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.

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?