I have been an abstract painter for about 25 years, and have taught painting and drawing to undergraduates for almost as long.
From both perspectives, I have concluded that painting, in terms of its influence on contemporary culture, has been marginalized -- it is a wallflower at the postmodern art party. Take a prominent example of painting’s situation as we approach the 21st century: The lists of last year’s finalists for the contemporary art world’s two Oscar-like awards -- the Turner Prize, in Britain, and the Hugo Boss Prize, handed out by the Guggenheim Museum -- included not a single painter. In fact, among many artists, painters and non-painters alike, it is quietly acknowledged that painting’s impact on the culture is nil. Painting is seen as, at best, an esoteric activity for a few diehards. At worst, it is considered destructively elitist, a part of the “oppressor culture” of dead white European males. The general public -- attached to movies, television, and computers -- barely registers painting as having anything relevant to say. The only question left is whether there is any audience at all for painting and, if there is, how to preserve it. This essay is a defense of abstract painting, the most difficult to understand and seemingly irrelevant kind of painting that exists. By limiting my subject to abstract painting -- which focuses on structure and builds an entire flat reality from color, surface, shape, traces of the hand, mistakes, and changes -- I can best address the question of why anyone should continue to make paintings, when so many more visually powerful media are available. In defending abstract painting, I must first toss overboard some excess baggage. I take as my model the iconoclastic abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, who thought that the claims of the other Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and ‘50s amounted to poppycock. To give painting back its dignity, he set forth, both in his own paintings and in a series of “dogmatic” statements, exactly what abstract painting is not. Allow me, in the spirit of Ad Reinhardt, to set forth my own list of what abstract painting is not: * First, abstract painting is not a vehicle for social or political change, even if its pioneers thought it was. Today, even more than in Reinhardt’s day, if even a figurative painter paints a picture that argues a particular social or political point of view, its impact -- in a society flooded with books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, movies, television, video, and computers -- is ridiculously small. The possibilities are even fewer with abstract painting. * Second, abstract painting is not avant-garde. It was in 1915, but it isn’t anymore. In terms of its ability to shock anybody -- the rallying cry of the now-defunct avant-garde -- painting today is feeble when compared with the power of the media mentioned above. * Third, abstract painting has never been, and most likely never will be, widely popular. Yes, its pioneers -- Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian -- all held utopian hopes for its universal appeal, but they were proved poignantly wrong. Abstract painting turned out to be too subtle, too self-referential, too slow, too demanding of the viewer’s patience, and too easy to poke fun at ever to attract a mass audience. * Finally, abstract painting cannot offer much of what we call Deep Hidden Meaning, in the way that religion or philosophy can. Put bluntly, abstract painting cannot provide a substitute for God -- the loss of whom is the earmark of modernism. Indeed, the ability of abstract painting to move people at all is much weaker than that of other arts, such as music, theater, novels, or poetry. On the other hand -- to continue in a more moderate, but no less passionate spirit than that of Reinhardt -- here’s what abstract painting can do: * First, it offers what I’ll call Little Hidden Meaning. To a viewer who can look at a still image (for some, a difficult prospect), and who is knowledgeable enough to place an abstract painting in the context of modern art as a whole, abstract painting offers a de facto philosophical point of view on life. There is a mistaken notion, coming from our lingering attachment to Romanticism and from our own narcissistic age, that abstraction is always about self-expression. In the broadest sense it is, of course, but it is also about ideas -- the complex struggle between order and chaos, for example, or how the flux of the organic world modifies the rigor of geometry. * Second, abstract painting can enable us to be quiet. In the 1989 French movie The Little Thief, a character brought a roomful of people dancing wildly to rock ‘n’ roll to a standstill by bellowing at them to be quiet so that he and his wife could dance a slow waltz. Abstract painting makes for a quiet room in the arts, allowing for a slow waltz. * Third, abstract art offers a counter to our society’s glut of things. An abstract painting is itself a thing, of course, a part of the material world. But it reminds people of a world without things. It suggests the old idea, now barely remembered, that there might be a hidden, underlying order, which the transience of life’s things can’t affect. * Fourth, abstract painting is often, quite simply, beautiful -- although that assertion is subject to tremendous dispute. Artists from the birth of modernism on have substituted the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of beauty -- truth in perception, truth in form, truth in materials. Many artists -- rightly -- are suspicious of the very idea of the beautiful, because it so easily petrifies into some rigid standard. Once locked into place, “beauty” obliterates the wide array of subtle variations within it. In addition, politics surrounds beauty, making the subject difficult to discuss directly: For many, notions of the beautiful are simply “cultural constructs,” used by dominant cultures to suppress “the Other.” Most problematic of all, folded up and hidden within the notion of beauty are conflicting values. Beauty implies an inequality in the way things look. If there is beauty, there is ugliness, and everything else in between. That kind of ranking offends our democratic sense of justice, because we moderns have defined justice as that which most closely approximates equality. But some people can’t help their “elitist,” or meritocratic, impulses when it comes to aesthetics, and are struck dumb by how utterly beautiful an abstract painting can be. * A fifth virtue of abstract painting is that it is not a story, particularly not one from the most readily accessible side of culture, which is all stories. We are bombarded by endless stories -- in television shows, advertisements, novels, movies, and virtual-reality games. We are constantly teaching and preaching, persuading and dissuading, by means of telling stories. Picking up on that aspect of our culture, many non-abstract painters have inserted stories, or “narratives,” into their paintings. But abstract painting resists narration and presents itself all at once, as a whole or a oneness that cannot, and never will, tell a story. * A final virtue of abstract painting is its very uncamera-like, uncomputer-like nature. The camera is so powerful that many people have reached the point where they can see the world only photographically or cinematically, and have lost the ability to see it in other ways. Before long, people will see the world only digitally. What abstract painting offers us at the end of the 20th century is, in sum, a useless non-story, a non-blinking “thereness,” without reference to anything other than itself and its own tradition. It defies translation into data, information, entertainment, rational image, or any kind of narrative. It presents an ineffable balance of sensation, experience, and knowledge. In the midst of a world in which everything we see is morphing into something else, abstract painting is one of the few things left that allow us to see the possibility of something’s remaining constant. If what I am saying about the virtues of abstract painting is true, then why isn’t there more interest in this art? It won’t do to begin listing all the abstract painters around, because the point is that few people pay much attention to them, compared with either figurative artists in general, or new-media artists working with video and sound installations. Yes, abstract painters still exist, but they are an aging lot, for the most part ignored. More worrisome is the seeming absence of a new generation of young and passionate abstract painters. How is it that abstract painting, a major player in most of 20th-century art, has arrived at this sorry point, where it is barely a contender? And how is it that painting in general, not just abstract painting, has arrived at this point? I suggest that the answer is rooted in two irrevocable changes that took place in the 19th century: First, the invention of photography, in 1839, and second, the general upheaval in philosophy. The invention of photography allowed anybody, even someone who had no drawing or painting skills, to fix an image of the real world onto a flat surface quickly and accurately. The painter suddenly seemed irrelevant and slow in his method of replicating the appearance of reality. More important, photography threw into question the whole raison d’etre of painting. For if the camera was recording the world objectively through light rays bouncing off objects, then painting, by comparison, looked subjective, even fictive. If painters couldn’t compete with the camera in mimicking reality, they would assert an alternative objective truth: All individual perceptions are true -- at least to the perceiver -- and therefore equally valid. Impressionist artists in the 1870s and 1880s, for all their stylistic differences, shared the conviction that it was the individual artist’s vision that was objectively true. Telling the truth about individual perception (Impressionism) quickly broadened to become telling the truth about individual feelings (Expressionism), reaffirming the fact that a major shift had occurred. That fundamental change in outlook changed the look of art in the modern age. It was a change from aesthetic effect, which relied on artifice -- that is, faking, telling lies -- to aesthetic intent, which relied on telling the truth, understood by artists as being sincere. But what -- in this kaleidoscope of individual “truths” -- would become of beauty? After Darwin and Freud, artists didn’t concern themselves with beauty anymore, except as a byproduct, or an aside, as they manipulated and played with form. Philosophy tried to come forth with a solution. It would protect beauty by separating it from destructive scientific analysis, and leave it alone as a “subjective” judgment. Philosophy yielded its primary position as objective interpreter of the world to science. Science then broke loose, leaving everything else behind, including poor philosophy, as subjective rubble. That rubble reconstituted itself as the stuff of relativism -- the idea that moral and aesthetic judgments are subject to continual flux. Relativism had been around at least since Plato, of course, but the modern age marked the victory of the relativist position. The relativist reply to practically any pretension to universal truth, beauty, or authority is, in effect, “Oh, yeah?” The hatchet man of relativism is irony. To condense an awful lot of the history of 20th-century art into one sentence: The past 80 years have consisted essentially of a battle between the ironists, who have reveled in the impossibility of universal truths, and the holdout universalists, who’ve tried to reconstruct classical philosophical truths in a modern visual language. In other words, it’s been Duchamp versus Mondrian. And Duchamp is the winner -- although more by forfeit than by knockout. It took Duchamp a while to win -- until the 1960s. Until then, when Pop Art burst Abstract Expressionism’s bubble, it had been coasting on its inflated reputation; at that point, Pop Art sprouted from the smart, witty seed that Duchamp had planted a half-century earlier. By simultaneously mocking and celebrating the modern culture of “stuff,” Pop made the abstract painter’s self-absorbed retreat look both elitist and silly. To be sure, Pop Art consisted mainly of paintings on canvas. But they were self-destructive. Pop Art’s implied message was that it was the appropriated images that counted -- the Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe -- and not the way in which paint was put on the canvas. Painting had always been profoundly centered on the artist’s touch, but now painting concerned the content or image. Since World War II, our culture has steadily evolved into what we identify as “mass culture” -- one in which millions of people’s interests are simultaneously and speedily gratified through popular music, movies, sports, and celebrities. Fewer and fewer people care any longer about the strange, slow activity called painting. Beginning in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, young artists, drawn to the new art forms of installation, performance, and video art, abandoned painting in droves. They had grown up with TV and rock ‘n’ roll; they were hip, smart, and sharp; they understood and embraced the seductiveness and power of popular culture, and they wanted in on it. We have now arrived at a division in the art world: hip and trendy on the one hand, reclusive and out-of-it on the other. How can abstract painters who want to have an impact on their culture continue in the face of that? First, they must aggressively separate themselves from popular culture, rather than strive to be bit players. Abstract painters have to become, philosophically speaking, difficult and cantankerous, because to survive, they must reassert the distinction -- discredited by postmodernists -- between “high” art and “low” art. They must reargue the case for high art -- an art requiring a subtle, sensitive, experienced, and even exceptional viewer. Abstract artists are making paintings that cannot be understood by everyone. They need to admit that to find meaning in abstract painting takes some work, and even some help. And abstract painters ought to celebrate loudly, rather than apologize for, the convention-bound nature of their artwork. These artists work within a rectangle, they use paint on canvas, and they follow a century of developed traditions of abstract painting. The revolution itself -- the early-modern moment that invented abstraction -- must have been electrifying, but that moment is forever over. For contemporary abstract painters and their viewers, the experience is profoundly different from what it was for their revolutionary forebears. Abstract art is a quiet pleasure rather than a dizzying thrill. The conventions are established, just as in baseball, and to derive pleasure from abstraction requires accepting its basic rules rather than continuously deconstructing them. Yes, abstract art is elitist, and abstract artists should be up-front about that. But you don’t have to stop loving The X-Files or the fights to understand and like abstract art. Nor do you have to be a white male of European royal blood. Yes, it is a product of European culture, but so are airplanes, computers, penicillin, and this essay. There are abstract painters, and patrons of abstract painting, of all races and both sexes. Today, many, if not most, young artists trying to get a rung up on the art-world ladder don’t care one whit about painting or its tradition in Western history. In fact, other than the fashion for discovering one’s “roots,” they are not interested in seeing history as something to belong to, or to be a part of, or to carry forward. Although many young, non-white artists indeed refer to their racial heritage in their art, the issue for them is more identity than aesthetics. The point is, most young artists (whatever their race or sex) prefer to see history, especially art history, as a massive amount of information that at times is useful for rummaging around in for ironic references, but which mostly is a pain in the neck and best left ignored. If we pull back from the abyss of Nietzsche’s picture of our modern condition, we can take from him one workable premise: It is history, used correctly, that separates us from the lives of dogs, cats, and cows. But what, exactly, is the correct use of history? People today distrust it. They want to know who’s doing the telling and why, because they are convinced that knowledge is a smokescreen for power. Unfortunately, however, it is only when the sincere, non-ironic use of visual history is coupled with the particular desire to make images that the young artist, in particular, can learn the visual language of painted abstract images and the meaning of abstract painting. No matter what, some people -- even some artists -- will never “get” abstract painting, for reasons that range from their belief that all art is political to their poor visual aptitude. In the end, abstract painting is going to attract an audience more likely to read the Aeneid in Latin than to watch Sarah McLachlan on MTV. But small as its audience may be, abstract painting can, indeed, say something about contemporary culture. As a colleague of mine from Hofstra University, the late Michael Gordon (himself a painter), often argued, it sets up a powerful moral parallel to the way in which we lead our lives. Abstract painters don’t start their paintings in a vacuum. Rather, they build on the foundation of historical abstraction. Individual paintings are the result of an accumulation of errors, wrong turns, corrections, and resolutions. Abstract painters paint the way we all lead our lives -- building on and rebelling against the givens and the choices, the purposeful actions and the accidents. An abstract painting, then, offers the perfect visual metaphor for life. George Orwell said that every man at 50 has the face he deserves. In virtual time and space, there is no 50-year-old face. Everything is a toggle choice that wipes out the previous smiles or frowns and obliterates “bad” or “wrong” choices. In a computer image, of course, there no longer exists even the concept of a mistake, since all evidence of it is simultaneously retrievable and destroyable. When we take away the ability to make a real mistake in art, one that can’t be wiped out, the final image has no wrinkles. It carries only a thin, stiff veneer, like the continuously lifted, stretched faces of 65-year-old Park Avenue matrons. At a glance, those ladies look quite fine. But a longer look yields blankness. It is through our errors and, indeed, our sins, both in art and in life, that we gain the capacity for innovative improvisation and possible redemption. Before modernism, painting was the noise in the culture, because it attracted attention. Now, the culture is the noise, and painting -- especially abstract painting -- attracts little attention, either in the culture at large or in the art world. Today, abstract painting’s saving virtue is that it offers us quiet, not noise. There is indeed a cultural crisis at the end of the 20th century: the continuous flux of everything, and the death of stillness. Abstract painting cannot change our culture, but neither can installation art, computer art, nor new-media attempts at appropriation, no matter how smart and savvy they are. Those art forms that appropriate the popular media are doomed to look forever pale in comparison to them, or worse, to be sucked down into their vast black hole. The power of abstract painting is this: It is a world beautifully separate from our postmodern, materialistic, morphing, ironic, hip age. Laurie Fendrich is an associate professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. http://chronicle.com |
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