When I first stumbled into the "Revivalism" of Abstract
Painting in NY via an article by Alan Pocaro on Provisional painting in the
British art blog “Abstract Critical”, I must admit it was a breath of fresh air
to see that installation and conceptual art were not the only art being produced
in the City. It led to my writing about provisional painting and becoming
embroiled in the labeling of Zombie Formalism. Since the early 2000’s I have
been laboring on my non-representational painting in New England and found few
fellow travelers in this cultural backwater with whom to share my ideas. Last year
I gathered together two former students, who work abstractly, Paul Pollaro and
Jason Travers, a friend Addison Parks, whose work I had followed since we first
showed together at Creiger -Dane in Boston and Susan Carr, who once showed with
me and Addison in group show at Creiger-Dane. I had hoped I would succeed in
drawing some attention to our work as a sort of Northern outpost of what was
happening in NY. Addison had attempted something similar but more comprehensive
in Boston in the late 90’s with a group show at Joyce Creiger’s gallery in which
he included his work, Susan Carr's and my work side by side with the an earlier generation of artists
including Richard Tuttle, Porfirio DiDonna, Louise Fishman, Leon Polk Smith and Milton Resnick. The
show called “Severed Ear” attempted to define a trail of abstraction that was
deconstructive of the authoritative work of the Modernist ethos in the same way
as provisional painting but with less focus on irony and more of a focus on the
lived life of emotions.
Notions of authority keep cropping up in regards to the
evolution or devolution of abstraction. Where did this sense of High Modernism
being incontrovertible come from, so as to become a lodestone that would
define an unassailable high point in American art. In a slugfest with the
English sculptor Robin Greenwood on Mark Stone’s Henri Art magazine, we both agreed
that there was something lacking in the contemporary iterations of modernism. He
thought Matisse was hard to surpass and I was more sympathetic to the work of
the Minimalists. The discussion revolved around notions of spatiality and its
lack in Provisionalism and Zombie art. Robin seemed to think that spatiality
is crucial to great painting. In my attempts to grapple with these issues I
recalled a notion of eidetic reduction from my readings of Husserl. In this philosophers
attempt to ground our perceptual world in something solid, he focused on the
apprehension of the outside world in our mind. It was very Cartesian and is
something that comes to mind when I get my hearing tested and I am asked to
distinguish pure sounds. In a hearing test we scientifically
break the web of hearing and cognition into its separate parts and define its
ranges in order to evaluate the condition of the auditory organ. It is similar
to the way that abstraction breaks down the visual world into pure colors with
ranges from warm to cool, grounded in our retinal view of seeing. The world is
captured and analyzed in our reduced apperceptions of it. I think it was this
connection between science as the only true knowledge and art at mid-century
that hoisted abstraction to its cultural centrality. To paraphrase Hegel’s words: abstract art was the century captured in thought.
 |
| Petersen |
If the hold on art by science is so total then we have to
see any attempt to break that hold as being dialectically related to it. It is
this dialectical relation, which allows critics to talk about Zombie formalism
for example. There is no inherent value in zombie art except as an attempt to
excise from itself any authoritative metaphysical grounding in knowing and
science. Without science it becomes a pure commodity retaining however its
commercial exchange value. By the same token “Provisionalism”” as defined by
Rubinstein or “Casualism” by Sharon Butler have
value as attempts to break the bonds of aesthetic purity and ironically refer
back to the laid back devalued creator as incapable of any authoritative
statements.
 |
| Behnke |
Abstract art that falls outside of the parameters of
provisional and zombie art I think is often hard to talk about in so far as it
lacks the dialectical relation to classical abstraction. This was the problem
with a show I recently came across on "Painters Table" of abstract art, entitled "If Color Could Kill” that is currently hanging at Vassar College. By
insisting in the title on the aesthetics of color it places itself outside of the commodification of zombie art and the irony of provisional abstraction. Especially in the work of Paul Behnke there
is, in his play of pure color and abstract patterns, an attempt to move back into
the language of Matisse where color relations create aesthetic moods of
pleasure. Few of the other artists are as rigorous in the analysis of color
except for Gary Peterson, who brings an Al Held notion of compressed space
without Held's ambiguity of flat vs deep space. They are both artists who don’t
mind not obscuring their roots. Their influences are obvious as is the case for
the rest of the artists in the show, where for example you see Elizabeth Murray
all over Benson and Moyse. It is good to be influenced and to live with those
influences and see where they take you. How these influences pan out over time
will be interesting to see. But at this point there is none of the anxiety of
influence typical of the struggling young artist and only from what I can see
on line there is a whole lot of shakin and bakin going on.
 |
| Moyse |
