Month: December 2015

‘Tightrope Walk: Painted Images After Abstraction’, North & South Galleries, White Cube Bermondsey

25 November 2015 – 24 January 2016

Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

There are many reasons to put on a group show. It could be to draw attention to a common style, to address a unifying theme, or perhaps the artists, if they are peers, feel a straightforward connection, so why not show together? For new art school graduates there can be strength in numbers. If the show is curated, there may be a conceptual brief. In the latter case however the artists would typically produce work with the concept in mind. Tightrope Walk; Painted Images after Abstraction, is one of those rarer breeds of group show where the individual contributors necessarily play second fiddle to the concept. Barry Schwabsky and White Cube have assembled a concept exhibition featuring some big hitters in painting; both alive and dead. I say featuring, in the knowledge that this word could be misleading. Nobody really features in this show. In fact, to discuss the individual merits of this or that painting in the show would seem to me to be like asking what breed Schrödinger’s cat was. Notwithstanding the fact that I am a huge fan of the paintwork of Picasso, Katz, Tal R and Morandi, amongst other artists in the show, it is hard to imagine an exhibition in which solidly impressive works by these artists seem almost hard to find; such is the homogenising power of the concept behind the show and the way it has been hung.

And that concept is about as big as they get.  The press release speaks of an effort to “…illuminate how the act of making a representational painting became redefined over the past century, following the emergence of abstraction as a competing proposition.” A sizeable selection of “representational painting” has been gathered and hung in such a way that it frustrates (perhaps intentionally) any attempt at comparison between individual works, and also discourages the viewer’s natural instinct to categorise the works according to any hierarchy based on quality, painterly virtuosity, renown or notoriety of the artist, or even based on unmediated visual pleasure. It is difficult to simply sit back and enjoy the painting. And why should we expect to? Clement Greenberg lamented the “laziness” of the public when confronted with what he called “advanced” art and “difficult” artists. (1) In this case it would seem to represent a missed opportunity as much as laziness not to address the concept of the show but to just sit back and admire the paintwork.

Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

A COMPETING PROPOSITION

The tightrope of the show’s title is taken from a quote by the painter Francis Bacon. As a metaphor it suggests the potential for artwork to fall definitively into one of two distinct territories; representation or abstraction. It also implies a narrow space which is almost uninhabitable; at the very least a space in which it requires the greatest level of skill and concentration to remain. Let’s not squeeze Bacon’s observation too tightly however. He was speaking about his own work very specifically and as an image with which we might seek to represent the central concept of this show, it tells us about as much as a ringtone does about the caller. By announcing its concerns to be abstraction and representation the show raises several interesting questions. If there is a space between abstraction and representation, was it always there just waiting to be noticed? If representation and abstraction are indeed two distinct territories, has the latter wrested territory from the former, and if so, is that territory lost forever to abstraction. Is abstraction an improvement on representation? And perhaps most difficult of all; what do we mean by abstraction?

By way of example, with regard to difficulty, let’s take a brief look at just one assessment of the theoretical minefield that is the territory of abstraction. Andrew Benjamin discusses abstraction via Clement Greenberg, who was averse to lyrical obfuscation when it came to interpreting artworks. As Benjamin notes, Greenberg’s reading of abstraction, albeit mainly limited to Abstract Expressionism, took as its starting point this type of painting’s immediacy to the viewer. The question of temporality was critical to Greenberg’s opinion of what constitutes an abstract painting. “The time of viewing is linked to the object maintaining and thus containing a single temporality, a temporality that would be united in the act of sheer presentation.” (2)  In other words, we no longer have to spend time, even seconds, chasing a narrative or a reference to something external to the painting itself. According to Benjamin, for the viewer “The interpretive consequence…is that there is no need to interpret painting from within the framework of representation.” (3) The point of this kind of abstract painting is “…the object’s own work.” (4) Greenberg focused on the evidence of the medium in front of the viewer. By this measure, when we look at an abstract painting we are looking solely at the object that is there in front of us, an object freed “…from the necessity of having to be the negation of representation.” (5) So abstraction is not just the opposite of representation. It has something to say in its own right, which doesn’t depend on comparisons to representational art for legitimacy. Or does it?

Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

It is easy to see some of the difficulties inherent in abstract art when we look back over the Twentieth Century and the claims that have attached themselves to it in all its forms. It’s hard to love something that turn’s its back to us. Writing about Robert Ryman’s painting Yves Alain Bois speaks of “…ineffable silence.” (6) This apparent silence has meant that throughout the Twentieth Century abstract art has been used in the service of a great many movements, ideologies and social experiments. Its malleability as mute, immediate form has allowed it to be taken up time and again in different contexts. At times the vocabulary employed has verged on the hysterical or the religious. Its apparent refusal to articulate a recognisable narrative has led to the idea that abstraction either has nothing to say or that it is saying all things at once, depending on our reading of it. The liberation of painted forms from “…extrinsic conventions…” of narrative, description and depiction meant that “…abstract painting…(could)…tell the final truth and thereby terminate its course.” (7) Without the “extrinsic conventions” of representational painting, abstract art it seems will necessarily make itself redundant. This redundancy has been re-enacted time and time again since the early Twentieth Century.

Despite the efforts of critics such as Greenberg to attribute a voice to abstraction, it remains difficult to talk about abstract painting in terms of the object in and of itself. We are constantly drawn back to the language of representation, if only to draw distinctions between the two. Representation it seems can be spoken of without referring to abstraction, but not the other way around. The language employed to put shape on abstraction so often reverts to the familiar vocabulary of representation. For Bois, Rymans paintings “…(cut) short any attempt at associative readings…” (8) These are works which “…suggest their own commentary,..define their own discursive terrain…” (9) I tend to believe that some of the best work being produced today which could be called abstract, admits more than a token amount of commentary. By this I mean that it looks abstract but often makes reference to recognisable sources, and in fact embraces “associative readings.” Patricia Treib would be one example.

Photo © White Cube (George Darrell)

It could be seen as anachronistic to put on a show nowadays based on such a binary division as the one between representation and abstraction. For quite some time now the general assumption has been that we have moved on from seeing painting as either one or the other exclusively. I was surprised to see so much work which was determinedly representational and so little that really seemed to be consciously trying to operate within the narrow space between the representational and the abstract. Of all the work in the show I would wager that many of the artists had decided to retreat altogether from any debate about the space between the two territories. Again I was struck by the feeling that so much of the work on display was being mobilised to help illustrate a concept which is far more complex than the evidence of these paintings on their own could do justice to. Given the central idea behind the show; to assemble representational painting which has been made “in cognisance of abstraction”, I wonder whether a more homogenous grouping of artists would have made for a more coherent argument.

 

• Clement Greenberg: Hans Hofmann,(1961) essay: Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1961
• Andrew Benjamin. 1996. What is Abstraction? London: Academy Editions.
• Ibid.
• Ibid.
• Ibid.
• Yves-Alain Bois. 1993. Painting as Model. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Ibid.
• Ibid.
• Ibid.

 

 

 

Cy Twombly at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill London from Oct 10 to Dec 12, 2015 and Rudolf Stingel at Sadie Coles Davies Street and Kingly Street London from Nov 4 to Dec 18, 2015

 

CY TWOMBLY
Bacchus, 2006–08
Acrylic on canvas
128 3/4 × 162 3/8 inches (327 × 412.5 cm)

© Cy Twombly Foundation

Apart from being inaugural shows there might not appear to be much common ground between Cy Twombly’s colossal meshes of looping marks in Gagosian’s new Grosvener Hill space and the Rudolf Stingel paintings on show at Sadie Coles’ new space on Davies Street and the existing Kingly Street venue. When it comes to artworks, the interpretive process can often involve making less than obvious, sometimes even forced connections in order to illustrate a viewpoint. So why not compare two apparently different shows if it serves to expand on issues of medium; in this case paint being the medium under discussion?

Cy Twombly’s paintings often elicit the response that they are condescending to the viewer in their simplicity, that they are painting’s response to the unmade bed. And many of the marks do look as though they followed the path of least resistance. They could be marks made by an idle colossus testing the largest marker pen in the world. The loops might seem to correspond to the orbit of an arm that has stopped wondering where to go next with the brush. There is not enough variation in the marks or the palette to reward the eye that is hungrily looking for variation in marks and palette. Twombly’s work was never about quick fixes of virtuoso paintwork. His marks demand an unexpected amount of time from the viewer; time in which we scan and differentiate between gestures and assimilate the collective impact they make on us as we stand in their shadow. For painting that looks so immediate, these epic doodles have an impact which is as much physical as it is visual. They are paintings which are much more than the sum of their parts.
Twombly’s marks could be said to be repetitive in the sense that they are the product of similar gestures repeated across the canvas. Seen from a distance they are meshes of loops and these meshes lean slightly to the right; further evidence of the body which made them. As mark making, they may not be as immediately gratifying as Jackson Pollock’s drips. Pollock’s drips however, employed a hidden tool with which the artist was able to conceal the mark of the hand. In allowing momentum to take control of the medium as it travelled through the air from the end of the swiftly moving brush, Pollock was, from a certain point of view, encoding his gesture. Twombly’s marks are direct. There is no mediation between the brush and the canvas. The paint is on the brush and the brush is on the canvas, and the gestures are made directly. But with the exception of marks such as Pollock’s, isn’t almost all painting made directly by brush on canvas?
When we talk about painting, there is more to be gained by dealing with different aspects of a work individually, rather than trying to arrive at an over-arching view of the work as a harmonic single object. We can discuss Twombly’s paintwork as an attempt to choreograph marks to appear random. In terms of distribution of marks we could say that they share the all-overness that Clement Greenberg spoke of in Pollock’s work. Some of the works here are also colour field paintings of a sort through their repetition of monochrome gestures which threaten to obliterate the light ochre ground beneath. The drawings with clusters of almost legible writing and mysterious geometric shapes could be seen as walls of graffiti on which one tag has attracted another. It is unlikely that Twombly was not aware of all of these possible readings. Each one on its own is worthy of far more discussion. A problem might emerge when we come to reconcile these observations about the work of paint in Cy Twombly’s canvases with the titles he chose for them. Hans Hofmann made various claims for his paintings which nowadays can act to disrupt the discussion of his paintwork. It can be hard to reconcile the sophistication of Hofmann’s arrangement of marks on canvas with his esoteric pronouncements about his work. In Twombly and Hofmann there is arguably enough going on in the paintwork alone to allow the viewer to make their own ruminations on how paintwork can be analogous to so much else in the world.

Installation view, Rudolf Stingel, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 04 November – 18 December 2015
Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
In Cy Twombly the viewer might find themselves squinting to perceive signs, images, breaks in the patterns which might speak to us of things being referred to. In Rudolf Stingel’s current paintings in Sadie Coles images disappear as we get closer. These are paintings, some on a sizeable scale, composed of hundreds of thousands of brush marks. They are photorealistic paintings, laboriously, methodically executed. As paintings which are meant to look like photographs they are hugely convincing and have an archive melancholy that is masterfully maintained across every inch of every canvas. And yet they are more than that alone. Perhaps the most interesting element of this series is the paintwork itself. The marks are not pointillist. They don’t have uniformity and definition as brush marks. For the same reason they can’t be seen as analogous to pixels. In fact the individual brush marks appear to lose all power to form fields of visual information the closer we get to them.

Installation view, Rudolf Stingel, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 04 November – 18 December 2015
Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

As images these paintings each represent a solitary animal in a wilderness. They could of course be animals roaming around the periphery of an urban area. Each animal is poised as though listening, deliberately frozen in anticipation, lending added tension to the melancholy within the canvas. There are several areas of the canvases which depict either the blackness of a forest at night or snow covered ground. To the observer primed to examine the paintwork these areas are as interesting as the features of the animal subjects. Areas of white fur delineated against snow, tree bark next to bird feathers; achieving a convincing distinction between these textures on such a grand scale takes no small amount of skill. As we lean in to examine the brushwork that has succeeded so well in convincing us that we were looking at photographs, we are surprised to see order break down. Instead of millions of uniform pixels, what we see is an infinity of apparently unique gestures made with the end of the brush. Each mark looks as deeply considered as the next.
Whether or not Stingel intended for his paintwork to be examined up close, or whether he was simply executing a series of works which had been conceptualised to a high level of completion ever before the canvas was even primed, the effect of composing such convincing images with tiny brush marks was always going to foreground the medium of paint. Why bother going to such effort to create these painstaking paintings if one of the main things you want to say is not about the power of paint, not just to transmit meaning, but to hold meaning. Stingel’s stoic, lonely subjects disintegrate the closer we get to them. What started as an evocative image of an animal becomes no more and no less than an abstraction; paint on canvas. The works in these two shows are striking, immediate paintings which require time and slowness from the viewer to be fully appreciated.