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?

The nihilist condition and provisional painting a la Rubinstein

Flannery O’Conner stated that you could not understand the modern world without understanding nihilism’s central role in moving and shaping modernity.  She said it was the air we breathed. As a Catholic I assume she felt that we cannot base the way we live on either the positivism of science or superficial societal strictures of what is good and bad. I am not very knowledgeable about Catholic doctrine but I know unlike the Protestants they believe in original sin and from what I recall of St Augustine’s “Confessions” you can only overcome it through the grace of God. To say that we are all nihilists is tantamount to saying we start out our lives as fallen from grace.

That a devout Catholic living in the conservative 1950’s South should find herself as Andy Warhol’s intellectual bedfellow only proves the pervasiveness of the nihilistic strains that permeate our world. These nihilistic experiences seem to hit us from different directions but genealogically have the same origin. Warhol’s fame as an artist was due to his understanding of the role that mass media played in our perception of self; that we are no longer individuals relating to a small community but have been abducted by alien forces as it were into the universe of the electronic media. If O’Conner can acknowledge the nihilism of society and express its fallenness, then could it be said that Warhol shares with her the same sense of our fallen condition and sees our mediated condition as a false transcendence?

So how to connect the dots that place O’Conner and Warhol in the same nihilistic world? Warhol picked up that mass media provides a sort of transcendence to the ordinary. On the one hand to be lifted up out of one’s existence and forced into the media is like being reborn in the human condition, a double dose of nihilism and fallenness. The fifteen minutes of fame implies transcendence of our mortal coils but only for a moment before we fall back into the banal. Is Warhol a theologian
of banality?

When I wrote about Guyton and Kassay, in my article on Zombie Art, who produce ice-cold replicas of High Modernist art, I detected that the only way to get a grasp on these artist’s success was to see the correspondence between the nihilist air we breathe and their total lack of anxiety about being a simulacrum of another person’s style. I threw in some gratuitous rhetorical flourishes, that painted these artists as being a sort of cultural dead end. But if you are a nihilist then dead ends are where you want to be. Especially when you take Stella’s work, which is part of the scientifically based positivist strain of modernism that looks for building blocks, “sine qua non”s and relation of parts to the whole, and then bleed it dry so that the copy is a pale memory of the original. What is intriguing is that there are contemporary artists who paint images similar to Guyton, but who are descendants of the positivist line of Held, Stella and de Kooning. David Row and Craig Stockwell are two artists who come to mind. In the case of Row his work has its origins in Held and de Kooning. In Stockwell I see Brice Marden. I think they want the viewer to visually and intellectually experience an event, a movement of rhythms in time and space, painting that still captures the energy, like the events  that are caught on an x ray in a scientific experience. It is very Aristotelian. Concepts like energy, time and movement are crucial to their self-understanding. 

 

Dave Row

Craig Stockwell

But the art scene moves quickly and although these descendants of High Modernism are successful, they are not at the center of the cultural radar. The name of Raphael Rubinstein comes up often as an apologist for a new movement he calls “Provisional Painting”. Around the end of the last decade, he noticed a distinct artistic style, when he made the rounds of galleries and artist’s studios in New York. It was abstract (Mary Heilmann, Aldrich), mildly ironic(Christopher Wool) and unabashedly derivative (Stanley Whitney) and in no way wanted to surpass its influences. He curated a show on the abstraction of the 80's this past year at Cheim and Read to convey that this movement was more than just a recent phenomena, but had its antecedent  in the work of for example Joan Snyder and Jonathan Lasker, although some  such as Snyder are incredibly earnest and only look provisional. I suspect, that like Greenberg’s ideas on abstraction in the Fifties, it got codified and became a self -fulfilling prophecy, where the artists outside of the movement (if you can call it that) start to think that this is the new wave to emulate and its ideas begin to infect the academy and its MFA mills.

Stephen Mueller

What I find astonishing is there is no reference to nihilism in the samples of his writing, that have appeared on line. If he had read Vattimo, a contemporary Italian philosopher, who came up with the notion of "weak thought" or "weak ontology", he would have understood the NY scene deductively, so that what was happening in NY, was already part of the nihilistic universe that Flannery O’Conner observed. The post–modern condition has its source in Nietzsche’s vision that God is dead, which takes on more meaning if you see that he also sees that metaphysics or any vision of the world where there are absolute truths is dead. However, as a hermeneutician, Vattimo thinks that thought is backward looking as well as forward looking, so that it will never abandon the metaphysical tradition completely. The metaphysical past will always haunt us as something that is still embedded in our language and institutions. Is not this what is happening with “Provisional Painting”? The edict, that was handed down from on high that painting is dead, meant that painting as embodying metaphysical absolutes was past. But can we stop painting? Can we stop interpreting the past? Is the will to say something about one’s experience of the world at an end and is not abstraction in its manifestations in the 20^th century full of bits and pieces of language that we can “bricole” with. You don’t have to espouse the absolutism of Held or Stella to borrow from their playbook. Vattimo says that traces of that metaphysics linger that are absolutely crucial to our existence. We can still believe in the power of the self to envision the world without espousing a powerful sense of Being and Truth, hence “weak ontology”.

 

Mary Heilmann

Jonathan Lasker

I think working inductively creates problems for Rubenstein, when he tries to extrapolate back to Matisse, Bonnard and Giacometti the provisionality of his acolytes. He sees an erasure in Matisse and assumes he is only problematizing what he is doing. But Matisse’s work grew out of a quest for scientific truth, where color has power to push and pull optically. He created positive visual events as does Row and Stockwell, and, if he erases something, it is only to bring him closer on his path to a cognitive whole. Genealogically, the late cutouts of Matisse lead right into Rothko and on to the minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly. Giacometti struggles to pin things down from his existential point in space .The more he tries to capture what he sees, the further away it moves from him. Nothing provisional about that. He is a phenomenologist of the experience of man under the Lacanian gaze of the other. The world provisional sounds so flaccid. How can you not feel the deep anxiety and sense of failure in Giacometti’s work? Some of the contemporary artists thrown into this bag of provisionalism tell Rubinstein there is nothing provisional about their work. But little of Giacometti’s angst is to be seen in the artists that Rubinstein espouses. Vattimo’s “weak thought” would be a perfect concept to encapsulate where painting is in Rubinstein’s provisional world. Vattimo sees a weak connection to Being in a positive light as a sort of enlightened nihilism. As in Richard Rorty’s world, we at best bounce off of each other interpretively and creatively, to establish horizons of meaning without insisting that our values are superior.  Vattimo even claims that these are the characteristics of Nietzsche's Superman. When taken in the context of what Malcolm Bull sees as Vattimo’s misunderstanding of Nietzsche, we can see that the problem with provisionalist painting today is the ironic weakness it espouses.

 

Schnable and Aldrich

For Nietzsche interpretation is evidence of the will to power.” It is a means of becoming the master of something.” Bull says: ”Interpretive failure occurs when someone  ‘no longer has the strength to interpret’ for ‘exhaustion changes the aspect of things, the value of things’. For Nietzsche interpretation and value creation are inseparable. Whereas the strong ‘involuntarily give to things and see them fuller, more powerful and pregnant with future… the exhausted diminish and botch all they see-they impoverish the value’. It is hard to knock a movement that controls the gallery scene and gets top dollar for its work, but it is only in the context of galleries with high ceilings that the work takes on any heft. 

 

Stanley Whitney

In a “Brooklyn Rail” interview Rubinstein sees the provisional movement as a reaction to the slickness of work by Currin, Koons and Murakami. I have observed this sort of reactive event in the New York scene several times over. Chuck Close comes to New York looking to stand out from the minimalist crowd, and, according to  an urban legend, espouses photorealism as a means to this goal. Neo- Expressionists react to minimalism and some of them like Schnable survive to be part of the provisionalist reaction to world wide corporate slickness. So it goes the agonic battle between generations. To know that it all functions under the umbrella of nihilism would be a good critical tool that would help critics understand the different strains of nihilism and maybe put the fire in the belly of the next generation to overcome the shadow it casts on all we do.

Snyder

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Zombie Formalism:the lingering life of abstraction in New York that just wont die

Durer using grid to draw

In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s  “The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Tugendhat and other 20^th c philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of Western metaphysics.  First Charles Taylor in a heading states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model, and its basic error is to construe consciousness as a relation to an object.”  The author in the first paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: ”….the subject as starting point, just as orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective communication in language the new universal system of reference.” A few paragraphs later he says: ”The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.”

Wade Guyton

It is interesting to unpack this in relation to the transition to abstraction at the beginning  of the last century, and in particular a rather recent recycle of minimalism that is cropping up in New York galleries and has received an imprimatur by the Whitney with a mid-career show of Wade Guyton, one of its practitioners. It provides an insight into the endless politics of suspicion that permeate so much of Western Culture over the last century and in particular painting. The ambition for the thinkers quoted above is to liberate our consciousness from a subjectively based consciousness that for various reasons is beholden to visuality. The first manifestation of this subjectivity or the “mental eye” was first seen in the realism that commenced in the Renaissance with the use of perspective and then in the Baroque with chiaroscuro. It reigned confidently over painting until the end of the 19^th century. This mental eye was built out of clear notion of a strong subject, that shaped via a scientific understanding of perceptual processes, the world that surrounded the artist. The imposition of the gaze of the individual on what surrounded him seemed to parallel the thymotic excesses of Western Civilization as it objectified via science and capitalism the whole world. The image of the conquistador Aguirre in Herzog’s classic film “Aguirre, the Anger of God” descending the Amazon and conquering solely with his imperious gaze all that he surveyed is probably the most emblematic image for me of this attitude. A rather powerful bit of information to support this notion of Western consciousness is that the perspectival system of the Versailles gardens radiated from the bed of Louis the XIV.  Sartre has a lot to say about the withering gaze of his grandfather, who was an old world authoritarian type. The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 20th century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s “Downcast Eyes”. To make his point about the domination of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating insight and mirroring.

Grotjahn

Zabala goes on to say: “If the old philosophy only referred to what could be seen clearly, the new philosophy refers only to what can be clearly communicated.” Rorty and others call this transformation: the “Linguistic Turn”.  Science required that objects be placed under the scrutiny of the researcher and submit to the scientific method.  A strange amalgam of suspicion and arrogance worked together in a mighty cabal to turn the world inside out. A naive acceptance of the world as it is presented on a day-to-day basis was replaced by a vision that the world must be founded on a more solid basis through the power of logos. The world became transformed into a series of topics: geology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, grammatology etc.

The first crack in that stranglehold on the real appeared in the phenomenological studies of Husserl and Heidegger. Heidegger has a phrase that always carried a lot of significance for me: “always already”. If we act on the world in a certain way, we are always already in it as a participant with other people using a language that we did not create. The pure cogito was immediately problematized. Our relation to things is not one of subject to object, but a more shared engaged reality of being in the world. His word for that reality was “Dasein”, which roughly translates as “being there.”

This became the start of a hundred years of philosophers trying to decenter the scientific gaze by deconstructing the language of metaphysics, with each new generation of philosophers accusing the previous one of still being subject to it. Wittgenstein added to this deconstruction by moving our focus away from the metaphysical to an analysis of how we use language in the real world. During the most recent era of French Deconstruction one adjective that you didn’t want attached to your ideas was “logo-centric”. Initially, the problem was that behind the strong ego was the belief in God as the origin of everything in a well-ordered universe, which still supported Descartes rationality. After that everything logical was perceived to be just a trace of that divine belief system, which had to be expunged from wherever in our language it was still hiding. And of course it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.

Sarah Morris

I got off on this tangent after reading John Yau write in“HyperAllergic” about what he called the latest “look” in Abstraction. The work of its practitioners, Morris, Guyton and Kassay looks very much like the Abstraction of Stella, Reinhardt and Kelly, which is decidedly logo-centric. Greenbergian ideas about reducing forms to basic elements and constructing abstract realities went hand and hand with the positivists who believed in the superiority of mathematical language over the language of poets and mystics. “What you see is what you get” Stella is purported to have said. The early spirituality of Rothko and Mondrian is gone. These artists are laconic macho painters. They give you the least amount of what might be construed to be a painting and then pull up the ladder behind them. I suspect that this paring down of painting to simple terms embodies in some manner the analytic analysis of language, which reduces language to its grammatical elements and then submits it to validity tests. They want to see how painting functions as shapes on a wall. Or as they loved to say in grad school: does it work.

Already Yau, who is not a fan of these artists, does accept the premise that we should not go back to the days of the gigantomachia of Gorky and de Kooning. And there may be some truth that this generation of artists is too imbued with the culture of deconstruction to attempt to overcome Kelley, Stella and Reinhardt or in the case of Kassay, Ryman, at least on their own terms. Something else is going on here: There seems to be a need to push painting toward something totally inert, that could be simply part of a common language, no longer power-laden as the last word of something irreducible, which was the goal of Kelly, Reinhardt and the early Stella. The work of these artists becomes as common as money, just a token of exchange, like baseball cards. By shifting the terms of painting away from any lingering notion of being an object and pushing it into the realm of language and in the case of Guyton producing the painting mechanically with an inkjet printer, sets the painting free from its roots in science and objectification.

Jacob Kassay

If the influence of Tugendhat and analytic philosophy is as pervasive as I think it is, the primacy of language theory would give permission to this generation to take painting further down the road to just words and sentences. Rorty who had his role in this winding down of the metaphysical, critiques Heidegger because “he treats language as a brooding presence rather than as a string of marks and noise emitted by organisms and used by them to coordinate their behavior.”

Heidegger placed importance on the ignored copula “is” that we use without acknowledging its role in grounding our day-to-day use of language in something more numinous. It backgrounds it and in poetry approaches the foreground. In the case of our contemporary practitioners of abstraction it has been excised.

These works of art look like paintings, act like painting but on closer inspection are as bloodless and lifeless as zombies. That the New York culture allows this kind of painting to rise to the top is no surprise: the New York financial world is known for creating zombie loans and the NY Fed has succeeded in creating a zombie economy.

Simone Weil said that culture moves in grand arcs either ascending  or descending. Assuming the movement is down, could it be we have reached the bottom?

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References to this article on line and in hard copy:

Raphael Rubinstein references my role in coining the notion of Zombie Formalism in paragraph 19 in this article in "Art in America", another reference to the sequence of events here: About:Content, Another reference:capscripts, and  at Paint This Desert and most recently on Hyperallergic

Question appeared on Jeopardy! noticed by Jerry Saltz who helped propagate the notion of Zombie Formalism
although he still claims that Robinson coined it.

Miklos Legrady at critic at New Art Examiner Chicago

Link to by my book on Amazon

Notice the correlation of Zombie art to Zombie Economy

nice interview on my ideas on ZF by Miles Hall

reference to my coining of ZF on page 7 in presentation by Marisa Lerer and Conor McGarrigle Art in the Age of Financial Crisis