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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Salle |
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?
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?
