It had all become a wonderfully seamless merger of theory and the art it purported to define. Modernism
divided by modernism, became postmodern, became Zombie Formalism. The last
remnant of self-consciousness was squeezed out. The image was often produced by
machines or was so redundant of past Modernism, any notions of the authority or
authenticity of the creator had exited the site of creation. Heidegger’s "monstrous philosophical site", where he crosses out Being (sous rature) bringing an end to
ontology or at most establishing a weak ontology, had worked its way into the
creative process of contemporary artists. Has Simone Weil’s cyclical trope of history hit the nadir of
meaninglessness and instead of bouncing in another direction became an
intensification of itself?This aesthetic nothing is not totally nothing as the
market gives it significant monetary value. The correlation between such art and
an economy built on zero interest rates was hard to ignore. Calculating bankers
needed to launder some of their gains from the phony stock market into Culture,
but the avant-garde instead of providing the usual opportunity for the bankers to
slum or dabble with artists besotted of Freud or Jung was now populated by
artists as savvy in their business acumen as the bankers themselves. The
artists just printed more paintings on their inkjet printers to be bought up by
the stockbrokers who had gotten rich on the Federal Reserve's money printing.
The dialectic of history provided no zigzag, no way out just more zombification
ad infinitum.
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| Mark Grotjahn |
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| Frank Stella |
This state of affairs was foretold in the early work of
Frank Stella. His work was not built out of the cosmic gestures of the Jungian Pollock
or the labor of the working class of de Kooning but out of color aid packs and bad
geometry. Whereas Stella felt some remorse over putting painting into such a
straight jacket and has spent the rest of his career paying homage to the
Italian Baroque, the Zombie Formalists, Guyton, Grotjahn, Morris et. alia look
like early Stella. They saw the scission his palette provided from flesh, blood
and the inner life as a good ground upon which to build their bloodless zombie
edifice. It did not refer back to a lived world but to the artifice of graphic
design.
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| Jasper Johns by Karsh |
Modernism was the last breath of authoritative self-consciousness
grounded in Science, the individual as capable of solid perceptions of the
Real. When one reads that Husserl’s eidetic reduction seizes reality as it is
captured by the senses, one understands that this is what Rothko did. I was
reminded of his spiritual intensity in Paul Rodgers “the Modern Aesthetic”
which sees Modernism as an ever-revivified battle against the Prussian state
and its reincarnations. For sure the scientific community achieved its goals with
a group effort but judging from the mid century portraits of greatness by
Yousef Karsh, the consciousness of the truth was a private affair. So here is a
definition you can take home: zombie modernism is modernism without the authoritative
stance of self-consciousness. There is no one home.
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| Jennifer Guidi |
So when I learned that Grotjahn’s wife, Jennifer Guidi was cranking out
sentimental paintings swimming in sunset colors and that the same collectors of
Zombie art could not get enough of them, I was startled. Is this the long
awaited bounce? Is all the sentiment excised from Zombie Formalism coming back
to start the new zag to zombies zig? Granted the “zombie stance” if it were a
yoga pose would be an impossible pose to hold. It requires a coolness and poise lest
even an iota of emotion leaks in. You would have to stop breathing. Grotjahn
started to drip a little paint on his geometry but that may have expressed an
indifference to any remnant of authority in his work. But it may have been the
crack in the dam. Are the images of Guidi ironic? Are these just painterly renditions of
Koons.
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| Walter Robinson |
The truth may lie in a show of Walter Robinson‘s painting curated
by Vito Schnabel in Switzerland. Vito is the scion of the Schnabel family,
founded by papa Julian. Robinson, the presumed inventor of the label of Zombie
Formalism (although I came up with the label several months earlier as Zombie
abstraction) and a denizen of New York’s art ghetto whom artist/art critic
Charles Giuliano described as a “known grifter and blowhard” in an article in
“Berkshire Fine Arts”, has produced a body of work which to my eye purports to
be a painterly version of Lichtenstein’s pop oeuvre. An article in Blouin Fine Arts pushes it as
the glorification of “appetite” in American culture. I get it: remove the cool
veneer of the billboard or the movie poster and replace it with the juicy
strokes of Robinson and you reveal the appetitive underbelly of American
society. Julian’s work was resurrected as provisional in the new millennium by
Raphael Rubinstein from its 80’s identity as neo-expression. Schnabel’s art
like Robinson’s always needs some sort of label. The Schnabel label unlike LV
won't cut it by itself. Pull off the label and the work looks like shit.
On occasion I come across articles about the New York Federal
Reserve’s involvement in money printing or as they call it: quantitative
easing. It appears they don’t know what the longterm effect is: they are just
winging it. It has created a bubble that is going to burst, that has enriched
the 1% at the expense of Main St. I think you could say the same thing about
the artistic culture of New York. If
Schnabel pere et fils , Walter Robinson and now Jennifer Guidi are what we must
bow down to as the culture of choice by
New York’s collectors then there is no bounce nor an intensification of
nihilism, just an untidy, murky pool of schlock. Is this a bubble ready to
burst? Or maybe just a backup of primordial
sludge that will give rise to a new art?
