Is there a Connection between Materiality and Painting from the French Deconstructionists to Ha Chong Yuan

Almost a year after I wrote my essay in 2013 on Zombie Abstraction I got an email from Mark Stone at https://henrimag.com/ that I had received confirmation of my role in coining the term Zombie Formalism from “Art in America” critic Raphael Rubinstein in an article he wrote in that magazine on French postmodernist thinking and French abstraction:"Theory and Matter" My son who has a Phd in internet studies said getting that reference in hard copy was the Mt Rushmore of writing in the digital realm. Not long after that thumbs-up I attended a lecture by the artist Sharon Butler, at the Maine College of Art. She is the founder of the ezine “Two Coats of Paint” and the term “casualist painting” that competes with Rubinstein’s “provisionalist” painting that defined much of the painting in the “Forever Now” show at MoMA. In the Q&A after the lecture Butler who had read, I suspect, my blogpost that written in response to John Yau’s article in Hyperallergic , introduced me as the coiner of Zombie Formalism. Walter Robinson of course for most people is the fountainhead of the ZF moniker even though he wrote of it several months later and Jerry Saltz placed him squarely in the  lineage (but no mention of my work), wrote an essay in the New York magazine that made it a current term of the art world. 

Ha Chonghyun (Ha Chong Yuan)

For some reason I never read the whole article by Rubinstein. A recent article again by Yau in Hyperallergic on Korean abstraction referred to as Dansaekhwa and the specific concern for a member Ha Chong Yuan. Support and surface issues are central in his painting  and made me recall the article by Rubinstein, which draws a direct link from French postmodernist theorists such as Derrida, Lacan and other Maoist thinkers such as Badiou and a bevy of young artists in the 70’s who took their words  seriously enough to deconstruct the pristine metaphysical structure of the flat surface. Hence: Theory and Matter . There is no attempt by Yua to connect Ha Chong Yuan with this movement but I am sure it exists. And as he missed on the zombie label he seems to miss out on the history of support and surface. It would be fruitful in creating an east/west link.  Unlike the French artists who in the style of Hantai take apart the ground completely verging on sculpture Hua reconstructs his surfaces to emulate Rymanesque monochromism and in its reliance on thin parallel horizontal lines the work of Agnes Martin.  But these two American artists retain a painterly visuality whereas Ha adds another dimension in the laborious way the pictures are constructed out of slats of wood through which a limited palette of paint is squeezed through from behind and then adumbrated with wire diagonally applied. In reproduction the work does look like either Martin and Ryman, but once one understands the way they are built a whole new level of meaning is attained through a notion of materiality and labor. Schwabsky in Art Forum points out the title of Ha’s painting is called “Conjunctions” referring to paint and support merging. This emphasis of the painting acknowledging and giving primacy to support has to have come out of the French connection. Or maybe it was the France based Hungarian Hantai who influenced them. 

"Theory and Matter" Pierre Buraglio

What I missed in not reading thoroughly the Rubinstein piece is his discussion of the know-nothing attitude of zombie formalism. And Schjeldahl’s dismissal of the art that issued from French theoretics. American Art could stand on its own.  It has an innate swagger that Bataille noticed in the American soldiers arriving in Paris after WW11. I talk about it here  Of course, it is well-known that none of the zombie formalists espouse that label or see it as definitive of their work. Rubinstein said that its freedom from theory maybe makes it susceptible to the kind of mercenary flipping that Robinson described in his essay. The joke about the stock market being just cans of sardines comes to mind: “These sardines are not for eating. They are for buying and selling” said a business friend of my father when I inquired years ago about a current stock market boom. The French artists build their art on the shoulders of Maoist and Marxist revolutionaries that want to change the world for the better. Zombies are neo-liberal merchants who reduce art to merchandise. I remember in highschool staying at the Ritz Carlton at a room rented by this friend of my father who merchandised toothbrushes. There was a supermarket toothbrush display set up in the room. I vaguely recall the name of the salesman. Nev Levinson? I learned later from my dad that the salesman ended up in prison for fraud or some other corrupt activity. In my mind he is conflated with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. Bleakly pushing goods around for a cut of the action. It was a side to my father that he did not want to dwell on but I do recall on several occasions where he talked about other business acquaintances who wondered about what it all meant. A story of a successful lawyer friend who would turn the lights out in his office and touch in the dark all the accoutrements of his trade including awards et alia. My artist friend Addison Parks, who had something of the priest about him would periodically find defects in my character, once blamed my father for having some nefarious nihilistic influence on me. At the time I dismissed his attempt to subject me to deep analysis as way off base especially in so far as my father created an image of himself that I accepted as a decent man who cared about the welfare of those around him. There must have been some fear on the part of Addison that my art was not all hunky dory and not just the child’s garden to play in that he described in the invitation of my first solo show at Crieger-Dane in Boston. What he must have sensed, that scared him as it does many other people, was a rather nihilistic notion that maybe the secret garden to play in is enshrouded in a kind of void. That the primal thrust is not to creating harmony but rather a raw Nietzschean will to power and its attendant destruction of what is.

Joan Miro

I recently received a link to a blog post by the abovementioned Mark Stone about the late work of Miro. My gosh it is a grim exploration of the canvas as battleground. Gone is the playful child’s garden that so influenced Calder.   Had Calder who clearly saw child’s play in the work of Miro been aware of a nihilistic streak in his work? My attempt to create a good guy/bad guy dichotomy in my Calder/Warhol essay been misguided. Are they both bad guys? Had Calder’s (Woventale's version of my blog) playmate in the playground always been an enemy of painting. Schjeldahl quotes him from early on: 

“I want to assassinate painting,” Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” 

This grimness seems to be the other side of the Dada coin. Maybe the jump into the surreal has more to the do with an embrace of the void rather than the child’s garden.  Stone seems to see that this is no longer  a critique of capitalism and commodification as Miro attempts but rather the status quo of art and the world we currently live in.

Porfirio DiDonna: "A Painters Journey" at the Danforth Museum

I wish I could remember his name. He was a talented student at AIB. The last I heard from him he was in Brooklyn making his way as an artist. Since I never had meaningful conversations with other faculty, he became my sounding board for discussions on the contemporary scene. He was at the stage in his life, where he wasn’t worried about finding his academic niche so that art was an open book. For the faculty it was a closed book. They had solidified their styles and now wanted to solidify their academic status. Teaching was pure theatre for them, holding forth in crits and making sure discussions didn’t venture too far from the script.

I recall at one point this student and I became intrigued by the work of Jake Berthot. He showed regularly at Nielsen and had a certain presence in the art magazines. Students who moved on to graduate school often had him as a visiting artist. His work was painterly and slightly mystical in its mood. Unlike much contemporary art it had an affect that was appealing to me. It didn’t have a conceptual issue to belabor. At the time, probably the early Nineties, he was painting colorful lozenge shapes floating in a darker ground. The edges were not sharp and the centrally placed lozenges looming out of the dark ground created a sense of the painting being a search and discovery.

One Winter the student learned of a major show of  Berthot's work at Dartmouth. We decided to make the trek up there to get a good sense once and for all what he was about. I can’t remember much about our reactions to the painting in  the show except that after viewing it we went to a local tavern, the sort you find on Ivy league campuses that have a pedigree to them, downstairs and dark with lots of wood paneling, names of former students carved in the tables and a good selection of draft beer. It was warm and cozy, a respite from the cold winter air. Enjoying a good draft beer, I found myself humming spontaneously: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”. Was it the mood of the Tavern? Or was this the sum total of the mood of Berthot's paintings? Did they radiate an atmosphere that didn’t go much beyond a popular ballad?

Low-grade spirituality. Reminded me of what I wrote about another Nielsen artist, a protégé of John Walker, who now shows at Alpha. Her expressionist paintings of beaches at slack tide conveyed  the low-tide languor we experience when we visit beaches off season. If Berthot makes me hum “The Christmas Song” then her work got me humming  “Ebb Tide”. I called her Johnny Walker Lite.

DiDonna

Hartley

Last night I went to a member’s opening at the Danforth Museum of another Nielsen artist,  Porfirio DiDonna, which purports to revive interest in an artist, whom they presume should have more recogniton than he is currently accorded.  He died in his mid- forties in 1986. Before his death he was able to develop a distinct style that also embodies the sort of yearning that I observed in Berthot’s work. According to the literature accompanying the show, he was a devout Catholic on a path to inner spiritual truth. His early work is put together out of minute dots that follow grids and are reminiscent of Agnes Martin. Each mark could be seen as the gesture of a believer denoting each Hail Mary with a flick of the rosary beads. There is a sense of marking time. The body of work that is ostensibly the most Catholic is put together with patterns and bands of warm colors that resemble at times chalices, or at other times elaborate priestly garb.  The marks that add up to these images/symbols remain independent as gestures of color on their own. Often they are S shapes, where the S gives a kind of thrust or purpose to the lines, a dance or flickering of the candle flame if you will. It is as though he deconstructed the images of the church in the way Hartley deconstructed the images from the life of his German soldier lover to create a pattern of love and relationship. In fact, from a grammatical point of view, DiDonna’s work seems deeply informed by Hartley. It is more gestural and the parts have an inner thrust to them that is reminiscent of deKooning or Pollock but in the end, if Agnes Martin

Berthot

informs his early work, Hartley is all over the last work.

It is unfortunate that we will never know where DiDonna would have gone with his quest to know something beyond his physical self. Unfortunate, as well, in that the  gestalt of his last works seems earnest, yet, a lot like Berthot’s, rests on the level of inchoate emotions. There is too much feeling and not enough knowing. Or maybe ”not knowing”. I think that if there is a God his transcendence is so far beyond our physical reality or any cognitive act that we can perform, that if we were to get close to it, it would char our souls to a crisp. Spiritual guides often warn adepts of pursuing a search for God, as it is fraught with danger and numerous cul de sacs.http://hyperallergic.com/97175/beer-with-a-painter-jake-berthot/

This show captures a creative climax, where everything holds together.There is the  spiritual glow conveyed by the  colors and his  gestures do take Hartley to a different linguistic space. But as a friend and artist said after reading Baker’s exegesis on DiDonna and recalling his work:

“About the shape of knowing:  I never understand why mysticism always takes the shape of monotonous centrality, soft edges, elegant curves, glowing light and color etc. etc. I like to think I'm reaching toward a kind of mysticism but through urgency, agitation, and explosiveness with an underlay of stillness.  It’s more how I sense the universe to be.”

Solid work, thoughtfully wrought, full of sincerity but I think in the end it leaves this viewer unconvinced of its greatness.  Maybe this was the first basic level to be uncovered in his spiritual journey.Greatness lay ahead of him, possibly.

Review of a recent show of his work at Elizabeth Harris.