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Whatever Happened to Abstract Painting?
"Here's
the question: who or what is controlling the spotlight? Does it automatically fade if it is kept in one place to long?"
by
John Perreault
After my paean to Barnett Newman in these pages last month, much more needs to be said, vis-á-vis
abstract painting. Did Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman solve all the problems?
To begin with, a huge
gap exists between the art that is produced and the art that gets attention. The attention comes and goes. Think of a spotlight
moving around a dark stage jam-packed with artworks. If all the lights were on no one would know where to look; there is too
much art. The spotlight moves from abstract painting to Pop and suddenly abstract painting is in the dark. No one sees it
anymore, so younger artists stop making it. Collectors stop buying it.
Here's the question: who or what is controlling
the spotlight? Does it automatically fade if it is kept in one place too long? Does it, unlike lightning, come back to the
same place twice?
The succession of art styles is like the succession of nations; it is theater. It is cruel. There
is the theater of war and the theater of one style against another; hot against cool; truth against beauty; youth against
maturity (both of which have virtues unseen to the other).
It is the unfamiliar that causes us to see. The familiar
becomes cultural wallpaper.
So maybe abstract painting really needed a rest.
No, it is not that simple.
First, art is not only about seeing. It is also about meanings. An automobile accident can get your attention; but it
is what happens to the driver and the passengers that causes one to weep. It is also not the cost of the car that is most
at stake. Usually.
One must never exclude economics. When the prime objects of a particular style become so expensive
that it seems unlikely that resale will ever return a profit, then it is time to look for the new---and the cheaper.
Which of the following will increase your wealth: (a) save all your money and buy a Warhol or (b) take all that money and
buy the work of 30 very young artists? Need money? When did you sell your Op Art collection? Oops! Too soon! Or (this week)
too late!
But the spotlight has no memory. The art world's short term memory gets worse and worse, fortunately. Styles
that get cut off or cast aside into the darkness prematurely or before they have been fully explored come back into the spotlight
and, blessed with a new name, new names or a slight twist, have a second life. Proto-Pop became Neo-Expressionism, Pop became
Neo-Pop and Appropriation, and now we have Minimalism, Part Two---and P & D Redux.
The spotlight keeps moving. All you
have to do is stay in one place, and eventually the spotlight will reveal your genius, again.
But that's the hardest
thing of all.
Does this mean there is going to be an Action Painting or N.Y. School revival? If so, it will take
much more than some random or even some money-driven moves of the spotlight. When the spotlight moved away from Abstract Expressionism
it moved from myth to irony. It also moved from one big style to pluralistic, hyperactive turnover.
Of course, classic
AE was produced at the end of the world. The context was the holocaust and the atom bomb. The move from the Beat to the Hip
was a movement from dark responsibility to disaffiliated cool. Art followed suit and there it remains, in spite of the activist
generation and Viet Nam. Art would not be caught with its pants down ever again.
Now we are told by the director of
MOMA that they need bigger rooms so that the diverse art now being produced can be displayed as an argument rather than conform
to previous linear treatments. But what is the art arguing about? Market share or which Modernism is best? Both questions
end up being the same.
But perhaps we are at the end of the world again…
What ever happened to abstract
painting? Clement Greenberg took away what Barnett Newman liked to call "the subject of the artists." Simple formalism is
easier to understand. If only Greenberg had really been a Logical Positivist instead of a barely disguised, albeit disenchanted
Hegelian, he might have understood minimalism. If only gel paints had not been invented. If only abstract painting had not
been totally identified with Greenberg. If only Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and far too many of his Canadian and Upstate
favorites were as great as Mr. Greenberg assumed, declared, demanded. If only Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and even Tom Hess
had spent less time attacking Pop Art and more time giving critiques to the second and third generation Abstract Expressionist
painters.
On the other hand, is there anything wrong with pin-stripe and protractor Stella, vertical stripe Gene Davis,
horizontal stripe and target Kenneth Noland, horizontal stripe Agnes Martin? And there is certainly nothing wrong with Ellsworth
Kelly. Instead of multiplying Newman’s zip, he removed it, leaving the walls of flat color to stand on their own.
Something,
however, went missing.
I maintain that abstract painting like Pop Art can be ironic, allowing myth to reenter.
Pattern Painting, for the most part, forsook irony because it was as much against Pop as it was against Minimalism. Mike Bidlo's
new, breathtaking Warhol/Pollock Rorschach paintings, which I saw during a studio visit, come close. Am I asking for the impossible?
Well, why not.
We need abstract painting for our own time. What can we do? Upgrade the evaluation of artists such as
Milton Resnick---beautiful paintings from 1959 to 1963 were recently shown at Robert Miller. Maybe we should take another
look at those Greenberg favorites Larry Poons and Jules Olitski. In "Clement Greenberg: A Critic's Collection" (Princeton
University Press) their paintings---and Noland’s--are stand-outs in a general mash of mediocrity. Recognize the importance
of Robert Mangold and Brice Marden (the latter at Matthew Marks in Chelsea through June 21). Take a second look at abstract
painters such as Deborah Remington, who after too-long a hiatus showed last fall at the Mitchell Algus Gallery and David Novoros,
whose work I saw through a studio visit, to name but two. And then too there are those who have backed into abstraction,
such as Pat Steir whose explorations of water as a theme have now yielded---in her recent exhibition at Cheim & Read paintings
that because of the wild and contrasting "splashes" can pass for abstract painting of the highest sort.
We still have
the problem of how to get subject matter into abstract painting—the Newman Problem. We still have the Beauty Problem:
What is beauty? What does it mean? We still have the big gap between what artists say and what the public hears or refuses
to hear. And then there is the Criticism Problem. It became too hard to write about abstract painting. Critics were fooled
into thinking that Greenberg had said it all. There were other fish to fry.
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