Ahab, the Pequod and Frank Stella at the Whitney

Frank Stella

It is interesting that Stella has a retrospective at the same time that  Zombie Formalism is reigning supreme in the contemporary art scene. The shadow of Stella’s early painting haunts their work and functions as a ground upon which these artists build their imagery. But it is not a ground with which they engage in a dialogue or agonic surpassing but a blatant copying. Whereas Stella’s work cut itself away from the Cartesian doubt of most Modernism and cut out for itself a role of being emblematic of the modernist and positivistic hegemony of America triumphant, the Zombie Formalists express a sort of redundancy where the present keeps repeating itself in a circular loop: Stella ad infinitum.

Sarah Morris

Mark Grotjahn

Stella makes it easy for abstractionistas to fall back on his work as a formula for “abstraction making”, in that he already excised color and form from their grounding in the perception of reality. Instead of a panoply of color that works dynamically out of the complexity of color perception, he uses a rules based strategy limiting their number and form as though pre-selected from a color-aid pack. This simplicity of color choice goes hand in glove with a simplicity of form. Moreover, his self-consciousness early on about the shape of the rectilinear canvasses’ relationship to the forms conveyed within, leads easily to taking the form making from the canvasses shape. Again,, it is his ignorance, willed or otherwise, about how colors interact with each other that frees him up to deal with the canvas as abstract form. I recall years ago meditating on his black canvases and realized that this absence of any activity of push and pull between colors resulted in the objectification of the canvas leading to the canvas beings perceived as a shape on a white wall. Object among other objects, including the humidity meter.  An absence of a metaphysical pointing out from the canvas to another realm keeps the canvas in a pragmatic world of just being a physical shape on the wall.  You can see this same strategy pursued by Ellsworth Kelley, who eventually deconstructs the support reinforcing its materiality, which is not the road Stella goes down. He could have gone there but for the haunting of the majesty of Baroque painting that turns him toward a pursuit of complexity and expansion off the wall out into space. He identified more with the overweening confidence of those Baroque artists than with the self-reflexive doubt that motivated the early Modernists. The artists of Rome had the majesty and power of the Church to buoy them up. Stella had the absolute domination of a positivist scientific world view promulgated by the most powerful nation in the world to launch him into an enormous expending of materiel.…

Frank Stella

An understanding of the relationship of Stella to his own antecedents is clarified by studying his influence on his descendants, the Zombie Formalists. Stella and the Zombie Formalists ignore core aspects of their sources. Stella abandons the optical self-reflection that formed the core of Mondrian’s artistic progress in order to use color as just shapes to play with. Within the paintings of the Zombie Formalists any notion of play found in Stella is abandoned so as to foreground a ghostly use of Stella as commodity. Interestingly enough, working backward hermeneutically from the dry commodification of the Zombies, the playful aspect of Stella in contrast seems to become a more salient aspect of his work. It is as a whole the product of "homo ludens" and is therefore more optimistic and out of sorts with the cold cynicism of the zombie zeitgeist. The retrospective seemed out of sync on so many levels with our times and lead me to understand why even the goofy playfulness of  Koons has to be couched in postmodern cynicism to be successfully marketed in this day and age.

Frank Stella

Derrida coined the term hauntology (a play on ontology) to express how the past informs the present in a post-ideological world. The enormous crucial battles of civil and individual liberation are over; there is just the road of ever more efficient technological functioning and communication. Heroic notions of humanity or the working class fade away as an ever more wired society keeps mankind integrated into the mechanism of the industrial state. Since the priority of this state of being is ever more efficient functioning, it is in its interest to obliterate any connection to the past that could slow it down. Although other modes of being that once existed come back to “haunt” the present, and we can try them on or play around with them, they do not define our essential mode of being in the world. Or maybe they can only be recycled in the current cynical mood as Stella has been by the zombie formalists or as John Currin does with the style of the populist Thomas Hart Benton.  The goal is to empty them of meaning so that ultimately private domains once explored in painting cannot escape being mechanized or function ever again as possible sources of individual self-realization.

"The Pequod Meets the Jeroboam" Frank Stella 1993

Melville’s story of the great white whale is often seen as a study and critique of capitalism. Ahab is only interested in his private quest and is clever and manipulative enough to convince his crew to go along with him. Melville is somewhat ambivalent about the morality of this exploitation as he feels we all exploit someone below us even as we are exploited. In my reacquaintance with the book several years ago what struck me was that the crew and Ahab are two different species of mankind. The crew is close to its surroundings ever ready so as to react to changing circumstances. When a sailor is knocked overboard on the shuttle out to Nantucket, Queequeg without prompting jumps into the icy November waters to save him. The crew creates bonds among each other instinctively knowing that their survival depends on being a band of brothers. They feel the palpability of the world as much as Ahab ignores it. For him everything is metaphysically abstract and involves goals that move the crew toward a denouement far from the practical goals of whaling.

There is an analogy I would like to attempt between Ahab's distance from the real and Stella's ignorance of any relationship to the long optical tradition of Western painting. The world is experienced by the crew of the Peqoud with a hands on feel for the things and events around them. For Ahab the world is not experienced in its praxis but is manipulated and ignored in the way Stella’s colors are abstract in the worst sense, derived from color-aid packs, not the way color is experienced in the eye as in Bonnard, Matisse or Cezanne. Stella has left artistically the sensuality of being in the world behind in order to fulfill what he sees as his manifest destiny to occupy more and more space. His formal affects are not achieved as for example in the work of Al Held, but imposed as he piles patterns on top of patterns. This  analogy of Ahab's delirium to Stella’s lack of grounding in the sensual is weak in only one sense: Stella does not live up to the the degree of Ahab's ascetic delirium. The journey he takes us on is neither majestic nor exhilarating. There is no hint at the void that lies under all of his exploits. At most Stella is a good engineer. Ben Davis in his spot on review of the show mentions a thesis Stella wrote at Princeton. Its bearing on his achievement is interesting to mention:

In that long-ago Princeton theses on Pollock and Celtic ornament, Stella claimed that the formula for "art" was pushing decoration to the point where it transcended itself. The knotted pyrotechnics of these final pieces certainly do that—it's actually hard to think of a space where they would work as passive décor. It's just that the direction they transcend decoration towards is the domain of theme parks and Broadway bombast. That is, spectacles built not to savor but to stun, not for connoisseurs but for visitors passing through.

The title of Davis’ essay is “All Style no Substance”. It raises questions about what is substance, what is substantial. The word can be better understood if broken down into “what stands under”. A meditation on what is substantiality and its relation to Stella’s work would be of interest to the connoisseurs and would make an engagement with the work of Stella worth their while if his work were at all engaged in that questioning itself. To savor such a discussion would be to linger, not to pass through.

* an interesting discussion is taking place here: on Henri Art Mag

strange article from 1964 in the New York Times seeing the Nihilism of Stella https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/16/archives/the-new-nihilism-art-versus-feeling.html

The New Realism:Ananian, Deyab, Lee and Mugar

I am not talking about Realist art per se, although a realist painter will be included in my discussion, but an attitude toward life that is realistic. I first touched on this in my critique of the Boston Art Scene and the Marathon bombings. I had just finished up a show in Boston that winter with Paul Pollaro. I had not shown in Boston since 2007, so it was a re-acquaintance with the Boston art world. The then current Boston art scene seemed to me to be more interested in providing well-crafted objects and weak sentimentality than with trying to understand the depths of the world we live in. Just the ripples on the surface not the powerful forces that shape that surface.  The political elite’s reaction to the Bombings later that Spring seemed to say that they had rather support a veneer of meaning, propped up by platitudes, than deal clearly with the nature of the world that produced such horror. In the case of the Marathon deaths, the political class brought out the big guns to channel Boston’s enthusiasm for sports so as to heal an emotionally rattled city overcome by this tragedy. It all reeked of Babbitry.

I recall in high school working late one night on an essay on "Moby Dick". I could not figure out the mystery of it all and the solution of a mystery seemed to be essential to the book and to writing a successful essay. Who is Ahab, what drives him? How do we function is a world shaped by mad leaders? It seemed ridiculous to hand in a paper that left the big questions unanswered.  I am sure that most of my classmates could have cared less. I remember going to bed at midnight, the night before the paper was due, somewhat disheartened with my unresolved essay, only to wake up a few hours later with an insight into the problem. It lay in the “Try Works” chapter. Recently, because I couldn’t remember what the chapter was about , I googled the title of the chapter.  I was not surprised it was a meditation on the need for perseverance and faith as one passes through the dark night of evil and sorrow, captured by the patterns of fire and smoke spewing from the rendered flesh of a freshly killed whale. “There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” says Ishmael. How do we navigate that distinction? It made me think of Clint Eastwood in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” who hovers between the two woes; one a wisdom born of sorrow; the other a kind of madness, akin to Ahab’s?

All I have reread at this point is that chapter but I am astonished how much there is to unpack in each sentence. The end of the short chapter describes Ishmael’s realization that he has been steering the Peqoud ass-backwards and is close to capsizing the whole boat for me is a searing image of an upside down topsy-turvy world full of mistakes that are combined to weave the fabric of reality itself.

 

"Victim "2014 Deyab

There are a handful artists, and I will include myself , who are emotionally robust enough to look at the shape of things and depict them accurately. I think the key to their way of thinking and feeling is an ability to see things in context: a kind of intuition of the whole or a knack at seeing what “is” in the context of the unseen. Larry Deyab at first glance can appear to be a so hip and contemporary with his preferred use of spray paint, photographic journalistic source material and a Richard Prince sense of the edit and erasure. But his art embraces a totally un-contemporary sense of horror more akin to Goya than Prince as he responds to the ongoing chaos of the Middle East. His preferred media of spray paint provides an identification with the lives of the victims who have been reduced to poverty and terror and if asked to paint their condition could not go the a fine art store to buy brushes. It conveys a sense of urgency and identifies with the victims with the brush of urban anger,spray paint. His subject matter heretofore dealt the Arab-Israeli conflict, now stands aghast before the unwillingness of the Western powers to engage in the Syrian conflict that is moving rapidly toward genocidal proportions: Images of blind fate, the hammer of doom. Victim and victimizer. The emotions go beyond the photo journalistic source of the images but seem more akin to some generational and macabre dance of evil.

 

"Sargasso Sea," Mugar 1997

Excess is at the heart of these conflicts. Over the top annihilation of the opposition, a fury that knows no boundaries. Confronting and engaging this aspect of life and death is not something easily achieved with Realism, nor with Abstraction for that matter. I attempted to engage these issues in my work from the late Nineties, shown at Crieger-Dane in Boston and has remained an issue that seems to escape the critics. Or maybe they see it but it is that very notion of excess that puts them off. Somewhere in my career I lost any desire to make art as a vehicle of self-expression. The Neo-Expressionism of the 80’s seemed to be the last gasp of that self-centered version that came out of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s.I wanted a language that would embody the state of things of things as they are. Things as they are swimming in a sea of forces bigger than themselves. But also as inevitably forced into conflict with each other. The titles of the work gave them away: “Mackerel Crowded sea “,”Sargasso Sea”, “Footprints”. The first title is taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, a poem that establishes a sharp contrast between the modern reality of man as swarm and a more god based hierarchy that lends a ground of eternity to our individual existence. “Sargasso Sea” created in my mind a sort of organic island without substance that houses enumerable species….”Footprints” imagines a larger force squashing lesser forces. The latter title and painting is no permission for this sort of oppression but a rather sang-froid description of academic politics. I have always felt that the sadism that we love to imagine is so far from our day-to-day lives virulently in the perverse little politics of the world we work in.

 

"Self Portrait" Ananian

Mike Ananian’s realism evokes implicitly a kind of male stoicism that reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”: the life of someone who has to get up for work each morning to fulfill his sales quota, whether there is pleasant background music or not. I also think of Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”, where real estate brokers driven by the Darwinian will to prevail, are capable of undercutting their colleagues, selling questionable properties and committing  crime. There is no room for humor or grace, only the hope that their life of struggle has some heroic meaning. The characters in Ananian’s portraits seem to carry their faces like Roman portrait busts without any halo of divinity.

"Helmet" by Billy Lee

They are strangely reminiscent of his UNC-G colleague Billy Lee’s sculptures of heroic hoplite heads. Guardian’s and sentinels that are eye-less. They don’t observe anymore; they have been reduced to pure will. They are holding their ground full of a contained phallic fury.

Maybe my work and the work of Deyab, Lee and Ananian is lacking in irony, the staple of contemporary art. We are  not fetishistic in the creation of our art objects, just forcing our images to remind the viewer of the hardness of survival. No bromides, no fatuous statements about commodification. This work is not fun. No matter how hard we try to create fantasies about the human condition and leaders and gurus to fulfill them we can’t escape the grim reality of conflict.