June 27 to August 30, 2013
547 West 25th Street
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s, a ruggedly alive exhibition organized by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, presents fifteen artists who were in their prime during that decade. By focusing on the physical reality of the artworks, and the social reality of this specific group of artists, the exhibition escapes the trap of misty-eyed nostalgia or explicit revisionism. In his catalog essay, Rubinstein discusses the show as a way to disengage the story of abstract painting from the bottom-line narratives that are seen as the “official account” of the decade, in particular the advent of celebrity-styled painters, and the dominance of Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, two labels that had more to do with marketing than with painted content. Instead, he offers the phrase “impure abstraction,” a hybrid mode of working between abstraction and figuration, to flesh out a portrait of a painting culture that was not as beholden to the one-critic model of analysis that effected the previous generation in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.

Reinventing Abstraction is more concerned with the transition of painting cultures and the accruing of historical knowledge than it is with the particulars of the decadent decade itself. The back-story to the 1980s begins with the social radicalism of the 1960s, when the majority of the exhibition’s included artists were in school, and continues through the 1970s when they were fully experimenting with their practice in an art world that had largely turned away from painting in favor of the dematerialization of the art object. The off-the-stretcher abstraction being made in the ‘60s and ‘70s had its own moment in the sun with High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, an exhibition organized by Katie Siegel and David Reed, which Rubinstein acknowledges as a guiding spirit for his own show.

A feeling of disengagement from the immediate past manifests itself visually in many of the works on view. It is as if an invisible pane of glass were mounted on top of the canvas to emotionally cool off the fast and loose painted gesture. Jonathan Lasker’s Double Play (1987), a painting in elegant quotation marks, has all its ingredients diagrammed to perfection: a rich brown backdrop, radiating pink bars, and an area of gooey cross-hatched “painting” splashed up against the surface. David Reed’s No. 230 (For Beccafumi) (1985-6) is a vertical monument to the paint stroke, showing off a translucent-matte finish that is as sharp and slick as a silkscreen. In both works these artists are making visible the idea of painting as a compositional force sans the hot-headedness of late night studio labor. Similarly, Mary Heilmann’s exuberant Rio Nido (1987) is a play between foreground and background, between the painting as whole and the painting as parts. Blue, magenta, red, green, and yellow marks set against black are read as shot holes dripping paint, a remnant of an action, and the painting exists as the evidence.

Carroll Dunham’s Horizontal Bands (1982-83), is a Surrealism-inflected painting on pine board composed of alternating stripes of graphically rendered root vegetables, allowing one to see his trademark phalluses just over the horizon. The tentative nature of this early painting reads more as a private sketch than as a full-blown work, a proposition of fresh beginnings that charges many of the paintings on view. Bill Jensen’s The Tempest (1980-81), a dimensional portrait of a star-like figure, is thickly celestial, like a corner blow-up of a Van Gogh. Gary Stephan’s unromantically titled Untitled (#45418) (1988) is the most overtly mysterious work in the gallery, an image of a dusk-lit landscape divided in half by a biomorphic form that eclipses day into night.

What’s striking about several of the paintings in Reinventing Abstraction is their wall-dominating size. It’s a scale that brings to mind 18th-century history painting as easily as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), and speaks of financial resources and passion to burn. The lavish variety of surface textures and oil paint mixed with other media makes today’s abstract paintings seem especially anemic when it comes to materials and scale. Even the smallest work in the show, Thomas Nozkowski’s Untitled (630) (1988), radiates a deeply felt engagement with the largess of history and psychic space.

In comparison to the work on view in High Times Hard Times, the majority of artists in Reinventing Abstraction make their radical choices within the framed space of the traditional rectangle, putting an exquisite pressure on the pictorial possibilities of abstraction. A notable exception is Elizabeth Murray’s Sentimental Education (1982), a painting of conjoined parts whose scale and rapturous energy speak to the colossal task of painting as both action and object. For all its obvious labor of construction, the work epitomizes the fun aspects of high Modernism.  Her oil on canvas appears as malleable as a Play-Doh construction of cobalt colors and finely drawn zig-zags. In this painting, and indeed her entire body of work, Murray epitomizes the transcendent grace of the art student as grand master.

The paintings in Reinventing Abstractions are all un-mistakenly the work of grown-up artists coming to terms with inherited values while finding new rhythms with which to move abstraction forward. In this sense, the art could be seen as a visual complement to Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986), a portrait of the decade in which commercial entertainment culture solidified its hold on American society, while also letting in the dreamy, fluent potential of Postmodernism as a way to break free from Modernism’s flight of progress. As a citizen of a tightly sealed, pluralist art world it can be easy to long for this not too distant past. It is important to fight this backward glance, and instead to ask, what does remain? I can think of a few things: the factuality of paint, the presence of art history and mentors, and the still shocking ability of a new abstract painting to dismantle the fiction of linear time, if only for a minute or two.

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Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch, and Andrea K. Scott joined David Cohen to discuss Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman, and Joan Snyder at Betty Cuningham.

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Joan Snyder: Women Make Lists
Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25 Street, 212-242-2772

A version of this article was first published at The New York SUN, November 18, 2004

If you were just a tyke in the 70s, you missed the Women’s Art Movement, its luxurious cant and mélange of no-styles. Now you can catch up at Joan Snyder’s latest exhibitions. There are two: Works on paper from the 70s to the present, uptown at Alexandre Gallery; recent paintings, downtown at Betty Cuningham Gallery.

Both shows illustrate the vulgarity of a movement that traded on the susceptibilities of its audience. Uptown, Ms. Snyder’s bleeding scribbles are being conjured into art history with a scholarly essay, one of those tricks of the bazaar that mesmerize a parvenu art crowd. Downtown, an ensemble of 20 canvases-entitled “Women Make Lists” and dedicated to the women of Iraq-celebrates the artist herself as the bearer of female benevolence.

Do [[ITALICS]] women make lists? You bet; I have one right here. Mine is a tally of the self-worshiping conceits trumpeted by a generation of women artists in their sortie against standards of achievement-dismissed by art historian Linda Nochlin as “the white male Western viewpoint.” Nochlin famously derided what she termed “the Lady’s Accomplishment” (“a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism”). In its place, scholarly fiat substituted Womanart and its own peculiar accomplishment: an immodest, not necessarily proficient, self-assertive level of amateurism that coincided handily with the assault of camp sensibility on public taste.

Ms. Snyder is the doyenne of Womanart. While camp advanced itself seriously, it expected to be taken lightly. Not so the Women’s Art Movement. In debunking the myth of the Great Artist, it hatched myths of its own. In dead earnest. Among these was the vanity that artmaking is just one of those things that women do naturally, like lactating. Instinct is art, sisters; we are the Earth.

Ms. Snyder’s instinctive, unspoiled mark-making is solemnly packaged at Alexandre Gallery. Between watercolor splotches of tongues and tits, gnomic scraps of handwriting present themselves as a strategy to “erase the boundary between the verbal and the visual.” And catch those “mamilla berries,” showcased with the reverence due sacred relics. Why not? An artist’s touch is a hallowed thing-to be honored under glass by the faithful, like Padre Pio’s bloody gloves.

Self-indulgent artlessness is perilously dependent on the quality of the artist’s hand. Ms. Snyder’s hand owes everything to academic rhetoric which has, indeed, confused the verbal and visual. One dazzling irony here is that esteem for the artist’s mark rests on the very recognition of greatness that the Movement sought to undermine. But the catalogue transcends this stumper by insinuating an association with big names: Hans Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollock, et alia.

Ever her own mythographer, Ms. Snyder lends herself to interpretation as a shaman, sibyl, priest, healer (those dried medicinal herbs stuck in the paint!) and a Miriam leading us to the Promised Land. That is where our inner goddess abolishes hierarchies, especially those of talent and taste; and reductive labial or mammary images are as good as a Duccio Madonna.

The game gets help, downtown, from sonorous Latin titles. “Perpetuo” (2004) submits a field of disembodied breasts with rivulets of paint flowing from erect nipples. “Antiquarum Lacrimae” (2004) approaches the lyricism of needlepoint maxims with “The Heart is a Lake” scrawled over blots.

From the downtown catalogue (yes, there’s another) we learn that Ms. Snyder’s single ambition after 9/11 was to make beautiful paintings; however, “her politics cut more deeply.” Just as well, really. These spills, shmears and drips clotted with glass beads, glitter, fabric, herbs-whatever- are strenuously unimpressive. But then so is the pretense to politics. She coyly omits mentioning whether her recent pity for Iraqi women and children was triggered by Saddam’s barbarities or the invasion that ended them. Viewers can project their own positions onto the ambiguity.

Politics, as used here, is a dodge for merchandising lacrimose fantasies of women as vessels of cosmic altruism: The Breast That Never Empties (“Mamilla Immortalis”). Still pitching the old zeal, she insists that “we need to send powerful female energy and imagery out into the universe ” to save the world from (male) violence. Even more implausible than Ms. Snyder’s painting is her adherence to a crumbling orthodoxy that denies women’s complicity in their own culprit cultures. Thirty years ago, her schtick about redemptive female energy was merely silly. Today, in the wake of female terrorists-and the sight of women dancing in Ramallah on 9/11- it is cynical. Or delusional.

Ms. Snyder is self-referential and sententious enough to be anointed the next Frida Kahlo. Promotional machinery is heating up. Current shows are preliminary to next year’s crowning event: a retrospective at the Jewish Museum and an Abrams monograph. An honest appraisal of the WAM-its achievment in breaking glass ceilings for women artists and the harm done by the means taken-would be helpful. Canonizing Joan Snyder only compounds the damage.

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