PICTURES OF NOTHING
ABSTRACT ART SINCE POLLOCK
The first in a series of five lectures delivered by Kirk Varnedoe in 2003 as part of the Mellon Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art
The video is
here
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Turner: Red Sky over Beach
Turner: Snow Storm at Harbor's Mouth
My title today is: why abstraction? and the title of the overall Melon lecture series is called pictures of nothing : abstract art since Jackson Pollock, and I should say at the beginning that overall title for this year‘s lectures is taken from the English author Hazlitt writing about the early 19th century English painter JMW Turner. Now as you can see from these two Turner landscape paintings of the 1840s a red sky over a beach on the left a snowstorm in the harbor‘s mouth on the right Turner was celebrated or notorious for painting, vaporous, and indistinct conjurings of atmospheric effects, and Hazlitt reports this remark of one dyspeptic viewer about such works as pictures of nothing , and very like. the attitude skeptical at best and dismissive, seems as premonitory of modern reactions to abstract art as Turner is himself.. But since such skepticism is what I’m out to confront
and since the issues of both nothingness and likeness have a big place in what I’m after, the steal from Hazlitt seem to be the right tease and provocation, but though the issues may be similar, the time I’m addressing is very different.
Why would a discussion of abstract art be driven by what’s missing? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on what has been present? Even if that does raise the question: “present for whom? Experts in the visual arts are not supposed to share personal experience.
Eventually, however, an explanation is forthcoming: Varnedoe considers his lectures at the National Gallery to be a response to Ernst Gombrich’s defense of illusionism delivered there fifty years earlier.
BTW, before he wrote art and literary criticism, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) painted portraits, and once even had a piece accepted by the Royal Academy. The dyspeptic viewer was probably himself. He had mastered that solid sense of volume he had seen in old master paintings at the Louvre. But as a professional essayist in progressive publications, he probably did not want to be known as reactionary.
I’m going to talk about abstract art over the last 50 years or so. The big question here is “Why abstract art?” And why 50 years? 50 years because backing up that far takes us to the mid 1950s and a crucial juncture in 20th century culture. To say why it was crucial takes backing up even further. Modern art in general and abstract art in particular, had been dominated by Europe and I show you your Picasso’s Ma Joli of 1911 and a Picasso wooden construction of 1914.
Picasso, Ma Jolie
I’ve long felt that analytic cubism made pictures of nothing - lacking not just recognizable subject, but also any emotion. I walk right past it when visiting art museums - there’s so much other stuff nearby to thrill and cheer. But when put it on a wall by itself, yes, there is a gritty reality of enduring interest there, like a liquor bar in the early morning, before it’s been mopped and wiped down.
In detail, it feels like a panting by Milton Resnick: heroic resistance to emptiness and despair
You just have to forget about all that pictorial theory stuff.
It’s magisterial.
Picasso, Still life 1914
And this is the kind of cheerful stuff that pulls me away from Cubist paintings. It’s like calligraphy, but instead of ink flowing from a brush, graphic energy flows through chunks of wood and stuff. Humorous, playful, powerful.
A bizarre, new, musical instrument ?
The fragmentation and the reassembling of the world affected by Picasso and George Braque, and their Parisian cubism of 1909, allowed, encouraged and goaded several artists, especially from outline countries like Holland and Russia to push further into a world of forms without any remaining trace or reference to recognizable objects or scenes.
I show you Kazimir Malevich “White on White” painting in the museum of modern art of 1918 and a typical Mondrian painting composition of the 1920s. The invention of these new kinds of abstract or non-objective art coincided with the cataclysm of World War I and they explained their renovations in manifesto terms of revolutions in both society and consciousness, proposing that they laid bare more fundamental more absolute more universal truths appropriate to a new spirituality and to modern science and the emergence of a new human order.
Mondrian, Composition 2, 1922
Yes, you could say that cubism had a powerful effect on Mondrian. After participating in an exhibit of such, he totally dropped representational painting (at which he was very good).
He also seems to have dropped the expression of any emotion other than joy. Which is not a bad thing.
Malevich, White on White, 1918
Malevich was a Cubo-Futurist before he did Suprematism - so he was also affected by Cubism. It's not surprising that, living in Russia at that time, joy did not concern him.
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Were both of these painters strongly affected by Cubism ? Yes
But Cubism does not answer the question: "why abstraction?" It certainly did not lead Picasso and Braque to making non objective paintings.
but with the rise of totalitarian governments and eventual collapse of Europe into a second world war the original utopian aspirations of the pioneer abstractionist seem thwarted and their collectivist optimism, discredited. Then during and immediately after the configuration of European culture in World War II, a new push towards abstract art then appeared amongst younger artists in America, especially in New York, but this the motivations and ambition seemed sharply different.
Didn’t the Dada artists offer the same negative response thirty years earlier?
Kurt Schwitters, MZ199, 1921
No metaphysical or social agenda here.
Just as personal as Pollock,
though less despairing.
And I show you the gorgeous painting in the national Gallery collection lavender mist on the left and the very large 18 foot long Barnett Newman painting in the museum of modern art called fear hero Suma.
both paintings of 1950 but came to be called abstract expressionism in the art of Jackson Pollock Barnett Newman will intoning Mark Rothko, and others emerged now from a surrealist context in the unconscious mind and was to paraphrase one of these artists “made out of ourselves without any accompanying insistence on the former metaphysical or social agendas of abstraction the mid 1950s was a key moment for the emergence of this new kind of American abstract painting when it was explored internationally and had important exhibitions
Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950, 87 x 118”
Detail
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus, 8x17 feet, 1950
Heroic exhaustion versus heroic restraint. .
BTW - how is Newman less metaphysical than Malevich?
BTW II: Did you notice that Varnedoe called the Pollock painting "gorgeous"?
It's the first aesthetic response he has offered.
Though it’s only one word.
Pollock, who died just at this moment in a drunken car crash in 1956, was particularly hailed by his prime champion the critic Clement Greenberg as a legitimate inheritor of the great tradition of European abstract art as in things like this Picasso accordionist Cubist painting of 1911.
Picasso, Accordionist, 1911
Pollock was said to have picked up for America, the torch of innovations lit by Picasso, eliminating deep perspectival space for example and Pollock was said to advance the line of abstractions inevitable progress logically towards it supposedly destined pure expression of the essential visual qualities of painting, without any remaining extraneous literary content, and here is one of the famous Hans photographs of Pollock painting, the kind of picture of the Lavender Mist represents by pouring and dripping paint in his barn studio in Long Island. But if Greenberg could see Pollock extending of European tradition in this sense these same poured and drip paintings also offered some radically new aspects of art making to the fore so that the painting seemed only like the record of the event you see Nama documenting, they brought the process of art making to the fore of the expression of the picture they allowed for the forceful expression of chance in the way that the paint fell uncontrollably in some senses by spat and drips across the canvas. They dissolved traditional distinctions as you can see by looking at lavender mist between figure and ground, and the same same picture shows these kinds of paintings dispersed incident, roughly evenly over the entire field of the canvas to yield a new all over wholeness that seemed to kind of anti-composition and more over the most celebrated to Pollock‘s drip pictures were big. They were up to 18 feet across and this almost mural scale suggested a sharply different different relationship between between the body and pictorial space. In these ways Pollock paintings seem potentially a whole new point of departure for abstraction. But this moment in the mid 1950s is also the same moment the same 50 years ago that saw the creation of Jasper John’s flag of 1955.
The above narrative applies to Pollock, but not to the other iconic names of American abstract Expressionism (Newman, De Kooning, Still, Motherwell, Rothko, Kline). All they had in common was being different from each other..
the deliberate dead pan work by the then unknown southerner in his mid-20s but has come to be seen as the death knell of abstract expressionism and the launch of an antithetical idea of art. Whereas painting like Pollock’s seemed expressive of a heatedly urgent, physical, psychic and emotional engagement and creating something holy unfamiliar, John seemed the opposite: coolly, detached seemingly diffident, , suffused with irony, and involved with the impassive presentation of commonplace things. John seemed to resurrect a different European tradition of the pre-war era - that of the subversive pranks of Dada art, and especially of the Frenchman Marcel DuChamps. “Flag” seemed akin to DuChamps’ decision, documented in this Steiglitz photograph of 1917, to select, sign, and submit to a New York art exhibition, a urinal under the title “Urinal”.
This is more like a history of the art market than a history of art - if you believe, as I do, that there is actually a difference - even if it was encouraged to disappear \when the artworld became centered on New York City, the commercial capital of the Free World. Whatever sells as art is art, and whatever art sells for more is more important.
In 1955, abstract painting began to replace aesthetics with concepts - unless we want to credit Barnett Newman for that transformation. It’s a key date in the history of the American artworld.
If you agree that ‘Lavender Mist” is “gorgeous”, you might consider it halfway there - with both aesthetic quality and provocative concepts like the use of chance, anti-composition, and the privileging of process over result.
The mediocre visuality of “Flag” may have just been the best young Jasper Johns could muster. But the title of the Stella piece that Varnedoe will show us next, confirms that “squalor” was indeed intended. When a piece is intentionally given low aesthetic impact, we are inclined to ask why.
Johns’ scrupulously hand-painted flag object, seems in effect to transmute DuChamps old way of not making art into a new way of making art. Instead of remaining a kind of hermetic in joke of art about art Johns’ flag opened the way for many artists on to life, and along with the work of his partner, Robert Rosenberg , it catalyzed the explosion of Realism in pop art, for example, embracing photography advertising in the whole image saturated world of modern media that Greenberg‘s ideal of a pure abstraction had so strenuously excluded.
Our starting point in the mid 50s then seems simultaneously to present a new form of abstraction and a new kind of challenge to or resistance against its premises and that’s the argument. I’m interested in documenting as it unfolds. For a lot of people who think and write a lot about culture, though, this moment is an even even bigger water shed between the end of modernism and the inauguration of a postmodern world. A great divide between the world to a Matisse and Picasso and that of contemporary art. I am not however one of those people and this dichotomy is not what I’m here to talk about. Those who believe in a strict, modern postmodern opposition will probably be discomforted and an important part of the story I have to tell this spring is about how strains from these two seeming opposite camps from John’s and Pollock, for example, from Picasso and DuChamps, overlapped and blended and about how important new language is depend precisely on those unexpected hybrids.
If Modernism demanded powerful form regardless of probable meaning - that might help explain the proliferation of the many exciting kinds of painting, including abstract, that erupted in the early decades of the 20th Century.
Could that demand be met by pieces that require correct interpretation to be called art ? “Flag” does not convince me - but Varnedoe may well have a different notion of modernism.
And why are we talking about hybrids anyway? I thought these lectures were about “Pictures of Nothing”
Stella’s ‘Marriage of reason and Squalor “, from a modern arts collection of 1959, for example, seems in some sense as a radical reaction against Pollock and yet Stella described it as what he called reverse Pollockism and there are many things about it be all over composition, wall to wall, edge to edge, the even distribution of emphasis across the canvas, the black industrial house paint which mimic what Pollock did, that are a direct response to Pollock’s work, whereas the stripes in the picture of Stella as he himself has said, seemed to come directly from John’s; just as the handmaid John’s flag is unthinkable, but without either Cezanne or Duchamps as a combined set of influencers and traditions so the Stella doesn’t seem to make sense unless you put together rather than set apart the modern Pollock and the postmodern Johns.
Does it have value based only on how it looks, apart from that context of Pollock/Johns?
Conundrums like this interests me a great deal but more basically I don’t buy the modern postmodern split because I don’t put a lot of stock in either ism, or indeed isms in general. Epoques don’t have essences. History doesn’t work by all governing unities, and works of art in particular tend to be quickly hard to pin down to generalities. These Mellon lectures will dwell on experience and works of art between the vague confusions of individual experience and the authority of big ideas. Sign me up for experience first. Given one minute more to either parse critical theory or stammer towards the qualities of the individual work of art, I will use the time for the latter. This may sound like dumb anti-intellectualism but I hope it’s something better.
Abstraction, of course, has a lot to do with ideas, and a lot of talk and theory. One of the valuable things it does, and does more fiercely than a lot of other arts, is to make us think and to read what others think. Greenberg on Pollock Professor Michael Fried last year‘s Mellon lecture on Stella and so on,
For some, the compulsion to think about an artwork is directly proportional to the credibility of the presenting institution - and - inversely proportional to how good it looks.
…..but it is experientially also crucially about particulars. The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully.
This makes sense until you consider the reverse: “the more there is to look at, the less important it is that we look closely and carefully.” I doubt anyone would agree with that.
The reason to look carefully, for example, at the simple shape of a teacup is not that there is less to look at - but that somehow its immediate aesthetic intensity compels you. (if it actually does)
..that’s also critical to what abstract art is all about: small differences, make all the difference So, for example, the next time somebody tries to sell you on the mechanical exactitude of Stella stripes, think again about the beautiful delicate breathing space in these stripes, the incredible feathered edge of the touch of the picture which has everything to do with its kind of dark espresso ground, best generation blackness that gives the picture it’s particular relationship to its epic time. This doesn’t translate well in photographs and it’s easy to lose in theory, but it’s critical to the experience of the picture.
Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park, detail, 1959
Yes, this piece can summon a certain mood associated with the Beat Generation, but why is that mood more important than, say, the moods created by thirty second television commercials? And couldn’t many variations, including even a surface covered with thick black paint, summon the same or very similar feeling?
Hard examination and questioning of the specificity of works of abstract art, and the experience of the viewer are our best way to hold out against them and test big ideas, What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the kind of ideas that flow out of and drive us back towards such confusing particulars of experience rather than the kind of idea that constantly and confidently mushes such things into soupy generalities. Still even though these talks will always try to focus down on individual works and creators. I’m also constantly going to be trying to indicate the connection of these artists with broader histories as wel: Cold War in Vietnam, America versus Europe, capitalism and socialism and so on.
Varnedoe does not enter this painting to live in it - it’s more like he’s taken a fishing expedition to find ideas connectable to outside narratives.
and given the extent of such ground cover, even though I make no pretense to inclusiveness and work only and highly selective and partial slices I am going necessarily to paint time again with comically broad brushes, and thus those who prefer reductive generalization and crude caricature summary summary will still, I am afraid, probably find a lot to like about what I’m going to do.
At least we’ve been forewarned! Big generalizations are fun, even if only as targets.
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Varnedoe is a sharp and engaging speaker, and I love how he’s always showing examples.
But it’s becoming ever more clear that, despite his full throated advocacy for the “specificity of works and experience of the viewer”, his focus is just on ideas. His aesthetic responses to abstract art are limited to offhand comments like "beautiful" or "gorgeous"
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I’m gonna start out next week talking about the 1950s , one of the standard stories of the 1950s and art history of recent years tells how the museum of modern art and the CIA colluded to promote abstract expressionism as an American tool in the Cold War battle, but this little paranoid cliché is not only flawed in itself, but hides some more interesting complex confusions and overlaps in the 1950s between ongoing pre-war traditions, especially what’s called constructivism with the agendas of science and the rule of objective order, aesthetic and social, and some new departures that had similar forms with very dissimilar premises.
One of the key instances in this regard is Ellsworth Kelly’s work in Paris in the early 1950s like this beautiful work that he donated the museum modern art called “ Colors for a large wall”, which is apparently close to, but crucially different from the math based systematic or systemic art of an artist like Richard Paul Lohse and the Zürich group with which he was associated, in exactly the same years, and this is a Lohse painting realized later, but based on a drawing and a system conceived exactly at the same time as Kelly. Sorting out the difference between what Kelly was after, and what Lohse was after we preliminarily are looking at the idea that this kind of art, which looks so backward when Pollock was painting in 1950, which seems so retrograde in terms of the triumph of broad gestural abstract expressionism, then in the 1960s , suddenly became confused with or exhibited with, as if it were the same thing, minimalist avant- garde work by younger artists like Carl Andre.
Here’s the Kelly and Lohse side by side
Richard Paul Lohse, 1983
Could not find the chosen image online, but this is pretty close
Can’t imagine anywhere I’d like to see this, even on a warm blanket on a cold winters night.
Richard Paul Lohse, , 1945-85
Lohse, however, could also make this, which
I find charming, and promising a future of happy moments
Ellsworth Kelly, 1951 Colors for a large wall
I remain puzzled by a pattern that may or may not be there - so the piece is tantalizing, if not as satisfying as the second Lohse. Below, the MOMA website tells us that the choice of colors was random, but if so, it only confirms that, just like sticks thrown for necromancy, nothing in the universe is really random
At the time of its production in 1951, Colors for a Large Wall was the largest painting Kelly had ever made. It brings together four strategies fundamental to modernism: the additive composition of similar elements (each square is painted separately), the use of chance (each square is arranged randomly), the idea of the readymade (each color was taken from the French craft paper Kelly used to produce the collage on which the painting is based), and the allover grid of its composition. The result is a painting in which no aspect of its appearance has been determined by the artist’s personal choices. … gallery signage, MOMA
To follow conceptual art is to be concerned with artists’ intentions. (Otherwise DuChamps “Fountain” goes back to the men’s restroom). All of the intentions attributed to Kelly by MOMA would seem to produce dreadful results and yet …. well… I kinda like how it turned out anyway.
Carl Andre
Here’s an Andre floor piece of the 1970s with exactly, seemingly, the same modular construction, same rigor as Kelly. The story of Kelly’s genesis in the world of Paris, perhaps the last American painter to have been crucially formed in Paris at a time when abstract expressionism was making the New York school. The story of Kelly’s formation and then co-optation in the 60s by minimalism will provide a different view of the 50s.
A pleasant aesthetic combined with “rigor” seems to be the recipe for this kind of work. Intention is all that separates it from a mass produced checkerboard. It can make for a nice photo, however.
James Terrell, Afram-Proto
Nothing more than an optical, illusion made with two slide projectors that face the corner of adjoining walls of a dark room. But nothing says that a high school science project can’t be displayed and sold and as art.
I wanna turn to the 60s itself and to minimalism in double forms at least if not several forms like Robert Morris‘s gray box of 1966 on the right and Jim Terrell Los Angeles artist a light projection on the left called Proto Aphram of exactly the same same year. Minimalism, of course, is the new kind of hard edge abstraction that emerged around and after 1960 in sharp reaction against the loose gestural, abstract, painting that it followed from abstract expressionism. Minimalism was so drastically reductive that it appeared utterly nihilistic, but within the dead certainty and flat lines that it seemed to propose lurk a lot of ambiguities and contradictions and I want to examine the battles within and overlaps between very different readings of this new push in abstract art. I want to confront for example it’s claims to be purely American and it’s philosophical base and it’s “I’ve gotta kick this to believe it” sort of empiricism, and how this represented a willed and self proclaimed split with Europe at the same time that the art seems to coincide with and drawn important revivals of the sculpture of Brancusi,for example, the Romanian or Russian Constructivism.
The play of ideas is very different from the play of paint on a panel. All those ambiguities and contractions don't make anything better to look at.
Varieties that appear in New York in Los Angeles, so that the gray neutral painted gray box of Robert Morris is so different and it’s reductive feeling again of the utter object hood of the sculpture versus Terrell‘s conjuring of a box that doesn’t exist at all, but is purely a light illusion that has entirely to do with playing on the sensorium, with creating inner events rather than external event events with an art that only exist inside in opposition to New York’s desire to create something that only exists outside and then to look at the varieties of things in between so that between the gray neutrality of Morris, for example and the shining illumination of Terrell one might position something like Donald Judd’s aluminum open box in 1969 and Judd will be someone we want to talk a lot about.for his combination of a seemingly rigorous reductive, geometry and odd materials, Harley Davidson, paint, galvanized metal, colored, plexi glass, etc. that deal with a different kind of delicacy in a different kind of subtlety than one finds in the manifestos of his work.
Enough already.
It now appears that even if Varnedoe were to talk about art that interested me, he will only address how it plays a conceptual game. He was the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA from 1984-1997, so that approach must have been endemic to that institution at that time. Echoing Frances Colpitt, later in these lectures, he will declare: "Minimalism revives and renovates what it seems to kill...it is a radically new kind of art, not a sophisticated variation on traditional modernism."
Death does eventually revive and renovate the universe. That’s what got us from microbes to intelligent primates. But I no more wish to view minimalism than I do a rotting corpse. And the iconic examples are not Art any more than a dead dog is a dog.
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So I will stop reading him now - except that - curiously enough, he's not done talking about “Pictures of Nothing" as he opens a discussion of “Art and Illusion”, the lectures that Ernst Gombrich delivered from this same distinguished podium in 1956, almost the same year Pollock died and Jasper Johns painted “Flag”. At this point in his lecture, it’s clear that “nothing” does not mean just the absence of recognizable objects, it also means the absence of feeling as well - i.e. Minimalism.
But in this moment of enshrinement, of monumentalization that we're in, abstraction, having been the great topic of the past century, also now feels in suspension, in eclipse.and we wonder whether abstraction holds the same attraction for the younger generation, what are they doing in this vein? And has abstraction, perhaps become banalized, defanged. The litmus test argument, has it now lost its problematic?
Ideas do lose their luster with familiarity - but curiously - beautiful objects do not - at least for those who have a psychological need to experience them.
So perhaps there is a basic doubt in everything I’ve laid out,… in addition to all these how stories over the past several decades, I feel obliged to ask some why questions .. including the big one, why abstraction"…. What is abstract art good for? For us as individuals, or for any society, Of pictures of nothing… I want to ask if there’s any grounding, of any logic , of any logic of the situation.
In 1956. Gomberg gave the Mellon lectures that became the book called "Art and Illusion" Let me take a bit of a detour for a minute or two to recapture some of the excitement that must’ve filled the National Gallery lecture hall in 1956 as he asked one of the biggest of all questions. Why does art have a history? ...the riddle of style : what explains the succession of odd stylizations by which different epochs and civilizations have represented the visible world? Since the world has always looked as it does, he asked, and since human eyes always function with the same wiring, why do ancient Egyptians and medieval Italian monks and Baroque ceiling painters show the world so differently. He was intensely dissatisfied with the kind of explanations that just fell back on some mystical spirit of the age, of Zeitgeist. instead, he wanted an explanation of the history of art that had more scientific and philosophical rigor.that would take into account both the permanent way we think, the way individual perception is hardwired to work and the way knowledge can progress accumulatively through successive ages in societies. His proposal, which drew on the best minds of his time in areas like perceptual psychology, and philosophy of science, was that within the confounding variety of the history of Western art could be seen a long, piece meal, but ultimately rational, progress towards the development of credible illusionism that is the trick of getting a viewer to conjure from painted marks on a flat surface, a convincing illusion of such things as seamlessly receiving space and three-dimensional volumes and this is a Piero Della Francesca of the mid 14th Century.
Call it what you like, but there is much more to the viewing experience than ocular anatomy and the physical properties of reflecting surfaces. And why assume that these historical artists were all trying to paint what they saw - so their “mistakes” are the result of ignorance? Gombrich is well aware of this and he puts the above cartoon at the beginning of his book, as if he were in on the joke. Ancient Egyptian artists presented much that was anatomical (and elegant!) about the human body. But it’s still a joke to suggest that their typical twisted depictions of walking figures was a consequence of not taking a post-Renaissance life drawing class.
It's hard to believe that a stellar art historian could possibly be insensitive to what these historical images were expressing. Was he just trying to relate to the scientific minds at the university? Just across campus from the physical sciences, the academic humanities still dream of discovering the algorithms that govern human behavior - despite no progress over the past century.
Not sure what counts as “credible illusionism” to Gombrich, but I’m pretty sure that many post Renaissance paintings would not qualify, and even more post-Impressionist. It’s a quality that fascinates him more than most viewers and artists.
Could not find this painting, either discussed or reproduced, in the Gombrich edition I found online. Piero was also a mathematician and his treatise on perspective has survived. But clearly, in this painting, Piero was not only concerned with how things might appear in reality. For whatever reason, the man seated at the far left is a giant. The narrative remains puzzling, but the aesthetics are unforgettable. Would it have been improved if the seated figure were made smaller?
Gombrich wanted to show that far from being a nearly servile copying of nature, we see it we draw it, Illusionist representation had been a real hard fought achievement of human culture.
Gombrich packed his book with images of many great masterpieces by Rembrandt, Constable, Van Eyck etc. But ever since Zeuxis painted grapes that could fool birds (Aristotle Poetics) , there have been many more illusionist painters than great artists. Nor really sure Gombrich could tell the difference without relying on the canon.
Boring grids are quite fashionable among conceptualist painters like Michelle Grabner.
But this one is actually compelling.
Panels from the Alhambra
Gombrich thought abstraction was understandable as an extension of the history of decorative pattern making, like the above Alhambra designs as well as rugs, basket weaves, tile work and the like, but if I can risk summing up and interpreting his many writings on the subject of abstract art, he seems to have felt that all arguments that modern abstract art might be something more than this were based either on mystifications about modern abstraction, reflecting hidden metaphysical truths, or in specious arguments that the tides of history in the modern age somehow required such innovations.
Nothing from the Alhambra appears in my edition of “Art and Illusion”, so I have selected my own (And surprisingly, there’s not that many online).
Don’t know of any connections between modernist abstract painters, and the various traditions of ornamentation, but I do agree with Gombrich that the moderns do not surpass the very best examples from the past, even when they are quite different.
Also don’t know where Gombrich stood on this, but the best of any art cannot be accounted for solely by what proceeded it It has a spirit all its own.
It was precisely that lethal combination of belief and higher ideals, stretching back to Plato and pronouncements about the requirements of history grounded in Hagel, and Gombrich’s close friend the philosopher Popper had just recently scourged in his wartime book, “The Open Society and its Enemies”, as the false philosophical foundations of totalitarian thinking as propounded both by fascism and by Soviet communism. I put it far more crudely than professor Gomberg ever would have: the implicit message of Art and Illusion seems to be that the construction of illusionist naturalism is directly consonant with a neurological hardwiring of human nature, and that the progressive way it developed makes illusionism also the appropriate house style of the best liberal traditions of free and criticism in open western Society.
Norris Kelly Smith had much the same idea in “Here I Stand”: where there is a credible illusionism with one point perspective (the point where the viewer stands), it places that viewer into a virtual reality in which he participates as a citizen.
This may account for Renaissance Italy, but we may note. that both Fascist and Soviet Art abhored abstraction in favor of a convincing illusionism. Their citizens were required to be passive on pain of death.
I want to wonder with you now whether they could ever be an argument for abstract art that was as good, as generous, as ambitious, as challenging as art for its opposite. Lord knows we need something better than what we’ve got because as Sir Ernst rightly saw, all the many claims about timeless, universal forms, and historical destinies that have been used to explain modern abstraction, or however, sincerely sophisticated —- were, in the end, intellectually bankrupt. There aren’t any hard reasons why abstraction has to be - any teleology that explains why it developed as it did - and it’s useless to keep looking for those kinds of justification and the familiar soft, explanations that it’s just a big hoax, a colossal version of the emperor‘s new clothes, perpetrated on a duped public by cynical art mandarins repeated decade after decade, is just whistling in the dark, since abstract art has been with us , in one form for another for almost a century now, and has proved not only a long-standing crux of cultural debate, but a self renewing vital tradition of creativity.
Could the same be said for Impressionism? It has lasted even longer, and unlike abstraction, actually is a coherent tradition of techniques and aesthetics. Some abstract painting is like that - including those who continue various strains of the New York school. But many others equate creativity with a market driven need for novelty in concept, materials, technique. And those are the ones which Varnedoe has been showing us ----like this one, for example:
And I could take the case of Donald Judd‘s early minimal sculptures A lighthearted, somewhat comic example here is a very early judge from 62. Judd was making what he called in one of his famous essay specific objects, that is he wanted things which didn’t seem to be either painting or sculpture which escaped category which weren’t familiar which couldn’t be pinned down to what they were. They were entirely idiosyncratic outside the common balance of descriptive language not anything anybody was prepared for, but in fact in dealing with these things, he himself and his viewers and critics started immediately categorizing these objects and continue to and in the literature were up to today. This weird work is known as Judd’s letterbox of 1962 and/or Kleenex box,
Had Judd intended to represent a letterbox, his career, if any, would have been quite different. As Varnedoe noted, his intentions failed - the piece he made is quite recognizable. But that’s not important. What is important is that he was playing the game in which museums like Varnedoe’s MOMA were the playing field - and - his pieces are pleasant, and as well made as high end office furniture.
What we still need, what is way overdue, is to make the case for a logic of abstract art as “Art and Illusion” made the case for illusionism.— that would describe it too, with respectful opposition to Gombrich’s s own dismissals, both as a legitimate reflection of the way we think individually and also as a valid and valuable aspect of liberal society, and this would of course be a tall order not at least because we have some very different ideas of the start of the 21st-century about how our minds work and how a just society functions. we have to, for example looking at work like Flavin’s, revise and expand Gombrich’s idea of making, that is the invention of autonomous forms and schemas as the mind’s primal work of building knowledge.
Varnehoe is presenting an alternative reality, in which Gombrich makes sense, abstract art is specific to a free society as well as uniquely appropriate to “the way we think”. But it’s not just his idea. It’s shared by many in that lecture hall and the broader world of the academic humanities. He is preaching to the choir.
If you’re not in that congregation, however, It’s a lot to swallow, especially how :
over the last 50 years, a lot of abstract art has demonstrated the way our intelligence innovates in many spheres, not by whole cloth invention or by discovering new things about nature, but by operating with a pun, the repertoire of the already known by adapting, recycling, isolating, recontextualizing, repositioning, and combining inherited available, conventions, or in the case of art existing dumb, man-made forms like those of architecture and objects cubes and stripes to propose new entities as the bearers of new thought.
If we are concerned with how human minds work, very few have given much thought to art and most could care less about the innovations discussed above.
Abstraction and illusionism are rather difficult to firmly distinguish except as intentions. Varnehoe considers art to be “vessels of human intention” - but don’t most paintings appear to have been been made with many, various, possibly contradictory, and possibly fleeting intentions?
If we are concerned with how specific art actually appears upon close examination, as Varnedoe says we should be, intentions are less important than results. Then it would make more sense to say that visual art is just light reflecting surfaces - some more illusionistic or referential than others. And all kinds have been with us for as long as humans have been making things.
Wine fermenting jar, 6000 bc.
Then Varnedoe then makes that same point himself - quoting what Gombrich calls “the viewer’s share”.
Cy Twombly, 1970
….and he offers a contemporary example of a similar cloud like surface,
one that entered the MOMA collection under his watch..
It’s quite pleasant and provides relief from the severity of the white cubes we all live in. I also believe, however, that there are many students in every art school who could draw a variation that could only be distinguished by pedigree..Same could be said for that ancient wine pot as well.
These things may work well in living spaces,
but wouldn’t want them taking museum wall space away from things that are visually more compelling.
.. the mirror seems to suggest something to do with glitz and glamour and consumer society in a way that reaches its final realization when he puts the mirror on the rabbit and makes this amazing object of mid 1980s. It’s often taken to be the ultimate object of Reagan Era glitz and the critique of the commodification of society, etc. etc. etc.. So what began as the neutral inclusion of a mirror in the Morris that then became the sci-fi theoretical inclusion in Smith and now comes around to a completely different thing which empowers Koons to find a form for, or a way of communicating, his interest in the kind of hard sheen and glamour of consumer products in American commercial society.
So thanks to Robert Morris, mirrors entered the vocabulary of contemporary art in 1965, to be picked up by Koons twenty years later and incorporated into what became the most valuable sculpture yet made by a living artist ($91 million at Christie’s)
This is pathetic in so many ways,- ---but I will only list two:
1. Robert Rauschenberg put mirrors into his combines throughout the fifties, some of which were at MOMA where Varnedoe was chief curator of painting and sculpture.
2. Varnedoe chose this as a primary example of “what is abstract art good for”
in this fashion, and there are many other examples, abstract art, while seeming insistently to reject and destroy representation, in fact, steadily expands its possibilities by adding new words and phrases to the language through the device of colonizing, the lid, slug, and formally blank spaces in the type tray seeming nihilism becomes productive in the system or to put it another way one tradition’s killer virus can be another one’s germ. And here I show you a Dan Flavin again, a monument to Tatlin on the left of the 60s, and a beautiful Bryce Marden painting, it’s like 14 feet long, a gorgeous big painting, the Grove group series of 1972, intransigent, hard, pictures of nothing or abstraction, stressing abstract art’s position within an evolving social system of knowledge in the way I’ve just done directly, that belies the old notion that abstraction is what we call a Adamic language, a kind of language that Adam spoke, a bedrock form of expression that has been reduced to a timeless point beyond or prior to the creation of conventions. In fact, if anything, the development of abstraction in the last 50 years towards works like these suggest something more Alexandrian than Adamic, that is a tradition of invention and interpretation that has become exceptionally refined and intricate encompassing a mind-boggling range of dripped stains, blobs, bricks, blank canvases and beyond, with its web now so accumulatively woven and dense that it can ensnare and cradle for its depths, vanishing, subtle , evanescent, and sunder forms of life and intensive meaning
The verbiage here is more attractive than the art - which Varnedoe thinks of as a language in which the greatest achievement is adding new words.
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the tradition of abstract art has recently shown time again, that for those who learn it, it can help make something out of apparent nothing and this is all in all a good thing. Like Gombrich’s illusionism, we’re dealing here with a constructed achievement that began in western Europe, but that is proven useful for a broader world.
Here, Varnedoe sets the “tradition of abstract art” apart from all the non-representational mark making that humans have done over the millennia, whether it be on pots, plates, walls, fabrics, floors, whatever. Not sure that earlier abstract painters like Kandinsky or Mondrian would be included either, since their intentions were so different from those artists Varnedoe had shown.
Early modern society created, and we have inherited, that paradoxical thing: a tradition of radical innovation. It is a remarkable system of productive reductions and destructions that has as its result the expansion of our potential for expression and communication.
But another paradox is that there is nothing new about newness for the sake of newness. Varnedoe is primarily concerned with intentions. There’s nothing new about two adjacent rectangles of solid color or stacking lightbulbs together, except in the intention of presenting it important new art.
But there’s bad news here too because this is a risky business. When I referred to abstract art as a learned language, I didn’t mean there was nothing to be gotten from an unprepared naïve encounter with a Flavin set of fluorescence bulbs in a gallery or a beautiful waxing encaustic like Marden’s, nor do I mean to endorse the sense of cultish elitism that requires an M.A. in art history and a subscription to Art Forum. give proper readings of what goes on in the Chelsea galleries. dealing with with recent abstraction, is neither like falling off a lot\g nor like solving differential equations, but the fact that it does profit from some prior knowledge that contemporary abstract art operates within, and by the terms of a long tradition, and that awareness of the parameters and game rules of that tradition. Who was Tatlin, for example, in the monument to Totlin, and what about John’s use of encaustic in the Marden, the awareness of the parameters and game rules of that tradition can sharpen our experience of what we’re seeing and enrich our arguments about about it.
Fritz Faiss, three untitled variations, 23 x 17, 1955, encaustic on canvas
Once again, Varnedoe mis-credited a technical innovation — made worse by the fact that he was not speaking off the cuff. He had plenty of time to discover the best examples. Or, did he mean to say that Johns popularized a medium, rather than introduced it as a new word in the language of art?
Faiss patented an encaustic material and went on to teach at UCLA and the Otis Art Institute. He was hardly an outsider. And, of course, before him, the history of encaustic painting goes back to the Renaissance and ancient times as well.
(BTW, these three pieces look much better to me than anything yet shown in this post).
The Flavin/Tatlin example is problematic as well. Couldn’t anyone who cared much for the lightbulbs look up Tatlin - and how important could that answer be to their experience?
but this idea of learning strikes some primal nerve of anxiety in us about authentic versus fake experience. The old fallback of the know nothing: I don’t know art but I know what I like flies in the face of our common sense awareness, reinforced a thousand times in our life, that some of the things most deep seated in our natural selves and give the highest pleasure in our lives , from sex and food on up to music, involve appetites that had to be educated, instincts that grow in depth and power by learning hierarchies of discrimination until second nature is nowhere separable from the first. Yet Visual art, and abstract art most particularly, remains one of the last bastions of unashamed, unrepentant, ignorance - where educated experience can still be equated with phony experience. In regard to abstract art, too, the syndrome gets ever more acute, as the tradition gets fatter and the works get leaner and what we see gets simpler and what we can bring to it gets more complex, so that we have to face being constantly worried that we are being played for fools by works like this, and even worse conned in the face of an art that by its very nature, willfully and knowingly, flirts with absurdity and emptiness, dancing on the knife edge of nonsense, and begging us to come along .
It does seem that Varnedoe was really rattled by “the emperor’s new clothes” attack on what was basically his life’s work. And he should be.
Note that it’s not just any crazy person who’s fantasizing the finest clothing but really is butt naked - it’s the emperor himself - the highest authority in all matters political, social, and religious. To doubt him is treason, blasphemy, and heresy. The artworld has no emperor, but if it had high priests, Varnedoe would be one of them. Without that authority, he’s not buying or curating big-name art, nor publishing what he had to say about it.
The examples of knowledge that he offered to contradict the know nothing skeptic are rather weak. Dan Flavin’s row of lightbulbs is still just a row of lightbulbs, even if you know all about Tatlin.
why put up with it - because we want what only this risk has been able to give us - of course we want from many of the forms of our culture : measures of comfort and continuity, a connection across time to enduring traditions; a respite from the relentless clocks that drive our individual lives, but in this society, we live, too, with a sharply ambivalent often painfully keen awareness that our lives are itremedially different than those of the past. We rise each day to a particular mix of sharpened pleasures and deepened anxieties that quickens our sense of separation from other days a century ago, a decade past, a slight two years ago, and this informs among many of us a hunger for a culture that affirms that sensation by giving us new forms that we can sense gives shape to our feelings, our moment in history, as distinct from those of our forebears or even of our youth. We flatter ourselves and torment ourselves with the belief that it has not all has been said, that there is more complex complexity to experience as we live it than has till now ever been articulated. And in order to allow room for the new cultural forms, we feel might be adequate to this vivifying, hubris and doubt we are willing to accept the destruction of past cherished norms, endure large measures of disorientation in the present and sift through a great deal of drek.
An impassioned plea that presumably could have been made in any time and place since things have always been changing (even in Pharaonic Egypt).
What Varnedoe did not realize back in 2003, is that his conceptual kind of abstract art had already become one of those older forms of culture that was about to become dated by art that was less concerned with theories of language, and more concerned with social justice or individual expressionisms. Art theory is not the only way to deal with contemporary life.
abstract art is propelled by this hope and hunger, as a particular reflection of the urge to push towards the limit case, the edge, to colonize the borderland around the opening onto nothingness, where the land has not been settled , where the new can emerge. That is part of what drives modernity, that urge to regenerate ourselves by the bathing in the extreme, for better or for worse
Throughout this lecture, Varnedoe says “abstract art” when he really means “conceptual abstract art”. —- as if other kinds, which obviously exist, are unworthy of notice. And he’s kinda sneaky about it. The subtitle of the series, “Abstract Art since Pollock” suggests that “abstract art” has the broader application, just as the “pictures of nothing” might be applied to the vaporous seascapes of Turner.
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“Nothingness” is seriously pursued by several traditions of meditation, including my own - but there, it’s a separation from - rather than a search for - the wealth, power, authority, and status that drive the contemporary artworld. I’m quite sure that Varnedoe would agree that looking at a stack of fluorescent light bulbs purchased at Home Depot is nothing like looking at Dan Flavin’s art at MOMA.
what is remarkable is that this particular, cultural experiment of abstract art - initially advanced by an advocate as a culture of crypto, religious timeless, certainty, and associated closely with a drive towards a new monolithic collectivism in society - should have been reinvented and flourish these past 50 years as a paradigmatic art of secular diversity, individual initiative, and private vision. A prime limit case of modern western societies’ willingness to vest the fate of its communal culture in the play of independent subjectivities and to accept the permanent uncertainties, pluralities, and never-ending unresolvable debate that comes with that territory.
He must be referencing Kazimir Malevich here - for his "Whie on White" painting and a kind of utopian idealism. All the other early modernists had their own, different ideas - but Varnedoe may consider them all outside his strictly conceptual notion of “abstract painting”.
Not sure how Varnedoe reconciles his call for “pluralities” with the categorical exclusions practiced by MOMA with his participation.
but if we’re going to spend time trying to worry out a philosophy of abstract art, and I’ll spend more time trying that along the way at the end, we should also remember that the prime contribution of America to philosophy is perhaps pragmatism , and the pragmatist question is basic; does it work ? What do we get out of it ? And it’s a partial answer to that uncertainty, the selective sketch of what we’ve gotten from abstraction these past 50 years or so, that I’m going to try to give you in the next five lectures thank you.
There is nothing in this introduction that suggests Varnedoe will offer any better answers than the ones he’s already offered here: questionable claims of influence and simplistic historical references. So let’s just acknowledge that most American of pragmatic benefits: play along to get along to gain status, and money (in his case, employment). It’s always been practical to agree with an emperor.
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Why abstraction? One answer is: My God - it’s so thrilling ! Set free from pictorial illusion, the intensities can go anywhere from grim determination to playful disorder to sensual explosion to - well - the opportunities for expression are endless.
But that’s an aesthetic reaction, and as Varnedoe tells us, there’s a reason his survey begins in 1955. That’s the year Jasper Johns painted “Flag”, and one year before Jackson Pollock crashed his car. Conceptual art has dominated the institutions of the American artworld ever since.
What’s especially fascinating about this lecture is that Varnedoe just can’t shake that cold skepticism first voiced by a harrumphing Philistine over 180 years ago: “Pictures of nothing! - and very like”. Varnedoe took that as his title, and repeatedly returned to the question: “ what is abstraction really good for?”. I suspect that somewhere in his circle of friends, a rogue, but otherwise highly respected intellectual, persistently dismissed Minimalism as “the emperor’s new clothes”. Varnedoe has been defensive about that ever since.
This lecture was delivered before gender and racial identity art overwhelmed the artworld, so Varnedoe’s concluding thoughts about a perpetual avant garde of conceptual innovation now seem dated. The artworld has turned righteous.
Would sure like to hear a knowledgeable survey of what the other kinds of abstract painting have accomplished over the past seventy years- but that may need to come from outside the curatorial staff of a major museum
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I’ve been rather dismissive of conceptual abstraction in this post - especially because Varnedoe ignores the other kinds.
But ultimately, I agree that it’s incompatible with art whose primary, or maybe even only, quality is some kind of aesthetic. That kind of art does not belong in a museum that champions the conceptual. And vice versa.
Can’t wait for conceptual art to finally be moved to the history museums where the Jeff Koons “Bunny” will well serve to characterize the cultural/economic elite of late 20th C. America.
Kopfhas, 2004, 43 x 57
