For Gagosian this Spring it's "Dots" (Damien's dots)

I regret having treated with snark on Twitter the new work of Damien Hirst in so far as my knee-jerk reaction did not allow me to see that  his work might have a connection with the zeitgeist defining the work of other contemporary artists.  It is hard to take him seriously when so much of his work like Koons's plays again and again the Trump card of oversized bombast. It leads me to believe that their dealer Gagosian's only goal is to totally dominate the art market with art of oversized egos that aims to emotionally crush the competition. Sorry Larry! I am sure you voted for Hillary but the work you show anticipated Trump, whose architecture crushed the Westside of New York with bad taste from which it will never recover unless global warming raises the sea level to wash it away. It became clear in the primary debates that Trump was incapable of dialog. For him there was only winning which means crushing the competition. So with Hirst. He will always find a way to gross you out, to desensitize you so that you lose faith in any sense of shared values. If there is any awareness of tradition in his work he inbalms it with icey technology as he did with his earlier dot paintings. Or his inbalming of the essence of phusis/life in the shark sculptures. shows how far a cold ego can go in destroying the natural world.  So what's up with  his new work that evokes a  sensibility, that looks like his fellow Brit Andrew Forge's homages to Seurat. Is this bloke getting a wee bit daft in his middle years.

Hirst

This morning I  recalled my essay Topoi of Contemporary Culture that ends with this paragraph:

We are neither the mothers nor fathers who built the modern industrial state for which modernism was the topos. Either we use abstraction ironically or pathetically (with pathos), or expunge any remnant of the self and let art blend into technology by destroying the boundaries of the human and the machine. Any hermeneutic to go back is doomed to miss the essence of the past. Contemporary abstraction is caught in a twisted embrace with Modernism which ever escapes its hold and retreats further and further into the past. How much longer will we  limp along in this contorted topology, that knows vaguely where it came from but for sure does not know where it is going. 



What if Hirst has decided to join in this twisted embrace with the past that is an acknowledgement of the logos of Western thinking that sought out the foundations of consciousness and applied them to the structure of painting. I have already remarked that there was a shift in the work of Jennifer Guidi, the wife of Zombie Formalist Grotjahn with her use of pointillism and atmospheric colors. It were as though the logic of  Zombie Formalism has hit bottom and could only reiterate its nihilism so many times before it became boring. Dialectically the only way out is to move back in a sort of culturally reactionary move to the origins of Modernism in the color of Seurat and Matisse. It would be comforting to think that Hirst drinking at the well of these artist might stimulate a new synthesis but Hirst is at his best at being a bully boy and even though his work assumes the oversized scale typical of New York galleries, which makes up for lack of intelligence, this work is a dead-end. This retreat into origins is interesting to consider culturally. Is it a fear that the mockery and tearing apart that is the leitmotiv of contemporary art  has gone so far as to destroy the cultural ethos that allows for such mockery in the first place?

Guidi

 

Spiraling downward: From Minimal to Material

Stella Zambezi series

Robert Linsley's  New Abstraction has an interesting blog post on the notion of symmetry, that got me thinking about several of the artists that he mentioned, as well as an earlier blog on Stella, who is his “main man” in Modern painting.  This is what I wrote on his blog:

“I was thinking lately about Richter in terms of the timelessness of his work. By that I don’t mean the timelessness that would be used to describe the Neo-Platonic art of the Early Renaissance but rather a lack of time. Haacke’s closed system has a sort of circular time. It is as you say a closed system that keeps repeating two different states of being. Similar to

Stella’s “Zambezi” that you commented on in another post that to my eye draws the eye in and out in a constant repetition. Richter’s painting is just one event that cannot circle back like Stella’s and although his works literally “hold up”, they risk and do at times descend into pure materiality. This embrace of the material results in what I would call art that is “time poor” to transpose a Heideggerian notion of “world poor”. This applies to the work of someone who appears to be a Richter neophyte, Dan Colen at Gagosian. I wrote about Richter and Stella on the occasion of last winter’s show of my work with Pollaro in Boston, where I talk about the materiality of Richter but this notion of time is new and I think relevant to the understanding of his work.”

Richter

It appears that Richter wants to stop time to impress one event on the viewer to such a degree that it eliminates any consideration of what came before or after. Paul Pollaro referred to it as a kind of neon blast. Gone is the role of the imagination, which might evoke memory, or the role of symbols that could point to an inner structure of consciousness that shapes the present. It is like a TGV passing by so quickly you cannot even see it as a fixed entity. Serra’s charcoal drawings have that kind of powerful presence. They capture a one/two punch in a heightened version of push/pull.

Serra charcoal drawing

“To seal becoming with the character of being. That is the supreme 'Will to Power' “. This statement by Nietzsche might be of help in sorting out what these modern artists are after. What it means is the following: Will to impress emphatically the individual presence in such a way that its power eliminates any other entity being part of the whole. In the end there is the winner and the winner creates or pushes into the background or rather completely out of site the loser.

 It is such a twisting of the original meaning of being and becoming: The source of Being in the Greek world was “The one” that existed beyond this world and in a strange way was the origin of this world. But it was hidden from the world and not of easy access. The world we live in is a world of becoming, of beings (small b) coming into existence and passing out of it. It is therefore a world of life but also of the decay of that life. In the NeoPlatonic work of the Renaissance mystics like Ficino referred to this world as the sub-lunar world which the individual had no control over. Individuals were subject to the blind laws of the stars and pulled by the moon toward death. 

Botticelli's "Birth of Venus"

Some of the great works of art such as the "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli were created as magical talismans to give the patrons such as the Medici’s power over such maladies as melancholia. According to the astrological notions of the time melancholy was influenced by Saturn and the only antidote to it was to channel the goddess Venus. The goal was to get beyond (transcend) this sub-lunar world by accessing the divine powers.

Piero della Francesca

This transcendence was not achieved through an act of will but by knowing the right prayers or alchemical formulas or in the case of art to use the right proportions, colors and geometrical shapes. In short, a kind of knowing to achieve harmony. How different from Nietzsche’s formula, which opens the door to limitless assertion of power. It is not a statement that encourages relationships and harmonies but aggressive stopping of any alternative except that which is imposed by the “Will to Power”.

Al Held

de Kooning

Self-assertion in the work of early Al Held pushes stuff into the background. This is also true in a lot of de Kooning’s work. At least there is a relationship in that on the canvas the oppressed shapes are still seen. Late de Kooning  enters a realm of pure movement. Richter shows nothing eliminated. There is just this eternal present of pure movement.

Late de Kooning

But the risk or rather the goal is that the assertion of will is not enough to hold up the material that is used to make the painting. This is the case of the work of Dan Colen.  I had a good laugh when it was pointed out to me by Paul Pollaro that this artist works in bubble gum and tar. My work has been described as looking like it was painted with bubblegum and Pollaro’s work is made with tar: One artist working with the materials that we use separately.

Dan Colen(bubble gum)

Dan Colen(tar and feather)

There is no event in Colen, just the characteristics of the materials of tar and feather or the bubble gum that was harvested from public spaces in the city. All sprinkled with irony. Nietzsche would see this as a weakness of the will.There is not enough self-assertion to impress the self on becoming. But I would counter that this is a perverse sort of self-assertion like a child throwing a temper tantrum or getting attention by flinging its turds at its parents.*

* see: "The Impossibility of Transcendence in American Art"
* see my review of Stella at the Whitney

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