"Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artist Dennis Hollingsworth)
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| Martin Mugar |
Coinciding with the debut of my writings in 2013 on the topic of Zombie Formalism I noticed that the New York artist Dennis Hollingsworth commenced to follow my writings with the occasional but always intelligent comment. The first time he commented on my painting is in the above statement made last year. The image to which he attached these words is also the first painting in years that I am most unequivocally happy about. For Hollingsworth it is functioning on at least three levels. (Text,Ground and Geometry). The obvious observations made by Boston critics about the gooey candy-colored sensuality is not predominant for him but rather the functionality of the spatial play. He gets it probably because we are both swimming in the same waters, sharing especially the same attitude about the mark. Dennis is attracted to a gnarly irreducible shape that he achieves by cutting his own nibs for the pastry applicator at the expense of the whole. I fall back on store bought nibs letters using the Cyrillic alphabet squeezed out also with a pastry applicator. Our marks are volumetric. For me the volumetric was a commentary on a road not taken in painting where the sloppy confidence of the abex stroke had taken over the thought process of so much painting. My exuded marks evolved from simple drips, to the Cyrillic alphabet, to whole words. Dennis refers to this as the text of the painting. The irreducible for Dennis lies in the strangeness of the stroke; for me the letter and the word.
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| Martin Mugar |
In June I visited his gallery in Paris Galerie Richard and asked to see some of his work. The director demurred saying they were still in crates having been recently moved due to the closing of the Galerie Richard in NYC and the packing was hard to unpack. Upon my return to the USA I sent Dennis an email telling him of my visit but did not hear back. Recently, I visited his website only to remark that he was being referred to in the past tense. Someone engaged a ChatGPT write his story as an artist. It had a bittersweet lilt to it. It was dated April 2023.
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| Dennis Hollingsworth |
In fact, lately, he has been using his webpage and is still alive and painting. I feel fortunate to have heard his opinions on the art world which were for the most part conservative in intent. He was commenting on Twitter on the ongoing struggle in Ukraine understanding the manipulation of the American Neo-Cons in perpetuating it. He had just started to take and interest in the notion of Monadology as it might apply to his work. Again, the irreducible is something that intrigues him.
The strangeness of the web where people appear and disappear.
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| Dennis Hollingsworth |
Martin Mugar
Another interesting blogpost comment from 2017 from Dennis Hollingsworth
ReplyDeleteThere won’t be an end to Zombie Formalism until we find its root cause. I suspect that you and I had the same reaction to the death of painting narrative: to rebel against it and focus on the corporeal body of paint in painting. And I suspect that you share my frustration to watch an art world not join in at least rejecting the idea of the end of not only painting but also of art ...but instead comply meekly with the spirit of the age as you so briskly illustrate with associated examples in the rest of society such as zero interest rate / quantitative easing.
I see this too in architecture (my first degree, and I taught as an adjunct in California for 8 years in architectural design). During a recent conversation with a friend who is still teaching, he was complaining about the influence of parametric design (think Zaha Hadid and Greg Lynn) and how young architects and arch students are enamored with a kind of architecture that is relies on form automation via software. As a teacher, this kills the opportunity to instill architectural complex concepts and problem solving. Instead, acolytes are letting forms be generated by graphic programs and they are projecting sloppy architectural rationale onto them instead of creating the various systems (structural, circulation, enclosure, etc) and synchronizing them into a final synthesis. The enamor of shiny surfaces assumes that nothing within is important or interesting. The life within architecture need not exist at all.
My assumption coming out of grad school (art) was completely off the mark: that it is the responsibility of every generation to question the received wisdom, shake it out in critique and fashion one specific for the subsequent one. Instead, all that was seemingly possible since the early 90’s was to write the bibliography and end notes for an art history for which no new chapters are considered permissible or possible.
In recent years, the acknowledgement and branding of Zombie Art/Abstraction/Formalism seemed to sear our art world with an irrefutable indictment. (Thanks and congrats to your nomination!) But we all seem to carry on as if the critique is toothless. Maybe blood won’t be drawn until the whole art world gets the courage to reflect on the entirety of the Postmodern epoch and savagely critique it. I see no sign of this happening soon since to do this, one would have to see the arc of Postmodernism from the 60’s to today as a whole, a characterization that I seem to be absolutely alone in making. We are living the parable of the elephant and the blind men, it is as if we prefer to remain blind! Indeed, I had first noticed that it had been déclassé to even mention Postmodernism back in the mid-90’s, and people still yawn to this day. But I think the zombies will yet walk this earth until we take a hard look at our history and try to see what sapped the life out of art as we know it.
All these thoughts have been simmering after reading your post, but it was watching this YouTube video that prompted me to send the link (below) to you. Now, I don’t want to encourage a transliteration of the content of the video to our shared concerns, but there is something interesting about how they describe what happens when the “purpose motive” drops out of society. I am associating this with the generational imperative in art to critique received knowledge and refashion a subsequent narrative to write the next chapter in art history. We as an art world have lost our purpose. What a better way to alternatively describe a zombie invasion?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRebNb0UoAc&t=159s
ReplyDeleteHere are Hollingsworth issues with MO?POMO
ReplyDeleteWe are still within the Modernism/Postmodernism MO/POMO envelope…
...and we can’t leave it until we tear it wide open.
MO/POMO were born as one but diverged in name when they issued forth.
I came to this conclusion after reading Shattuck’s “The Banquet Years”, linking Alfred Jarry to Duchamp.
Painting was the sun and it had to be occluded so that we could see -give justice to- the stars -aka the alternate media (other suns).
Duchamp’s urinal occluded the sun, was the progenitor to POMO, which laid dormant for 50 years until the later emergence of Pop.
What crystalized at the high point of NYC AbEx (MO) was the effort to touch G-d (transcendence) via material means.
The POMO turn at its flowering was to flip the script: 2 point 2 (not touch) everyday life (not G-d) via conceptual (not material) means.
What followed in train was the exposition of POMO.
First, Pop pointed to everyday life, but was still ensnarled in the painterly facture of their MO antecedents.
Minimalism turned down the dial of materialism in artwork until the conceptual remained in view.
Sol LeWitt was the fruit of the POMO tree, he clairvoyantly anticipated the information age, focusing on art as a series of instructions.
POMO continued past its prime, elaborating alternative means of pointing to everyday life: Crit Theory, Decon, the personal = political
As a river begins as a crisp and cold stream, widens into a slowing dirty course and fans into a stinking silted delta… so too POMO.
We are living in the delta phase, we can only hope we are the ones evaporating into clouds that will later form dew in the mountaintops.
What must be distilled: the lessons learned, a critique of both MO/POMO, especially POMO since it is implicitly a critique of its twin.
We are prevented from doing this since the majority of the artworld refuses to be concise in the definition of POMO.
We insist on seeing only trees and no forest, the forest for us as yet does not exist.
We whistled past the graveyard when the Berlin Wall fell, clinging to Fukiyama’s “End of History” thesis.
Evidence that the creed persists: MoMA’s “Forever Now”.
We whistled past the graveyard when the Twin Towers fell…
...deaf to the atavist’s reminder that utopia will always be in a future that never arrives.
We are told that history is over and new chapters cannot be legitimately written.
Recognizable possibilities are restricted to writing endnotes and bibliography.
And now the zombies have arisen, hungry to eat brains.
Yet still, we are defenseless, bereft of resources to arm us via the critique of the MO/POMO epoch that brought us to this place.
We are 21st century creatures, yet mentally trapped in the framework of the 20th.
It will do us well to be reminded that we are not bound by the strictures of the previous era.
We should shake it down in critique, cast off what no longer pertains.
We should keep what yet pertains and add that which is relevant to our time and of our horizon.
Every artist has a responsibility to provide their own answer, to throw the dice and let tomorrow’s artists decide who the winner is.
My throw: defy the narratives of death and nihilism;
...recognize the intensification that the information age bestows on us and refuse the hamster wheel;
...realize that we must write our own programming code;
…reject the puppet show of combatting MO/POMO;
...celebrate the Janus faced MO/POMO, guardian of doorways and gates looking forward and backward;
...recognize that our hands are on the steering wheel, we are not helpless;
...acknowledge that the world possesses a grain to it and strive for the wisdom to know when to go against it…
(Invoking the Tao Te Ching) MO/POMO are the same / But diverge in name as they issue forth…
…Being the same, they are called mysteries / Mystery upon mystery - / Gateway to the manifold secrets.
Hello Martin,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliment of your blogpost, much appreciated.