December 12, 2014 through January 25, 2015
56 Bogart St (between Harrison Place and Grattan Street)
Brooklyn, 718 473 0819

Deanna Lee makes paintings and drawings that reference several influences: the biology slides she looked at while growing up (her mother is a scientist), the actual pattern of the grain of the wood she paints on, her heritage as a Chinese-American artist who has copied reproductions of Asian paintings. These experiences and conditions have resulted in very good art; her paintings demonstrate a fascination with the cusp between abstraction and figuration. The latter is evident in Lee’s treatment of her imagery, which can suggest topological maps or, in her ink drawings, some of the Chinese landscapes she is familiar with or the jagged images of an artist like Clyfford Still — one painting is directly inspired by the American painter. Lee shows us how a miscellany of influences can enrich and deepen our experience of painting, especially in New York City, where so many artists come from different backgrounds. We are by now quite used to the various reports of artists with different experiences from our own. It is clear that this has been the strength of New York as a cultural capital, which remains a center for artists who want to work out relations between American culture and their own new — or in Lee’s case, relatively new — history of immigration.

Lee’s art evokes feelings of nostalgia for lost ways of seeing. But she regularly contemporizes her perceptions by seeking unusual sources for her art. In clfrd (2014), clearly a reference to AbEx painter Clyfford Still’s style, Lee also constructs an elegant gouache-and-acrylic composition that builds off the lines of wood grain on the face of her panel support. These lines occupy large passages in the picture, particularly the vertical body of light purple on the left side of the work. In the middle, viewers find a ragged vertical of yellow that cuts into the purple hue seen on either side of it. Some deep red, mostly enclosed by the purple, shows through toward the edges of clfrd; the origins of the painting’s beauty derive from a tradition well understood in America, where Still’s legacy is well known. Lee’s reading of the past shows us how a painter can find a dimension of change in the idiom she works with.

In AWGP 3 (2013), Lee works on a smaller scale; the painting’s dimensions are nine by twelve inches. Repetitive light-blue lines, again a reflection of the wood grain beneath, look a bit like a mountainous Chinese landscape. They occur on a background that changes from a purple below to olive green above, with a curling mauve strip dividing the two areas. The work leans toward the decorative, but not in a negative way; one is reminded of the high hills and broad mists of Asian painting traditions. There is a point where Western abstraction and Asian traditional art meet, for the latter’s painterly effects can be isolated and turned into something non-objective. AWGP 2 (2013), another small painting, works in a similar way. The picture, which presents regular horizontal lines of dark purple repeating above two equally divided green grounds (one a dark forest color and the other an acid green), could be the detail of a contour map. Its thin strips begin with a lake-like image inserted at the bottom of the composition. Here the feeling is that of an oasis, a point of reference dictated by harmony. It resides in what could be an actual place, one very nicely detailed by the painter.

Eagle Street 1 (2014), one of six ink works on vellum put up in the show, continues with the notion of a repeated outline, in this case showcasing the closely patterned cracks of her studio wall. Looking a lot like the skin of an onion, the painting has several thin lines that edge out of the body of the bulging image. One of the best things about Lee’s art is the multiplicity of its references, which in this instance range from landscape to abstraction to the rendering of a particular thing. Her work’s ability to bring up several allusions at once is one of its greatest strengths. As a painter, Lee offers us a language that is more widespread in its inspiration than it seems. Moreover, the specificity of its structure — the studio wall pattern — allows Lee to work from a reference that is culturally neutral, even if the image’s material — ink — looks to a Chinese past. As a method, this is extremely interesting, for it supposes that the means of inspiration can be as specific and local as the place where one makes art, as the title of the piece indicates. In general, Lee’s paintings remind us that today’s artists often explore, more than kind of, cultural effect; Lee does this extremely well.

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We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. . . . The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation. [No] matter how heroic, or innocent, or moral our individual lives may be, this new fate hangs over us.

Barnett Newman (1948)

[The] new painting does have qualities of passion and lyrical desperation, unmasked and uninhibited, not found in other recorded eras; it is not surprising that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which may well be non-existent . . .

Frank O’Hara (1959)

*   *   *

World War II had a shattering effect on Americans. News of the war was unremitting, disseminated by newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio, photographs, films and posters, and above all, by letters from millions of servicemen, who were represented by blue stars in the windows of their homes, growing numbers of which were changed to gold, indicating a dead husband or son. Only a few of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists served in the armed forces–most were overage–but all were intensely aware of the approximately 16 million Americans who were serving, and the hundreds of thousands who were being killed.

The war, which followed earlier plagues–World War I, Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and the Spanish Civil War–defined the 20th century. Morton Feldman, a composer and friend of avant-garde painters, once wrote, “[William] Byrd without Catholicism, Bach without Protestantism, and Beethoven without the Napoleonic ideal, would be minor figures.” 3 So would Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still and, with the exception of Hans Hofmann, the other leading Abstract Expressionists without the omnipresent World War II and the subsequent Cold War. Feldman concluded, “It is precisely this element of ‘propaganda’–precisely this reflection of a zeitgeist–that gives the work of these men its myth-like stature.”4

The Abstract Expressionists did not illustrate the hot or cold wars. Instead, they internalized the political and social situation and asserted that their painting was essentially a subjective or inward-looking process. What they ended up expressing was the tragic mood as they felt it of the decade–an embodied mood. 5

*   *   *

By 1947, de Kooning found his earlier biomorphic inventions limited, and Pollock and Still, soon to be followed by Rothko and Newman, came to believe that primitivistic and mythic subjects they had been painting could not fully convey the anxious and tragic mood that artists felt the need to express, a mood intensified by the Cold War with its threat of nuclear devastation.

The looming mushroom cloud became the defining image of the period. The bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were only the beginning; bigger and better bombs fusing hydrogen nuclei were being tested. Horrifying images were etched on the public imagination, burnt and mangled bodies or “a flower disintegrating, shriveling into oblivion. . . . Searing light, blinding heat, total annihilation. Nothingness was possible.” So was the end of the world–in a new Holocaust. People built bomb shelters and armed themselves to keep their neighbors out; children were made to crouch under desks at school during bomb drills. 6 This gave rise to what Gottlieb termed “the neurosis which is our reality.” 7

In this climate, Pollock, Still, and de Kooning felt compelled to embody their experiences directly in images that were more immediate than their earlier improvisations. They were very conscious of the Cold War and the Bomb’s menace and internalized and personalized the disheartening situation and expressed its mood. 8 They assumed that the world was experiencing what they were, and that if they dealt authentically with their feelings and concerns, their work would be rooted in reality. 9

In 1947, in a dramatic and unprecedented development, Pollock and Still “broke through,” as they put it, to Field Painting and de Kooning, to Gesture Painting. In their quest for directness and immediacy the Field and Gesture painters rejected Synthetic Cubism, geometric abstraction and existing Surrealist and Expressionist styles. Their divorce from previous modern tendencies presented them with formidable difficulties. As Motherwell wrote:

With known criteria, the work of the artist is difficult enough; with no known criteria, with criteria instead in the process of becoming, the creative situation generates an anxiety close to madness; but also a strangely exhilarating and sane sense too, one of being free–free from dogma, from history, from the terrible load of the past; and above all, a sense of nowness, of each moment focused and real, outside the reach of the past and the future. 10

In a similar vein, Rosenberg wrote that for artists committed to any predetermined system, the truth was already in existence outside the artists’ own experience, but that painting as “a way of experiencing . . . means getting along without the guidance of generalities, which is the most difficult thing in the world.” 10 Jack Tworkov concluded that “Abstract Expressionism . . . has no rules, no specific character, attitude, or face. . . . As such it is non-academic if you realize that . . . you cannot predict in advance what its look ought to be.” 11

In moving from familiar picture-making into an artistic terra incognita, the Field and Gesture painters encountered daunting formal challenges. If the orderly composition of cleanly edged forms in the clear, flat color of Cubist abstraction were suppressed or jettisoned, then what? Freewheeling brushwork? Open color? The problem was to compose coherent abstract pictures–-for the Field painters, using expanses of color, and for the Gesture painters, using improvisational drawing with the brush. Creating an immediate image, one that would make a sudden impact on the viewer, presented the artists with another difficult formal problem. One solution was to create an allover, single or mass image, as in Pollock’s linear webs, or Still’s, Rothko’s and Newman’s expansive color fields. Another solution was to paint aggressively, as de Kooning and Kline did. Immediacy could also be achieved by greatly increasing the size of the canvas. The “big picture” also facilitated directness since painters could bring more of themselves physically into the painting–more of the body, the arm rather than just the hand. Immediacy, directness and large scale became earmarks of the new American painting.

The innovations of the Mythmakers, Biomorphists and especially the Field and Gesture painters, violated the art-world’s expectations of what Modernist art was supposed to look like, and their work was generally spurned. It is difficult today, when Abstract Expressionism has long been recognized both at home and abroad, to fathom the hostility it encountered from the art world well into the 1950s. The artists believed passionately in what they were painting but often found it difficult to rebut attacks on their art, since it appeared so unprecedented that at first it did not resemble art at all, sometimes even to the artists.

In their quest for authenticity and in response to the ominous  mood of the 1940S, the Abstract Expressionists refused to prettify or “finish” a painting: they accepted crudeness; a number deliberately cultivated a raw look. To the Mythmakers clumsiness was associated with archaic myth and “primitive” art. For the Gesture painters lack of finish was the result of improvisational or direct painting and was prized. In the name of honesty, let all the scars and blemishes show. The Field painters valued an anti-decorative look because they identified it with the Sublime. Such adjectives as beautiful, tasteful, or elegant were put-downs. Tell an avant-garde painter that his work was decorative and you would be shown the studio door. As Thomas Hess wrote, thinking of de Kooning’s “scarred and clotted pigment,” “The picture was no longer supposed to be Beautiful, but True–an accurate representation or equivalence of the artist’s interior sensation and experience. If this meant that a painting had to look vulgar, battered, and clumsy–so much the better.”12 Finishing a painting was looked down upon because it meant that the evidence of the process of search and discovery had been touched up or prettified. At a meeting of some two-dozen avant-garde artists at Studio 35 in 1950, Reinhardt asked, “Is there anyone here who considers himself a producer of beautiful objects?”13 No one did.

The Field and Gesture painters considered roughness a peculiarly American quality. They associated refined and  beautiful painting with School of Paris picture-making. It was common at the time to compare Kline’s American, direct, immediate, and bold brushwork with the Pierre Soulages’ French, restrained and nuanced facture, which was considered Kline’s School of Paris counterpart. 14 At the meeting at Studio 35, Motherwell said that “young French painters who are supposed to be close to [our] group . . . in ‘finishing’ a picture . . . assume traditional criteria to a much greater degree than we do. They have a real ‘finish’ in that the picture is . . . a beautifully made object. We are involved in ‘process’ and what is a ‘finished’ object is not so certain.” De Kooning agreed, “The point that was brought up was that French artists have some ‘touch’ in making an object. They have a particular something that makes them look like a ‘finished’ painting. They have a touch which I am glad not to have.” 15

It is noteworthy that jazz was the preferred music of the new American painters. Lee Krasner recalled that Pollock “would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records–not just for days, day and night, [but] day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof! . . . Jazz? He thought it was the only other really creative thing happening in this country.” 16 At the time jazz was often denigrated as rough and vulgar–-or what Thelonious Monk’s termed “Ugly Beauty,” the title of one of his pieces. 17

Unfinished-looking painting had a social class aspect. Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman and Baziotes were working class or lower middle class. As avant-garde artists, they were poor, living as bohemians. Coarse facture was a metaphor for their plebeian roots, and a response, perhaps, to  living where animals would die, as Kline quipped. The New Yorkers put themselves forward as tough, macho workers, a posture that was in sharp contrast to the stance as artist-aristocrats of the  French émigrés in New York. The photograph of Pollock in Life magazine with his cigarette dangling from his mouth may have been a pose, but it had a message. It typified the rugged American Westerner–the prototypical small farmer or rancher.

As proletarians and bohemians the new American painters  prized the unpolished look in their canvases because it was the polar opposite of the middle class spic-and-span kitchens and bathrooms featured in glossy advertisements in popular magazines, which fueled America’s burgeoning consumer culture in the past-war era. Just as the affluent society rejected avant-garde artists, so the artists spurned the glitzy signs of commodity worship. The coarse look of their painting was a defiant denial of Madison Avenue slickness: the paint-smeared dungarees versus the gray flannel suit; the look of the grimy studio against Better Homes and Gardens; and most importantly, the “unfinished” brush work as a signifier of authenticity against the impersonal immaculate surfaces of appliances and packaged goods.

As the American economy and culture became more corporative, the cultivation of the unfinished appearance had another aspect, namely the rejection of the growing regimentation of life and the alienated work that capitalism required. 18 In opposition to work that entails “a division of labor, a separation between the individual and the final result,” art historian Meyer Schapiro  maintained that the Abstract Expressionists had prevailed over  standardization by creating works that were “more passionately than ever before the occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling, works that affirmed the individuality or the ‘self’ of the artist,” and hopefully would inspire their fellow citizens to seek freedom.19

As if evoking the imagination of disaster, the abstractions of Pollock, Still, Rothko, Newman and de Kooning from 1947 to roughly 1950 are bleak, oppressive, foreboding, angst-ridden and alienated. They lack fixity or repose and exhibit signs of discord, harshness and, at times, violence. Color is disquieting more often than not; formal design is ambiguous and threatens to decompose and disintegrate. 20 Pollock’s dripped and poured skeins of paint in canvases such as Full Fathom Five (1947) are congested and suffocating; Still’s heavily coated areas of pigment are oppressive and turbid, and de Kooning’s facture, as in Excavation (1950), is raw and aggressive. The colors preferred by the three painters are dark and unappetizing–-in a word, anti-decorative. Although their works are abstract, they retain references to the human image. De Kooning reduced his figures to anatomical fragments; Still invented threatening humanoids and after 1947 spread their organic parts over the canvas, and Pollock buried or trapped stick-like figures in his poured webs. In one horizontal canvas, Number 1, 1948, Pollock evoked the figure by impressing his own hand onto the surface–the tangible trace of his body. Moreover, Still’s and Pollock’s canvases from 1947 to 1949 were generally vertical, their verticality suggesting the upright human figure.

Above all, the abstractions of Still, Pollock, and de Kooning are distinguished by the tension between disorder and order. De Kooning’s paintings, e.g., Excavation, seem to be in perpetual flux. The frayed edges of Still’s shapes, as inNumber 6 (1945-46), serve to destabilize composition. The pulls of order and chaos, disintegration and integration, and control and loss of control are most straightforwardly revealed in Pollock’s poured paintings. Greenberg maintained that it was precisely the opposition between disorder and order in his canvases that gave them their particular timeliness. He further claimed that “Pollock’s superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create a genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control. 21 Oscar Wilde once said that Turner invented sunsets because he made viewers see them in a new way. Similarly, Pollock can be said to have invented chaos.

The chaos in Pollock’s painting seems to well up from deep within his psyche, as a kind of upsurge of primal energies, which  provides the work with its authenticity. Chaos, however, was not only the result of Pollock’s individual psychology, but was informed by the turbulent state of the world, which, like his adventitious process, seemed unmanageable and beyond rational control. In Pollock’s work, the personal and the social converge. He did seek to organize the seemingly accidental effects yielded by his technique, ordering and making sense of them, as he himself would claim. In response to the accusation that his work was chaotic, Pollock responded, “NO CHAOS DAMN IT!” He also insisted, “I CAN control the flow of paint. There is no accident.”22 Frank O’Hara called attention to Pollock’s success in wresting pictorial order from his poured pigment; he wrote of his “amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate the simplest of elements, the line–to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone.”23 Nonetheless, the poured images are on the verge of breaking down and disintegrating into chaos far more than they coalesce into a structured image.

Like Pollock’s Field abstractions of the late 1940s, de Kooning’s Gestural paintings reflect the mood of the time not only in their dark colors but in their rough facture and mutilated anatomies. Indeed, de Kooning’s images evoke the torn flesh remains of aerial bombardments. Yet they preserve traces of humanist man, or as much of him as de Kooning could salvage. Pathetic though this tenuous hold on the human is, it is the source of whatever optimism and sensuous pleasure is to be found in his black-and-white paintings.

Disorder, chaos, disintegration, violence, and darkness–the manifestations of a tragic sense–are embodied in the most expressive of Field and Gesture Painting of the late 1940s. This work speaks graphically of the human predicament during World War II and the early years of the Cold War–“the crisis,” as Rosenberg termed it–and perhaps too of the universal human condition. 24 The world at the time seemed to be descending into a chronic state of uncertainty, confusion, and madness–“the night of the world,” to borrow a phase from Hegel. 25 The revelation of the Holocaust intensified the awareness of the human capacity for both barbarism and suffering. The bad dream of recent history pervaded the artists’ studios. 26 Thomas Hess recalled that Abstract Expressionism was “founded on despair and glimpses . . . of hopelessness.” 27 In a 1943 letter to the New York Times, Rothko wrote that “only that subject matter which is tragic and timeless is valid.” 28 Newman agreed, “The basic truth of life . . . is its sense of tragedy.”29 Elsewhere he said that he wanted his paintings to make “contact [with] the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy.” 30

Typical of his verbal style, de Kooning’s statements were  cryptic. He did not say explicitly that his art was tragic but a talk he gave in 1951, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” reveals much about the cheerless mood of the time. De Kooning took aim at utopian-minded geometric abstraction. Its advocates or “theoreticians,” as he dubbed them, believed that nonobjective art would release humankind from its wretchedness. They had a longing for “glass and an hysteria for new materials which you can look through.” De Kooning said that he faced life’s misery, which was exemplified by “an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter.” 31 As Motherwell summed it up, “I think that my generation is the most tragic that has ever existed. American painting is really after a sense of the tragic. If [it] is really tragic, then it may be great. If not then it is of no consequence.” 32

The compelling evocation of the tragic mood in the work of Pollock, Still, de Kooning, Rothko and Newman was responsible for their growing recognition. It did take several years for the art world, and much longer for the general public, to appreciate their subjective abstract art, but with a single exception (Hans Hofmann) only tragedians among the Field and Gesture painters have grown in stature. Why these artists and not myriad others working in a similar vein or in entirely different styles? The reason is that during the 1940s their art, scarred as it was by anxiety and darkness, put its finger on the pulse of the decade. In their struggle to register their subjective experience, the most acclaimed Field and Gesture painters created works that provided compelling insights which illuminated the mood of their time. The artist’s personal sense of being as manifest in his painting was of a piece with his historic moment. That is, the mood of the artist’s inner world corresponded with that of the outer world and consequently revealed truths not only about the artist and his culture and society, but also about the human condition. As Motherwell said, “each period and place has its own art and esthetic–which are specific applications of a more  general set of human values, with emphases and rejections corresponding to the basic needs and desires of a particular place and time.” 33Thus, the strongest Field and Gesture painters created work that was at once personal and social, subjective and intrasubjective, historical and trans-historical. Their painting was both of its moment and transcended it.

Notes:

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July 15 – October 2, 2005

This lively exhibition at the Albright-Knox Museum is about connections and dialogues and more broadly about how to buildbuilding bridges.  The connections do more than demonstrate relationships between works within this exhibition or between this exhibition and past exhibitions curated by the museum’s new director, Louis Grachos.  These connections are bridges to the past, to the present, and to the future.  They open up new possibilities for audiences to appreciate good art that do not presently exist.

If this is not the best possible survey of contemporary abstract art that could be put together, and it is not, it is certainly strong enough and unique enough to be well worth a visit to the Albright-Knox.  Indeed, some of the reasons why this could not be a more representative exhibition of contemporary abstraction,  are part of its strengths.  Dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, the Albright-Knox was one of the first museums to collect abstract art and today, the museum’s collection is approximately 60 percent abstract.  At issue here is a valiant attempt of the museum’s curatorial staff to juxtapose its legacy of abstract masters with current abstract art that is not limited to painting.  Extreme Abstraction reflects a predilection to showcase works that are experiments in materials, color, form, and media (video, computer-based art) as well as various new venues for abstract art—floors, steps, and outside walls.  The result is that the more than 150 works selected for this show enable the past to reframe the present and the present to reframe the past.

In the words of David Pagel, these are mostly examples of “hands off” art that eschew the use of a brush to apply conventional paint (oil or acrylic) to canvas.  Hot art is compared to cool art.  The basic dialogue then is between this newer art and the museum’s very strong, albeit not complete, permanent collection of abstract art beginning with Malevich,  Rodchenko,  and Mondrian, and then journeying through Abstract Expressionism, Optical and Kinetic Art, Color Field and Minimalism.  Here, masters include: New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Wilhelm deKooning, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt; Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and minimalists of varying sorts—Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol Lewitt,  Elsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin.  It is noteworthy that the permanent collection is so strong that one has to work hard to find omissions like Barnett Newman,  Robert Ryman and Brice Marden.  But then again Morris Louis and Richard Serra are present as bookends between the end of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Minimalism.  Here, an Eva Hesse would have been welcome but there is a strong Lynda Benglis floor piece.  There are also two excellent examples of the Light and Space Movement—Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin.  The Bengalis  and Kauffman are particularly important because they represent direct antecedents  to the contemporary extreme abstractions in regard to the use of quirky, industrial materials and colors, as well as blurring the line between painting and sculpture.   They portend the delightful impurity of the Extreme Abstraction sensibility by exchanging extroversion for introversion, affirmative emotions such as joy and playfulness for angst, and substituting a garden of earthly delights for high-minded ideals.  And most telling, such artists producet art that is perhaps more expressive of the materials they use than their own personal struggles to wrest meaning out of the void.

The installations here are crucial.  For example, a powerful Jackson Pollock, “Convergence” (1952), is paired with a floor piece,  “Reckless” (1998) by Polly Apfelbaum, which is an assemblage of individually cut pieces of synthetic stretch velvet, fabric and dye.  Such dialogues are multifaceted.  At certain formal levels the works are similar—they both show all-over abstraction and they are both floor pieces albeit in different ways.  Apfelbaum’s is a floor piece in terms of the installation and Pollock’s in terms of how the work was painted.  But they are also profoundly different in ways central to today’s Post-Modern abstraction.  The Apfelbaum and related works in the exhibition such as Linda Besemer’s Fold painting, consisting of a sheet of pure acrylic paint draped over a bar, have a feminist agenda; they, along with Lynda Benglis’ “Fallen Painting” (1968) which is a floor piece of pigmented latex rubber, demonstrate that women’s work can give rise to “high art”.  Specifically, such works are “crafted”, not painted on canvas,  playful rather than driven.  There is, however, a deeper connection that needs to be explored.  Pollock, Apfelbaum, Besemer and Benglis create art that, in the terms Robert Smithson (1965) used to describe Donald Judd, have an  “uncanny materiality”..   How these works were created and how they need to be viewed are transformed by the expressive materials used.  Such art encourages a viewer to look at Jackson Pollock differently.  Pollock’s style of working, in regard to his throwing and dripping paint as he danced around a canvas, created art that is best seen in an active, embodied way.  Michael Fried not withstanding, theatricality in abstract art is born here with Pollack, not with Judd’s minimalism.  The scale, surface tactility,  and complexity of pattern invite the viewer  to complete the work by moving close to it and walking from side to side.  This is also true of Apfelbaum’s and Bengalis’ floor pieces.

A major strength of this exhibition is that works do more than enhance one another—they have a synergistic effect.Another interesting form of connection or dialogue is how the museum’s installation allows different works to enrich the meaning of works in the same visual space.    John Armleder, for example, uses in his own work to key an installation of Oop and Kinetic art he curated form from the museum’s permanent collection.  The installation newer work, especially coupled with a video by Jennifer Steinbcamp makes theisolder art seem fresh, exciting and contemporary in feeling, and not so distant from cousin to Leo Villareal’s monumental outdoor light piece.  Although Villareal’s mechanisms are extremely different being based on computer software and LED lights, his work in this context becomes a contemporary descendent of Op and Kinetic art..  Then there is a wonderful dialogue among works from different artists and different periods all of which turn color into lava-like flow fields.  What other exhibition comes to mind that would encourage us to see similarities among the work of Clifford Still, Morris Louis, Lynda Benglis and Ingrid Calame?

There is also a productive visual dialogue between David Reed’s exuberant xxxx vertical painting of brushstrokes that playfully twist and turn and fold and unfold and a massive sculptural piece that shares many of these attributes by Liz Larner.  Here, blues, greens,  redsyellows, and purples speak to each other across a broad visual field, thereby giving a dynamic, contemporary twist to Albers’ color contextualism, this time across media.  The Reed and Larner works also share a kind of tawdry sensuality of form and color and both require an active, embodied viewer since they change from different distances and viewing stations.  Further, they are neither organic nor inorganic, but trapped between these worlds (Larner’s sculpture could be seen as e an alien space ship.)

The exhibition also reflects a hidden connection across time and space with a previous show that involved Louis Grachos, the new Director of the Albright-Knox Museum.  Specifically, his earlier curation at Site Santa Fe of an exhibition entitled, Postmark: An Abstract Effect (1999) included thirteen artistsmore than a dozen artists that are in the present show.  This suggestsIt appears that the seeds of at least certain aspects of Extreme Abstraction were planted in Postmark’s exhibition of “hands off” abstraction—w, work informed by the movies, TV, computer screens and automobiles.  These abstractions captured a world in which the boundaries between high art and low art are blurred if not obliterated.  In this connection (pun intended) Extreme Abstraction’s placing of a Flavin light sculpture across the room from David Batchelor’s “Idiot Stick” is illustrative.  Specifically, this exhibition, as did Postmark, celebrates the impurity of a current abstraction that is often more decorative than spiritual.  The impurity also extends to the inclusion in the current exhibition of photographic and video forms of abstraction including the photographic material of Adam Fuss and Gregory Kucera and the videos of Jeremy Blake and Jennifer Steincamp, the latter of which dialogues so beautifully with the large Armleder light piece

.  There is also an interesting connection albeit a much lower degree of overlap between the Albright Knox’s previous exhibition, The Forman Collection of Monochrome Art, which although it included some nontraditional materials like Florence Pierce’s resin pieces which were also in the PostMark exhibit but did not make it into this one.  This is unfortunate because Pierce’s work is an interesting hybrid.  It has an affinity to Agnes Martin’s transcendental minimalism while at the same time being much a creature of the expressive industrial material it uses, a subtheme of the present exhibition.

There is also what is likely to be an unintended  but we find fascinating connection between several works in this exhibition and a classic surreal painting by Salvador Dali, the Persistence of Time.  In Dali’s work, the line between inorganic and organic objects is blurred, time pieces flow and drip, losing their rigid boundaries.  Interstingly, there are a number of works in this exhibition that have a kind of flowing, bendy, drippy kind of quality that threaten their integrity as solid objects.  These include works as divese as Apfulbaum, Pollock, Besemer, Reed, Zimmerman, Yamaoke, Grosse and Davie.  This affinity group suggests that at least for a subgroup of artists in the Extreme Abstraction exhibition,  there is a kind of meta-impurity, what might be termed surrealist abstraction.

Finally, the museum and especially its director are to be congratulated for initiating an exhibition program, starting with the Forman Collection this spring, that departs from the current rage for a kind of decadent figuration reminiscent of Klimpt and Schiele.  InsteadThe Albright-Knox is offerings us a virtual library laboratory for the study of abstraction in its many forms.  Taken together with Grachos’ earlier Postmark exhibition at Site Santa Fe,we have a demonstration these three exhibitions demonstrate that the death of abstract art has been greatly exaggerated.  Abstraction has once again abstraction has morphed.  It has changed its material, form and aesthetic sensibility, thereby making it an ever more elusive target for the its would-be executioners  of abstraction.  Indeed its arch-enemy, Post-Modernism, has now been assimilated into it.  Abstraction is dead; long live Abstraction.

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