might say that the Photorealists tried to keep the image as good as it was in the camera. Photorealism is an obvious stylistic movement, but it wasn’t really a socially based movement, a collection of friends and friendly antagonists—as were the

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Abstract Expressionists and the Pop artists. The Photorealists came from and have lived and worked in different parts of the country. While some knew one another, they weren’t part of a tightly knit circle, particularly in their formative years. The closer artists are to one another, and the closer they are to art centers, the more powerful are the forces for dispersion. Proximity amplifies the power of new ideas and the allure of change, just as it compounds the inevitable personal rivalries and the dissatisfactions engendered by a competitive artworld. Photorealism has, to its ultimate advantage, maintained a relatively low profile, comfortable with flying under the radar and thereby avoiding forces that seek to undermine and delegitimize it. It is telling that as the older Photorealists leave us, a similar number of younger ones take their place. It feels like a naturally balanced and regulated artistic ecosystem, albeit one still confined mostly to the United States. There has been some European participation of late, but despite the ready fit of Photorealism and glittering cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, and Tokyo, there have been no significant Asian manifestations of the movement to date. Photorealism is basically a self-selecting style, rather than a culturally or educationally encouraged one: many artists are drawn to freewheeling gestural painting of one sort or another, but there are far fewer who take deep satisfaction in spending months and months of diligent small-scaled work on a painting whose final appearance is almost completely known in advance. Photorealism has survived because it has remained undiluted and conceptually coherent, but also because it has managed to stay consistently compelling. While a viewer can approach it on an immediate level—for its technique, finesse, and appealing subject matter—that viewer can also go deeper and enjoy the complexity and contradictions, the multiple means of entrance that Photorealism affords. We are fortunate to live in an artistically pluralistic age, where still-vital art is not cut off prematurely. There may come a time when Photorealism will feel dated, most likely when the readily recognizable artifacts of the postwar age that populate its canvases become strange, or worse, quaint. But for now we should take pleasure in an art that is fully thought-out, true to itself, and in its low-keyed and insistent way, provocative and puzzling. Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, Summer 2017

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“The strength of memory that is left behind.” Those, I was told by a witness, were Cy Twombly’s last words. Enigmatic, evocative, open-ended, forceful yet melancholy, they seem to be a fitting subtext and coda for the work of a great postwar painter’s painter. Twombly, who died in 2011, is the subject of a thorough and sensitive retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, curated by Jonas Storsve, with the support of the Cy Twombly Foundation, its president, Nicola Del Roscio, and Twombly’s son, Alessandro. The 140 or so paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs on view hit the major developments and periods in the artist’s career, even if the show does not contain all of his best works. The quality level is consistently high, easily convincing viewers that Twombly’s reputation as a perplexing but indispensable marker of our time is well deserved. The exhibition will not travel, largely because many of the loans were nearly impossible to obtain. That difficulty parallels a particular aspect of Twombly’s work. You have to make an effort to come to this art. It doesn’t reach out to meet you. A certain state of absence, openness, recession, and whiteness (verging on erasure) is key to the enterprise. Twombly himself could be hard to pin down. Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, he studied in Boston and Lexington, at the Art Students League in New York, and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during its heyday in the early 1950s.1 He lived at various times in New York, and early on became part of a group of artists that included Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He joined the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 and had his first show there in 1960. He returned to the city frequently, both to visit and to work. By the late ’50s Twombly had settled in Italy, marrying an Italian artist, Baroness Luisa Tatiana Franchetti and buying a spacious apartment on the Via di Monserrato in Rome. He stayed in Rome for the most part but also lived and worked in a host of other Italian locales. His periods of fixed residency were regularly punctuated by travel to Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan, Yemen, Iran, 181

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Turkey, Greece, Russia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and in the winter months to various tropical islands. Del Roscio told me that Twombly was not the kind of artist who got up every morning and spent eight hours in the studio no matter what. His works were nearly formed in his mind before he sat down to paint. Thinking, reading, traveling, remembering, and more thinking—not tortuously finding the image, obliterating it, and then refinding it—was the way he came to his art. That method makes for a kind of contemplative serenity and a feeling of remove, of distanced engagement with the work. It serves to set Twombly apart from the Abstract Expressionists, to whose work his bears some resemblance, aligning him instead with his friends Johns and Rauschenberg. (Rauschenberg, whom he met at the Art Students League in 1950, was perhaps his oldest and closest artist friend.) However, more than Johns or Rauschenberg, Twombly was simultaneously able to move beyond and to hold on to Abstract Expressionism, inserting outside references into his paintings, yet retaining an obdurate core of abstraction. His mixing of gestural abstraction and wide-ranging reference (not the least of which were the many varieties of handwriting) puts Twombly at the center of debates around painting today. He was both antecedent to and elder contemporary of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Brice Marden, Christopher Wool, Chris Martin, Amy Sillman, Jonathan Lasker, Suzanne McClelland, and Dona Nelson, among others, who create semiotically and formally complex, layered canvases often featuring script and large areas of open space. Furthermore, Twombly’s seemingly casual and unaggressive approach allies him with younger informal abstractionists like Richard Tuttle, Mary Heilmann, Harriet Korman, and Raoul De Keyser. The Pompidou show highlighted three cycles of work, each given its own room: “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963), “Fifty Days at Iliam” (1978), and “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000). These groups of paintings, executed at what the curator considers to be key points in the artist’s career, do not necessarily comprise Twombly’s most important individual works, but they provide an opportunity to study his development as an artist. The exhibition starts with four large, roughly surfaced, muscularly gestural black and white paintings from the early ’50s. The last two, Quarzazat and Volubilis (both 1953), were produced after Twombly returned from a trip to Morocco with Rauschenberg and the writer Paul Bowles.2 The paintings are bold and harsh, with strong linear elements that suggest primitive architectural constructions. Twombly soon moved away from this assertive, form-creating mark-making, embracing instead quieter compositions with considerably less tonal contrast. But the big

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emphatic gesture—not something we normally associate with Twombly—never really went away. The artist employed it at various times, for example in the “Nine Discourses on Commodus” series; in the 1993–95 “Quattro Stagioni,” a group of paintings based on Nicolas Poussin’s “Four Seasons” (executed at the end of the French artist’s life); and in Twombly’s own powerfully graphic final works, the “Camino Real” series (2010–11). These suites add considerable variety and depth to our understanding of his oeuvre. Twombly’s more characteristic work—open, loosely sprung, with large, lightly inhabited, mostly white areas interspersed with scrawled or incised linear elements—began in earnest in the mid-’50s. One of the pictorial assumptions that he (along with many other painters) inherited from the Abstract Expressionists was that scale mattered. Size was especially important for Twombly, since it rescued his work from the impression of delicacy and tentativeness. His paintings were big from the beginning, allowing for the accumulations of hand gestures to have both breathing room and a sense of purpose—even if that purpose was not immediately evident. These elements could be seen in the white, nearly empty “Lexington” paintings from 1959, which were rejected by Castelli because “he did not know what they were,”3 as well as in the considerably more exuberant, colorful, and sensual (body parts abound) School of Fontainebleau (1960), Empire of Flora, and School of Athens (both 1961). The last three works were painted in Rome, and their titles pay homage to Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, Poussin, and Raphael. The paintings seem to echo the large, baroque spaces of the city Twombly inhabited. Living abroad, working in spacious studios and surrounded by a complex, historically rich Mediterranean culture allowed Twombly the freedom he needed for his art. Importantly, the scale of Twombly’s paintings removed his abbreviated calligraphic markings, which included handwriting, scribbled depictions, and pure abstraction, from the realm of drawing, with its implicit acknowledgement of the paper’s edges, and shifted them to the arena of allover painting. He used script to great and varied effect. Writing, as a manifestation of language, has the ability to move freely between different levels of abstraction. Twombly played with this, just as he negotiated the elision between legible and illegible script, exploiting the many ways that handwriting can be regarded as a thing in itself— the slant and spacing of the letters, the tilt of the word line, the script’s forcefulness or shakiness, its lightness or darkness, and the degree to which it is visible or obscured by erasure, super-imposition, or overlay. The extremely well-read Twombly often employed literary and historical references in his works. He was very keen on poetry, and lines and passages from

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John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stéphane Mallarmé, C.P. Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis, and Octavio Paz (among many others) regularly appear in them. But what seemed to resonate most with Twombly was the world of ancient Greece and Rome. (His mother once said that when he was in kindergarten he repeatedly mentioned that he wished to go to Rome.) To involve yourself deeply in the past is to position your art in the realm of memory, and with that come the distortions, lapses, and unexpected connections that memory is prone to. Memory is a sort of collage, and plumbing its potential was a key element of Twombly’s working method. While the artist’s classical references often impart an elegiac or lyrical sense to the paintings, this is not the case with “Nine Discourses on Commodus.” Painted in the distressing period immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the series is named after an especially megalomaniacal and bloodthirsty second-century Roman emperor. Commodus’s twelve-year reign was a disaster—marked by coups, assassinations, massive corruption, and bloody gladiatorial combats. His misadventures caused serious military and territorial losses for the empire and contributed to its decline. The nine equally sized vertical paintings, executed on monochrome, mediumgray grounds, replete with smears and drips of yellow, white, and (most prominently) red, call to mind flayed flesh and seem, Francis Bacon-like, to capture a scream or the unfolding of a psychotic break. They are a powerful commentary on a world that seemed to be teetering on the brink of chaos. Before and during the time he worked on this series, Twombly paid a good deal of attention to Bacon’s work and to the writing of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet (creator of the screenplay for the slow and uncanny 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad). The influence of Robbe-Grillet’s measured, granular, repetitive, systematic, and disjunctive narration can be found throughout the “Nine Discourses.” Forceful as these paintings are, their debut at Castelli in 1964 proved to be a commercial and critical fiasco. Minimalism and Pop were riding high, and the exhibition came at a bad time for work with an Abstract Expressionist flavor. The reviews were generally poor, but Donald Judd’s review in Arts Magazine was especially contemptuous and dismissive. For Twombly, however, the impact of the show’s reception was not entirely negative, although it did move him away from current developments in American art. He felt liberated—able to enjoy his solid European reputation without having to worry about what people back home thought. He said that he “was the happiest painter around for a couple of years: no one gave a damn what I did.”4

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He returned to Castelli in 1967 with the first of two relatively austere series that became known as the Blackboard paintings—white wax crayon on grounds of gray industrial paint. Some of the works feature looping and Slinky-like scrawls, others trace out complex mathematical or drafting diagrams. All in all, the works were well received. They were a better fit with the art of that time, and the often-reproduced paintings continue to look fresh. While they remain among Twombly’s most popular and highly valued canvases, in the context of the Pompidou show, they feel a bit like outliers. The ten painting series, “Fifty Days at Iliam” finds Twombly back in the world of the Greeks. Begun in the summer of 1977, it is a meditation on the Trojan War as recounted in Alexander Pope’s early eighteenth-century English translation of Homer’s Iliad. The canvases are immense, with the largest, Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, measuring about 10 by 16 feet. That painting, while being an integral part of the cycle, is relatively simple and quite effective on its own. It consists of three quatrefoil-like shapes rendered in oil paint, oil crayon, and pencil and set on a glowing white ground. Each shape is about a third the height of the canvas and the three are centered horizontally just above its midpoint. The shield forms are (from left to right) crimson red for Achilles, purpled gray for Achilles’s beloved (and slain) companion Patroclus, and a ghostly white for the Trojan Hector. The color in the shields is a bit sullied and the paint application—especially in the Achilles and Patroclus emblems—feels pressured and frenetic, the overall forms barely keeping the marks contained. The heroes’ names are penciled in on a diagonal just outside the upper left quadrant of each quatrefoil, and there is enough coarse shading, again most prominent in the Achilles and Patroclus sections, to give the shapes weight and presence. More than the other paintings in the group, we sense an emptied-out, funerary quality—a formal, cadenced memorializing, an archaic drumbeat of sorts. Twombly repeated the quatrefoil form, which he then overlaid with a square, in three untitled 1985 oil-and-acrylic works on shaped panels. The crisply edged (and completely symmetrical) painting surfaces allow for a more densely filled image, and these paintings, executed in shades of deep sap green cut with creamy white, are among Twombly’s most pictorial works. They recall the late Monet of the Water Lilies or Joan Mitchell’s assertive and melancholy paintings from the early ’60s, with their large, rounded, dark green forms. There is not the usual empty space in these paintings, and yet there is an abundance of cool light and shade, depth and air. They may depart from Twombly’s typical work, but in this show they act as a kind of self-assured resting place. Overt landscape references recur in Twombly’s series “Quattro Stagioni.” These four luscious, roughly ten-foot-high canvases are painterly and colorful,

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especially the green-black, yellow, and white Inverno (winter) and Autumno, with its juicy, dripping reds and purples. (Twombly would likely have had in mind the annual winegrowers’ festival in Bassano in Teverina, the municipal region north of Rome where he had a studio and painted these works.) The ten-painting “Coronation of Sesostris” (2000) is the last major series anchoring the exhibition, although to my mind the later “Bacchus” or “Camino Real” series would have worked as well. According to Thierry Greub, Twombly based the paintings on the rising and setting of the sun, inspired both by the story of the Egyptian king Sesostris and the mythical journey of the Egyptian sun god Ra across the skies in his divine boat.5 Incorporating verses from Sappho and quotations from American poet Patricia Waters that contemplate the death of the ancient gods, the “Coronation” series is more overtly narrative than most of Twombly’s works, dealing explicitly with the cycle of birth and death. It is fitting that a man in his seventies would give some serious thought to the arc of his life and the possibility both of its end and of its continuation. It also makes emotional sense that “Coronation” was started in Italy but shipped to and finished in a studio that Twombly had set up in his childhood hometown of Lexington. Twombly’s work did not flag as he aged. Nor did it decrease in scale or ambition. Of particular note are the “Bacchus” paintings (2006–08), which were done during the Iraq War and feature blood- and wine-red coiling scrawls, and the final works of the “Camino Real” series, where the loops from the Blackboard paintings and the “Bacchus” paintings are made even bigger and more graphically and chromatically harsh with vehement swirls of red, orange, and yellow bleeding out against a field of acid green acrylic. The title for the “Camino Real” series was taken from Tennessee Williams’s 1953 play set in a dead-end town—a mix of Latin America and New Orleans— which contrasts the high-mindedness to which we aspire with the shabby reality we are forced to inhabit. We can certainly imagine that Twombly, who was ill at the time and near the end of his life, took this potentially tragic dichotomy to heart. Sculpture clearly engaged Twombly, even though he did not produce any of it between 1959 and 1976. Modestly scaled for the most part (some are quite tall), his sculptures are white-painted or plastered assemblages of what seems like the detritus of ordinary life—studio sweepings, wood scraps of all sizes, dried or artificial flowers, cardboard boxes, bits of metal, electrical boxes. The works’ whiteness unifies the disparate materials, causing the forms to appear to float, but also obscures the materials—pushes them away from reference and

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comprehension. As Twombly said, “White is my marble.” Marble it might be, but not the smoothly carved stone of the Roman busts he collected. Twombly’s white feels bleached out, fugitive. The hue was important for the artist in all of his work. He said in a late interview, “Whiteness can be the classic state of the intellect, or a neo-romantic area of remembrance—or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé.”6 Whiteness for Twombly signified a kind of potential, like blank paper, or John Cage’s7 seemingly silent composition, or Rauschenberg’s early white paintings.8 A connection to archaic sculpture—a number of Twombly’s threedimensional works evoke draped cloth or simplified kouros figures—is clear. Also apparent is the link to another area of his collecting: African art. Del Roscio confirmed to me Twombly’s long-standing interest in African fetishes and their importance to his sculpture. The fetish reference, however, is downplayed, with no obvious summoning of the ritualistic power of such objects. This reticence, reinforced by the sculptures’ white color (black would have a completely different feel) allows the force of the African art invoked to come upon the viewer more slowly and more subtly, and to lift the works out of the realm of the expected. The Pompidou’s dramatic and effective installation of Twombly’s sculpture—a group of sixteen pieces set on a low, white, stepped pedestal in a room whose wall of windows opens onto a spectacular view of the Paris skyline—adds to the power of the works. It imparts a sense of clustering and reiteration, creating charged spaces between the separate objects. While recalling a display of anthropological artifacts, the Pompidou installation also brings to mind images of Brancusi’s studio, and cements the sculptures’ affinity to important developmental lines of modernist work. Twombly is an acquired taste, a bit of a dandy, a bit of a flâneur, and not American in the same way as Johns and Rauschenberg. He lived for the most part in Italy, yet his artist friends were Americans, and he had limited connections with the Italian art of his day. Other American artists have spent time abroad, but not quite like Twombly. He lived in Italy for nearly sixty years and was, somewhat unrelated to art, integrated into its society. But he also kept his distance and his independence. Being an American, visiting his native country—often for extended periods— but neither living there nor acknowledging his expatriate status, gave him a kind of freedom from assumptions about what his art ought to be. In many ways, his peripatetic existence anticipated the lives of artists today. Twombly’s artistic stubbornness, his avoidance of certainty, brings weight and resistance to his art. As Clement Greenberg said in Emile de Antonio’s 1973 film, Painters Painting (not in relation to Twombly, but it fits), “The best art of our time

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or any art since Corot, not just since Manet, makes you a little more uncomfortable at first, challenges you more. It doesn’t come that far to meet your taste or meet the established taste of the market.” Twombly’s art always seems to be slipping away. Its ambiguities and uncertainties are baked into it, which quite possibly points to the reason for its continuing and now rapidly growing appeal. In a time of doubt and anxiety, many yearn for belief and assurance, for comfortable and irrefutable ideology, while others are willing to let go and be fruitfully unrooted. Rauschenberg’s seemingly straightforward yet deeply enigmatic statement for the catalogue of Dorothy Miller’s landmark 1959 Museum of Modern Art show, “Sixteen Americans,” applies perhaps even more directly to Twombly. Rauschenberg said, “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Twombly has certainly left something behind, something to fill the gap—the strength of memory is probably as good a description as any.9 Art in America April 2017

Notes and References 1 Although he was born and raised in the South, Twombly’s parents were originally from New England. His father was a coach and the athletic director at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and had played professional baseball for a time. The young Twombly (born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr.) inherited his nickname Cy from his father, who was called that after the well-known pitcher Cy “Cyclone” Young. The Twombly family was a cultured and happy one, and the young man’s artistic pursuits were encouraged. 2 That formative voyage came during the two artists’ eight-month stay in Europe and North Africa. Twombly had gotten a travel grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and invited Rauschenberg along. 3 Paul Winkler “(Lex),” in Cy Twombly, exh. cat., ed. Jonas Storsve, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, p. 54. This comes from a conversation between Winkler and Twombly discussing Leo Castelli’s initial response to the paintings. 4 Nicholas Cullinan, “Nine Discourses on Commodus, or Cy Twombly’s Beautiful ‘Fiasco’,” in Cy Twombly, note 45, p. 87, citing Kirk Varnedoe’s conversation with Twombly. 5 Thierry Greub, “Cy Twombly’s Antiquities,” in Cy Twombly, p. 104. 6 Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” in Writings on Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola Del Roscio, Munich, 2002, p. 27.

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7 Cage composed 4´33˝ in 1952. He was a teacher at Black Mountain when Twombly was there, and served as an inspiration to him. 8 In a letter from Rauschenberg to Twombly (the text is written in caps) Rauschenberg refers to the creation of the white paintings: IF ONLY TIME WERE OURS TO SPEND, AGAIN. TO HAVE OUR LIVES. I PAINTED THE 4-PANNEL [sic] PAINTING A VERY EXPENSIVE FLAT WHITE TONIGHT AND IT IS DRYING NOW LIKE WHITE AIR FROZEN IN ITS STUBBORNESS [sic] . . . I WANTED YOU TO BE WITH ME SO MUCH WHILE I WAS DOING THE PAINTING AND THOUGHT OF BLK. MT. IN THAT FUNNY LITTLE ROOM WHEN WE PAINTED THEM THE FIRST TIME. Apr. 15, 1954, Archives of the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Gaeta. 9 At the very end, Twombly was hallucinating due to his deteriorating condition and the lack of oxygen in his brain. And yet there was an underlying and poetic rationality to it all. He spoke continually of art, asking, for example, that a small Picasso that he owned be brought to his bedside. His last thoughts were about his art: “I let it inside to create, to regenerate, to make it stronger rather than let it go out all at once like a flash in the eye. I made art that regenerates itself. I enjoyed making it so much. Oh! I loved it so much.” Then after a long pause: “The strength of memory that is left behind.” From conversations with Nicola Del Roscio, and Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings, vol. II, 1956–1960, Munich, Schirmer Mosel, 2012, pp. 5–6.

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Art Between Form and Anti-Form

Two exhibitions opening simultaneously at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY (Keith Sonnier: Until Today), and the Dia Art Foundation/ Dan Flavin Art Institute in nearby Bridgehampton (Keith Sonnier: Dis-Play II), allow viewers to explore a wide range of sculptural and installation works, along with early video and sound pieces by one of the most influential artists of his generation. Keith Sonnier was associated with a group of sculptors gathered loosely in the late 1960s under the headings of Postminimalism and anti-form. Those artists, virtually all of who remain productive today, challenged accepted norms of traditional abstract sculpture, as well as the premises of the nearly contemporaneous Minimalists—whose serially monolithic “specific objects,” as Donald Judd referred to them, also posed a threat (at least for a while) to established taste. Sonnier, along with Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Jackie Winsor, Barry Le Va, and Richard Tuttle, among others, pushed back against certain givens: hard, permanent, expensive (or expensive looking) materials; fixed configurations; standard push-pull Bauhaus composition; and monumentality. Rejecting these conventions—laden with the implications of straight male power and entitlement—they opted instead for the soft, the variable, the modest in scale, the temporary, and the materially banal and unexceptional: the crummy, yet evocative stuff of ordinary life rather than welded or machined steel, stone or bronze. Process was to be emphasized; the look of the offhand, playful, and casual was cultivated, and associations with life and the world welcomed. These premises might seem common and self-evident now, but they weren’t 40 or 50 years ago, even if there were collateral sculptural stirrings in the work of Fluxus and the Italian Arte Povera artists. Sonnier is best known for his work with neon tubing, a material typically found in signage, but under-used in the fine arts. Despite its general air of commercial chintziness, it lends itself remarkably well to expressive and aesthetically engaging ends. As opposed to rigid forms, as in the fluorescent 191

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bulbs favored by Dan Flavin, neon is extraordinarily malleable, a versatile means for drawing in space. Although it is spatially bounded by its glass tubing, its chromatic quality is ever-shifting as it casts a gradually diffusing aura of color; this color is composed of pure light rather than pigment and can thus add to and intermix with the glow of nearby tubes of a different hue. Neon tubing is a powerful visual form-maker—and, with its ready adaptation to text, a potential linguistic channel. As opposed to the planes and volumes of most sculptural materials, its fine lines consume little actual space, which allows it to stand alone or be combined with other materials without crowding them. The Parrish show includes works that juxtapose neon with a variety of other forms and objects: incandescent bulbs and fixtures (“Neon Wrapping Incandescent II,” 1968); glass sheets (“Ba-O-Ba I,” 1969); aluminum plates (“Cycladic Extrusion I,” 1988); found objects (“USA: War of the Worlds,” 2004 and “Los La Butte,” 1990); and sinister, vaguely threatening electronic gear (“Syzygy Transmitter,” 1992). Invariably Sonnier gives a prominent place to the connectors, transformers, and, especially, black electric wires that control the lights—all loose and floppy things that hang and fall where they may, each elegant in their offhandedness. While Sonnier has worked with neon throughout his career, his interests have been wide-ranging, and the Parrish and Dia exhibitions provide a well-rounded sampling of his production. (Examples of his fluent work in drawing are currently on view at the Tripoli Gallery in Southampton.) He attended graduate school in the mid-’60s at Rutgers—then home bases for Pop Artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and George Segal, as well as key members of the Fluxus Group, and, importantly, Allan Kaprow, the pioneer of installation, performance art and happenings. Sonnier has lived ever since in New York City and on the east end of Long Island. Yet, key to his overall approach to art and life is his upbringing in Cajun Louisiana and his ongoing connection to its very distinct culture: French speaking, Catholic (of the easygoing and flexible variety), humorous, and musical—imbued with a love of dancing, parades, spicy, tasty food, and good times. Sonnier’s parents were progressive, and, like many Cajuns, friendly with people in the black community. (His mother, for example, knew the great zydeco musician Clifton Chenier, and would ask him to play at the local dances.) This open-mindedness inspired in Sonnier a love of travel and a desire to immerse himself in other cultures, leading to extended stays in Europe, Asia, and South America. The Parrish show includes fine examples of his bamboo sculptures made in India (“Sarasvasti” and “Ganesh,” both 1981), as well as carved, painted, and slotted wooden sculptures inspired by visits to Japan and Indonesia (“Aizen-Myoo,” “Suku-Na-Biko,” and “Yamoto,” all 1984), and a painted and stained bamboo and timber piece (“Ktut,” 1983).

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Sonnier, who is comfortable with fabrication and advanced technology, explored interactive video and sound work early on, and has regularly produced complex public artworks in neon. But he is just as conversant in the humble and handmade: flocking pulled off the wall; flimsy string and rubber pieces; and, in one of the Parrish show’s most subtly striking pieces, the floor-based “Untitled” (1967), a length of silvery satin (salvaged from one of his mother’s dresses) stretched into a narrow 10-foot length of repeated identical loaf-shaped forms. Installation work has formed an important part of his output from the beginning. Some of it is fixed and architectural, but other works are much looser, performative, random, and dizzily playful. Dis-Play II (1970), a large, darkened, psychedelically-tinged installation at Dia, features a nicely disorienting array of black lights and flickering strobes, neon, and scattered fluorescent Day-Glo pigments; as well as foam rubber, glass, and plywood—all made even more complex by a looping presentation of jumpy videos. As these exhibitions make abundantly clear, Keith Sonnier is an artist of true verve and vitality—engaged and highly productive for over 50 years. While no artist can do everything, know everybody and be everywhere, Sonnier has given it a shot, and in the process, he has managed to shine a light into some of the most interesting artistic corners of his times. Hyperallergic, August 2018

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Frames and Personas

If you are in need of a creative polymath, look no further than Brian O’Doherty. Now ninety years old, O’Doherty—physician, geometric painter, conceptual artist, cultural critic, lecturer, television host and producer, editor, National Endowment for the Arts administrator, and Booker Prize–nominated novelist—has recently published a career-spanning collection of essays. Dating from 1967 to 2016, these pieces range from extremely close readings of Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko to writings both prescient (a 1971 essay on Andy Warhol) and retrospective (pieces from 1989 on George Segal and 1990–91 on John Chamberlain, Frank Stella, and Eva Hesse, and, finally, a 2016 essay on a suite of late Robert Rauschenberg paintings). Film, video, and music are also given their due, with perceptive examinations of Orson Welles, Nam Jun Paik, the director Steve McQueen, and experimental composer and confidant of the Abstract Expressionist painters, Morton Feldman. Marcel Duchamp, a friend of O’Doherty’s (as were seemingly most of the key artworld players of the period), also gets an idiosyncratic look, in an account of the making of O’Doherty’s portrait of the artist in the form of an electrocardiogram. Duchamp’s famed equanimity is put to the test as O’Doherty takes him away from a dinner party into a bedroom, and there subjects him to a full-blown EKG, complete with gel and metal leads attached to his chest and legs. O’Doherty writes, “He lay still, unperturbed. If I had said I was going to take out his heart, I suspect he would have been mildly curious as to how I was going to go about it.” Few things with a contemporary visual bent seem to escape Doherty’s notice—a quality evident in his work as an art critic for the New York Times, his editorship of this magazine from 1971 to ’74, when he widened and occasionally politicized its purview, and also in his involvement with television. He hosted or helped originate, among other well-known programs, “Invitation to Art,” “Dialogue,” “American Masters,” and “Great Performances.” O’Doherty is sharp and expansively cogent on the architecture and decorative flourishes of Miami Beach and Las Vegas (the two Vegas essays—the first from 195

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1972 and the second a 2016 reevaluation of the changing sign-scape of the town, both in A.i.A.—serve as fine companion pieces to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s classic 1972 Learning from Las Vegas). Although these examinations of the semiotics of glitzy vernacular taste are replete with O’Doherty’s engaging aperçus, such ventures are not unexpected from a cultural critic of his breadth. But who else would or could write a very serious essay titled “The Politics and Aesthetics of Heart Transplants” (with reference to the Frankenstein myth) or explore the formal conventions and philosophical implications of microscopic photography? O’Doherty’s best-known piece, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space,” is unfortunately not included in this volume, probably because that essay and the others from 1976, as well as the 1986 “The Gallery as Gesture,” were published separately as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1986). The current collection, as edited by Liam Kelly with an introduction by fellow art historian Anne-Marie Bonnet, concludes with another look at what has happened to the ostensibly neutral space of the contemporary exhibition, and that reexamination animates the entire book. Context and the many varieties of framing are matters of ongoing concern to O’Doherty. He is particularly acute when it comes to that most common of every day frames, the window. Near the beginning of his 2009 essay “Windows and Edward Hopper’s Gaze,” he remarks: Windows, which are simply interruptions in a wall, have significant cultural duties thrust upon them. They exist in a potent semiotic minefield. They frame a vista and maybe a culture. To whom is the window’s invitation addressed? To you and me, to the public gaze with its unstable modalities of curiosity and indifference. And to the private gaze from within. Looking in and looking out being the only alternatives a window presents. Each representing the two continents of inside and outside. Looking out on the public sphere is generally without guilt. Looking in, which transgresses privacy, is one of the last etiquettes observed on the street. Looking in transgresses a pane, a plane. That gaze from the outside encounters the way windows are masked with the demure opacity of window-shades, the toiletry of lace curtains, the vertical and horizontal strips, like fish-gills of venetian blinds. So windows may be dressed and undressed to the gaze. There is, you remember, a profession called window-dressing.

That essay and the following one, “Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning” (1999)—a detailed, keenly observed analysis of a painting so familiar that we scarcely see it anymore—are, I believe, some of the most insightful things ever written about Hopper, an artist O’Doherty also knew personally. Key to framing, both artistic and critical, is understanding not only the how and why of separating

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the viewable from the excluded, but also understanding that the way we look at things is invariably conditioned by our position in both fictive and actual space. O’Doherty says of Early Sunday Morning, “Seen from across the street by someone of Hopper’s exceptional height, shops, windows and cornice sweep across the picture in a single plane and, as frontal things do, stare back at you.” The bright hermetic white cube, the architectural and social frame that allows us to focus on, clarify, and identify as art the often mysterious productions of modern painting and sculpture, has, in O’Doherty’s view, now been largely displaced by the theatrical black box—the preferred space of postmodern film, video, and performance—and by “relational” actions that manifest a powerful impetus to merge art and life. The title of his 1967 review of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls is “Narcissus in Hades.” Identity is also a frame—an often-shifting one—and we position ourselves within it with greater or lesser ambiguity. O’Doherty, born and educated in Ireland but a resident of New York for over fifty years, has not only successfully assumed a range of professional roles but has also cast himself in alternate personas at different stages in his life and for varying lengths of time. The reason, as he said in the 2011 essay, “Divesting the Self: A Striptease,” is “Because each had a job to do. A job I, myself, could not.” There is Brian O’Doherty, of course, but also the most public of his guises, Patrick Ireland, his painter stand-in, brought to life by the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Derry and laid to rest in a funeral on the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art thirty-six years later, when peace had finally come to Northern Ireland. There are also William Maginn (named after a multipersona nineteenth-century Irish writer who sometimes signed himself Ensign Morgan O’Doherty), Sigmund Bode (the youthful, convention-defying artist of O’Doherty’s Dublin years), and, most fascinating, his female self, Mary Josephson. A politically committed American critic, Josephson stayed tantalizingly elusive, once declining a plum writing assignment that would have required meeting artist and magazine editor John Coplans in person.1 O’Doherty’s writing moves in and out of the frame of objectivity and personal distancing, often in the course of one essay. He can float the most abstract of thought balloons—paragraphs that are brilliant from part to part, but as a whole challenge you to construct the larger argument. But a bit later, there he is, in the studio with Hopper or Rothko, in a coffee shop with Morton Feldman, in Duchamp’s apartment, or at a party with Eva Hesse, telling us what he and the other artist said, how they felt, and especially what it all looked like. O’Doherty shifts between active participant and detached speculative mind with a fluidity and stylistic grace that propels you forward, even as it tugs at your sleeve and

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asks you to stop, reread, and give it more thought. O’Doherty wants us to inhabit what we perceive, to be an acute looker while fully engaging in the conundrums and contradictions that art puts to us. It is not an easy task, but it is one that he has managed admirably these many years. Art in America, February 2019

Notes and References 1 For an insightful analysis of O’Doherty’s shape-shifting, see Thomas McEvilley, “An Artist & His Aliases,” Art in America, May 1971, pp. 138–41. Brian O’Doherty: Collected Essays, Oakland, University of California Press, 2018

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Inside Outsider

A forty year, roughly two-hundred-piece Franz West survey, launched last fall at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and now at Tate Modern in London, brings home to viewers the extraordinary formal range of this quirky, provocative, and influential Austrian artist. Bound by no one medium, he was equally at home (or, more likely, ill at ease) with sculpture, painting, drawing, graphic work, installation, furniture design, video, and performance—or any combination thereof. West, who died in 2012 at the age of sixty-five (after many years of hard living), dropped out of school at sixteen and almost immediately entered Vienna’s growing avant-garde world. Ambition, coupled with an impulsive, anarchic streak and a don’t-give-a-damn attitude characterized his art from the beginning. West was born in Vienna in 1947, the son of a Communist coal merchant of Serbian origin, Ferdinand Zokan, with whom he did not get along at all, and Emilie West, a cultivated, warm, artistic Jewish dentist, whom he greatly loved (and whose name he took). Those postwar years in Austria were grim, but the general air of disorder and breakdown had positive aspects. It ultimately opened things up and provided space for a radical, anti-establishment art in a city that was set in its artistic ways. West, largely self-taught, was strongly attracted to the new art scene, but in his early days he was clearly a peripheral character.1 An odd duck who at first sold his work in the street, he took drugs and drank heavily, got beaten up and thrown out of bars, and seemed to many just a satellite of his flamboyant older half-brother, performance artist Otto Kobalek. West, however, was charming, inspired, and possessed of a real—if unorthodox and complicated—talent for friendship (attested to in the catalogue by the recollections of numerous friends and collaborators). He hung in there, and by the 1980s found his work increasingly exhibited, both in Austria and abroad. Key to West’s development was his reaction to Vienna’s best-known avantgarde group, the Actionists—Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and others. There is nothing to catch people’s eye like pissing in public and drinking your urine, shitting while singing the national anthem 199

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(again publicly), and covering your body with shit while masturbating—all of which Günter Brus did. Unsurprisingly, such artists received a great deal of attention, something that West very much wanted for himself. They, however, were not terribly interested in him, perhaps because they sensed his lack of adulation. While West liked the aggressive, performative aspect of the Actionists, their emphasis on the body, and their desire to offend the bourgeoisie, he rejected what was, to his way of thinking, their self-indulgent seriousness, their Christlike posturing, and their obsession with blood, pain, mutilation, and suffering. He wanted something equally powerful but lighter and considerably more casual. The Pompidou’s Christine Macel, co-curator of the exhibition, refers to West’s desire to become “a dandy with an elegant and rebellious body of work and an unpredictable intelligence, at once frivolous and intellectual.”2 A certain studied idleness, in the mode of Duchamp, was part of his artistic affect. Macel remarks, “Sitting down and lying down were also West’s greatest sources of inspiration. This was a matter of necessity as much as of inclination, for his health sometimes forced him to adopt such states of otium.”3 For all of that, West was remarkably productive. But his art, even the large-scale welded aluminum or epoxy resin sculptures, eschewed the look of the planned, well-made object. He was drawn to whatever was at hand—crummy, disintegrating foam rubber and nonchalantly painted papier-mâché; lumpy, awkward aggregations of plaster; seemingly tossed-off, often vaguely pornographic exhibition posters; singularly uncomfortable pieces of “furniture”; and formally disjunctive collaborative efforts with other artists. Bad color was West’s calling card: nasty bubble-gum and intestinal pinks, shrill chartreuse and depressing institutional greens, lavenders to set your teeth on edge, sullied sky blues and a whole range of aggressively insipid pastel tones. Like the Actionists, he was committed to merging art and life, and to directly involving spectators. That interaction—with viewers encouraged to perch or slump on the furniture, or to hold the white, weirdly balanced, portable Passstücke (Adaptive) pieces—was often physically awkward, but also visceral and rewarding. To make something visually engaging yet awkward and dopey-looking is harder than one might think. It often comes down to an innate grasp of scale— not just scale in terms of overall size, but scale as the measure of the relation of part to part, color to color, surface to surface, action to action. The Labstücke (Refresher) sculptures of the 1980s, for example, Trunkenes Gebot (1988) or Labstücke (1986), are “drinking sculptures,” in which an empty alcohol bottle, its contents consumed during the making of the work, is embedded in the sculpture itself. In Trunkenes Gebot, a bottle of J&B scotch pokes out of the top of a tall

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canted and articulated column made of steel, wood, and polyester, slathered with sea-foam green acrylic paint. Labstücke gives us a green bottle of Metaxa, precisely centered, but buried up to its neck in a lumpy sleeve of harsh yellow papier-mâché, which in turn sticks up from a very wonky yellow plank-like form, also in papier-mâché. The placement of the bottles in both pieces is so obvious, their relatively small size so out of proportion to the rest of the sculpture, the semiotic heft of the implied drunkenness so insistent, and the overall gawkiness so blatant, that despite everything it just works. It is instructive to compare pieces like these to Robert Rauschenberg’s combine sculptures, for example, Monogram (1955–59), with its taxidermied angora goat cinched at its belly by a tire. The Rauschenberg, although joining seemingly incompatible objects, is in fact perfectly and elegantly balanced, both formally and sensually. The goat and the tire, although we hadn’t previously considered it, are made for each other—and the resulting image is right and unforgettable. The West, on the other hand, never sits comfortably. Its awkwardness virtually hums: it is the sculptural equivalent of a three-day hangover. Incongruous conjunction runs through West’s work, although not in the typical Surrealist mode—think of Magritte’s gigantic apple squeezing out the space of an otherwise empty bourgeois sitting room or his cheery daytime sky seamlessly blending into a lonely small-town night—but rather in the way that expected formal relations may be skewed to unsettle the viewer. We can understand jarring colors, paint haphazardly applied to a crumbling surface, odd placements like the pair of red shower sandals stuck on an untitled 1974 painting, waiting to be stepped into: these are all in the expected zone of casual art-making and the Duchampian readymade. Yet certain things are more subtly disturbing. We normally establish, for example, a comfortable physical distance between ourselves and others, especially when conversing. This distance can vary from culture to culture, but the rightness (or wrongness) of it is something that we intuitively feel. It gets expressed in many different formal ways, notably in furniture design and placement. West consciously subverts this. With Eo Ipso (1987), his first outdoor sculpture, the artist disassembled his mother’s old washing machine, patched it up with metal sheets, painted it a queasy light hospital green, and stretched the whole thing out so that it became two seats placed very far apart from each other yet still attached, with another green metal pedestal “chair” placed separately off to the side. The work seems to be a setup for some kind of social interaction, but everything is too far apart and too oddly turned for easy face-to-face conversation, and the seats themselves are anything but comfortable. A similar unease is to be found in

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Psyche (1987), where two chairs are positioned at angles, facing three obliquely placed mirrors.4 Tate Modern’s Mark Godfrey, the show’s other co-curator, put it this way: “Think about sitting down on the chairs of Psyche with a partner and looking at your three reflections in its mirrors while being aware of him or her looking at you at the same time. Here, narcissism meets paranoia.”5 The sculptural base is another site that West exploited to evoke dislocation. To our modern eyes the classic pedestal is neutral—a boxlike or cylindrical form intended either to raise the sculpture to viewing level or to elevate it above the plane of ordinary life, physically protecting the work while underscoring its special qualities. Challenging the role of the base has long been a part of the modern approach to sculpture. It came under assault from Rodin in The Burghers of Calais (1884–95), a figure group commemorating the humility, fellow feeling, and sacrifice of six of Calais’s leading citizens during the siege of the city during the Hundred Years’ War. To underscore this, Rodin intended to place the work on the ground among passersby, not to separate it from its viewers. Later, Brancusi made his complex sculptural bases part of the work itself; and in the postwar years, the base virtually disappeared from abstract sculpture. West, on the other hand, saw the base as a rich source of semiotic dissonance. He could, for example, perch painted papier-mâché sculptures on top of a set of four partially filled bookshelves as in 2 to 2 (do too 2 [too do 2 {to do two}]), 1994, or cover a white plinth with poetically explanatory text as he did in Kollega (1988), or simply use whatever was around: television sets, cabinets, a refrigerator, old suitcases, cans, junky or elegant tables, a bed, straightened metal clothes hangers, or even another artist’s work. These bases were integral to the overall sculpture, as were Brancusi’s, but unlike his they very clearly did not speak the same language as the sculpture itself. They felt detachable but vital—a kind of homemade prosthesis. Using a fellow artist’s work as a base or, conversely, placing other artists’ sculptures on his own (as he did with pieces by Herbert Brandl, Otto Zitko, and Heimo Zobernig in an untitled 1988 work) speaks to one of West’s principal concerns—collaboration. His shared artistic efforts were fruitful but often fraught. He continually sought others out for company, inspiration, intellectual justification, and help, but he was uneasy with commitment. Sometimes the artistic partnerships ended abruptly and seemingly inexplicably, with all the expected hurt feelings; but more often than not, fellow artists were loose about it—Franz was just being Franz. As sculptor Rudolf Polanszky commented, “One thing I’d say is this: we were both successful, but in different ways. He wanted to be famous and he got famous. I didn’t want to be famous, and I didn’t get famous. So we both achieved what we wanted!”6

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Earlier on in his career, West was uncertain about his painting skills, and he would frequently ask other artists to paint his sculptures. That practice, which continued after West became more confident, produced some very fine pieces, especially the papier-mâché and bent-wire works, such as Die Ernte des Tantalos (1988), a piece he made with Brandl. Occasionally (and not always with his collaborators’ knowledge), West would use works that he had acquired from other artists. The four-person Viennese artist collective gelitin said, “When Franz saw a new word, an aesthetic, a move in your work that he was interested in, he incorporated it into his own art. He was very generous. One takes and one gives, as with any respectful exchange—just sometimes without asking!”7 At other times, West would populate installations with his friends’ art. Viennoiserie (1998), for example, is a domestic-looking grouping of some of his furniture pieces and sculptures placed in front of a wall hung with framed drawings by Seamus Farrell, Richard Jackson, Roland Kollnitz, Joseph Kosuth, Paul McCarthy, Muehl, and Raymond Pettibon.8 An especially compelling work of this sort is Extroversion, made for the 2011 Venice Biennale. The installation replicated the kitchen in his Vienna home, but turned it inside out and decked the walls, cabinets, and shelves with forty-three works by West, his assistants, and various friends. West won the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement that year. As the artist became more successful and his international reach expanded, his natural tendency toward indolence was tested. Being on the museum, biennale, and ultra blue-chip gallery circuit required an uptick in production. New studios were acquired, more assistants hired, and various ongoing projects— the papier-mâché Legitimate Sculptures (as he called them), the furniture, the Outdoor Sculptures—had to be regularly produced in order to keep the whole enterprise afloat. West’s loose, improvisational, catch-as-catch-can, “anybody here have any ideas?” approach had its limits. West’s later production was anchored by the large-scale Outdoor Sculptures. Made of lacquered, casually patched-together aluminum or epoxy resin, they are lumpy-looking twisted linear forms (in general structure not unlike bent paper clips); giant wonky balls; oversize, vaguely donut-shaped hassocks or footstools meant for sitting. Also designed for sitting or leaning against are somewhat rectangular or potato-shaped boulder forms. Throw in sculptures that look like vertical cigars, abstracted Venus of Willendorf figures, or (not to put too fine a point on it) large, brightly colored turds, and you have a body of work eminently suitable for long-term public display. The sculptures are permanent, goofily attractive, and immediately recognizable as West’s. Looking at, say, Rrose/Drama (2001) (its title surely alluding to Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy), with

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its complex, intestinal, horizontal, hard-to-grasp Möbius-like form, its overly sweet pink color, and its patched-up, do-it-yourself surface, one can scarcely deny either its originality or its homey familiarity. West was not a stickler for site specificity. The dealer David Zwirner once asked the artist why he had placed his large boulder-like sculpture Warum ist etwas und nicht nichts? (Why Is There Something and Not Nothing?), 1997, “literally in the middle of nowhere.” (The work sits at rural crossroads near Stronsdorf, a town of about 1,700 people in far northeast Austria.) “Franz, with all due respect,” Zwirner added, “since when are you interested in the great outdoors?” West rolled his eyes, picked his nose, and flicked snot on the floor—a gesture that Zwirner took as the artist’s way of clarifying his creative process.9 This casual attitude might be refreshing and unpretentious, but people who buy or commission works tend to take a keen interest in their placement. West, concerned as he was about his reputation and fame, could scarcely repudiate his public and private patrons’ well-meaning interest. A particularly enjoyable aspect of the show’s installation in Paris was the siting of seven sculptures in the adjoining Marais district (plus one in the museum lobby itself). They were placed in parks, gardens, and courtyards—all quite elegant and typically Parisian—where they looked colorful, lively, and funny: incongruent but appropriate. The Outdoor Sculptures are often tempered, even domesticated, by their surroundings. Any neutral white-cube exhibition space brings out the inherent unease in a wide range of West’s work, but place one of his big sculptures out in the world and it accommodates itself rather nicely. Possibly this is a subtle form of collaboration, in deep accord with the artist’s overall project. West’s disruptive sensibility, slapdash formal approach, and humor put him in sync with the Post-Minimalist sculptors, painters, and performance artists who emerged in the 1970s and ’80s in Europe and the United States. Artists like Richard Tuttle, Mary Heilmann, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Keith Sonnier, and Bruce Nauman in the US, along with Europeans like Sarah Lucas, Urs Fischer, Bruno Gironcoli, Ugo Rondinone, and Albert Oehlen, were able to leave stylistic purity and consistency behind, to take what they wanted from whatever medium caught their fancy, and to adapt their references and techniques to the changing culture around them. They have been the flâneurs of this era’s ironic, pop-inflected, crudinfused, historically unmoored world. Rather than patiently shaping and refining a vision, they go at the culture with abandon and verve, skimming its variegated surface, assured by a real interest in matters philosophical and linguistic of their works’ ultimate theoretical justification. West’s influence can be felt on many

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younger artists, especially from Europe—Anselm Reyle, gelitin, Tatiana Trouvé, Camille Henrot, Laure Prouvost, Tobias Pils, Helen Marten, and others. West was particularly refreshing in his utter lack of sentimentality, selfrighteousness, and pomposity. He embodied a key artistic ethos of our time, one which allows surprisingly original abstract forms to interact with both the performative and the referential. He saw art as, at heart, a social act, but not one that merely reinforced a set of norms and ideals agreed upon by right-thinking people. He was too much a troublemaker for that. Friendship was important, a necessary component of art-making. So was excess—pushing things just far enough, and then a bit further. The slickness of the factory-crafted art object, announcing the work’s price and the owner’s power and good taste, seemed anathema to him. His art was never comfortable or comforting. No matter how central he was to the artistic dialogue of this time, or how well-liked and respected by the art community, West was always an uneasy fit, an outsider in spite of himself. Art in America, April 2019

Notes and References 1 From 1977 to ’82, West was frequently advised by Bruno Gironcoli (1936–2010), an influential sculptor, draftsman, and professor at the Akademie der bildenden Künste. West’s study with Gironcoli was informal, and he never received a degree. 2 Christine Macel, Franz West, exhib. cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, and London, Tate Publishing, 2018, p. 35. 3 Ibid., p. 31. 4 “Psyche,” in addition to its philosophical, psychological, and mythological associations, also refers to a kind of mirrored dressing table. 5 Mark Godfrey, ibid., p. 127. 6 Rudolf Polanszky, ibid., p. 94. 7 gelitin, ibid., p. 174. 8 “Viennoiserie” is another example of West’s love of wordplay. It refers to the things of Vienna, but it is also the French term for breakfast or snack pastries—croissants, brioche, and the like, often presented as an assortment, as are the works in this installation. See Marika Bayer-Wermuth, ibid., p.13. 9 Exchange recounted by David Zwirner, Franz West, p. 142.

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“The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction”

“The Unusual Suspects” examines some key elements of today’s abstract painting. While scarcely an atlas of an arena this large, it does provide a way to look at the current state of affairs. The paintings in this show, varied as they might be, do not fit neatly into sets of fixed categories, but rather they organize themselves around related points and orientations on the larger map of abstraction – in this case an interest in color, logical organization, careful facture, and indirect but compelling social and philosophical reference. Multiplicity and shifting perspectives characterize abstract painting today. There are no approaches that are privileged over others, no aims more compelling or historically demanded, no gaps that must be filled before we can proceed. This is not old-fashioned pluralism, rather it is the recognition that in the defined and convention-encompassed precincts of painting, the continually expanding body of work coming into the world will, by its nature, seek and find places to settle. In doing so, the accepted distance between points on the spectrum of style will be altered and new affinities and correspondences revealed. By using a synchronic lens to look at today’s abstract painting (that is a view of a larger field at a specific point in time) artists will necessarily be reflected in different lights, seen from different angles. In the process, singularities will emerge. Abstract painting exists now in an interconnected web and that web is being continually warped. How an artist will be seen depends on how the web is oriented and where the observer is. The artists in this show, from different generations and backgrounds, represent points of intersection in the field, examples of concentrated interest. In an art system where boundaries are regularly crossed it is unproductive to set up a series of boxes in which to fit artists, but quite useful to posit various clusters of attraction (rather like iron filings clustering around a magnetic pole). This creates an interconnected map rather than a logical flow chart, a shifting network rather than an Alfred Barrlike diagram of originality, lineage and influence.

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An ordering of this sort is not only non-hierarchical and non-linear, but in a metaphorical way, non-planar. It is like a loose grid inscribed on a sheet of paper, rendered three-dimensional as the paper is turned and twisted. Surprising confluences appear as seemingly disparate things become closer to one another. It is a system of affinities, a shape-shifting, three-dimensional chess game, rather than one of leaders and followers, of lineage and its associated expectations of disruption and rejection. Siting a painting in the bounded but expanding field of abstraction is less a precise calculation than (as in physics) a reckoning of the probability that something is somewhere and, in this case, of a certain scale. Abstraction today is self-conscious and purposeful, deliberate and deliberative. It is, importantly, not a movement or a group of movements, not a unified approach. There is the sense of the interchangeability of components, of the availability of a shared stylistic toolbox. While inevitably imbued with the underlying irony implicit in postmodernism, this art is neither negative nor is it a cynical pastiche. Rather the irony (conscious or unconscious) allows for distancing, breathing room, and in the process resurrects the older and profoundly optimistic idea of the freedom of art. Everything is on the table and anybody can play. You do not have to be certain kind of person, an artist with a specified history, a given ideology or a prescribed program. Abstraction both today and in the recent past is fluid; reflecting the larger set of complex, shifting, abstract relations that underlie cognition and perception. It is multi-layered and combinational, not unlike vision itself – the ocular merging that results in an image composed of separate inputs (including memory) being seamlessly joined. The strictures and structures of history too are creatively loosened. They can be played with or referenced at will. Interchangeability, not inevitability is the key. The goal is the formation of the lucid, transparent object, not the obdurate, irreducible one. In the absence of hierarchical orderings or priorities, how are things held together? Abstraction in its fully formed state has been with us for somewhat over a hundred years. Western art had not seen anything quite like it, although the elements of abstraction were to be found throughout the productions of western art – particularly in painting, the decorative arts, and architecture. As abstraction rapidly expanded, it coalesced into an ongoing series of named movements. These were usually localized, although cubism, and later on Abstract Expressionism, had an especially wide reach. The artists in these movements were generally acquainted, lived in relative proximity to each other, and had a tight circle of critics and supporters. There were often manifestos, artists’ statements, and social activities (panels, performances, lectures) associated with movements. Generally speaking, very few artists were satisfied with the names of

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movements, and when pressed would often deny that they were connected to that movement, although despite their protests, history kept them there. This process of movement formation stopped (especially for painting) in the late 1980s or at the latest, the early 1990s. There might have been a few attempts (often market initiated) but they lacked conviction. Yet all the while, painting continued unabated. A result of the loss of differentiation and urgency that movements provided was on one hand liberating for the artists: they were not bound by the rationale of a movement or the strictures applied by critics associated with that movement. But alongside that liberation was the tendency to take the easy way out. Given the absence of certainty (misguided or not) that movements provided, a kind of generic, standard abstraction came into being, producing a slew of perfectly adequate and well executed gestural paintings, hard edged geometric, soft edged geometric, organic, semi-realistic, and mixed media works – or combinations of any of the above. In a way, abstraction had become another genre, like landscape, still life, or figure painting. The large number of merely adequate paintings has led us to think of abstraction as a settled question; but there are many contemporary abstract paintings that must be looked at in a different and challenging way. They might at first not appear to be something especially new, but then the field of painting in general, and abstraction in particular, is an ostensibly circumscribed one – bounded by historical and material concerns. The very large majority of paintings are rectilinear, flat, painted on a familiar painting surface (canvas, paper, wood, metal, a wall), and executed with regular paints (oil and acrylic for the most part) or possibly embellished with collage or assemblage elements. And while numbers of abstract paintings depart from strict rectilinearity and physical flatness, that departure is conditioned and given dialectical substance by the existence of the rectilinear and the flat. They are seen as shaped or dimensional because the bulk of paintings are not. Familiarity of material and technique, combined with the inevitability of historical reference, and painting’s innate metaphorical quality (it’s a painting but it’s something else too) leads to a superficial similarity – the misunderstanding that since paintings, and particularly abstract paintings, share basic commonalities, they are saying essentially the same things and should be read in the same way. But abstract painting has changed, although the change has rarely been noted. This change affects both paintings from both the present and the recent past. It is as much a matter of how they are viewed as how they are planned and executed by the artist. Earlier abstraction moved into open territory. The Cubists, Futurists, Constructivists, Dadaists, or Expressionists of the first decades of the twentieth

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century, freed themselves from the constraints of representation and in doing so saw the newly opened vistas of the non-representational. In a similar way the American Abstract Expressionists, operating after the historical dividing line of the Great Depression and the horrors of WWII envisioned themselves setting out on grand projects in what until then had been the unloved stepchild of Europe, New York City. In all of these cases the artists were confronting their version of terra nullius, or land belonging to no one. They created critical and philosophical structures in which to operate, and then made work that satisfied and illuminated those requirements. The situation is different now. Work in abstraction has been going on for thirty to forty years without accepted structures to both view and make it. It has simply been made and made by artists with a real aversion to the prescriptive. It is not a question of creating art to fit a general program, but rather how to view the art that has already been made in the absence of a program, in a land implicitly recognized by artists as fully occupied. Art movements always positioned themselves against earlier movements, and have as their basis a rejection of previous critical or stylistic norms. Mid-century abstraction approached previous art, such as cubism, as something to be sweated out, rebelled against. Present abstraction takes previous art as a more or less equally weighted given. With the increasing number of artists and art schools, plus the globalization of the artworld, production has sharply increased. Along with the jettisoning of art movements, the change in the media and publishing world and in the visual precincts of academia, there has been a lessening of the power, influence and reach of traditional art critics. More art and artists, fewer critics, and a diminished sense of cohesive community should in fact call for a renewed and thoughtful ordering of the diffused state of painting. It is an ordering however of what has and is in the process of being done – a synchronic view – not merely a description of or advocacy for the work of a like-minded group. If abstract painting seems to be going one way now – and we can certainly note a shift toward a deliberate, clearer, more bounded look – that does not, per force, imply historical inevitability, ideological obligation, or aesthetic necessity. If there is no such thing as mainstream abstraction anymore, if the conceptual space between painters is a constantly shifting set of measurements, if criticism and theory in abstract art cannot be prescriptive, then how can we identify in the present moment, what is of real interest? The artists in this exhibition are often seen as “artists’ artists,” exemplars of thought-provoking conjunctions and approaches, aesthetic first responders. The purpose of this show is to illuminate a sector of the moving web of art, to present a group of painters who reflect the

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aesthetic light around them in unexpected and exciting ways. The paintings of women and men of different backgrounds and, importantly, of different ages, each with different goals and different means of attaining them, are being placed together so that every work of art will both stand on its own and be given meaning by the works around it. The paintings on display are fully formed and complex, as well as carefully and skillfully made. They represent what might be thought of as an Industrious Revolution. They are a snapshot of a significant portion of abstract art today, a still image of a moving map. In the lively and uncertain artworld that we inhabit, and especially in the bounded, bracketed, but expanding zone of abstraction, the energy that we see here creates its own form. DC Moore Gallery, June 2019

Notes and References Artists: Paolo Arao, Samantha Bittman, Amie Cunat, Angela Heisch, Federico Herrero, Shirley Jaffe, Valerie Jaudon, Shirley Kaneda, Harriet Korman, Jonathan Lasker, Carrie Moyer, Thomas Nozkowski, Odili Donald Odita, Brian O’Doherty, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Katia Santibañez, David Storey, Barbara Takenaga, Kevin Umaña, Stanley Whitney, Jack Youngerman

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Index The letter f after an entry indicates a page that includes a figure. Aboriginal art 107–16 Aboriginal people 110–11 Abstract Expressionism 35–6, 69, 89–96, 128, 155, 178 “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976” exhibition 119, 120–1, 122, 129–30, 131–3, 135–6, 137 Alloway, Lawrence 81 Americans 64–5, 210 brushstroke paintings 148–9 contention 119–20 Lichtenstein, Roy 147–8 Mitchell, Joan 60, 61, 63, 69–70 non-traditional materials 78 abstraction 2, 35–6, 37–9, 40–2, 59 African-Americans 166 Alloway, Lawrence 81–2 Atmospheric 157 decentralization 73 decorative 41–3 Field 157 fluidity of 208 Fully Abstract painting 156–7 Geometric 157 Gestural (freely-brushed) 156–7 history of 208–10 language 162–3 Lichtenstein, Roy 147–8 Mimetic-Abstract Hybrid painting 156 Organized Organic painting quilting 71, 73 “The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction” exhibition 207–11 “Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline” exhibition 41 academic art 171–2

accessibility 174 acrylics 113 act of painting 126 “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976” exhibition 119, 120–1, 122, 129–30, 131–3, 135–6, 137 action painting 125–6 Actionists, the 199–200 Adorno, Theodor 131 Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, The” 131 African-Americans 122, 166 see also Thomas, Alma Aizen-Myoo (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Albright-Knox Art Gallery 63 Alhalkere (My Country) (Kngwarreye, Emily Kame) 112 Alloway, Lawrence 4, 69, 81–7, 152 “Arts and the Mass Media, The” 81 Greenberg, Clement 128 “Robot & the Arts, The” 87 America 45–9 Abstract Expressionism 64, 210 African-Americans 166 Alloway, Lawrence 83, 84–5 communication 84–5 Gee’s Bend 71–2, 74, 75–6 Great Depression 100–1 Los Angeles 143–6 New York 89–91 Photorealism 174–5 popular culture 84–5 Rutgers group 51–7 “American Action Painters, The” (Rosenberg, Harold) 125–8 American Folk Art Museum 97, 98 American Icon (De Andrea, John) 21, 22

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214 “American Masters” (television program) 195 American Moon (Whitman, Robert) 52 American Painting: The Twentieth Century (Rose, Barbara) 47 American Polynesia (De Andrea, John) 20 “ ‘American-Type’ Painting” (Greenberg, Clement) 123, 127 Andre, Carl 32 Anooralya (Wild Yam Dreaming) (Kngwarreye, Kame) 109 anti-form 191 “Anti Form” (Morris, Robert) 140 anti-Semitism 163 “Anti-Sensibility Painting” (Karp, Ivan) 174 architectural ornamentation 40 Apfelbaum, Polly 42 Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians 7f Apollo 12 “Splash Down” (Thomas, Alma) 168 Arao, Paolo, 211 Arboretum Presents White Dogwood (Thomas, Alma) 168–9 Archigram 86 “Art as Technique” (Shklovsky, Viktor) 176 art critics 4, 134, 136, 210 see also Alloway, Lawrence and Greenberg, Clement and Rosenberg, Harold O’Doherty, Brian 195–8 unkindness 92–3, 125–8 women 121 art movements 151–2, 153–4, 155–8, 178, 208–10 “Art of the Real, The” exhibition 36 artists 2, 41, 128, 208–9 categorising 207–8 chimpanzees 120 painting 152, 154 painting categories 152 style 166 unkindness among 92–3, 125 Artists’ Club 61, 89-90, 92 Artist’s Reality, The (Rothko, Mark) 95 “Arts and the Mass Media, The” (Alloway, Lawrence) 81 artworlds 4–5 Ashbery, John “Pyrography” 95

Index Atmospheric Abstraction painting 157 Attic (de Kooning, Willem) 62 Australia see also Aboriginal art Aboriginal people 110–11 Papunya 107–8 Austria 199 Autumno (Twombly, Cy) 186 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (Greenberg, Clement) 131 Ba-O-Ba I (Sonnier, Keith) 192 “Bacchus” series (Twombly, Cy) 186 Bacon, Francis 184 Baeder, John 175 Balken, Debra Bricker 125 Banham, Reyner 85 Bardon, Geoffrey 107 bark paintings 112, 115 Bars (Petway, Lutisha) 76 Bars (Williams, Irene) 74 Baselitz, Georg 68 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 182 Baziotes, William 91–2 Bearden, Romare 122 beauty 38–9 Beauty Parlor IV (Kaprow, Allan) 52 Bechtle, Robert 42, 155, 175–6 Six Houses on Mound Street 7f Beckett, Samuel 65 Bell, Charles 175 Benglis, Lynda 191 Berlin, Isaiah 178 Bittman, Samantha 211 Black Holes Silver (Takenaga, Barbara) 16f Blackwell, Tom 175 Blue Tree (Mitchell, Joan) 59 Bluhm, Norman 64, 68 Blum, Irving 144, 145 Bochner, Mel 32, 161–4 Everybody Is Full of Shit 164 Jew 163 Joys of Yiddish, The 163 Language is Not Transparent 8f, 163 Bode, Sigmund (Brian O’Doherty) 197 Body Painting (Kemarre, Abie Loy) 112 body paintings 112–13 Bonnefoi, Christian 42 Bontecou, Lee 120, 131–2 boundaries 1, 4–5, 84

Index lack of 136 painting 152 Bradford, Mark 166 Brandl, Herbert 203 Brecht, George 51, 56 Event Card(Exit) 56 “Event Cards” 56 “Events” 56 Three Aqueous Events 56 Breeze Rustling through Fall Flowers (Thomas, Alma) 167 Breslin, James Mark Rothko: A Biography 93 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The (Duchamp, Marcel) 162 Brillo Boxes (Warhol, Andy) 24–5 Britain Alloway, Lawrence 83–4 American influence 83–5 post-war rebuilding 86 Broadway Boogie-Woogie (Mondrian, Piet) 40 Brus, Günter 199–200 Brushstroke Abstraction I (Lichtenstein, Roy) 148–9 Brushstroke Abstraction II (Lichtenstein, Roy) 148 brushstroke paintings 148–9 Brushstroke with Spatter (Lichtenstein, Roy) 148 Brushstroke with Still Life VII (Lichtenstein, Roy) 12f, 148 “Bunk” (Paolozzi, Eduardo) 86 Burghers of Calais, The (Rodin, Auguste) 202 Bush Plum Dreaming (Robinson, Dorothy Napangardi) 114 Cage, John 52 Calvi (Mitchell, Joan) 65 “Camino Real” series (Twombly, Cy) 183, 186 Capilla de Milpillas 103 Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art 40 Castelli, Leo 61 Castelli Warehouse 141 categorizing 152, 153–4, 155–8, 207–8 cemeteries 19, 26

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Cézanne, Paul 60 chance 52, 56 Chelsea Girls (film) (Warhol, Andy) 197 Cherry Blossom Symphony (Thomas, Alma) 168–9 chimpanzees 120 Chinese Mountain, The (Jaffe, Shirley) 9f “Chord” group (Mitchell, Joan) 68 Chord VII (Mitchell, Joan) 68 Cincinnati Fireplace (Kozloff, Joyce) 9f Clark, Ed 166 classification 1 clothing, used 75, 76 Club, the 89–90, 92 Club Without Walls (Edgar, Natalie) 89–90 collage 177 Collection (Steinberg, Saul) 132 colonialism 110–11 color 32–3, 46–9 acrylics 113 Mitchell, Joan 66, 69 quilting 75, 76, 77 West, Franz 200 Colorfield painting 157, 167 Commodus (Roman Emperor) 184 communication 84–5, 101–2 see also language computer graphics 28 “Conceptual Abstraction” exhibition 151 connections 2–3, 143–4, 145–6, 178–9, 207–8 Constructivism 156, 209–10 Continuous Project Altered Daily (Morris, Robert) 139, 140, 141 corduroy 77 “Coronation of Sesostris” (Twombly, Cy) 182, 186 Cottingham, Robert 175 craft 2 Cristero Rebellion 100, 104 criticism 4, 119, 134, 136, 159 see also Alloway, Lawrence and Greenberg, Clement and Rosenberg, Harold unkind 93, 125–8 women 121 Cross Section of a Bridge (Mitchell, Joan) 59, 61 Cubism 124–5, 156, 178, 209–10

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culture 37, 45, 49 “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, The” (Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max) 131 Cunat, Amie 211 Cycladic Extrusion I (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, The (Motherwell, Robert) 92 Dadaism 156, 209–10 Dancers, The (Segal, George) 15f Darger, Henry 97 Davis, Gene 48, 167 De Andrea, John 20–1 American Icon 21, 22 American Polynesia 20 de Kooning, Elaine 68, 92 de Kooning, Willem 60-2, 89-90 Attic 62 Excavation 62 Gotham News 128, 129 Greenberg, Clement 124-5, 127, 157 Marilyn Monroe 122 Woman I 128 “Woman” paintings 122, 124 death 19–26, 30, 48, 67, 75 decentralization 73 decoration 38, 39–43, 47 “Defining Art” (Rosenberg, Harold) 130 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso, Pablo) 38 denim 75, 76 “Dialogue” (television program) 195 Dinner Table, The (Segal, George) 53 Dis-Play III (Sonnier, Keith) 193 distance 201–2 “Divesting the Self: A Striptease” (O’Doherty, Brian) 197 Djarrakpi Landscape (Maymuru, Galuma) 115 Djukulul, Dorothy Magpie Geese (Mutyka) and Crocodile 115 Warrnyu 115 ‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief ’ (McEvilley, Thomas) 72 Dolla, Noël 42 dotting technique 107, 108, 112, 113

Dreaming, the 111 “Dreaming Their Way” exhibition 107, 108, 109, 111, 112 “Dreamings, the Art of Aboriginal Australia” exhibition 116 n. 2 Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter Rebels in Paradise 143–6 Duchamp, Marcel 26, 145, 195 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The 162 Dwan, Virginia 145 E.G. (Whitman, Robert) 52 Edgar, Natalie Club Without Walls 89–90 “Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning” (O’Doherty, Brian) 196–7 Egypt 186 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Kaprow, Allan) 52 Eliot, T.S (literary criticism) 82, 119 Ellis, Stephen 42, 157 Empire (film) 176 Empire of Flora (Twombly, Cy) 183 Eo Ipso (West, Franz) 201 Ernte des Tantalos, Die (West, Franz) 203 eroticism 21 Essex (Truitt, Anne) 121 Estes, Richard 42, 175 ethnocentrism 72 “European Couples, and Others” exhibition 29, 32 Evenings at Seventy-Third Street (Mitchell, Joan) 68 Event Card(Exit) (Brecht, George) 56 “Event Cards” (Brecht, George) 56 “Events” (Brecht, George) 56 “Everybody Is Full of Shit” (Bochner, Mel) 164 Excavation (de Kooning, Willem) 62 Expressionism 209–10 Extroversion (West, Franz) 203 Exuberance (Hofmann, Hans) 129 Faded Air I (Mitchell, Joan) 69 Fantasia (Hofmann, Hans) 129 Fauvism 178 Ferber, Herbert 92, 94 Ferren, John 95

Index Ferus Gallery 144–5 Field Abstraction painting 157 “Fifty Days at Iliam” (Twombly, Cy) 182, 185 Fine, Perle 95 Fischer, Urs 204 Flack, Audrey 175 flat work 78 Flavin, Dan 5–6, 29–34, 59 color 32–3, 49 greens crossing green (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) 31 Minimalism 34 monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) 30, 49 ‘ “monument’ for V. Tatlin” series 32 Primary Picture 49 untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery) 32, 49 untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 31 untitled (to Henri Matisse) 33 untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) 33 untitled (to the citizens of the Swiss cantons) 33 flight 167–8 fluorescent lights 30–1 Fluxus 55 food art 55 Forbidden Planet (film) 85, 87 “form follows function” 38–9 framing 186–7 France 64–5 Francis, Sam 60, 64 Frankenthaler, Helen 121 Mountains and Sea 121 Freudian psychology 37 Friedlander, Lee 176 From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism 1969 to Today (Sultan, Terrie) 171 Fry, Tony and Willis, Anne-Marie 108 Fully Abstract painting 156–7 Funeral Heart (Oldenburg, Claes) 131 Futurism 209–10 “Gallery as Gesture, The” (O’Doherty, Brian) 196 Ganesh (Sonnier, Keith) 192

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Garden in Sochi (Gorky, Arshile) 129 gay scene, Los Angeles 144 Gee’s Bend 71–2, 74, 75–6 Gehry, Frank 40, 146 General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument (Saint-Gaudens, Augustus) 16f, 23–4 Genesis—The Break (Newman, Barnett) 129 Gentry, Herbert 166 Geometric Abstraction painting 157 George, Rachel Carey 75 George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (Mitchell, Joan) 63–4 German Expressionism 156 German neo-Expressionism 155 Gérôme, Jean-Léon Pygmalion and Galatea 20 Gestural (freely-brushed) Abstraction 156–7 gestural painting 68, 121, 122 Mitchell, Joan 60, 61, 62 Giant (film) 144 Gironcoli, Bruno 204, 205 n. 1 Goanna Dreaming (Nungurrayi, Gabriella Possum) 114 Gober, Robert 22 Untitled Leg 22 Goings, Ralph 42, 175 Goldberg, Michael 63, 68 Goossen, E.C. 36 Gorky, Arshile 60–2, 120 Garden in Sochi 129 Liver is the Cock’s Comb, The 129 Gotham News (de Kooning, Willem) 128, 129 Gothic (Pollock, Jackson) 123 Gottlieb, Adolph 93 Goya, Francisco Naked Maja 55 Goya’s Box (Watts, Robert) 55–6 Grande Jatte, La (Seurat, Georges) 155 “Grande Vallée, La” cycle (Mitchell, Joan) 67–8 Grande Vallée XIII, La (Mitchell, Joan) 67 Graves, Michael 40 Great Britain 83–4 Great Depression 100–1

218

Index

“Great Performances” (television program) 195 Greece 185 Greene, Graham Power and the Glory, The 100 Greenberg, Clement 4, 45, 51, 82, 119, 120–1, 128, 133–7, 171, 187–8 Alloway, Lawrence 82 “ ‘American-Type’ Painting” 123, 127 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” 131 Cubism 214–5 favored style 123 Frankenthaler, Helen 121 Hartigan, Grace 122 Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste 134 “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name” 127–8 de Kooning, Willem 124–5, 127, 157 Attic 62 Excavation 62 Gotham News 128, 129 Greenberg, Clement 124–5, 127, 157 Marilyn Monroe 122 Woman I 128 “Woman” paintings 122, 124 Krasner, Lee 122 mass culture 130, 131 Minimalism 130, 132 “Modernist Painting” 132, 134–5 painting 171 Pollock, Jackson 123–4, 126, 157 Pop Art 131 “Recentness of Sculpture” 137 Rosenberg, Harold 126–8 sculpture 130 Smith, David 130 Stella, Frank 132 Still, Clyfford 129 Truitt, Anne 121–2, 133 unkindness 92–3 greens crossing green (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green) (Flavin, Dan) 31 Guston, Philip 60-1 Hamilton, Richard 85–6 Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? 86

handwriting 183 Hantaï, Simon 166 Happenings 52, 53, 133 Hare, David 92 Hartigan, Grace 122 New England, October 8f, 122 Summer Street 122 Heilmann, Mary 182, 204 Heisch, Angela 211 Held, Al 5, 27–8, 42, 156 Hemlock (Mitchell, Joan) 62 Hendricks, Geoffrey 51, 55 Picturesque America 55 “Herd of Independent Minds, The” Rosenberg, Harold 131 Here III (Newman, Barnett) 130 Herrero, Federico 211 Hesse, Eva 191, 204 Hess, Thomas 125 history 60, 95, 208–10 painting 151–5 synchronous approach 151–2 Hofmann, Hans 60, 66, 90–1, 121, 129 Exuberance 129 Fantasia 129 Provincetown House 129 Sanctum Sanctorum 129 Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (Greenberg, Clement) 134 Honey Ant Dreaming mural 108 Hopper, Dennis 144 Hopper, Edward Early Sunday Morning 196–7 Hoppins, Gloria Housetop pattern quilt 72 Hopps, Walter 144, 145 Horkheimer, Max 131 Housetop pattern quilt (Hoppins, Gloria) 72 “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name” (Greenberg, Clement) 127–8 “Human Concern/Personal Torment” exhibition 25 humor 40, 132 Humphrey, David 156 Hydrangeas Spring Song (Thomas, Alma) 169 Hyper-real sculpture 3–4

Index “Icons of the Desert: Early Paintings from Papunya” exhibition 115 n. 2 Ides of March (Pavia, Philip) 89 Impressionism 20, 155, 175 In (Lichtenstein, Roy) 54 In Memory of May 4, 1970-Kent State: Abraham and Isaac (Segal, George) 21–2 Independent Group, the 85–7 industrialism 45 innovation 153, 155, 158 “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space” (O’Doherty, Brian) 196 Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (O’Doherty, Brian) 196 inspiration 167–8 Internet, the 39, 136, 159 Inverno (Twombly, Cy) 186 “Invitation to Art” (television program) 195 Ireland, Patrick (Brian O’Doherty) 197 Iris (Louis, Morris) 133–4 Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses (Thomas, Alma) 167 “Irregular Polygons” (Stella, Frank) 46 It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 89 Italian neo-Expressionism 155 Jaffe, Shirley 42, 65, 157, 211 Chinese Mountain, The 9f Jew (Bochner, Mel) 163 Janis, Sidney 92, 126 Jaudon, Valerie 42, 157, 211 Jewell, Edward Alden 93 jinete (horse and rider) 103 “Joan Mitchell: The Fifties, Important Paintings” exhibition 68 Johns, Jasper 36, 120, 181, 182 Josephson, Mary (Brian O’Doherty) 197 “Joys of Yiddish, The” (Bochner, Mel) 163 Judd, Donald 32, 40, 49 Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (Hamilton, Richard) 86 Kaldis, Aristodimos 95 Kandinsky, Wassily 35 Kaneda, Shirley 42, 157, 211

219

Kaprow, Allan 51–2, 53, 54, 120, 132–3, 142 (on Anti-Form) Beauty Parlor IV 52 18 Happenings in 6 Parts 52 Happenings 52, 133 Tree 53 Words 133 Yard 51 Karp, Ivan 54 “Anti-Sensibility Painting” 174 Katz, Alex 155 “Keith Sonnier: Dis-Play II” exhibition 191–3 “Keith Sonnier: Until Today” exhibition 191–3 Kelley, Mike 204 Kelly, Ellsworth Window 36 Kemarre, Abie Loy 112 Body Painting 112 Kent State shootings 21–2 Kiefer, Anselm 40, 68 King of Spades (Mitchell, Joan) 62, 68 Kleeblatt, Norman 119, 161 Kleeman, Ron 175 Kline, Franz 60–1, 90 Kngwarreye, Emily Kame 109–10, 112, 114, 115 Alhalkere (My Country) 112 Anooralya (Wild Yam Dreaming) 109 Soakage Bore 112 Kollega (West, Franz) 202 Korman, Harriet 157, 182, 211 Kozloff, Joyce 42 Cincinnati Fireplace 9f Krasner, Lee 77, 91, 121, 122, 125 Kuh, Katherine 94 Kunitz, Stanley 94 La Butte, Los (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Labstücke (West, Franz) 200, 201 Labstücke (Refresher) works (West, Franz) 200–1 Ladybug (Mitchell, Joan) 64 Lake George Window (O’Keeffe, Georgia) 36 language 1, 159–60 abstraction 162–3 Bochner, Mel 161–4 Yiddish 163

220 “Language is Not Transparent” (Bochner, Mel) 8f Lasker, Jonathan 157, 182, 211 Spiritual Etiquette 10f Last Year at Marienbad (film) 184 Lawrence, Jacob 122 layering 78 Lazy Gal (Bars) (Pettway, Arcola) 77 Lazy Gal (Bars) (Pettway, Arlonzia) 74 Lazy Gal (Bars) (Pettway, Loretta) 75 Le Va, Barry 191 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise and Izenour, Steven) 84, 196 Leaves (Petyarre, Gloria Tamerre) 115 Legitimate Sculptures (West, Franz) 203 Leslie, Alfred 62 Lewis, Norman 122–3 Multitudes 10f Phantasy II 123 Street Musicians 11f Twilight Sounds 123 Lewitin, Landes 95 “Lexington” paintings (Twombly, Cy) 183 Lichtenstein, Roy 5–6, 51, 54, 147–50 Brushstroke Abstraction I 148–9 Brushstroke Abstraction II 148 brushstroke paintings 148–9 Brushstroke with Spatter 148 Brushstroke with Still Life VII 12f, 148 In 54 landscapes 149–50 Little Big Painting 148 Look Mickey 54 Perforated Seascape #1 (Blue) 150 Pink Seascape 150 Portrait of Allan Kaprow 11f, 54 Portrait of Ivan Karp 12f, 54 Rowlux 149–50 Seascape (1964) 149 Seascape (1965) 150 Three Landscapes 150 Lin, Maya Vietnam War Memorial 23 Little Big Painting (Lichtenstein, Roy) 148 Liver is the Cock’s Comb, The (Gorky, Arshile) 129 Livingstone, Jane 63, 69, 70

Index Log Cabin – Courthouse Steps – Bricklayer (Pettway, Lorraine) 73 logos 28 Look Mickey (Lichtenstein, Roy) 54 Los Angeles 143–6 County Museum of Art 143 Louis, Morris 36, 48, 120, 140, 167 Iris 133–4 “Unfurleds” 48 “Veils” 48 Low Water (Mitchell, Joan) 59, 66 Lucas, Sarah 204 McClelland, Suzanne 182 Macel, Christine 200 McEvilley, Thomas ‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief ’ 72 McHale, John 86 McLean, Richard 175 Maginn, William (Brian O’Doherty) 197 Magpie Geese (Mutyka) and Crocodile (Djukulul, Dorothy) 115 mail art 55 Malevich, Kazimir 35 Man in Elevator (Segal, George) 53–4 “Man, Machine and Motion” exhibition 86 Man with Folded Arms (Segal, George) 53–4 Mangold, Robert 69 Marca-Relli, Conrad 95 Marden, Brice 41, 157, 182 Marilyn Monroe (de Kooning, Willem) 122 Mark Rothko: A Biography (Breslin, James) 93 markets 136 Marriage of Reason and Squalor, The (Stella, Frank) 132 Martin, Chris 182 mass culture 130–1 see also popular culture Matta, Roberto 91 Matter, Mercedes 95 Max’s Kansas City 33 Maymuru, Galuma 115 Djarrakpi Landscape 115 Yirritja Dhuwa Gopu II 115 Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box (Thek, Paul) 24–5 Mehretu, Julie 166

Index memory 181, 184 Meniel, Bertrand 175 Mexico 100, 104 Capilla de Milpillas 103 migration 100–1 Milky Way Seven Sisters Dreaming (Nungurrayi, Gabriella Possum) 114 Miller, Dorothy 188 Mimetic-Abstract Hybrid painting 156 Mimetic painting 155 Minimalism 34, 40–1, 42, 130, 155 color 49 Greenberg, Clement 130, 132 Rosenberg, Harold 130 Mitchell, Joan 5–6, 59–70, 121 Blue Tree 59 Calvi 65 “Chord” group 68 Chord VII 68 Cross Section of a Bridge 59, 61 Evenings at Seventy-Third Street 68 Faded Air I 69 in France 64–5 George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold 63–4 “Grande Vallée, La” cycle 67–8 Grande Vallée XIII, La 67 Hemlock 62 King of Spades 62, 68 Ladybug 64 Low Water 59, 66 multi-part paintings 66–7 My Landscape II 59 Noon 13f Salut Sally 66 Salut Tom 66 Sunflowers 68, 69 To the Harbormaster 68 untitled work of 1957 121 Vie en Rose, La 66–7 Wet Orange 66 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition 59, 69–70 “Mitchell paints a picture” (Sandler, Irving) 62–3 modernism 3, 37–9 “Modernist Painting” (Greenberg, Clement) 132 Mondrian, Piet 28, 35, 60, 62, 90

221

Broadway Boogie-Woogie 40 Victory Boogie-Woogie 40 Monet, Claude 60, 64 Waterlilies 67 Monogram (Rauschenberg, Robert) 201 montage 177 monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) (Flavin, Dan) 30, 49 “ ‘monument’ for V. Tatlin” series (Flavin, Dan) 32 morality 41 “Moroccan” pictures (Stella, Frank) 46 Morris, Robert 5–6, 139–41 “Anti Form” 140 Continuous Project Altered Daily 139, 140, 141 Untitled (Scatter Piece) 139–40. 141 Motherwell, Robert 91–2, 94, 95 Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, The 92 “New York School, The” 91 Mountains and Sea (Frankenthaler, Helen) 121 Moyer, Carrie 211 multiculturalism 108 Multitudes (Lewis, Norman) 10f My Landscape II (Mitchell, Joan) 59 “Mythic Act, The” (Rosenberg, Harold) 126 Naifeh, Steven and Smith, Gregory White 126, 127 Naked Maja (Goya, Francisco) 55 Nampitjinpa, Alice Tali at Talaalpi (Sand Hills at Talaapi) 113–14 Napaltjarri sisters story 114 “Narcissus in Hades” (O’Doherty, Brian) 197 narration 39 Nauman, Bruce 191, 204 Nelson, Dona 182 neon tubing 191–2 Neon Wrapping Incandescent II (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI (Sonnier, Keith) 15f Nevelson, Louise 121

222

Index

New Brunswick 56–7 New England, October (Hartigan, Grace) 8f, 122 New York 89–91 “New York School, The” (Motherwell, Robert) 91 Newman, Barnett 59, 81, 92, 94, 120 Genesis—The Break 129 Here III 130 Onement IV 129 White and Hot 129 “9 at Leo Castelli” exhibition 141 “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (Twombly, Cy) 182, 183, 184 1957 (Rothko, Mark) 107 1960s 45–9, 51 Noland, Kenneth 47–8, 167 Via Blues 47 Noon (Mitchell, Joan) 1f Nouvel, Jean 40 Nozkowski, Thomas 157, 211 Nungurrayi, Gabriella Possum 114 Goanna Dreaming 114 Milky Way Seven Sisters Dreaming 114 O’Doherty, Brian 4, 195–8, 211 alter egos 197 “Divesting the Self: A Striptease” 197 “Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning” 196–7 “Gallery as Gesture, The” 196 “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space” 196 Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space 196 “Narcissus in Hades” 197 “Politics and Aesthetics of Heart Transplants. The” 196 Portrait of Marcel Duchamp 13f “Windows and Edward Hopper’s Gaze” 196 O’Hara, Frank 68 Oehlen, Albert 204 “Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963” exhibition 51–5 O’Keeffe, Georgia Lake George Window 36 Odita, Odili Donald 157, 166, 168, 211

Oldenburg, Claes 120, 131 Funeral Heart 131 Onement IV (Newman, Barnett) 129 Opalka, Roman 42, 176 Organized Organic painting 157 ornamentation 39 Orphism 178 outside sources 2–3 outside world 177 Outsider Art 97–8, 104 Painters Painting (film) 187 painting 2, 78, 151–8, 164, 209 act of 126 Bochner, Mel 162 categories 152, 153–4, 155–8, 207–8 dimension 154 Greenberg, Clement 171 history 151–5, 208–9 innovation 153, 155, 158 synchronous approach 151–2 three-dimensional 156 Panorama (Twombly, Cy) 17f Paolozzi, Eduardo 85–6 “Bunk” 86 Papunya 107–8 Parade, La (Seurat, Georges) 155 “Parallel of Art and Life” exhibition 86 Passstücke (Adaptive) works (West, Franz) 200 Pattern and Decoration 42 Pavia, Philip 89–90, 95 Ides of March 89 It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 89 Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians (Apfelbaum, Polly) 7f perfection 3–4 Perforated Seascape #1 (Blue) (Lichtenstein, Roy) 150 performance events 52 perspective 28, 102 Petway, Lutisha Bars 76 Pettway, Arcola Lazy Gal (Bars) 77 Pettway, Arlonzia 75 Lazy Gal (Bars) 74 Pettway, China 77 Pettway, Loretta 74

Index Lazy Gal (Bars) 75 Pettway, Lorraine 73 Log Cabin – Courthouse Steps – Bricklayer 73 Petyarre, Gloria Tamerre 115 Leaves 115 Phantasmagoria (Thomas, Alma) 17f Phantasy II (Lewis, Norman) 123 photography 172–3, 176–7 Photorealism 3–4, 27, 155, 171–9 Held, Al 27 Picasso, Pablo 38, 62 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les 38 Picturesque America (Hendricks, Geoffrey) 55 Pink Seascape (Lichtenstein, Roy) 150 political rhetoric 37 “Politics and Aesthetics of Heart Transplants. The” (O’Doherty, Brian) 196 Pollock, Jackson 36, 60, 81, 120, 123–4, 126, 140, 157 Gothic 123 Rosenberg, Harold 125–6 Pop Art 55, 155, 174 Alloway, Lawrence 81, 85 Greenberg, Clement 131 Lichtenstein, Roy 147–8 Rosenberg, Harold 131 “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism” (Rosenberg, Harold) 131 popular culture 84–6 see also mass culture Porter, Fairfield 68 Portrait of Allan Kaprow (Lichtenstein, Roy) 11f, 54 Portrait of Ivan Karp (Lichtenstein, Roy) 12f, 54 Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (O’Doherty, Brian) 13f Post-Impressionism 155 Postminimalism 191 Pousette-Dart, Joanna 211 Power and the Glory, The (Greene, Graham) 100 Primary Picture (Flavin, Dan) 49 “Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” exhibition 72 “Protractor” series (Stella, Frank) 46–7

223

Provincetown House (Hofmann, Hans) 129 proximity 5 Psyche (West, Franz) 202 psychology 37 Purism 178 purity 37–8 Pygmalion and Galatea (Gérôme, Jean-Léon) 20 “Pyrography” (Ashbery, John) 95 Qantas 109 Quarzazat (Twombly, Cy) 182 “Quattro Stagiono” (Twombly, Cy) 183, 185–6 quilting 71–9 “Quilts of Gee’s Bend, The “ exhibition 71–9 Radical 37 railroads 101–2 Ramírez, Martín 97–105 jinete (horse and rider) motif 103–4 Madonnas 103 Untitled (Abstraction with Arches) 14f Untitled (Alamentosa) 99 Untitled (Collage) 103 Untitled (Horse and Rider) 103 Untitled (Landscape) 104 Untitled (Madonna) 103 Untitled (Man at Desk) 102 Untitled (Train and Tunnel) 14f, 102 Ransom, John Crowe (literary criticism) 82 Rauschenberg, Robert 181, 182, 188, 189 n. 8 Monogram 201 readymades 26, 30 reality 35–6 Rebel Without a Cause (film) 144 Rebels in Paradise (Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter) 143–6 “Recentness of Sculpture” (Greenberg, Clement) 137 Reed, David 42, 157 referentiality 59 Reinhardt, Ad 42, 90, 92, 120 repetition 72 resemblance 19–20, 26 Riopelle, Jean-Paul 65 Resnick, Milton 95

224 resurrection 25–6 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 176, 184 Robinson, Dorothy Napangardi 114–15 Bush Plum Dreaming 114 Salt on Mina Mina 114–15 “Robot & the Arts, The” (Alloway, Lawrence) 87 rock paintings 112–13 Rodin, Auguste Burghers of Calais, The 202 Roman Empire 184 Rondinone, Ugo 204 Rose, Barbara American Painting: The Twentieth Century 47 Rosenberg, Harold 4, 119, 120–1, 123, 128, 135–7 “American Action Painters, The” 125–8 “Defining Art” 130 favored style 123 Greenberg, Clement 126–8 “Herd of Independent Minds, The” 131 Kaprow, Allan 132–3 mass culture 130, 131 Minimalism 130 Mitchell, Joan 121 “Mythic Act, The” 126 Pollock, Jackson 125–6 Pop Art 131 “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism” 131 Saul, Peter 131 sculpture 130 Smith. Tony 130 Steinberg, Saul 132 Still, Clyfford 128–9 Rosenblum, Robert 46-7 Rothko, Mark 33, 35, 65, 61, 81, 92, 93–5 Artist’s Reality, The 95 1957 107 Writings on Art 95 Row, David 157 Rowlux 149–50 “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective” exhibition 147–50 Rrose/Drama (West, Franz) 203–4 Rubin, William 47 Russian Constructivism 156 Rutgers group 51–7, 192 Ryman, Robert 35

Index Saint-Gaudens, Augustus General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument 16f, 23–4 Salt, John 175 Salt on Mina Mina (Robinson, Dorothy Napangardi) 114–15 Salut Sally (Mitchell, Joan) 66 Salut Tom (Mitchell, Joan) 66 Samaras, Lucas 51, 53 Sanctum Sanctorum (Hofmann, Hans) 129 sand paintings 112–13 Sandler, Irving “Mitchell paints a picture” 62–3 Santibañez, Katia 211 Sarasvasti (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Saul, Peter 131 scale 40, 67, 160, 183, 200–1 Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish (Thomas, Alma) 169 Schapiro, Meyer 91 Schnabel, Julian 68, 182 School of Athens (Twombly, Cy) 183 School of Fontainebleau (Twombly, Cy) 183 sculpture 130, 139–41 bases 202 Sears, Roebuck and Company 77 Seascape (1964) (Lichtenstein, Roy) 149 Seascape (1965) (Lichtenstein, Roy) 149 Segal, George 21–2, 51, 53 Dancers, The 15f Dinner Table, The 53 In Memory of May 4, 1970-Kent State: Abraham and Isaac 21–2 Man in Elevator 53 Man with Folded Arms 53 Woman on a Chicken Crate 53 Serbia 19, 26 Serra, Richard 141 Seurat, Georges Grande Jatte, La 155 Parade, La 155 Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector (Twombly, Cy) 185 Shklovsky, Viktor “Art as Technique” 176 Shower (Whitman, Robert) 52 Siena, James 157 Sillman, Amy 182 “Situation” show 84

Index Six Houses on Mound Street (Bechtle, Robert) 7f “Sixteen Americans” exhibition 188 Smith, David 130 Smith, Kiki 25 Smith, Tony 95, 130 Smithson, Alison and Peter 85–6 Smithson, Robert 32 Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset (Thomas, Alma) 168 Soakage Bore (Kngwarreye, Emily Kame) 112 Sonnier, Keith 5–6, 191–3, 204 Aizen-Myoo 192 Ba-O-Ba I 192 Cycladic Extrusion I 192 Dis-Play III 193 Ganesh 192 La Butte, Los 192 Neon Wrapping Incandescent II 192 Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI 15f Sarasvasti 192 Suku-Na-Biko 192 Syzygy Transmitter 192 Untitled 193 USA: War of the Worlds 192 Yamoto 192 sources 2–3 space travel 153, 167–8 Spiritual Etiquette (Lasker, Jonathan) 10f Starry Night and the Astronauts (Thomas, Alma) 168 Steinberg, Leo 134-5 Steinberg, Saul 132, 134–5 Collection 132 Stella, Frank 32, 36, 46, 46–7, 120, 132 “Irregular Polygons” 46 Marriage of Reason and Squalor, The 132 “Moroccan pictures” 46 “Protractor” series 46–7 Still, Clyfford 81, 128–9 Storey, David 156, 211 Street Musicians (Lewis, Norman) 11f stripes 47–8, 167 quilting 73, 76–7 “Strong Language” exhibition 161–4

225

“Studs” exhibition 144 Stylized Mimetic painting 155–6 Sublime, the 38 subject matter 59, 93, 111–12, 175 outside world, the 177 Subjects of the Artist (school) 92 Suku-Na-Biko (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Sullivan, Louis 40 Summer Street (Hartigan, Grace) 122 Sunflowers (Mitchell, Joan) 68, 69 Surrealism 90–1, 155, 178, 201 symbolism 26 symmetry 73 synchronicity 151–2 Synchronism 178 “Systemic Painting” exhibition 81 Syzygy Transmitte (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Taaffe, Philip 40, 42, 147, 157 Takenaga, Barbara 211 Black Holes Silver 16f Tali at Talaalpi (Sand Hills at Talaapi) (Nampitjinpa, Alice) 113–14 Tate, Allen (literary criticism) 82 Technological Reliquaries (Thek, Paul) 24 technology 86–7, 167–8 temps modernes, Les (journal) 125 “The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction”, exhibition 207–11 Thek, Paul 24, 26 Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box 24–5 Technological Reliquaries 24 Tomb-Death of a Hippie, The 25 Warrior’s Leg 24 Thiebaud, Wayne, 101 “This is Tomorrow” exhibition 86 Thomas, Alma 5–6, 165–70 Apollo 12 “Splash Down” 168 Arboretum Presents White Dogwood 168–9 Breeze Rustling through Fall Flowers 167 Cherry Blossom Symphony 168–9 Hydrangeas Spring Song 169 Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses 167 Phantasmagoria 17f Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish 169

226 Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset 168 space flight inspiration 167–8 Starry Night and the Astronauts 168 White Roses Sing and Sing 169 Wind, Sunshine, and Flowers 167 Thomas, Rover 107 Three Aqueous Events (Brecht, George) 56 three-dimensional painting 156 Three Landscapes (Lichtenstein, Roy) 150 Tjilkamata 113–14 To the Harbormaster (Mitchell, Joan) 68 Today (television program) 120 Tomb-Death of a Hippie, The (Thek, Paul) 25 Tomlin, Bradley Walker 92 topography 111 transformation 26 transportation 101–2, 103 travel 101–2 flight 167–8 space 153, 167–8 Trunkenes Gebot (West, Franz) 200–1 Tree (Kaprow, Allan) 53 Truitt, Anne 121–2, 133 Essex 121 tunnels 102 Turnbull, William 85 Tuttle, Richard 182, 191, 204 Twilight Sounds (Lewis, Norman) 123 2 to 2 (do too 2[too do 2 {to do two}]) (West, Franz) 202 Twombly, Cy 5–6, 181–8 African art 187 ancient Egypt 186 ancient Greece 185 ancient Rome 184 Autumno 186 “Bacchus” series 186 Blackboard paintings 185 “Camino Real” series 183, 186 “Coronation of Sesostris” 182, 186 Empire of Flora 183 “Fifty Days at Iliam” 182, 185 handwriting 183

Index Inverno 186 “Lexington” paintings 183 memory 181, 184 “Nine Discourses on Commodus” 182, 183, 184 Panorama 17f Quarzazat 182 “Quattro Stagiono” 183, 185–6 School of Athens 183 School of Fontainebleau 183 sculpture 186–7 Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector 185 untitled works 185 Volubilis 182 whiteness 186–7 Tworkov, Jack 95 Umaña, Kevin 211 Unfurleds Louis, Morris 48 unkindness among artists/critics 92–3, 125–8 United States of America. See America Untitled (Sonnier, Keith) 193 Untitled (Abstraction with Arches) (Ramírez, Martín) 14f Untitled (Alamentosa) (Ramírez, Martín) 99 Untitled (Collage) (Ramírez, Martín) 103 Untitled (Horse and Rider) (Ramírez, Martín) 103 untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery) (Flavin, Dan) 32, 49 Untitled (Landscape) (Ramírez, Martín) 104 Untitled (Madonna) (Ramírez, Martín) 103 Untitled (Man at Desk) (Ramírez, Martín) 102 Untitled (Scatter Piece) (Morris, Robert) 139–40, 141 untitled (to a man, George McGovern) (Flavin, Dan) 31 untitled (to Henri Matisse) (Flavin, Dan) 33 untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) (Flavin, Dan) 33

Index untitled (to the citizens of the Swiss cantons) (Flavin, Dan) 33 Untitled (Train and Tunnel) (Ramírez, Martín) 14f, 102 Untitled Leg (Gober, Robert) 22 untitled work of 1957 (Mitchell, Joan) 121 “The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction” exhibition 207–11 USA: War of the Worlds (Sonnier, Keith) 192 van Gogh, Vincent 60, 98 Veils (Louis, Morris) 48 Venturi, Robert 40 Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise and Izenour, Steven Learning from Las Vegas 84, 196 Via Blues (Noland, Kenneth) 47 Viallat, Claude 42 Victory Boogie-Woogie (Mondrian, Piet) 40 Vie en Rose, La (Mitchell, Joan) 66–7 Viennoiserie (West, Franz) 203 Vietnam War Memorial (Lin, Maya) 23 Voelcke, John 86 Volubilis (Twombly, Cy) 182 Waldorf Cafeteria 90 Wallis, Brian 85 war memorials 23–4 Warhol, Andy 25, 48 Brillo Boxes 24–5 Chelsea Girls (film) 197 Warrior’s Leg (Thek, Paul) 24 Warrnyu (Djukulul, Dorothy) 115 Warum ist etwas und nicht nichts? (Why Is There Something and Not Nothing?) (West, Franz) 204 Waterlilies (Monet, Claude) 67 waterline (Watson, Judy) 109 Watson, Judy 109 waterline 109 Watts, Robert 51, 55–6 Goya’s Box 55–6 West, Franz 5–6, 199–205 Eo Ipso 201 Ernte des Tantalos, Die 203

227

Extroversion 203 Kollega 202 Labstücke (Refresher) works 200–1 Labstücke 200, 201 Legitimate Sculptures 203 Outdoor Sculptures 203, 204 Passstücke (Adaptive) works 200 Psyche 202 Rrose/Drama 203–4 Trunkenes Gebot 200–1 2 to 2 (do too 2[too do 2 {to do two}]) 202 Viennoiserie 203 Warum ist etwas und nicht nichts? (Why Is There Something and Not Nothing?) 204 Wet Orange (Mitchell, Joan) 66 white, the use of in Cy Twombly’s work 186-7, 189 n.8 White and Hot (Newman, Barnett) 129 White Roses Sing and Sing (Thomas, Alma) 169 Whitman, Robert 51, 52 American Moon 52 E.G. 52 Shower 52 Whitney, Stanley 166, 211 Whitten, Jack 166 wholeness 37, 38–9, 42 Williams, Irene Bars 74 Williams, Tennessee 186 Wind, Sunshine, and Flowers (Thomas, Alma) 167 Window (Kelly, Ellsworth) 36 windows 196 “Windows and Edward Hopper’s Gaze” (O’Doherty, Brian) 196 Winkfield, Trevor 156 Winogrand, Garry 174, 176 Winsor, Jackie 191 Wölfli, Adolf 97 Woman on a Chicken Crate (Segal, George) 53–4 Woman I (de Kooning, Willem) 128 women 20–1, 61, 111, 121–2, 144 Women Ancestors from Mina Mina story 114

228 Wool, Christopher 182 Words (Kaprow, Allan) 133 Writings on Art (Rothko, Mark) 95 Yamoto (Sonnier, Keith) 192 Yard (Kaprow, Allan) 51 Yiddish language 163

Index Yirritja Dhuwa Gopu II (Maymuru, Galuma) 115 Young, Annie Mae 76–7 Youngerman, Jack 42, 211 Zoneblack 18f Zoneblack (Youngerman, Jack) 18f Zwirner, David 204

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