Everyone knows that the death this month of John Ashbery deprived us of a great poet. Fewer realize that we also lost an outstanding art critic. It’s understandable. Ashbery often made light of his violon d’Ingres, perhaps in order to ward off the cliché—true enough, as most clichés are—that the New York school into which he was (uncomfortably) pigeonholed consisted of poets involved with the art world. Or maybe he just recognized poetry as the higher calling. David Bergman, the editor of Ashbery’s 1989 volume of selected art writing, Reported Sightings, of course followed suit:

In 1960, when John Ashbery accepted a friend’s offer to replace her as art critic for the Paris Herald Tribune, he was merely seeking employment in a city where Americans found it both difficult and necessary to earn money in order to live. Little did he know that the job would lead “as one thing follows another” into a career in which for the next twenty-five years almost without interruption he worked as a “sort of art critic” for such different journals as ArtNews, Newsweek, and New York. (p.xi)

But Ashbery was well aware that such accidental happenings, one thing following another, as they always do, is as much as we have of what used to be called destiny. His art criticism was important in itself and for his poetry, however much he might have minimized it—“as though to protect what it advertises,” to quote his most famous poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

The commonality between the two parts of Ashbery’s work is evident, first of all, in an inimitable tone, which one discerns as clearly in his critical prose as anywhere else in his oeuvre. This tone is the essence of his poetry, but also of his idea of art. Admittedly, it occurs more fitfully in the criticism than in the poetry, of which it is practically the whole substance. As a jobbing reviewer working to deadline, he could turn out considerable quantities of merely intelligent observations about whatever the subject of his assignment was, allowing (or forcing?) the poet to show his hand in just a stray sentence or two. But there are other pieces that clearly meant more to him, ones in which he was working out the aesthetic principles that would both carry through his poetry and inform his appreciation of painting, drawing, and sculpture.

It’s easy to see that Ashbery’s idea of art was indebted to Surrealism, and Bergman rightly began his selection (thematic rather than chronological) with a section on “Surrealism and Dada.” But Ashbery’s sense of Surrealism was his own, and not André Breton’s; maybe I’d better refer to it as small-s surrealism, not a proper name but a potential broadly distributed throughout the aesthetic field. For Ashbery, surrealism is basically the realization that art is at its best when it is “the product of the conscious and the unconscious working hand in hand.” (p.6) His writing accordingly cultivates a tone of unruffled common sense—and often the substance, rather than just the tone—as a way of staying open to the “irrational, oneiric basis” of it. (p.7)

It is this interpenetration of the banal and the enigmatic that accounts for Ashbery’s singular tone. An example: Of Joseph Cornell he writes, “But the galleries which showed him had a disconcerting way of closing or moving elsewhere, so that one could never be sure when there would be another Cornell show.” (p.14) The statement is ordinary and factual enough; and yet Ashbery sets off unexpected overtones. The simple fact that galleries are typically rather transient businesses somehow becomes an unexpected portal to the more significant mysteries of the ungraspable form that the representation of reality takes on when interpreted by way of an artist like Cornell (or a writer like Ashbery), so that “these eminently palpable bits of wood, cloth, glass and metal must vanish the next moment.” That vanishing points to the great metaphysical question: Does anything exist? Ashbery is sensitive to the way great art often seems to point to nonexistence as the hidden truth of existence.

But that idea, like all those that assert the most potent fascination over certain minds, loses its power when spelled out, as I’ve just so ham-fistedly done. Its force is in its intimation. Ashbery quotes de Chirico quoting Schopenhauer: “To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.” (p.126) Such isolation has nothing necessarily to do with social estrangement or any sort of definitive withdrawal from contact with others—though Ashbery does manifest sympathy with the lost and lonely ones of art (John F. Peto, Patrick Henry Bruce…)—but simply, as Schopenhauer says, a vital moment of distance from everyday life but within it.

This understanding of the essentially commonplace nature of the artistic effects that de Chirico called “metaphysical” allows Ashbery a rare vision of the essential unity of modern art—a unity that cuts across even the most heavily defended stylistic boundaries, including those between art and adjacent cultural fields: “Surrealism has become part of our daily lives,” he explains, and “its effects can be seen everywhere, in the work of artists and writers who have no connection with the movement, in movies, interior decoration and popular speech.” (p.4) No wonder that he finds it to be “the connecting link among any number of current styles thought to be mutually exclusive, such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and ‘color-field’ painting. The art world is so divided into factions that the irrational, oneiric basis shared by these arts is, though obvious, scarcely perceived…. It’s still what’s happening.” (pp.7-8)

Still today, blinkered art historians would enjoin us not to perceive this overlooked essence, depriving us of the “original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal” perceptions that seem to have come so easily to Ashbery. Sure, everyone acknowledges the roots of Abstract Expressionism in capital S-Surrealist ideas of automatic writing, and it only takes a little nudge to begin seeing the dreamlike qualities of the chromatic fluidity in the work of a color field painter such as Jules Olitski, but his assertion of a Surrealist basis for Minimalism is likely to raise some eyebrows. Surprisingly, Ashbery insists on an art history that is not cyclical or dialectical but linear—much more so than, say, Clement Greenberg’s. “The pendulum has not swung” from an ostensibly irrationalist Romanticism to a more objective and hard-headed art of the real, he insisted, and in fact “the history of art proceeds in orderly fashion, in a straight line.” (p.10) It’s a line that in Ashbery’s eyes passed through something as mundane (and as tangential to any mundane consensus about the mainstream of art history) as a still life by Jane Freilicher, yet Ashbery’s words also resonate with Donald Judd’s praise of Frank Stella’s paintings, in which “The order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.” One thing following another is Ashbery’s sense of Surrealism and of history.

This sense of continuity is why Ashbery can discern a “metaphysical similarity” (p.17) between Joseph Cornell and Sol LeWitt. He could have quoted LeWitt’s statement that the conceptual artist is a mystic, not a rationalist, leaping to conclusions that logic can’t reach, but he didn’t need to, drawing instead on the experience of the art itself: “Cornell’s art assumes a romantic universe in which inexplicable events can and must occur. Minimal art, notwithstanding the cartesian disclaimers of some of the artists, draws its being from this charged, romantic atmosphere, which permits an anonymous slab or cube to force us to believe in it as something inevitable.” (pp.17-18)

It might be argued that—like Milton’s Satan who carried hell with him, saying, “myself am hell”—the charged atmosphere necessary to see Minimalism in this way is something that Ashbery brought with him, and that the inevitability of the Minimalist object was entirely historical and discursive. But I don’t think so. How could anything so flatly empirical have so quickly given rise, for instance, to Robert Smithson’s earthworks, “wherein the romantic artist’s traditional folie des grandeurs is carried to dizzying new heights.” (p.352) The folie is more affecting for the fact that it may indeed be nothing but folly. In praise of Carl Andre’s sculpture Ashbery cited “its implicit admission that all this may be a put-on, may not be worth your while. The poignancy of this situation heightens our response to a Newman, a Rothko, or an Andre.” (p.230)

Of course, Ashbery’s poetry was often suspected of being a put-on, or not worthwhile. It’s somehow telling that “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” first published in 1974, is a kind of experiment within his oeuvre, an attempt to write the sort of essaylike poem he would never otherwise write, and have it yet be entirely his own and not an imitation of someone else’s style. It succeeded in convincing some of the skeptics that Ashbery wasn’t a put-on. It’s interesting to realize that the poem had its origins in an assignment a decade earlier for the New York Herald Tribune (International Edition), a review of a show of Parmigianino’s and Correggio’s drawings at the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre. But an ear for words and phrases, rather than subjects, tells us that the poem’s roots are spread further out into his art criticism. Consider Parmigianino’s hand, “thrust at the viewer” in the poem’s second line, and then re-read the 1967 essay in which he rightly cites Robert Rauschenberg as among those whose art profitably derived from that of Joseph Cornell (and thereby, he says, passed the influence on to Judd, LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Ronald Bladen)—the lesson being “the same in each case: the object and its nimbus of sensations, wrapped in one package, thrust at the viewer, here, now, inescapable.” (p.17) That thrust—Ashbery’s, Parmigianino’s, Rauschenberg’s—remains inescapable. It’s still what’s happening.

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Although most of the painters who were grouped under the rubric of conceptual abstraction have continued to work productively in the subsequent decades, it was never recognized as a dominant form of contemporary art-making. Other trends garnered more attention: the in-your-face figurative painting of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage; the topical art rooted in identity politics, feminism, and queer theory of Glenn Ligon or the early work of Sue Williams; and the relational aesthetics of artists like Félix González-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija, to name a few. For all that, the issues raised by conceptual abstraction never went away, and to one degree or another, they continued to be a (not always acknowledged) stimulus to the efforts of younger artists such as Matthew Ritchie, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Kristin Baker, and others — and such as Dannielle Tegeder, one of the most interesting in this tendency and the subject of this exhibition.

In a sense, Tegeder turns the guiding intuition — what some might call the ideology — of the reductivist tradition inside out: This intuition tells the artist that as more and more of what had formerly been the matter of art could be jettisoned, that is, as the work came closer and closer to arriving at some concentrated essence, the fuller and more powerful it would be; the fewer elements it could have, the more complete it would be. What Tegeder realizes — perhaps more than any of the other artists who have emerged from the semi-secret tradition of so-called conceptual abstraction—is the rather frightening corollary of the reductivist intuition, which is that when the artwork is complexified, stratified, and subjected to what Stephen Westfall called the “ongoing cultural condition of hyper-contextualization,” then the work loses its grip on any sense of completion, of wholeness, and becomes ever more fragmented, contradictory, underdetermined, and irrational (in the way an irrational number, such as pi, turns out to be endless). A certain arbitrariness comes into play.

In a condition that embraces complexity and hyper-referentiality, any particular work seems always to point beyond itself, not only to the real world, but to its systemic relations with other works; the work that does not complete itself within its frame links up with others. Thus, Tegeder’s paintings (including paintings on paper) do not communicate a sense of formal containment; their multiplicity of rectilinear elements rarely re-mark or echo the containing edges of the rectangular panel or paper support, nor do they reiterate its flatness. But, neither do they conjure a self-consistent fictional world. Instead, a plurality of diagrammatic spaces seems to be overlaid in such a way that they hold each other in place, however precariously, without actually cohering. That this represents a distinctly dystopian attitude is clear from some of Tegeder’s titles, such as Monument to the Geo-Chemistry After Structure with Yellow DISTURBANCE Code and Disaster Averter and Atomic Station (2009) or Puriamond: Cascade System of Destruction & Explosions (2007); a different kind of irony can be detected in Instructions for Utopian Gray World Machine & Copper Inner Structure (2007) where the self-evident contradiction in the phrase “utopian gray” seems to comment on how the dynamic élan of an El Lissitzky might have devolved into the quietist stasis of Gerhard Richter’s gray, which, as he has said, “makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other color has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.” This gray does after all represent a kind of opening, but only insofar as it is anything but utopian.

Tegeder would probably agree with Richter in this, but the saturnine gravity that comes perhaps all too easily to him is not her way. Her art may evoke disturbance and destruction, but in a strangely playful way: There may always be some disaster afoot, but no disaster is ever total. Some fundamentally constructive energy remains to keep things afloat. Richter admitted that his art had to work through to beauty, but it had to be, he specified, “not a carefree beauty, but rather a serious one.” Tegeder, by contrast, finds a carefree beauty in serious ideas. There are still, as another of her titles would have it — this time of a multipart painting from 2011 — Structures of Possibility.

In fact, incompleteness and self-contradiction seem to be the very basis of possibility, as this work suggests. None of the five parts of Structures of Possibility completes any of the others; each one, by introducing new colors, new shapes, new vectors of energy that could not have been anticipated through one’s perception of the other four, affirms that each, on its own, harbors visual possibilities that could only have been manifested in concert with the others and not separately. In a sense, such a work might have been extended indefinitely, incorporating ever more elements, ever more contexts. But a sufficient point of completion has arrived when the work succeeds in intimating its own infinite expandability; to go further would have been redundant. In this sense, Tegeder’s work cultivates the fragment — yet makes a system of it,
an ensemble that is more than a simple juxtaposition of unrelated parts.

What is true of the parts of a painting is true of Tegeder’s oeuvre as a whole, which includes not only painting but so many other kinds of things. It is easy to see that her sculptures might almost be concatenations of forms extracted from the diagrammatic linear webs found in her paintings and expanded three-dimensionally — yet always, I think, holding out the possibility for further expandability still, so that one always tends to see these sculptures both as works in and of themselves and as models for constructions that might exist on some vast cosmic scale as in Suspended Galaxy System (2010) or, yet again, of phenomena that might already exist on a molecular scale. The sculptures thus reveal the paintings to contain possibilities that could never be realized pictorially but this does not mean that the sculptures themselves constitute some ultimate realization. They too suggest possibilities yet unrealized, perhaps unrealizable: They are indeed “forecast machines,” as the title of one (Traveling Forecast Machine with Octave Construction, 2009) would have it. The Library of Abstract Sound (2009) extracts, not three-dimensional forms, but sounds, occurring in the fourth dimension of time, born from the ostensibly two dimensions of paintings on paper. In doing so Tegeder imposes a new kind of incompletion on visual forms: Until we not only see them but hear them, do we really know them?

The titles of Tegeder’s earlier works point to another dimension of the artwork’s incompletion: language — and by supplying the missing element, the incompletion is not remedied but magnified. Few artists have ever used such long titles; take for example a piece from 2004, Alitipia: Community Under Construction with Jumbo Love Dot Boiler; Six Safety Vessel Stations, Containing Habitats and Rainbow Structures; Five Square Two High Rises; Dangling Safety Chrysalis; Abandoned Oz City; Side Room with Circle Storage Nexus; Interconnecting Underground Transportation Network with Abandoned Square Tower Blue Day Time Underground Water City, with Multi-Square Housing Project and Side Village with Hidden Headquarters and White Circle Plan Streamer with Airline Resistant Habitat Structures and Secret Square Gardens. It’s as though every time an element is added, it conjures the necessity of adding still another. Again, the point is not even to follow this through to exhaustion but only far enough to imply inexhaustibility. Even if Tegeder’s titles have grown less profusely elaborate, they remain no less essential to her work. She has used various methods and, as she calls them, “literary games” in their invention. “I keep a large jar in the studio where I collect found text that I later use in titles,” she explains. “I also cut up hundreds of actual city names and recombine them into new fictional city names, then create anagrams from the materials and colors in the works.” Affinities with Burroughs and Cage, Surrealism and Oulipo are hardly accidental. No wonder that she has also used language independently of its functionality in titling, treating it as an artistic substance in itself, in the form of books. But this brings me to the threshold of another dimension of Tegeder’s work, a threshold which this is not the occasion for me to cross: One more reminder that with this artist, the structures of possibility are never finished. Something can still be done with Modernism to the extent that it keeps building itself by taking itself apart.

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Richard Hamilton: The Late Works was  at the National Gallery, October 10, 2012 to January 13, 2013

“Richard Hamilton: The Late Works” was conceived while its subject, who died in 2011, was still alive. Now, sadly, realized without the artist’s collaboration, the exhibition at the National Gallery is both different from and smaller than what was first envisioned; as curator Christopher Riopelle writes in the catalogue, “The scope of the exhibition [Hamilton] had hoped to mount could not be realized.” As a result, perhaps, this exhibition shows an artist of smaller compass than one remembers, for instance, from his 2010 show at the Serpentine Gallery, which was not a full retrospective but put the accent on the broadly political dimension of his work throughout his career. By contrast, “The Late Works”—something of a misnomer as several of the nineteen pieces shown date from the 1990s or even the ‘80s, though it’s true most were made from 2004 onward—is a selection oriented mostly toward Hamilton’s responses to the great tradition of European painting. There are specific references to masters ranging from Titian and Cranach to Matisse and (Hamilton’s great inspiration) Duchamp; the theme of the Annunciation is prominent. All this makes sense, of course, in the context of the National Gallery. The Saensbury Wing, 1999-2000, whose title is an excruciating pun, depicts the museum’s own Sainsbury Wing (designed by Venturi and Scott Brown), inhabited by a lone female nude, in a pastiche of the style of the Dutch specialist in church interiors Pieter Saenradem—as seen for instance in the National Gallery’s own Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem, 1636-37; deep in the distance one spies hanging on a far wall one of Hamilton’s own greatest works, The Citizen, 1981-83, the depiction of an IRA prisoner at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland.

The inadvertent effect of the exhibition, however, is to show just how far Hamilton could slip from the moral and aesthetic intensity of a painting like The Citizen. Instead, what comes into view here is a rather academic artist preoccupied with a kind of commentary on the achievements of his predecessors rather than on anything like an urgent and unforeseeable synthesis. Nor does Hamilton’s fascination with combining painting with contemporary digital technology save the day; it only adds to the blandness of facture that casts a pall over some of these pieces. And like so many academic painters, Hamilton seems to use the female nude’s status as a culturally blameless motif—if it’s a reference to Titian, then there can’t be anything prurient about it, can there?—as a way to indulge a personal delectation while pretending to a high-minded disinterestedness; it’s not the indulgence that rankles, but the pretense. All the worse, the three final paintings on view, Balzac  [a] + [b] + [c], 2011 (printed 2012), the authorized remnants of an unfinished project based on Balzac’s story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” are far from the “profound meditation on art, beauty and desire” that Riopelle pronounces them. They are merely the most naked of the exhibition’s pastiches. In each three versions of the same image, citations of self-portraits by Poussin, Courbet, and Titian are shown as if earnestly discoursing on the seductively recumbent girl with dreamily closed eyes who stretches out so sensually in the foreground; she too is a quotation, from a photograph in the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Academicism says that if you combine great parts, you will make a great whole; but here is one more proof that the result can be much less than the heavy-handed sum of the all-too-obvious parts. What made Hamilton so different, so appealing, was anything but this.

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The conflicts and antagonisms that impinge on the place of painting in contemporary culture are innumerable, and they’ve been with us for generations. In wake not only of Gerhard Richter’s work, but also that of Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, among others, the relation of painting to photography remains contested, as does the closely related issue of the dichotomy between representation and abstraction-and also that between abstraction and the readymade. Another related problem, most obviously articulated in Pop art and its many subsequent derivates, is the one often signaled by the dichotomy between high and popular art-although it would be more accurately articulated as the problem of what becomes of an art whose roots are entirely in high culture when the very division between high and low is becoming an increasingly dated historical artifact.

Not only must any serious manifestation of painting implicitly take a position on such issues-every indication is that it must also fix on one or more of them as its very subject matter. A glance at the work of Craig Fisher is sufficient to indicate certain positions that have been taken: this art is entirely abstract and non-objective, and appears to have found an effortless equanimity in being able to align itself with the highest traditions of modern painting that go back through Abstract Expressionism to the Impressionists-but in a way that never asserts a complacent or toplofty denial of all those formerly despised or ignored aspects of being that are now sometimes described as “abject” or “formless.”

That very equanimity suggests, however, that the tension that would give Fisher’s work its true subject is not to be found in its vicinity. Instead, let’s look for the irritant that impels this art in less specifically aesthetic, more broadly metaphysical terrain: in problems of human action, and specifically in the relation of will or intention to everything that, determinate or indeterminate as the case may be, seems to function independently of our will. The more perceptive of the critics who have commented on Fisher’s work have always noticed the importance of this theme, David Cohen marking the effect of a “courtly style in which volition is held to lack decorum, but in which it is equally poor manners to betray angst in the denial of volition” (Art Press, March 2000) where Lilly Wei found “chance configurations” of which Fisher “acts more as agent than as author” (Art in America, September 2000).

Every action, every event must have its stage. Isn’t that why these paintings take place on raw canvas? Canvas is preeminently the place where painting takes place, and in order for this “taking place” to be exposed, made evident as such, the stage too must be made to show itself as a stage. So the canvas is that which, in the painting, has not yet been assimilated or subsumed into painting. Or which will not be so assimilated, one might say, until the last minute-that is, until the fecund unity of the picture emerges from the sparseness and welter of those seemingly stray bits of pictorial matter that float as if indifferent to one another across the picture. The ambivalent nature of the canvas-its hesitation to be seen as either already a manifestation of painting or as a mere field, a readymade, on which that which is truly painting will take place-is lightly mocked in some of Fisher’s paintings by certain passages that have been painted in a shade as close as possible to that of the canvas itself. Fisher’s ability to joke with the fundamentals of his art in this way is, needless to say, quite distant from what in the ’80s used to be mislabeled irony, despite one commentator’s having mistaken his work for a “tongue-in-cheek conceptual exercise” (Kim Levin, The Village Voice, October 26, 1993), which is just what it is not. It’s more like the matter-of-fact recognition that there are, after all, more serious things in life than this-a simple matter of keeping one’s fascination with art in perspective.

Now as for the events that take place on this canvas: To characterize them is either too easy or too difficult. Pours, smears, dabs, rubbings, stains…and I can use the thesaurus, if I care to, to expand the descriptive vocabulary to encompass flows, discharges, smudges, spatters, traces, blots, mottlings….but that will hardly give the reader a real sense of what these things look like. They are of the order of material instances that are differentiated but not individualized. Sometimes they seem to be the kind of things that happen accidentally, but more often they seem rather to be the sort of marks one might make intentionally and yet absently-the kind of marks one might make in order simply to test a brush, or a particular mixture of pigments, that one intends subsequently to put to some more concerted use. And then there are marks that appear to be not on but somehow of its surface-places where the canvas itself seems to buckle and harden. These are caused by puddlings of paint on the verso-just as certain other more or less faint discolorations have been made by inundating the other side of the canvas with paint: another deconstruction, if you will, of the canvas’s status as ground for the events of the painting.

It is this sense of absented intentionality that leads me to believe that the underlying concern of the paintings is the relation of the artist’s intentions to the realm of determinacy and indeterminacy (which is to say the realm in which intentions are irrelevant). Wasn’t that Buster Keaton’s subject too? Houses fall down around him, but Buster soldiers on as if everything were going according to plan and, somehow, everything does work out right. Of course, that’s because his alter ego Keaton was there behind the scenes directing the film. Craig seems, in these paintings, to be rummaging around in the studio, spilling things, sopping up the mess, procrastinating by trying out his new brushes, doing anything but having a solid go at asserting his intention to make a painting-and somehow or other, at the end of the day, there’s a ravishing one anyway. Lucky thing his alter ego Fisher was there patiently directing. To get a grasp on the paradoxes of intention, it seems-the way you can fulfill them by evading them, and presumably frustrate them by carrying them out as well-you’ve got to be of two minds.

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