September 11 – October 10, 2010
319 Bedford Avenue, between south 2nd and 3rd streets
Brooklyn, (718) 486-8180

Don Christensen’s new geometric paintings at Sideshow in Brooklyn are bright.  With almost all his colors deployed at full intensity, they are even hard to look at until becoming fully acclimatized.  Within a half hour to forty-five minutes his colors simmer down and rescind the initial reaction.  Complex movement within the compositions emerges when you have endured the blast and come through to the other side.

Christensen also has a certain masculinist approach. Each painting jumps out from the wall, vying for attention, with little modulation and no nuance.  What is remarkable and mysterious about his work though, is how unencumbered it is, without baggage and/or memory, offering, essentially, a real taste of freedom.

I came back for a second look to see if my first impression would hold up through careful observation.  Can paintings truly be free of memory, free of all associations, i.e. the process of looking that inevitably leads to other artists or movements long forgotten?   How could Christensen with his geometrically-oriented pieces rooted in the kind of visual language evidenced in the earliest fragments of pottery, achieve a relatively reference-free field when that field should, by all accounts, be laden?

Christensen is no outsider unaware of what has gone before him.  He has been around New York since the early days of the No Wave era when punk bands were comprised mostly of art school graduates, and his older brother Dan, was a key figure in color field painting.  Don Christensen went to the Kansas City Art Institute for a couple of years, as well, before heading to New York to become part of the 70’s underground scene.  The tabula rasa effect in his work is well within the bounds of intention.

Silver Button, (2009) a multicolored stairway that leads into a vast silver void is paradigmatic.  Here the surface has simply been painted, the way a house painter paints a wall; yet with none of the associations or legacy of the monochrome.  This reduces painting to its most fundamental aspect.  Stools and other three dimensional objects found and built are literally installed above and to the right or left of the paintings.  Like speech bubbles in a cartoon, it is as if they are what the paintings are saying.  Painted in patterns or single colors, sometimes with drips and gloss, they set the tone for an understanding of Christensen’s work as liberated from the past.

The sense of play in Christensen’s work is contagious.  In Charlie Ringo’s Crown, (2009) a round form overlaid with spikey green shapes engaged in wacky color combinations, gives rise to the notion that it is really perfectly okay to let yourself run wild and not worry about the outcome.  Christensen makes it seem like everyone, inherently, has the ability to do so.   An experienced eye knows the “Look Ma, no hands!” effect is, in fact, hard won.

In Santa Santa, (2010) a complex of triangles runs top to bottom, dividing up the canvas through a series of diagonals.  At the same time, there are horizontal bands of alternating colors, green and yellow in the foreground and in the middleground and most prominant black, white and red.  The colors drive home the Christmas theme while the form provides a web of conflicting spatial cues.  The background triangles reach forward to touch the foreground triangles confounding the middle ground, which nonetheless holds its own in the void.   The longer you look at it the more complex and unique the geometry becomes.  It is the stand-out piece in the back room, and shows that Christensen has come no where near to exhausting the possibilities these new works open up.

Christensen’s show is refreshing in how it makes painting look fun and easy. What I felt as I was leaving the gallery is all the fun he’s had along the way.

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Aged sixty-four, Dan Christensen died in 2007 of heart failure due to polymyositis,  a  muscle disease from which he’d suffered for years, but he left a large, diverse body of work. I’d followed his career since the 60s, when he created a stir with the raw vitality of his tightly-coiled “spray paintings.”  As art writer for Time, I saw to it that Time reproduce one of these paintings in color in 1969 (I later learned that Newsweek had featured Christensen in 1968).

I always thought the spray paintings were Christensen’s best, but the “plaid paintings” offer a truly worthy sequel.  Painted between 1969 and 1971, they lack the energy of the spray paintings, but offer a wonderful calm and serenity instead.

“Plaid” is a bit of a misnomer, for these paintings are not characterized by many narrow crisscrossed bands of color.  Rather, they incorporate broad, simple bands of color and/or rectangles–sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal, only sometimes overlaid to create a “plaid” effect.  Facture is neither painterly nor hard-edged geometric, but in between–straight edges that nonetheless exude life.

By using different colors and canvas shapes, Christensen conveyed different moods.  Baze(1969) is a fairly narrow vertical with a crimson field. From top to bottom, it is bisected by a narrow vertical band of hot pink, behind which, about three-fifths of the way down the canvas, is a horizontal band of scarlet. On either side are vertical bands of chartreuse and peach, hanging most of the way down but cut off at the bottom by another horizontal band, of brown. Overall, the mood is cheerful, bright and merry.

Dark Tulip (1970), another winner, is a large horizontal, with a broad charcoal gray band across the bottom, atop which stand two vertical bands of color and three vertical rectangles of it.  Left to right, the order of these shapes and colors is blue-green (band), night purple (rectangle), brown (rectangle), Kelly green (band) and forest green (rectangle).   The mood is solemn, majestic, dignified.

Untitled (1970) falls in the middle range between these extremes. A moderate vertical rectangle, on the right from top to bottom is a broad vertical band of deep red (separated from the edge of the canvas by a narrow band of pale black that turns into a small area of whitish-lemon near the bottom). On the left is a shorter vertical rectangle of bright orange, with a smaller area of bright green beneath it.  A narrow horizontal strip of bright yellow separates the orange from the green, and the gray from the whitish-lemon.  The mood is solid, sturdy, workmanlike.

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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