Laura Owens and the New All American Century

A few years ago I wrote a blog that covered in part the “Forever Now” show at MoMA ,which included Laura Owens, although I did not single out her work for comment. The catalog essay accompanying the show tried to establish a shared gestalt of the exhibit's participants based on the Internet culture we live in. For the author it were as though all the dynamic dialectics of American Art of the last half of the 20thc had come to an end and were replaced by a sort of neo-liberal endlessness in the style of Fukuyama’s  “End of History “: the Cold War was over; Western Capitalism had won and globalism and its factotum the Internet were destroying any hierarchies in a global race for infinite efficiencies.

Owens

I was intrigued by David Salle’s recent essay on Owen’s in the “New York Review of Books”. Its effusive praise seems intent on lifting her out of any cultural critique as for example the one Salle himself partook of back in the 80’s or the internet cultural thesis of "Forever Now". Salle glorifies  her “can-do” spirit. He sees her as a quintessential american pragmatist. If someone like Robert Longo, along with Salle, part of the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 80’s, drew businessmen in free fall, it embodied a critique of rampant capitalism in a period where one might still be horrified by it. The experience of “Free-Fall” is what Salle loves about Owen’s work. But it is more of the country fair roller-coaster variety.

Owens

In Schjeldahl’s essay in the “ New Yorker,”entitled “The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens” he creates an ”Aw-schucks” image of her as an unpretentious Mid- Westerner.  She is described as spunky and in a canny fashion having moved through high-end art academies like RISD and CalArts without submitting to their dogmas. Like Salle he sees her as leaving behind the dialectical critique that tied the work of Rubinstein’s Provisional painting antithetically to Modernism. She appears to benefit from a loosening of Europe's hold via postmodernism on contemporary art with a hearty embrace of American pragmatism as the philosophical zeitgeist of a New American art. The language she employs in her work fits into the distinction I made on Twitter about the relation between the Provisionalist painters and late Stella.  In Stella’s work early and late there is an intentional  schism created between its material and any reference to the optical world that still remained in the Abstract Expressionists. Everything becomes "materiel"and the visual is sort of color-coded and the imagery is not so much abstract as just signs and symbols.  These are the bits and pieces with which Owens pieces together her new artistic world. Imagistically she makes direct quotes from the later Stella. Whereas Stella yearns for the overall dynamic of the Baroque, Owen’s goes far beyond the bas-relief that Stella adheres to. So there is a doubling of the detaching of the retina in the work of Owens and at times an exploding of the idea of painting into our physical space in a way that Stella never achieved. And whereas every move Stella made came out of a certain machismo to leave mood and gestalt behind, Owens using this imagery coming from various media, the internet and graphic design ties everything up with the language  children’s books with not an ounce of Camp.

Salle uses “gestalt” and the lack thereof in Owens’s work as a "mot-clef," with which he hopes to unlock the secrets of her work. According to Salle it was an obsession with gestalt that underlay the teaching at the schools she attended: the Modernists at RISD or the Conceptualists at CalArts. Parts have to add up to an idea; you could have heard the same story in the ”Pit” at Yale, parts/whole, mastering black and white before venturing color. But Owens survived all that macho bullying and kept a certain predilection for play alive in her work, a knack for how to mix and match or as I once described it in “Shake and Bake”.

Salle does express some reservations about the notion of the role of an anti-gestalt in her work since one could say all art has some sort of over-all-ness: try as you may you can’t escape meaning. Even ZombieFormalism with its squeezing out of any mood or feeling in Guyton’s inkjet work is still a selection of parts that create a whole even if the mood is in its absence of mood. A better conceptual framework with which to package Owen’s work would have been to use anthropologist Levi-Strauss’s “Bricolage” defined in English as tinkering. It was a way of putting together a cultural structure  as a sort of mish mash typical in so-called primitive societies not dominated by monolithic scientific schema.  The postmodernist Derrida latched on to the notion of bricolage to make a point of the possibility that even in the monolith of Western scientific culture we are doomed to function in the manner of bricolage. We are always already in a culture, defined by it, swimming in it so to speak. But each response to it takes place in time looking back hermeneutically as well as being in the present and is subject to distortion. We end up with something that is not homogenous. Salle’s work from the 80’s fits perfectly into that construct. It is a commentary on our mediated Warholian existence, where we are not sure where our physical self ends and the world of the media begins. The media sends us mixed signals from Sesame street to pornography all at the same time.  I recall the zeitgeist of that time from a talk Robert Longo gave at UNC-Greensboro in the early 80's: The subject of his speech was basically a self-indulgent rant about who came first the Euro trash Neo-Expressionists or the New York Neo-Expressionists. At the end of his talk he stated that just before he draws his last breath his last thought he will be: “Eat at Burger King”. Succinct postmodernism. Owens is post-postmodern. As she does not want to squeeze everything into the same procrustean bed, she lets things lay side by side with ambiguity. Salle  thinks ambiguity is a mot-clef in understanding her work. It allows him to make the point that ambiguity is not irony, the gestalt of the postmodernists that he came out of. 

Owens

What Salle is getting at is her abandonment of a gestalt as a totalizing meaning. He says her espousal of ambiguity arises from images being sourced from different media all put in the same space that may agree or not agree with each other. Or referencing something other than what their sources imply. Salle refers to her as a space alien who is strangely out of touch or detached from our culture but because of this may function as an effective cultural critic. She has no skin in the game and can be even-handed about her relationship to popular culture. The only popular culture is the culture of children's books she reads to her kids. She is not a critical theorist from Frankfurt, angry at our culture for its superficiality nor bitter for it mediating and totalizing so much of our lived-life. Maybe thinking along with the anthropologist Levi Strauss we could see her as the creator an American cargo cult out of the bits and pieces of our cultural detritus. I noticed this tendency in the semiotics of David Row that is built out of citations of other painters. That would bring her in by the backdoor to a kind of gestalt. But just as she pieces the parts together in a funky mix of objects in a hybrid of sculpture and painting it is up to us maybe to make further connections to come up with our own interpretation.  

Salle

She told Schjeldahl of a list of dictates she wrote up to aspire to as an artist when she was in her early twenties: among them were “Think big,” “Contradict yourself constantly,” “No Guilt,” “Do not be afraid of anything,” “Know if you didn’t choose to be an artist-You would have certainly entertained world domination or mass murder or sainthood.” I would say they are a pretty good description of where she exists with her work today. She thinks big with her New York gallery scale work but not very deeply. She can easily contradict herself since any position she holds means so little to her, it can be easily changed. I would love to be a person without guilt but how can you live and love among others without at least occasionally feeling you are not fulfilling your own expectations or the expectations of others (though I’ll admit she may just be referring to painting not human relationships). And if you think art is keeping you from indulging in mass murder, maybe your art should be a self-aware exploration of those dark desires.

The post-modern view implicates that we are always moving away from our origins, yet even in the continual distancing from the origins something of the source remains.  Like Stella Owens says: what you see is what you get. There is nothing beyond the work itself that the work might point to. Anything that might upset the applecart of her manufactured world is kept at bay. For me the disparities the mix and match of the real and the printed are already well covered by Rauschenberg. 

The description of Owens I get from the two articles made me think of my mother a nurse in the Navy during WW11, whose favorite compliment was to call someone a “real trooper”, someone who pragmatically knew that things had to be done and there was no time to overanalyze details or motives. Yet even she knew that the realm of pragmatics did not apply to her relationship with nature, that offered her a refreshing sense of belonging.  She knew that she was more than an object maker or as Barnett Newman said not just an object among objects. Even Salle back in the day,had a touch of strangeness of cultural weirdness and disparities, e.g. the weight of pornography on the mundane. A lot of it did not add up but that void he created had a touch of the spiritual. Where does all of Salle’s neo-expressionistic culture clash end up: with Laura Owens ! whose work has all the Aw-shucks banality and mild irony of a Grant Wood.*

n.b The article written by Carl Kanduch on Abcrit shares a lot of the same points as this essay. And resulted in several people being blocked by Roberta Smith on Twitter.

*In a comment below someone claims that I misjudged Grant Wood who has a dark streak in him. All  I see is irony at the most and that could be shared with Owens.There is now a retrospective of his work at the Whitney.Is it ironic that it follows Owens?

David Row at Loretta Howard (Feb18-April 2)

The opening of a show in New York of David Row’s work at Loretta Howard concurrently with the Cheim and Read show of his mentor Al Held’s painting from the late 60’s, along with many superficial resemblances between the two, made it hard for me at first to shake Held’s hold on my interpretation of Row’s painting. But Row’s intent and intelligence only become clear when you understand their dissimilarity. 

Yield 1976

The show of Row’s painting  represents 40 years of work. The first painting in the show was done around 1976 or just about the time he graduated from the Yale MFA program. It is a small work of four panels, none the same size and each allotted a different color or value. One can imagine they were part of a series where he followed rules that dictated various permutations in the rule based world of Minimalism. A world of rectangles vs. squares, of whites vs. yellow. It is a working space that acknowledges how we use cognitive labels to order our world. This strategy of objects sharing some characteristics but not others continues throughout his career. I suspect that this early body of work was an apprenticeship that allowed him to separate his identity from that of his teachers at Yale, none of whom were Minimalists.

 

Nine below Zero 1993

His interest in painting not as perception but as cognition lifts him out of the visual language of Held, that functions in the early Sixties on the push/pull of figure/ground or in the late Sixties on the conflict of orthographic vs. perspectival vision. All of the above constructs are cognitive in the sense that they shape our visual world, but the perceptual always precedes in our understanding of things the higher level of semiotic signs and symbols, that seems to be the world that Row prefers to express himself in. Hence, the difficulty of interpreting a painting such as “Nine Below Zero”: At first glance it is reminiscent of the “Big N” of Held, with its figure/ground ambiguity but like Row’s earlier minimalism it is a “compare and contrast” of how the Zeros add up cognitively. One is black on white, the other white on black and create as byproducts in one panel a white lozenge in the other a black lozenge. The nine from the title I think refers to the nine squares created by a grid that underly each zero. Probably, more than any other work in the show it straddles the two realms of knowing; the realm of signs and symbols and the underpinnings of figure/ground where Held functions.

The introduction of the curvilinear into his work appears to be lifted from the late paintings of de Kooning.  To achieve an understanding of the Abstract Expressionist De Kooning, a notion of real physical gesture, which he uses to create time and space, is crucial. Interestingly, Row reduces this to a semiotic sign. Granted they are hand painted but he domesticates the heroism of de Kooning into a sign that is often contrasted with another sign such as the stable grid pattern in “Point of View.” However, when you realize that those swirling patterns represent a kind of irreducible signifier for movement, like the convoluted twists and turns of Chinese dragon painting, then, Row’s lifework becomes clearer and very interesting. He is really involved in the language of painting or better yet painting as language. 

Point of View 2001

The terrain was set for Row by Held, who always grounded his work in real visual constructs.With a similar imperative Row transformed the raw visual language of Held into semiotic constructs to keep his work intellectually grounded.  It is always the sign of genius that one can acknowledge the greatness of ones predecessors without imitating them. That sort of leap from the perceptual to the semiotic gives his work a dialectic rigor so as to avoid either the trap of Zombie Formalism, which tries to erase Modernism with commodification or the weak gestures held together by some sort of irony of Provisional painting. In our conversation about his work Row said he was always the serious student and implied that maybe he was too much so. Knowing the value of things takes a serious turn of mind. It allowed him to appreciate semiotically his progenitors, a word Beckett, a tradition obsessed writer loved to use, so as to take Modernism to another level of self-understanding.

 

Catskill 2014

The nihilist condition and provisional painting a la Rubinstein

Flannery O’Conner stated that you could not understand the modern world without understanding nihilism’s central role in moving and shaping modernity.  She said it was the air we breathed. As a Catholic I assume she felt that we cannot base the way we live on either the positivism of science or superficial societal strictures of what is good and bad. I am not very knowledgeable about Catholic doctrine but I know unlike the Protestants they believe in original sin and from what I recall of St Augustine’s “Confessions” you can only overcome it through the grace of God. To say that we are all nihilists is tantamount to saying we start out our lives as fallen from grace.

That a devout Catholic living in the conservative 1950’s South should find herself as Andy Warhol’s intellectual bedfellow only proves the pervasiveness of the nihilistic strains that permeate our world. These nihilistic experiences seem to hit us from different directions but genealogically have the same origin. Warhol’s fame as an artist was due to his understanding of the role that mass media played in our perception of self; that we are no longer individuals relating to a small community but have been abducted by alien forces as it were into the universe of the electronic media. If O’Conner can acknowledge the nihilism of society and express its fallenness, then could it be said that Warhol shares with her the same sense of our fallen condition and sees our mediated condition as a false transcendence?

So how to connect the dots that place O’Conner and Warhol in the same nihilistic world? Warhol picked up that mass media provides a sort of transcendence to the ordinary. On the one hand to be lifted up out of one’s existence and forced into the media is like being reborn in the human condition, a double dose of nihilism and fallenness. The fifteen minutes of fame implies transcendence of our mortal coils but only for a moment before we fall back into the banal. Is Warhol a theologian
of banality?

When I wrote about Guyton and Kassay, in my article on Zombie Art, who produce ice-cold replicas of High Modernist art, I detected that the only way to get a grasp on these artist’s success was to see the correspondence between the nihilist air we breathe and their total lack of anxiety about being a simulacrum of another person’s style. I threw in some gratuitous rhetorical flourishes, that painted these artists as being a sort of cultural dead end. But if you are a nihilist then dead ends are where you want to be. Especially when you take Stella’s work, which is part of the scientifically based positivist strain of modernism that looks for building blocks, “sine qua non”s and relation of parts to the whole, and then bleed it dry so that the copy is a pale memory of the original. What is intriguing is that there are contemporary artists who paint images similar to Guyton, but who are descendants of the positivist line of Held, Stella and de Kooning. David Row and Craig Stockwell are two artists who come to mind. In the case of Row his work has its origins in Held and de Kooning. In Stockwell I see Brice Marden. I think they want the viewer to visually and intellectually experience an event, a movement of rhythms in time and space, painting that still captures the energy, like the events  that are caught on an x ray in a scientific experience. It is very Aristotelian. Concepts like energy, time and movement are crucial to their self-understanding. 

 

Dave Row

Craig Stockwell

But the art scene moves quickly and although these descendants of High Modernism are successful, they are not at the center of the cultural radar. The name of Raphael Rubinstein comes up often as an apologist for a new movement he calls “Provisional Painting”. Around the end of the last decade, he noticed a distinct artistic style, when he made the rounds of galleries and artist’s studios in New York. It was abstract (Mary Heilmann, Aldrich), mildly ironic(Christopher Wool) and unabashedly derivative (Stanley Whitney) and in no way wanted to surpass its influences. He curated a show on the abstraction of the 80's this past year at Cheim and Read to convey that this movement was more than just a recent phenomena, but had its antecedent  in the work of for example Joan Snyder and Jonathan Lasker, although some  such as Snyder are incredibly earnest and only look provisional. I suspect, that like Greenberg’s ideas on abstraction in the Fifties, it got codified and became a self -fulfilling prophecy, where the artists outside of the movement (if you can call it that) start to think that this is the new wave to emulate and its ideas begin to infect the academy and its MFA mills.

Stephen Mueller

What I find astonishing is there is no reference to nihilism in the samples of his writing, that have appeared on line. If he had read Vattimo, a contemporary Italian philosopher, who came up with the notion of "weak thought" or "weak ontology", he would have understood the NY scene deductively, so that what was happening in NY, was already part of the nihilistic universe that Flannery O’Conner observed. The post–modern condition has its source in Nietzsche’s vision that God is dead, which takes on more meaning if you see that he also sees that metaphysics or any vision of the world where there are absolute truths is dead. However, as a hermeneutician, Vattimo thinks that thought is backward looking as well as forward looking, so that it will never abandon the metaphysical tradition completely. The metaphysical past will always haunt us as something that is still embedded in our language and institutions. Is not this what is happening with “Provisional Painting”? The edict, that was handed down from on high that painting is dead, meant that painting as embodying metaphysical absolutes was past. But can we stop painting? Can we stop interpreting the past? Is the will to say something about one’s experience of the world at an end and is not abstraction in its manifestations in the 20^th century full of bits and pieces of language that we can “bricole” with. You don’t have to espouse the absolutism of Held or Stella to borrow from their playbook. Vattimo says that traces of that metaphysics linger that are absolutely crucial to our existence. We can still believe in the power of the self to envision the world without espousing a powerful sense of Being and Truth, hence “weak ontology”.

 

Mary Heilmann

Jonathan Lasker

I think working inductively creates problems for Rubenstein, when he tries to extrapolate back to Matisse, Bonnard and Giacometti the provisionality of his acolytes. He sees an erasure in Matisse and assumes he is only problematizing what he is doing. But Matisse’s work grew out of a quest for scientific truth, where color has power to push and pull optically. He created positive visual events as does Row and Stockwell, and, if he erases something, it is only to bring him closer on his path to a cognitive whole. Genealogically, the late cutouts of Matisse lead right into Rothko and on to the minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly. Giacometti struggles to pin things down from his existential point in space .The more he tries to capture what he sees, the further away it moves from him. Nothing provisional about that. He is a phenomenologist of the experience of man under the Lacanian gaze of the other. The world provisional sounds so flaccid. How can you not feel the deep anxiety and sense of failure in Giacometti’s work? Some of the contemporary artists thrown into this bag of provisionalism tell Rubinstein there is nothing provisional about their work. But little of Giacometti’s angst is to be seen in the artists that Rubinstein espouses. Vattimo’s “weak thought” would be a perfect concept to encapsulate where painting is in Rubinstein’s provisional world. Vattimo sees a weak connection to Being in a positive light as a sort of enlightened nihilism. As in Richard Rorty’s world, we at best bounce off of each other interpretively and creatively, to establish horizons of meaning without insisting that our values are superior.  Vattimo even claims that these are the characteristics of Nietzsche's Superman. When taken in the context of what Malcolm Bull sees as Vattimo’s misunderstanding of Nietzsche, we can see that the problem with provisionalist painting today is the ironic weakness it espouses.

 

Schnable and Aldrich

For Nietzsche interpretation is evidence of the will to power.” It is a means of becoming the master of something.” Bull says: ”Interpretive failure occurs when someone  ‘no longer has the strength to interpret’ for ‘exhaustion changes the aspect of things, the value of things’. For Nietzsche interpretation and value creation are inseparable. Whereas the strong ‘involuntarily give to things and see them fuller, more powerful and pregnant with future… the exhausted diminish and botch all they see-they impoverish the value’. It is hard to knock a movement that controls the gallery scene and gets top dollar for its work, but it is only in the context of galleries with high ceilings that the work takes on any heft. 

 

Stanley Whitney

In a “Brooklyn Rail” interview Rubinstein sees the provisional movement as a reaction to the slickness of work by Currin, Koons and Murakami. I have observed this sort of reactive event in the New York scene several times over. Chuck Close comes to New York looking to stand out from the minimalist crowd, and, according to  an urban legend, espouses photorealism as a means to this goal. Neo- Expressionists react to minimalism and some of them like Schnable survive to be part of the provisionalist reaction to world wide corporate slickness. So it goes the agonic battle between generations. To know that it all functions under the umbrella of nihilism would be a good critical tool that would help critics understand the different strains of nihilism and maybe put the fire in the belly of the next generation to overcome the shadow it casts on all we do.

Snyder

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