Barry Schwabsky : Vitamin P3 Introductionne

 Barry Schwabsky  : Vitamin P3 Introduction

New Trajectories

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This third edition of Vitamin P is different.

Newness is no longer restricted to  recent generations and  Barry Schwabsky is no longer the editor. That job went to Phaidon''s own team, ,Tom Melick and Rebecca Morrill.  He still writes the introduction but no longer accompanies it with chosen images. 

But he’s still on the defensive about painting - this time in response to the calumny of “ zombie formalism” - the term coined by Walter Robinson in his 2014 essay on Artspace :  “Flipping and the rise of Zombie Formalism”. This essay is much talked about on the internet, though the original text cannot be found there.

 Henry Taylor, Resting, 60 x 78, 2011

(This artist, though not this painting, was listed in this edition)

 It is a journalistic axiom: the reporter should not become part of the story. Unfortunately, this laudable maxim conflicts with what in physics is known as the 'observer effect': the only way to detect or measure something is by interacting with it and therefore necessarily having some effect on it, however minute. 

With this third installment of the VITAMIN P series, the books themselves have become part of the story that is being conveyed about the changing face of painting in the new millennium, though it's not a part l intend to exaggerate. But it is significant that the very methodology by which these books have been compiled - as much their specific contents in terms of the art included and the interpretations made of that art - has been recognized as typical of the times for the way the selection process has been, as it were, crowd-sourced, rather than representing the viewpoint of one central authority (whether an individual or even a committee). According to a prominent historian of literary theory, Vincent P. Leitch, this amounts to 'a postmodern project par excellence without the label. It encompasses many incompatible styles... testifying to twenty-first century proliferation as well as disaggregation in the arts."

Schwabsky made the same claim about "proliferation as well as disaggregation"  in P1 and P2 ,but I continue to see a monoculture of academic concerns mostly about semiotics and language.

 Leitch's summary of the present situation is suggestive in its understanding that seemingly contrary trends are not only simultaneously in force but actually complementary, that our contemporaneity is characterized by both 'a persistent disorganization of culture into separate spheres and the ubiquitous interaction, sometimes convergence, of the fields.  As a rough parallel, consider how in the political realm a dramatic rise in nationalism and sectarianism has accompanied the seemingly unstoppable tide of globalization and of its ideological correlate, the pensee unique of neoliberalism; neither trend is in itself entirely active or reactive, progressive or regressive. In terms of the arts, what this means is that painting, sculpture, poetry and so on can no longer hope to establish that 'autonomy' or 'autarchy" that the critic Clement Greenberg, for one, thought was the goal of the various arts under the conditions of modernity."

But only certain special “separate spheres” got included in this survey. Many are left out.

But nor is there any sign of that 'art in general' that seemed to be promised or inaugurated in the work of Marcel Duchamp and of the conceptual artists who followed up on his clues half a century later - at least according to the magisterial account of Belgian theorist Thierry de Duve.  Far from having confirmed itself as the one all-encompassing art, conceptual art has taken its place as one more genre among the others. Certain artists now function in a directorial mode, like managers of their own enterprises, executives who do not themselves lay hands on the materials in which their art is embodied but simply hand down instructions to be carried out by others - that said, oftentimes their works are the most dependent on fine craftsmanship. It's just that what's involved is not the artisanship of the signature artist but of the hired fabricators. (Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Ai Weiwei are just three of the most obvious examples.)" 

Back when museums of modern art were first built, they were about formal concerns much more than concept. But even though those priorities have now been reversed, museums of conceptual art have yet to appear. I doubt they ever will.

If contemporary arts - including painting - are neither autonomous nor 'general' but constantly separating and recombining, how do we map them out? It's a question of recognizing that the borders are fluid, rather than stable, so that today's overview might not match tomorrow's. That doesn't mean taking an ahistorical viewpoint and fetishizing the present. Quite the contrary, it means being careful not to mistake whatever emerges from the particular historical conjuncture for a representation of the essence or even the future of, in this case, painting. To those who want to maintain a Hegelian idea of history as an intelligible process towards a determinate aim, or telos, this may sound like an exit from history in its truest sense. So be it. In fact, the true sense of history remains unsettled, under contention. While we cannot claim that painting in recent years has either progressed towards or fallen away from some immanent goal of its own self-realization, it can be said that much has occurred in painting. In fact, from my perspective, the surprising fact is that the five years since the publication of VITAMIN P2 have been more ebullient, more eventful for this art than were the nine years that passed between the publication of VITAMIN P in 2002 and the appearance of P2 in 2011

  I’m not finding anything in P3 that could not have been made decades earlier.

In part, that eventfulness can be registered by way of an escalation of conflicting ideas about and within painting - a sure sign of the liveliness of any art being the degree to which it sparks dissensus which, following the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, we can define as not just a difference of opinion but more broadly as 'a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we sense something is given! This is the shared ground of the realms of politics and art - again, fields that are neither entirely distinct nor congruent, but whose boundaries are always being redrawn as they meet and diverge. As Rancière goes on to specify, 'Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions produce dissensus by hollowing out that "real" and multiplying it in a polemical way... It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done." 

Word salad.

When the VITAMIN P series began in 2002, what seemed most noteworthy to me was the dispute over whether the frame within which a painter's work should be received really was something that could be indicated by the word 'painting' or whether it had to be framed in terms of the broader category 'art’ . Today, although the category of painting has not been re-established as an entirely autonomous domain, disputes within that domain - about the trajectories that might be most productive and whose boundaries are now understood to be shifting and provisional or else blurred and indistinct - appear more dynamic. 

 Should the experience of painting be affected by how they’re talked sbout?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

One of the most animated discussions, at least in the United States, has been the ruckus over 'Zombie Formalism', a term popularized (if not invented) by Walter Robinson, a painter and writer who has been a mainstay of the New York art scene since at least 1973, when he co-founded the post-conceptual, proto-punk magazine Art-Rite. 

Walter Robinson, Lots of Paint, 2024

 (I wrote about his Chicago exhibition here )

Part of what makes the debate over zombie formalism interesting is the fact that while it takes the form of a debate about aesthetics (“formalism") it was set off by a concern about the market - in particular, a concern about what has been perceived as a new prevalence of 'flipping' in the market for works by emerging artists.It is not clear whether this has in reality become any more common; The New York Times concluded that 'the data indicate that contemporary works appearing at auction within three years of their creation are not coming to auction faster than in the past, and that such flipping remains very much the exception, not the rule." Nonetheless, spectacular phenomena, such as the May 2014 sale at auction for $125,000 of a canvas that had sold for $7,500 out of the artist's debut show less than a year earlier, turned many heads. At a time when economic inequality has been increasing exponentially - and giving rise to social moments intended to resist it - it is inevitable that old concerns about the intimacy of painting with the market should once again come to the fore. The difference today is that other forms of art no longer seem exempt from the same concerns, since their bureaucratic support structures are now so nakedly dependent on, and vulnerable to, the same neoliberal economy.

If  it’s been proven that “flipping” is just as rare today as it’s been in the past, how can  it make a discussion of form any more interesting?  And are the formal qualities of new high market art really that much worse than what came before?  This whole argument is just attention grabbing  fluff.

 While many observers were rightly suspicious of the market's heavy and very visible hand in the careers of a few young artists, and especially of its potential consequences for young men - mostly - who had shown no sign they could sustain careers at such a level in even the medium term, Robinson identified an aesthetic common to much of the new art being flipped and gave it a name. Unlike the names of Modernist movements that were invented by opponents as scathing takedowns and now survive as terms of honour - Impressionism, the Fauves, Cubism, and so on - 'zombie formalism' will most likely not live on in the history books. It is worth looking at now, though, as an index of post-millennial anxieties about painting and its relation to the market and the broader culture. The art-historical assumptions in Robinson's polemic 'Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism' are surprisingly shaky: he is right to associate the idea of formalism with the brilliant but ultimately wrong-headed critic Clement Greenberg, the rejection of whom 'was absolutely central to SoHo art conversation in those pre-Chelsea days' when Robinson came on the scene." He is wrong to imagine that Greenberg had 'championed' the early work of Frank Stella, and probably even more mistaken to think that the work of contemporary painters like Jacob Kassay and Lucien Smith accord with Greenberg's 'aesthetic’ principles. Nonetheless, Robinson's description of what gives paintings like those of Kassay or Smith their attraction is spot on:

 With their simple and direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, and can be said to say something basic about what painting is - about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings ... Finally, these pictures all have certain qualities - a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm - that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design." 

Sounds like a good description of Barnett Newman paintings as well.

Jacob Kassay, 2011, 49 x 178

Lucien Smith, Southampton Suite, 2013, each 108 x 84”

I would not travel to see these works, but if I had to wait somewhere they were hanging, I’d probably find them enjoyable.

Walter Robinson, Spin paintings

… as opposed to these annoying pieces by Robinson.

To a large extent, Robinson was perfectly placed to recognize these qualities because he had himself pioneered many of them, in the spin paintings he made in the mid-1980s (several years before Damien Hirst hit on the same idea. Zombie formalism - like Robinson's (or Hirst's) spin paintings - is a way of lending a conceptual allure to what would previously have been thought of as Colour Field painting or process painting, but without burdening it with too much intellectual content. The conceptual aspect is the application of a one-shot idea, fulfilling the maxim (from Sol LeWitt's 1967 essay 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art) that 'the idea becomes a machine that makes the art. Robinson, like others after him, became fascinated, for a while at least, with the notion that an actual rather than a metaphorical machine could become the executor: You want to make abstract paintings, but it's so difficult because you can't think of anything that seems original, he later recalled of his use of a spin machine. 'Suddenly the idea of using this machine, which everyone knows about, frees you totally. It's like this postmodern epiphany. You don't have to worry about being original!" One could say much the same of Lucien Smith's trouvaille of painting with a fire extinguisher, or Jaco Kassay's employment of an electroplating apparatu: except that the results are less various and surprisin than those provided by the spin machine. The charm of zombie abstraction is that it encompasses at once painting, an imitation of painting, a joke (or anyway a witty conceit about painting and a critique of painting and that it can be all these things at once because the removal of the artist's first-hand involvement allows his or her intention to become utterly ambiguous; the artwork's unique selling point is the extent to which the artist has arrived at an original tactic for evading originality. That this is a desire deeply embedded in artistic modernism can be shown, for instance, by Greenberg's praise of Jackson Pollock, back in 1948 for having (like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in their Cubist period, according to the critic) arrived at 'a style that, so to speak, feels for the painter and relieves him of the anguish and awkwardness of invention, leaving his gift free to function almost automatically'" That this was, in retrospect, so fantastically wrong about Pollock, whose 'anguish and awkwardness' would later have such tragic consequences, only highlights the idea's power as a fantasy, that of the perfect meshing of imaginative liberty and constrained mechanical activity. 

Machines making art?   How prescient!   Welcome to the new world of  artificial intelligence. Now that’s what I’d call “zombie art.”

Regarding the “ambiguity of artists intentions” - hopefully they are always so.  ( otherwise I would call it commercial art or propaganda)

This approach to art-making is pretty much guaranteed to provide diminishing aesthetic returns. For some commentators, such work really does portend the death of the creative spirit. According to the critic Jerry Saltz, for instance, the age of modernism has been one in which 'the most original work led the way, but suddenly, he continues, circa 2014: 

something's gone terribly awry.... An inversion has occurred. In today's greatly expanded art world and art market, artists making diluted art have the upper hand. A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by the market, and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends' wealthy friends, getting them to buy the same look-alike art." 

 Speculator collecting may be something new, but hasn’t a large swath of artistic production always been market driven?

Such paintings, says Saltz, are 

'decorator-friendly. looking spiffy amidst contemporary décor, but also, and perhaps more importantly, Net-friendly: tailor-made for instant digital distribution and viewing via jpeg on portable devices. It looks pretty much the same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collectors needn't see shows of this work, since it offers so little visual or material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see and get it fast, and then it doesn't change. There are no complex structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incongruities to come to terms with. It's frictionless, made for trade. Art as bitcoin."

(The full text  is found here )

Good contemporary painting does not necessarily need viewers to “come to terms with unique visual iconographies” or assimilate “complex structures”  But work that is incomprehensible and painful to see does need such extra effort - or leaps of faith - or to rely on the specialized expertise of gallerists or art critics like Saltz.

 Saltz's passionate and timely demand that painting should be a rich experiential encounter rather than a quantum of information sliding effortlessly and indifferently through the digital ether is one that I fully agree with. At the same time, it would be odd if the people who make and enjoy paintings were somehow to remain unaffected by something that has affected our culture as deeply as social media. Not only do these media change the way we perceive things, but they do so in part by changing the way perception is distributed - who is perceiving what. There is a kind of multiplication of views. What the critic Lawrence Alloway understood fifty years ago, when what he called 'the communication network' in which art is implicated was far simpler and slower than that which we experience today, is all the more true now: We are all looped together in a new and unsettled connectivity" Reproductions, whether in printed or digital form, cannot replace the painting they reproduce, but they do, as Alloway reminds us (against the conservative tendency to deplore their very existence as a snare), 'widen our comparative knowledge of art!”

Online  reproductions can also provoke a “rich, experiental encounter” - though I would never call the reproduction of a painting a “quantum of information” unless it was intended to be nothing more (i.e. conceptual art)

Here are the examples of “zombie formalisms” or “crapstraction” that Saltz provided:

None of the above thumbnails provoke my interest as well.

… and even the larger images leave me cold.

So I’m agreeing with Saltz here.

And applaud him for showing what he does not  like.

That’s highly unusual for a published art critic to do.

But it’s even more important for art critics to show what does catch their eye among artists with have little or no reputation.

By way of contrast, here’s  the kind of thing that the Instagram algorithm predicts will interest me, based on the artists I follow and pieces I’ve liked.  

 I do sense  some inner life here that the “zombies” do not have.

These artists are acting like industrious junior post­modernist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction, deploying visual signals of Suprematism, color-field painting, minimalism, post-minimalism, Italian Arte Povera, Japanese Mono-ha, process art, modified action painting, all gesturing toward guys like Polke, Richter, Warhol, Wool, Prince, Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Sergej Jensen, and Michael Krebber. ,

It’s art-historical clear-­cutting, aesthetic monoculture with no aesthetic biodiversity. This is not painting but semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s work, recently called “established postmodern praxis.”

I agree - but would include most of the Vitamin P painters in that monoculture as well - as well as everyone on Saltz’s list except for Oehlen and Richter.  

There's an irony embedded in the fact that Saltz's heartfelt attack on zombie formalism - which, he admits, even includes some work that he likes - is accompanied online by a slide show intended to prove his contention that too much contemporary painting looks too much alike. A succession of tiny thumbnails is actually more effective as evidence that you have to see the paintings in person to know what significant characteristics they share, if any, than that the paintings really have anything in common. Besides, one can imagine seeing a similar slide show of, say, quattrocento Madonnas, seventeenth-century Dutch genre scenes or nineteenth-century French landscapes and being asked, 'Don't they all look alike?' The fact is that in this form the works in each category would all look very similar. One would have to see them in person to discern - assuming a sufficient level of knowledge - which Madonna is by Bellini and which is by an also-ran, which genre painting is a Vermeer, which landscape a Corot. What Saltz should really be complaining about is the fact that years of becoming habituated to an art world ecology in which each artist cultivates some distinct signature device (say Mark Rothko's rectangular clouds of colour, Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots or Christopher Wool's stencilled block letters) to immediately distinguish his or her work from that of his or her peers, has left us relatively poor in connoisseurship. The paintings are different enough, only we've become too dull to see it. 

An interesting discussion - because, as already noted,  I agree with Saltz that “too much contemporary painting looks alike” - while I disagree that a piece by Bellini, Vermeer, or Corot must be seen in person to be identified as such.  Even small thumbnail of those great artists  would make me want to see more.

 BTW - Here is an  example of a Corot drawing - where the fake looks better than the original. For cash value, the tepid Corot original is worth thousands - the superior copy is worth almost nothing. Art  museums today are way more concerned with authenticity than aesthetics. 

In any case, another New York-based writer, Howard Hurst, soon posed the essential question: Who Has the Cure for "Zombie Formalism?" 

I doubt there is a cure for “zombie formalism” ( or zombie figurative, for that matter).  But at least  gatekeepers can keep it out of art museums, if they have been trained and selected for aesthetic awareness rather than conceptual conformity or agility. That runs counter to European academic values going back to Charles LeBrun , however, so it may be a pipe dream for many centuries to come.

Below, Schwabsky suggests that we need artists to mature - so they have time to outgrow it. Whatever. Including older artists is a good thing - but mostly because artworld recognition comes later for some than others.  I’m glad that this edition is less concerned with age.

The clue, as it turns out, lies 'with the idea that it takes years, possibly decades for an artist to mature, and that it's impossible to make every painting successful'" The cohort of painters who have made it into this third iteration of VITAMIN P - that is, the painters who've been recognized by a certain number of the critics, curators, and fellow artists who've served as nominators for this volume - suggests that today there is stronger backing for Hurst's faith in persistence and maturity as elements in the artistic equation than there has been for many years. Look back to 2002, when VITAMIN P was published: at that time, few of the 114 emerging painters included in the book were over forty years old, and only two (fifty-one years old at the time of publishing), Bhupen Khakhar in 1934 (sixty-eight years old). VITAMIN P2 arrived nine years later, in 2011. This time, there was a good handful of artists in their early-to-mid-fifties - Stephen Bush, Pierre Dorion, Merlin James, Jutta Koether, Surendran Nair, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl - but still only two who were significantly older, Carmen Herrera (born in 1915) and Nalini Malani (born in 1946). This time around, on the other hand, there has been a real redistribution, a change in the ratio of young, middle-aged, and elder artists whom knowledgeable observers believe have 'emerged' on the international scene in recent years. This time, artists over fifty would be those born in 1965 or earlier. Again, the volume includes a number of artists in their fifties - Dexter Dalwood, Mark Flood, Fernanda Gomes, Yunhee Min, Raul Recio, Henry Taylor - but in contrast to 2002, when there was just one artist any older than that, and to 2011 when there were two, in 2016, VITAMIN P3 includes as many as fifteen artists who are in their sixties through to their nineties: Etel Adnan, McArthur Binion, Juan José Cambre, Mary Corse, David Diao, Peter Dreher, Mernet Larsen, Chris Martin, Marwan, Donald Moffett, Michael Simpson, Arpita Singh, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten and Rose Wylie. By contrast, the young artists most often associated with the label 'zombie formalism' are nowhere to be seen." Indeed the most cursory of glances through the pages of this book reveals the strength of figurative painting made by artists of all ages, as well as approaches to abstraction that are far removed from those of the 'zombies. 

Cannot see how Mary Course , included in this edition, is somehow less of a zombie formalist than Jacob Kassay.  I’ve listed all the abstract painters in P3 at the end of this post. 

What does it mean that the art world is suddenly discovering (or rediscovering) so many artists who have been quietly working away, not in isolation by any means, but with less attention than they deserve? This is not something that is exclusive to painting. There has been a widespread impulse to comb through the archives and explore the peripheries to re-evaluate conceptual art, performance, video art and photography of the last fifty years, as well as painting. It seems to have something to do with a feeling that we may have prematurely settled on a late-modern canon, that the byways of art in the postwar era, and especially since the revolts and rebellions, encompass many more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and that some of these can be of incalculable aesthetic value. 

Has there really been an uptick in the re-evaluation of older artists ?  That would be nice - but since no kind of verification accompanies this assertion, I doubt any exists.  This is just more hot air.

It's no acciden that the greater proportion of the elder artists in this compilation are women, people of colour, or from places marginal to the main axes of the US/Western European art system. I don't think it's wrong to speak of a general awakening to the injustice in the way in which such artists have been sidelined by critics, art historians and the gallery world, despite the evident quality of their art. But that's not all. Beyond the yearning to redress former wrongs as well as to enjoy the untasted pleasures that the work of unfairly overlooked artists can offer, there seems to be a deeper, more inchoate desire at work. It's the feeling, I think, of having taken a false route into the future - of needing to retrace one's steps and see where the untaken forks in the road might lead. An astonishing number of major exhibitions in recent years have half-forgone the conventional task of biennales and similar shows, namely to report on the situation of art in the present by showing recent works, with the at-least-implicit rejoinder that, these days, the only way to report on the present is to rake through the past. And not only. are the curators looking to the past for signs of the present; so are many artists. They have re-envisione themselves as something more like collectors, curato or archivists than makers. In reviewing one of those shows, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, it became clear to me that this was not only nostalgia or postmoder pastiche - though there's still plenty of that around too - and that 'this is more than just retro styling. There must be a terrible feeling abroad that no one but an artist is going to salvage any sense of memor and that since, as Walter Benjamin put it, "the past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption", our stubborn present-mindedness may represent the loss of some last chance.? By immersing ourselves in the works of elder artists whose practices and histories are relatively unfamiliar - not yet over-interpreted or canonized, and more than just another spin on familiar ideas - we put ourselves in the curious position of listening to messages that are new and old at once, immediate and yet from a depth. Our sense of the consistency of the present is shaken, at least a little. For 150 years or more, cultural progress has been built on the belief that our destiny was zooming on a straight course into the future. Today, the path doesn't seem so straight. Painting itself is an old and - it has been repeatedly claimed - outmoded way of making art. So many new art-making technologies would seem to have pushed it into the slow lane. But just as we now feel more willing than we have been for decades to open our eyes to the works of artists who have taken the time to let their work ripen, we should also be more willing to see whether long-familiar modes of artmaking still have secrets to reveal with some bearing on the future, clues to our new trajectories. So let's take another look at what the painters can accomplish.

Better yet, let's allow that conceptual projects are as different from aesthetic painting as fantasy football is from the game that's played in stadiums. Each should be judged on their own terms and fill separate books with their achievements.

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In my discussions of P1 and P2, I showed images of the pieces shown by those books.

But here are t my own chosen favorites of what the artists have online.

Stanley Whitney, b. 1946

Stanley Witney, 2024 to 2026

Throbs with a love of life.

I could live with any these

(If I could afford them)

Julia Rommel. ( b. 1980). Morrocan Boy

Cool and meditative 

More decorative than expressive 

but definitely not crapstraction

Maria Taniguchi, b. 1981

An enjoyable contrast 

though not s piece i would travel to see

MacArthur Binion, b, 1946’

Probably  more engaging in person,

but maybe not 

Serge Alain  Nitegeka, b. 1983,,Barricade, 78 x 99 “

A strife that’s too dynamic/disorienting to be European

 

Yunhee Min, b. 1962, Up close in distance, enamel on glass, 2018, 31x 26’

Aggressively sensual

Joe Bradley, b. 1975, Country Heel, 2025

The comforting, exciting, clumsy world of children.

Helena Popova, b. 1961, 2013, 30 x 22

Dull enough to be zombified

Sarah Cain, b. 1961,  SF Rays, 2017

An exciting day in the city

Matt Connors, b. 1973, Location in English,  2020, 23x 20

The colors are having a party

Mary Corse, b. 1945, 2022

Defiantly boring

Even zombies have more life

Jennie C. Jones, b. 1968

Might be more engaging in person 

Gray enjoys hints of yellow 

Prabhavathi Meppavil, b. 1965

Might be meditative 

Ulrike Muller, b. 1971, Some, 2017, 15 x 12”

Nice variation on a yin-yang symbol

Ulrike Muller, 2017

Good for the cabin of a yacht

Dexter Dalwood, b. 1960, The Crash, 2008,  59 x 81”

Unsettling but beautiful 

A vision that’s more than just clever composition

Elizabeth Mcintosh, b. 1967

Cheerful, disruptive,  and goofy play with grids.

Elizabeth McIntosh, Dazzle, 61 x 69

Well named

Elizabeth Neel, b. 1975, March to May, 2024, 61 x 79”

Elegance.

A calligraphic event that seems to have lasted for weeks

Julia Dault,  b. 1977,The Comet, 2014, 44 x 36”

Possibly quite delightful in person

David Diao, b. 1943

Love this guy.

Perfect for a daycare center

Makes me wish I had young children

Julia Rommel, b. 1980,  Suburban Kids,  39 x 31, 2019

Very nice arrangement I could live with

Julia Rommel, 2019

Mary Ramsden, b. 1984,  Icon 6,  2019,13 x 10

The exciting attack of the border against the center

 

Mary Ramsden, Wall Up, 2019, 79 x 102” 

So much wanton humor and diversion 

Amy Sillman,b. 1955,  Split 2, 2020, 72 x 60”

Really like the indefatigable Ms Sillman,

 wrote about her here

Here’s what she has to say on the MOMA website:

I was trained in the 70s when the goal of making art was to question the art that you were making while you were making it. We weren’t even supposed to be making paintings so the only way to make a painting in that decade in that environment was to unmake the painting while making the painting. I grew up in the time where a certain kind of struggle and dissatisfaction and desire to sort and keep pushing and overturning something that’s beautiful right away was the goal of how I was trained and also in a way how I would naturally approach anything as a material criticality or a material questioning - to always not know what the thing should be. It’s partly analytic process and a partly irrational process or responsive or almost instinctual process where you may undo something or refined something or make something tenser where you’re seeing what’s appearing before you and then you’re trying to push it somewhere. The longer I’ve been making paintings in this slow developmental way the more I realize that what I’ve been interested in partly is always the issue of time, that the work changes and changes and changes and changes again and that the real idea behind making a painting is not to make a static image or to stay with that image, but to change it and the pleasure of seeing it change is partly the pleasure of painting. It’s a kind of film, but only for one person because the viewers only see the final scene 

Sounds like a good exercise for art students - but apparently it’s still how Sillman works - and as she says,  the viewer only gets to see the final scene. 

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P3 is my favorite volume so far in the series, -  probably because I ignored images in the book, and made some effort to search online for  what I liked.

Here are the older artists that I liked:

David Diao, b. 1943

Stanley Whitney, b. 1946

Amy Sillman,b. 1955,

Henry Taylor, b. 1958

Dexter Dalwood, b. 1960,

Sarah Cain, b. 1961

Yunhee Min, b. 1962,

  Elizabeth Mcintosh, b. 1967

…so I appreciate that this series is now including earlier generations - though it doesn’t seem to have helped with selecting  figurative painting. 

“Zombie formalism” , as identified by Jerry Saltz,  does seem like an insightful critique of one corner of the artworld that I think has been around at least since Cubism proliferated beyond Picasso and Braque. Many buyers want things that are identifiable as new, progressive, cutting edge- but also are pleasant and decorative.  Others want pieces that look nasty, and that’s not really any better. It’s good that art critics occasionally offer biting aesthetic judgments.

But if if old is now OK - non dysfunctional representations of people or the world are still excluded. And the series still calls itself “NEW  trajectories”

Hopefully future editions will cast an even wider net.