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| Frank Stella |
It is interesting that Stella has a retrospective at the
same time that Zombie Formalism is
reigning supreme in the contemporary art scene. The shadow of Stella’s early painting haunts their work and functions as a ground upon which these artists
build their imagery. But it is not a ground with which they engage in a dialogue
or agonic surpassing but a blatant copying. Whereas Stella’s work cut itself
away from the Cartesian doubt of most Modernism and cut out for itself a role
of being emblematic of the modernist and positivistic hegemony of America
triumphant, the Zombie Formalists express a sort of redundancy where the
present keeps repeating itself in a circular loop: Stella ad infinitum.
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| Sarah Morris |
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| Mark Grotjahn |
Stella makes it easy for abstractionistas to fall back on his
work as a formula for “abstraction making”, in that he already excised color and form from their grounding in the perception of reality.
Instead of a panoply of color that works dynamically out of the complexity of
color perception, he uses a rules based strategy limiting their number and form
as though pre-selected from a color-aid pack. This simplicity of color choice goes
hand in glove with a simplicity of form. Moreover, his self-consciousness early
on about the shape of the rectilinear canvasses’ relationship to the forms conveyed
within, leads easily to taking the form making from the canvasses shape. Again,, it is his ignorance, willed or otherwise, about how colors interact with each
other that frees him up to deal with the canvas as abstract form. I recall
years ago meditating on his black canvases and realized that this absence of
any activity of push and pull between colors resulted in the objectification of
the canvas leading to the canvas beings perceived as a shape on a white wall. Object
among other objects, including the humidity meter. An absence of a metaphysical pointing out
from the canvas to another realm keeps the canvas in a pragmatic world of just being
a physical shape on the wall. You can
see this same strategy pursued by Ellsworth Kelley, who eventually deconstructs
the support reinforcing its materiality, which is not the road Stella goes
down. He could have gone there but for the haunting of the majesty of Baroque
painting that turns him toward a pursuit of complexity and expansion off the
wall out into space. He identified more with the overweening confidence of
those Baroque artists than with the self-reflexive doubt that motivated the early
Modernists. The artists of Rome had the majesty and power of the Church to buoy
them up. Stella had the absolute domination of a positivist scientific world
view promulgated by the most powerful nation in the world to launch him into an
enormous expending of materiel.…
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| Frank Stella |
An understanding of the relationship of Stella to his own antecedents
is clarified by studying his influence on his descendants, the Zombie Formalists. Stella and the Zombie Formalists ignore core aspects of their sources.
Stella abandons the optical self-reflection that formed the core of Mondrian’s
artistic progress in order to use color as just shapes to play with. Within the
paintings of the Zombie Formalists any notion of play found in Stella is
abandoned so as to foreground a ghostly use of Stella as commodity. Interestingly
enough, working backward hermeneutically from the dry commodification of the
Zombies, the playful aspect of Stella in contrast seems to become a more
salient aspect of his work. It is as a whole the product of "homo ludens" and is
therefore more optimistic and out of sorts with the cold cynicism of the zombie
zeitgeist. The retrospective seemed out of sync on so many levels with our times
and lead me to understand why even the goofy playfulness of Koons has to be
couched in postmodern cynicism to be successfully marketed in this day and age.
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| Frank Stella |
Derrida coined the term hauntology (a play on ontology) to
express how the past informs the present in a post-ideological world. The enormous
crucial battles of civil and individual liberation are over; there is just the
road of ever more efficient technological functioning and communication. Heroic
notions of humanity or the working class fade away as an ever more
wired society keeps mankind integrated into the mechanism of the industrial
state. Since the priority of this state of being is ever more efficient
functioning, it is in its interest to obliterate any connection to the past that
could slow it down. Although other modes of being that once existed come back
to “haunt” the present, and we can try them on or play around with them, they do
not define our essential mode of being in the world. Or maybe they can only be
recycled in the current cynical mood as Stella has been by the zombie
formalists or as John Currin does with the style of the populist Thomas Hart
Benton. The goal is to empty them of meaning
so that ultimately private domains once explored in painting cannot escape
being mechanized or function ever again as possible sources of individual self-realization.
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| "The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam" Frank Stella 1993 |
Melville’s story of the great white whale is often seen as a
study and critique of capitalism. Ahab is only interested in his private quest
and is clever and manipulative enough to convince his crew to go along with him. Melville is
somewhat ambivalent about the morality of this exploitation as he feels we all
exploit someone below us even as we are exploited. In my reacquaintance with
the book several years ago what struck me was that the crew and Ahab are two
different species of mankind. The crew is close to its surroundings ever ready so as to
react to changing circumstances. When a sailor is knocked overboard on the
shuttle out to Nantucket, Queequeg without prompting jumps into the icy November waters to save
him. The crew creates bonds among each other instinctively knowing that their
survival depends on being a band of brothers. They feel the palpability of the
world as much as Ahab ignores it. For him everything is metaphysically abstract
and involves goals that move the crew toward a denouement far from the practical
goals of whaling.
There is an analogy I would like to attempt between Ahab's distance from the real and Stella's ignorance of any relationship to the long optical tradition of Western painting. The world is experienced by the crew of the Peqoud with a hands on feel for the things and events around them. For Ahab the world is not experienced in its praxis but is manipulated and ignored in the way Stella’s colors are abstract in the worst sense, derived from color-aid packs, not the way color is experienced in the eye as in Bonnard, Matisse or Cezanne. Stella has left artistically the sensuality of being in the world behind in order to fulfill what he sees as his manifest destiny to occupy more and more space. His formal affects are not achieved as for example in the work of Al Held, but imposed as he piles patterns on top of patterns. This analogy of Ahab's delirium to Stella’s lack of grounding in the sensual is weak in only one sense: Stella does not live up to the the degree of Ahab's ascetic delirium. The journey he takes us on is neither majestic nor exhilarating. There is no hint at the void that lies under all of his exploits. At most Stella is a good engineer. Ben Davis in his spot on review of the show mentions a thesis Stella wrote at Princeton. Its bearing on his achievement is interesting to mention:
There is an analogy I would like to attempt between Ahab's distance from the real and Stella's ignorance of any relationship to the long optical tradition of Western painting. The world is experienced by the crew of the Peqoud with a hands on feel for the things and events around them. For Ahab the world is not experienced in its praxis but is manipulated and ignored in the way Stella’s colors are abstract in the worst sense, derived from color-aid packs, not the way color is experienced in the eye as in Bonnard, Matisse or Cezanne. Stella has left artistically the sensuality of being in the world behind in order to fulfill what he sees as his manifest destiny to occupy more and more space. His formal affects are not achieved as for example in the work of Al Held, but imposed as he piles patterns on top of patterns. This analogy of Ahab's delirium to Stella’s lack of grounding in the sensual is weak in only one sense: Stella does not live up to the the degree of Ahab's ascetic delirium. The journey he takes us on is neither majestic nor exhilarating. There is no hint at the void that lies under all of his exploits. At most Stella is a good engineer. Ben Davis in his spot on review of the show mentions a thesis Stella wrote at Princeton. Its bearing on his achievement is interesting to mention:
In
that long-ago Princeton theses on Pollock and Celtic ornament, Stella
claimed that the formula for "art" was pushing decoration to the
point where it transcended itself. The knotted pyrotechnics of these
final pieces certainly do that—it's actually hard to think of a space
where they would work as passive décor. It's just that the direction they
transcend decoration towards is the domain of theme parks and Broadway bombast.
That is, spectacles built not to savor but to stun, not for
connoisseurs but for visitors passing through.
The title of Davis’ essay is “All Style no Substance”. It raises questions about what is substance, what is substantial. The word can be better understood if broken down into “what stands under”. A meditation on what is substantiality and its relation to Stella’s work would be of interest to the connoisseurs and would make an engagement with the work of Stella worth their while if his work were at all engaged in that questioning itself. To savor such a discussion would be to linger, not to pass through.
* an interesting discussion is taking place here: on Henri Art Mag
strange article from 1964 in the New York Times seeing the Nihilism of Stella https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/16/archives/the-new-nihilism-art-versus-feeling.html
The title of Davis’ essay is “All Style no Substance”. It raises questions about what is substance, what is substantial. The word can be better understood if broken down into “what stands under”. A meditation on what is substantiality and its relation to Stella’s work would be of interest to the connoisseurs and would make an engagement with the work of Stella worth their while if his work were at all engaged in that questioning itself. To savor such a discussion would be to linger, not to pass through.
* an interesting discussion is taking place here: on Henri Art Mag
strange article from 1964 in the New York Times seeing the Nihilism of Stella https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/16/archives/the-new-nihilism-art-versus-feeling.html
