January 17 to February 25, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

The exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian uptown is remarkable both for the quality of the paintings and for the way they embody the transformational moment in which they were made. The 17 paintings filling a single large room are all from 1974-75 and if they are metronomic in their structure and in their presentation, their urgency and excitement are as palpable as when they were first presented. Together with a catalogue by the show’s curators, Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, that delves into the mid-70s context of Reed’s paintings, this show creates a vivid historical context for the works that commence Reed’s distinguished career.

Painting Paintings reunites many paintings that were shown in Reed’s heady debut at Susan Caldwell gallery in 1975. Reviewing it that year for Art in America, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Reed’s paintings have “the strength of modesty, of ambition reduced to a level not further reducible. There is no ‘getting around’ these paintings”.

Part of the interest of the work, then and now, is how it distills painterliness. The schema is simple—each painting contains roughly a dozen horizontal bands of red or black alternating with white or off-white. The canvas panels are less than a foot wide and about six feet vertically—wider paintings consist of these regular units bolted together. But it is the process that makes these paintings standout. The paintings are the result of Reed pulling a large loaded brush of red or black paint through a thick wet ground of whitish oil paint. What follows from this premise are viscerally compelling incidents where the brushstrokes have dissolved into viscous skeins of paint. Although the gesture of Reed’s brushstroke is simple and repetitive, pigment and gravity collaborate to form detailed arrays of micro-cosmic composition—each is a unique painterly moment, off hand and delectable at the same time.

There is a specific bodily relation to Reed’s paintings that is crucial and cannot be reproduced.  The bands of brushstrokes can be apprehended through photography but in terms of the physical experience of looking at these paintings, the stripes do only perfunctory duty. Rather than function as the paintings’ compositional goal the alternating bands are the structure that allows paint to hang in an intimate choreography of splashes and blendings.  In the catalogue Siegel and Wool note that the linear compositions are like writing with their left to right pulls of pigment. They also bear a resemblence to a musical score. Additionally, the quality of Reed’s paintings relate to the sumptuous and insistently rhythmic compositions that Philip Glass and Steve Reich were performing in lower Manhattan in the mid-seventies. The vertical panel has an ergonomic architecture tuned for a human body to paint its surface. The clarity of each painting’s facture reminds us that as viewers we take up the same location in front of the canvas as the artist did while painting it. The paintings invite us to step in close to see and soak up lush surface specifics.  It is this pull to intimacy that gives Reed’s paintings their humanity and warmth. And that seems to be where the picture is in these works— not in their imagistic configuration but within the physical process of close looking.

Through contemporaneous documents—magazine and catalogue pages, installation and personal photographs, as well as reproductions of works by other artists—the catalogue presents the personal as well as cultural context for Reed’s emergence as a painter. There is an evocative photograph from 1968, for instance, of Reed in attendance at the New York Studio School with the painters Philip Guston and Leland Bell surrounded by students. Although Reed moved on from the conservative spatialist conventions of that institution, the catalogue presents his development less as a rejection as the taking up of a radical rethinking of art underway at that time in New York. The catalogue includes a chapter based on the exhibition, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, curated by James Monte and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney in 1969 that manifested the concerns of process-oriented artists of the late 1960s. The show included only one painter, Robert Ryman, and as such might have been called “Anti-Painting”. Most of the artists selected were less interested in the history of painting and sculpture than in science, technology, and sociology. Even so, these “Anti-Illusion” artists employ a number of shared pictorial conventions. Foremost is the use of repetition. Partly this is an affection for rhythm, but it is also a control to discover how different effects come from the same action. Additionally repetition is used to present narrative in a manner like film through a sequence of frames. Finally, there is a taste for documentation as representation—either through the technical means of photography, film or video, or through the presentation of material residue as evidence of the action that produced it. As indicated by the use of the word in the 1969 show title, Material, material, raw and unadorned, is savored in the work of artists such as Lynda Benglis and Carl Andre. It was an insightful choice by Siegel and Wool to include these contemporary works in Reed’s catalogue because it demonstrates how he embraced pictorial values of the zeitgeist. It is an achievement, and an unlikely one, that Reed brought what were often thought to be anti-painting values to his painting so naturally.

One flight down at Gagosian, the curators installed a group of works tangentially related to Reed’s paintings, including examples of Joel Shapiro, Wool himself, Joyce Pensato (a classmate at the Studio School) and Andy Warhol. While such efforts at building context work well in the catalogue, in the gallery the group show seemed more convenient than urgent. In comparison to the focus embodied in Reed’s paintings the group show was at best a pleasant distraction to Reed’s prodigious accomplishment.

As the catalogue emphasizes, Reed spent years painting from life, practicing drawing, and listening to accomplished artists speak about painting. Writings by Reed reveal his love for historical painting; his notes about color and the location of shapes within his compositions show a lineage of academic discipline. Cearly, Reed’s education in traditional painting and drawing have been a resource over the years. Although the works in the “Anti-Illusion” catalogue have a great absurdist exhuberence I couldn’t help but think how evanescent are those works that rely on document and trace rather than engaging the more traditional forms of painting and sculpture. The Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock in the midst of painting is iconic but it’s the painting that remains to give the photograph its consequence. Inversely, with Richard Serra casting lead against the corner of a wall and floor (also reproduced in the catalogue) it is the photographs that remain to signify the artist and his gesture. In this case it is Serra’s persona, or you could say stunt, that is the primary artwork. For Reed, the painting itself is the primary document. As the title suggests, Reed’s subject is Painting, not his body’s gestures. It was ambitious for Reed to take on the then contemporary pictorial conventions of repetition, documentation as representation, and material immance. As for the accomplishment of these paintings—there is still no ‘getting around’ that.

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November 2, 2016 to January 14, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76 and 77 streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Across the room, one of Warhol’s “Rorschach” paintings imitates the legendary “inkblot” test developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach –evidently some of the only imagery for which the artist developed his own painting, rather than repurposing photographs. Like Warhol’s Rorschach, the silkscreened ink splatter of Christopher Wool’s Minor Mishap (Black) (2001) conjures up the death – or perhaps the afterlife – of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, much of Wool’s mature work has gone on to address such questions. The silk-screened reproduction of painted, gestural brushstrokes raises questions about autonomy and authority in painting – questions which Warhol’s work unleashed with a vengeance. In its chromatic austerity, this room obliged viewers to concentrate on formal rhymes and contrasts, many of which reward patient looking.

Individual canvases could also bear their own mysteries. In Warhol’s series of silkscreened crosses, a few of the white forms bleed into each other – exceptions that instigate attention to the rule of their order. Near the middle of the canvas one finds the faintest line, traced in such a way – however unwittingly – to suggest a horizon, which contravenes the relentless flatness of the painting. The formal details of Wool’s paintings frequently come in the form of the pixels of which they are composed, again suggesting an update of Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots for the virtual age.

The exhibition’s second room bursts into color. From the slightly ribbed surface of Guyton’s untitled fireplace white dots seem almost to rise like ash or sparks from the proverbial fire, while red “paint” appears smeared upwards in one area. A more dramatic smearing appears in Wool’s Double Blue Nose (2003), which almost suggests an erased Brice Marden painting – evoking once again the fate of abstraction, this time by way of Rauschenberg’s erasure of De Kooning’s drawing. The slightly earlier Untitled (2001) appears looser in the skeins and loops of its red lines. Not all of the works here are painterly. The primary colors of Guyton’s wayward X’s (the red letter shadowed by a black counterpart) bring to mind Mondrian’s neoplasticism. Once again, the repetition of the two, seemingly identical blue X’s makes technological reproduction unavoidable as a point of reference. Based on a shadow photographed in his office, Warhol called his Shadow paintings silkscreens “that I mop over with paint.” A close view of the canvases reveals the almost impasto swirls of giant brushstrokes. Nearly all of the spontaneous, “autonomous” brushwork in this exhibition appears in reified form, in the abeyance of photographic or scanned reproduction. But the eddy of Warhol’s (or an assistant’s, however the case was) brush betrays – just on the eve of the 1980s – a renewed investment in the hand’s trace.

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January 7 to February 22, 2014

381 Broadway, 2nd Floor, between White and Walker Street
New York, info@nationalexemplar.com
Hours: Thursday to Sunday, 2-7pm

Compared to words, pictures are the more enigmatic, imprecise mode of expression; consequently, words are (as demonstrated here) often employed to describe and organize interpretations for images. Leo Fitzpatrick, however, attempts to conduct the reverse by subtly motivating the act of painting to service words. His fascinating solo show at the National Exemplar Gallery is comprised of a quiet ring of monochromatic text paintings of uniform, modest scale that outline the rim of the gallery’s space. Black capital letters are painted in the most nondescript, precisely medium-strength sans serif font. One corner of the room feels momentarily warped by five standout canvases set against darker and hazier backgrounds, but most titles come as suites of two or three canvases. The installation does not immediately clarify these groupings or suggest an agreed upon starting point to viewing the work.

The thirty-six year old artist first gained attention as a teenage skateboarder in Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). In addition to his paintings he is also known for his ardent word collages made with old paperback novels, found images, and other cultural debris. He has also published several volumes of poetry, mostly pages of restless, probing free verse lines quite similar to text found in these poem paintings: “a collection of sad hopes and futures dying / a destiny fit for a king.” “MY ANGER IS MY HOME (THE BOY WHO COULD MAKE HIMSELF DISAPPEAR) AND I’M HOME ALONE.” Compared to other artists who work with words such as Christopher Wool, Carl Andre or Jamie Shovlin, Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with language is curiously literal and reverent. These canvases are too large to fit household printers, but the increased typeface retains the proportional familiarity and intimacy of 12 point Arial on A4 paper. Each canvas contains a sparse handful of words, displayed in aesthetically reasonable compositions that are not overdesigned. Lines are never robotically centered or justified, and words are only severed after prefixes and never interrupted mid-syllable. The result is a group of effortlessly truthful still-life portraits of poetry in its essential state.

Painting’s accessible, lyrical physicality does not engulf language’s abstract identity; the verses gain the perfect degree of hyper-articulated visibility without having to materialize their contents as reinterpreted, disenchanting illustrations. Sourced from poems and diaries that Fitzpatrick has been keeping since age eight, these paintings awaken distant feelings that are invisible yet intensely palpable. Memories of unresolved poignancy and angst have long been archived as experience, and the paintbrush fully reactivates their sting. The blunt, black brushstrokes come through like deep trenches and dig into plush layers of white and wintry grays, putting to bed buzzing palimpsests of revised dreams and nostalgia.

One of the most mesmerizing moments in the show is a series of three canvases that begins with “NEVER AGAIN” and ends with “AGAIN.” “NEVER AGAIN” is positioned at the top of the left panel and “AGAIN” at the bottom of the right, conversing like two clearly adjacent pieces in a complex puzzle set. The center canvas reads, “I WAS/IN LOVE/WITH YOU/INTILL YOU/LEFT WITH/HIM.” Intentional or not, Fitzpatrick’s misspellings are immensely engrossing. There is something sinister about the word “intill” that makes it stick and linger – perhaps it is due to the unexpected absence of the friendly roundedness of the shape of “U”? After a lengthy gaze, the brigade of vertical strips here will begin to appear dangerously sharp and spear-like. A delicate frenzy of cracks and wrinkles on the finely shattered surrounding surface confirms their weight.

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JOAN WALTEMATH: The Guggenheim provides special challenges to painting, but also provides unique opportunities, one of these being the ability to see the work from different angles and distances as you move up or down the ramp.  In Wool’s case I think it works to his advantage insofar as you can really see the surfaces of the paintings.  Photography gave us a standard that there should be no glare in a photograph of a painting, over time I think that has conditioned the way we see and think about surface.  Are these works lit to be photographed, or seen? There was one piece, untitled 2009 AIC gift where glare on black is lighter that the neighboring white enamel, and so from one angle that hot spot jumps forward and then shifts back again spatially as you continue to walk by.   For me all these kinds of formal acrobatics are really uninteresting unless you get the sense that they are tied to some train of thought or awareness on the part of the painter, so I’m always trying to find how to make an interpretation that ties the formal to the philosophical.  In Wool’s case I read all this shifting around as indicative of an interest in the transient world, its mutability.  I had the feeling with his various moves that Wool was trying to keep his work open and mutable in and of itself.

DAVID RHODES: The issue of reflection in Wool’s paintings is a direct result of his use of enamel paint. But he doesn’t ever, for example, employ a totally reflective surface. by using glass or a mirror as does Gerhard Richter. The effect of the reflection is to both enhance the surface as a physical presence whilst at the same time complicating the reception of the image because of the way lighting and the presence of other objects are manifest on the surface. This oddly encourages movement in front of the painting in order to ‘see’ the painting, not see it better as an image necessarily, but in order to respond to its physical properties. Perhaps this makes for a more kinetic and immediate experience as opposed to a meditative delayed experience.

WALTEMATH: As a result of this, David, I noticed how thick the stretcher bars were, and how in that specific dimension he was able to locate himself vis-à-vis other historical periods and concerns. Though we are talking about his painting’s material properties, we are not in the realm of painting as object, and for me the stretcher bar thickness was what made that clear.

NORA GRIFFIN: Surface was definitely at the top of my mind while looking at Wool’s paintings, and also in the theater of the Guggenheim, watching others look (or more often “pose” for iPhone photos with the work) around me. I have to say, I was repelled by much of the art with the possible exception of the rice paper drawings, which seemed like a perverse conflation of delicate and raw materials, and thus mildly interesting. David R, interesting what you say about the slick enamel surface encouraging a more “kinetic” experience of the viewer in front of the painting — I agree, and actually had trouble standing for more than a few seconds in front of each one, and only when I caught glimpses looking around the Guggenheim’s ramp did I really observe the paintings. But I think this is ultimately not work that is meant to be “seen”; it’s meant to be bought and sold, accruing value, and hung in palatial mansions and museums throughout the Western world. Certainly, it is work that can be thought about, as we are all doing here, but it is a kind of thought that is separated from an organic viewing experience, that I find distasteful and dehumanizing. Joan, I like that you bring up photography too. I definitely think these paintings are locked into a relationship with media that we can only begin to guess at. There’s a kind of proto-digital look to the early enamel paintings that I can imagine at the time of their first exhibition must have seemed new, and possibly exciting.

DAVID COHEN: Christopher Wool is a closed book to me: I have never been able to fathom how his work garners the critical attention and auction price tags that it does.  When I learned of the Guggenheim retrospective and that several of my regulars wanted to write about him I thought now would be the chance to see him in depth and in the company of astute commentators, that maybe the blinkers would drop and an “aha” experience would ensue: that the Wool would fall from my eyes. Well, seeing the show hasn’t done it for me.  On the contrary, I have to describe it as one of the most enervating and dispiriting museum exhibitions I’ve seen in a long while.  The text works have none of the humor or the indignation of, say, Richard Prince or Glenn Ligon, and I’m no Prince fan, believe me.  The near absence of color is not a reductive gesture in the mode of Reinhardt or Ryman, it seems to me, so much as just a stinginess of spirit, part and parcel of the nihilism that seems the only feasible explicator of his dreary, aimless, pedantic, pretentious and self-satisfied oeuvre.  Look at those photos he took traveling around Italy and Turkey etc.  To be in a room of Islamic carpets and bring back a desultory black and white snapshot that you’ve had printed from a crappy camera and then Xeroxed.

His most encouraging line, almost I guess his trademark, is his lethargic though insistently anti-lyrical loop paintings.   Alzheimer de Koonings denuded and bleached, they make one realize that his nihilism leaves forebears in the dust: Thinking of Rauschenberg as a formal and perhaps attitudinal forebear, Wool is too deskilled even to erase – smudge being his preferred MO.  Actually, they are not riffs on late de Kooning so much as early Charles Cajori who probably taught him at the Studio School (his resume usually cites Jack Tworkov – when the School isn’t omitted altogether). One lasts angry squeak, if I may: It says something about a contemporary abstract painter that their work actually makes Robert Motherwell look fresh and relevant.

RHODES: David, I think dismissing an artist on assumed intentions, as well as failing to address the qualities of individual works, is too easy. Humorous comments like “too deskilled to erase…smudge being his preferred MO” raises a laugh, but there isn’t anything to discuss.  It’s on the same level as saying “Cézanne was too lazy to paint up to the edges of his canvas.” Witty maybe, but an opinion to engage with, no. Try describing why none of the paintings have anything to do with line and space, he’s not “riffing” on de Kooning so much as using line as painting, to make and move space around, “Alzheimer de Koonings” as you call them, by the way are often tremendous. In my opinion, take a look at the paintings at Gagosian on Madison Avenue (don’t look at the price tags though.) As to your saying that he is nihilistic: Skeptical, angry, intellectual, lyrical, a lot of things, but nihilistic? There is way too much work and engagement for that. The photos of his studio after a fire, look for something redemptive in destruction, and they have a beauty, they look for something not entirely wasted in scenes of abjection.

COHEN: I think whatever the artist’s intentions, if you occupy the space of a certain kind of painting then you must stand comparison with the forebears or contemporaries that you evoke or to whom you bear striking formal resemblance.  Then of course there are outliers who don’t seem to connect to people to whom they stake some claim of connection – Cézanne and Poussin for instance – and time tells whether the connection seems valid. Wool is unquestionably in the same ballpark of intention as Albert Oehlen with whom he shares an ability to produce big, commanding decorations while somehow remaining fully committed to an anti-expressive attitude.  I’m perfectly open to a painting that eschews cohesion or compelling gestalt in favor of something more radically abstract, in the way that free improvisation departs from more traditional jazz.  But if the tropes and flourishes echo the jazz greats then it has to stand comparison to them. Yeah, like Motherwell, the problematic late de Kooning looks better – after Wool.  In a way, though, perhaps Wool is influencing late de Kooning, in the sense that de Kooning insisted that HE influenced the old masters.  The unwilled late works, with the scale and colors chosen by others, look more contemporary thanks to Wool and company.  I think that Wool is also an enabler to artists like Wade Guyton.

RHODES: David, when you say Wool and Oehlen are committed to anti-expression are you quoting their intentions or implying that you regard them as incapable of expression. Wool is a far more fluent painter than Motherwell though they both show their cubist roots in a collaging or piecing together of imported parts, take Motherwell’s Figure with Blots from 1943, also on view at the Guggenheim, it presents a collaged rectangle of paper with black blots that finds its space compositionally despite being such a relative foreign body in the painting.

WALTEMATH: The late ’70s and 1980s  in New York City were especially exhilarating years in many ways.  I lived through those times, and if I can ruminate a bit, perhaps I can shed some light on what I remember as conditions, concerns and the climate that made some of those decisions that seem desultory, remarkable. I found the photos from the ‘70s some of the most surprising and revealing works in the show.  The randomness inherent in the environment due to the absence of routine maintenance at that time, gives a unique chance to look at the aesthetics of decay, entropy.  This move towards chaos – how a thing hovers on its edge – was a concern of Smithson and other artists in the generation that came before Wool.  Barry Le Va for another example, examined the relation between determinant and indeterminate forms.  New York at this time was an incredible place to study the coming apart of things in that period before “development” filled in all the blanks.  So many of the shots focus on liquids moving, spilling, spilt and urine running out of corners which was a ubiquitous sight in those days.  A splatter on one brick wall is reminiscent of Richard Hambleton’s scary black shadow figures from the ‘80s, which was even grittier.

This was the time, too when body fluids began to be recognized in a new way for their deadly potential in carrying disease, so there is a deep undercurrent here in Wool’s preoccupation, that might seem on the surface like a fascination with messes or attraction toward demise as Peter Schjeldahl puts it.  The consistency of those photo compositions with the later paintings gave me to believe that there were genuine concerns that were being worked out in them. The darkness in these photos works much like the wipes in the later paintings.  One wire screened door glass that’s been wiped with a dirty rag gives a gauze to the stairwell beyond and reads like a pretty direct precursor to the later paintings in this context.

Loose Booty is a beauty and shows the edge between patterned repetition and an inflected over compositional structure.  One medium blob to the right makes this point. I maintain this is what he is interested in.  Everything in the earlier work points to an interest in abstraction devoid of expressive or emotive content, which is not to say one doesn’t feel things in looking at them, but that this is not how the intention behind them is framed. From across the room the patterned flowers take on a kind of all over character, loosing their more decorative aspects to the overriding gestalt.  That gestalt is consistent with the photos.  I think anyone living downtown at that time learned to see all that chaos and debris as extremely liberating and not abject as it reads today.  It was freedom and makes today feel like living in a straightjacket.

The painting called Rotation Collision was an important moment for me in this show in so far as it is a rare moment where Wool steps over the line and one could say over determines visually – he strives here which is surprising–Usually he strides a beautiful line between chance and intent, random and determined that calls into question the limits of making. If life is a negotiation between what happens and what you want to happen Wool provides the analogue, a deal, which gains clarity as you ascend the circular ramp of the museum.

COHEN: Joan’s historic context with its personal reminiscences is quite fascinating.  I saw the show with a group of students and a visiting artist from California all of whom seemed as depressed by the experience as myself.  One kid made an astute observation: that the graphics of punk, presented by the curators as the dominant cultural reference at his arrival in New York, entailed grainy black and white tabloid press headlines and reproductions relevant to Wool.  I tend to relate fine art to other fine art usually, a limitation and a result of my training I guess, so this observation was revelatory.   Unlike Vivienne Westwood there is no romanticism at the end of his punk tunnel.  The damaged studio shots, made for an insurance claim, as redemptive?  I’d love to see it that way with you but simply can’t. I guess I just come from a very different sensibility. We can open the book and still not be on the same page.

WALTEMATH: Right now it seems a long way off but during the 80s there was a tendency, when money started to pour into the art world, that people would set up a kind of historical raison d’être for their work.  By carving out a niche for oneself in relation to the grand art historical narrative, you set up something to bank on.  I see Wool’s approach as a product of this era, although now its not necessarily being seen in these terms. What interests me about Wool is how, at a time when painting was not on the map, he really did the nuts and bolt work to find a way to make it possible to get back into that grand narrative. The focus was on Pictures Generation, appropriation, Jenny Holzer, Art and Language.  The one thing the scene didn’t give permission for was a kind of formal language in painting. Wool mines the past and brings forward all these tropes, devices, ideas, anything that will work as part of his vocabulary and connect him into that narrative.  That is what I see in the installation of his work at the Guggenheim. On a formal level I think he’s trying to find a way to come to terms with the grid in these paintings and the importance of what minimalist aesthetics gave us.  He takes the readymade roller patterns and has a link to Duchamp, whose position truly dominated in the ‘80s when those stencil paintings were made.  I sense there’s a lot of anger about not being able to paint, I mean if you were a painter and you came to NY in those years, there were very limited means you could use and have a shot at having any kind of public voice.  I also remember those days being filled with a lot of confusion about the relation to the past.  It was often seen and/or talked about as the post-historical period and while there was a recognition that the avant guard was over, the desire for the new wasn’t. At the same time this historical filling in the blanks game was going on as artists jockeyed for positions.

Rosalind Krauss and the October crowd had pretty much damned the grid as stuck in modernism.  I think for a lot of painters at that time, there was a necessity of coming to terms with the grid in some way, shape or form.  What I see Wool going for initially as he moved out of the text paintings are these subtle inflections where the pattern of the grid moves off its raster. The paintings Loose Booty or Riot are example of what I am referring to — talking loudly and saying nothing.  So I think Wool’s decisions about what and how to paint were based in a historical necessity.  There was no chance in those days to create any kind of experiential space.  So in my view we cannot critique it on those terms.

COHEN: I’m sorry, Joan, but we must be living in parallel universes.  No painting in the ’80s, Wool heroically held out, Bleckner too but others had to go to Europe.  Hello?  The ’80s were awash with turpentine.   You have to be an in-crowd exclusionary critic to say of any period that there was no painting or no possibility for painting etc. when it is only in perhaps your own circle that these attitudes prevailed, or in the pages of the art magazines you allowed to gain hegemony that such a discourse prevailed. What’s interesting to me is not Wool as the lonely last painter, but that Wool actually isn’t in the master narrative that was being compiled at that time.  A pretty good indicator of who was really being talked about in the ‘80s is Irving Sandler, the man with his ear to the ground.  In his Art of the Postmodern Era, From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) there is no reference or footnote to Christopher Wool.  Now he has a retrospective at the Guggenheim and we are attending to his surfaces as if he is Reinhardt or Newman and boy is he not. A footnote regarding Pattern and Decoration: The curators tell us that Wool’s pattern paintings of the ’80s arose from observation of the forlorn semi-demolished buildings in the East Village; maybe, but he was looking at P&D obviously, too.  His works are contemporary with Donald Baechler too, right?  But for the curators only the likes of Duchamp and Pollock are worthy as referents and comparisons, and they leave out non-superstar sources and affinities, all part of the genius-packaging process that goes with museological apotheosis.

But here is something I would like to hear the aficionados address: scale.  Because wandering up and down the Guggenheim ramp I was very struck how essentially scaleless these works are.  They don’t reveal different kinds of gestalt at different distances – they mostly don’t have gestalt, indeed work hard not to have gestalt.  They kind of click at one distance and that’s about it.  He tries out different sizes as he does techniques and surfaces, all to keep busy and I guess fill the world with Wools.

GRIFFIN: Joan, I’m especially interested in your discussion of decaying and abandoned urban spaces in the ‘80s and how Wool pictured this in his photography and paintings. I grew up in the East Village in the 1980s, and remember that sense of openness in the city’s landscape, but also the grossness (trash piled high everywhere) and very real sense of danger and violence amid the decrepitness. For me Basquiat is the poet of the ’80s streets, and from an earlier era, Brice Marden’s oil and wax monochrome gray scale paintings from the 1960s speak to a kind of in-between space, where beauty registers amidst decay. Also Dorothea Rockburne’s crude oil on paper drawings. But perhaps I am just asserting my biases for work made before the 1980s art boom, and also letting in the idea of beauty felt amidst decay. Could it be that the lack of beauty and/or color (for me they are linked) is one of the bottom line problems that I have with Wool’s oeuvre?

I think its cutting Wool too much slack to have to try and imagine the conditions that produced these paintings in the 1980s. For those of us who did not live through that period (and that will one day be everyone) that becomes a kind of academic exercise separate from the viewing experience. Joan says: There was no chance in those days to create any kind of experiential space.  So in my view we cannot critique it on those terms.  But, not to be too much of a hot-blooded humanist, isn’t “experiential space” the only constant we have to critique and understand paintings? Shouldn’t a painting be able to speak on its on terms through any time period or millennia? I don’t understand Piero della Francesca’s frescos as the believers of his day saw them, but I do still *see* them and they speak to me about humans, space, and art.

RHODES: I’m interested in Joan’s point about emotion being stripped from the making of the gestural markings. It’s often the case that the making of a painting is not always visible in the viewed work. Think of Reinhardt. Silk screening, however basic and available as a technique, could be seen as a doubling endlessly of an original or as a means to transfer an element from one painting to the other, like de Kooning’s newspaper blottings. Drips within the context of painting are variously signs of process, playful pictorial devises, take Mary Heilmann, or simple acknowledgments of what paint does. Within the context of painting in general that includes house painting, and of course Wool uses decorative patterned rollers and enamel, the significance of drips could well include the German expression in wide use before 1945  “Jude Tropf” or Jew drip, which was applied to house paint that had been applied and accidentally dripped. In other words it was annoying. I don’t say this is actually part of Wools intention, but as we are “reading” the paintings, in more ways than one. I think Wool is working with the tradition of Ab-Ex, but also reaching back to Dada and Surrealism, automatism is central to his painting, particularly the later large scale oil on linen paintings. Surrealism and Dada have been understated as part of the Ab-Ex endeavor in favor of expressionism, expressionism being seen as more noble, and perhaps more known.

GRIFFIN: As I walked through the museum, I kept trying to imagine another context where this work might seem exciting to me. I remembered that growing up I would visit my friend whose father was an abstract painter, and on his studio wall was a poster of Wool’s Cats in Bag Bags in River (1990). It worked beautifully as a poster; was abject, shocking, funny (sort of), and also seemed very “cool” at the time as well. Perhaps the connections between Wool and the punk/rock poster aesthetic can be teased out some more. The thinness and industrial materials he uses already speak to me as paintings as “posters.” I love posters, live with posters, and think they are culturally significant, but they are not the same thing as paintings.

I found the word paintings the most compelling, perhaps because they felt like honest statements (and have the closest affinity to the babble of the “street”). Trouble (1989),Untitled (Sex and Luv) (1987) and Blue Fool (1990), would all shine on their own in a gallery or a group show with other work. I think the Guggenheim’s grandiosity and modernist pedigree really makes Wool’s work look like a joke is being had on us. Some paintings were not meant to be seen en masse in the Guggenheim because they don’t possess the right internal conditions to be seen in that kind of space.

WALTEMATH: I like that we are all coming at this work from so many different angles, it means there is something to sink our teeth into here. And in the end there is no need to concur about anything. The most interesting things embody all manner of contradictions. By experiential space, I meant that some paintings are made to construct a kind of experience that unfolds, and use that manner of unfolding to reveal what they are about and some paintings are using other means to communicate.  I think often abstraction works through enfolded experience, but not all abstraction.  Wool’s paintings are in some sense following a lineage of formalist abstraction, that is how I am reading them, and yet they use images – of pattern of flowers or words – as their main vehicle.

I’m reading them as taking a lineage of formalist abstraction because of how they take up and investigate problems of seriality, randomness, chaos that I see in the early investigations of Andre, Judd, Smithson, Barry Le Va to name a few.  So, no, I don’t see experiential space in Wool’s art- and in developing this term I’m drawing on Wilhem Worringer’s formulation in his book Abstraction and Empathy (1908) as the constant. Rothko might be a barometer for experiential space, and Wool is nowhere near that deep.  My point is you can’t evaluate Wool on terms set for painting by Rothko, you have to figure out his (Wool’s) terms.

And yes a painting should be able to speak on its own terms through any period, and if in using the details and circumstances of the time to discover the possible terms, you find that the work doesn’t really function outside that, then there is a clear cut critique and the nays have it. I found this was my only way into Wool’s art, to go into my experiences and memories of the time, and this is born out to a degree by the importance these black and white photographs play in the whole exhibition and how they and it are being received.  At the same time, none of these images was the least bit memorable, not that that is the point.  What they reveal is a certain compositional strategy on his part or a way of ordering things and that’s where I see the real meat of this show is – that is abstract.  So I look to the history of formalist abstraction for precedents.

RHODES: I don’t see any new problems that the architecture of the Guggenheim presents, that is different for Wool, as a classical modernist painter that goes beyond the curve walls and ascending ramp. Wool’s use of vernacular materials and words are consistent with experiments from the early years of the 20th century in France, Germany and Russia in particular, through to Jasper Johns and beyond. Sure, Wool reveled in some aspects of the openness of an unpolished low rent environment that was downtown New York in the ‘80s, but as paintings they don’t break with the challenge of producing vital engaging work, I don’t think the rawness of some of the paintings (imagine Courbet or impressionist painting when it was first seen if you are used to David and Ingres, or Piero?) or by the way in the rectangle format, that for some time has not been a given for painters, indicate bad boy or punk in art, but an affiliation with attitudes of renewal.

COHEN: Joan, I’m fascinated to hear Worringer’s dichotomy cited in relation to Wool – can you amplify that?  Wool presumably is the epitome of an urbanite so one would expect on Worringer’s terms an alienation from nature.  But his shapes and patterns are surely no less geometric than organic?

WALTEMATH: I referred to Worringer in relation to how one experiences a painting because of his concept of empathy, being the kind of ‘strahlung’ or emanation coming from a work that one feels, like one feels a large red expanse or the energy of certain kinds of brushstrokes, and that this is a way to interpret what the artist is saying -I call that experiential – versus images, which speak in their own way or concepts that are referred to, which are located outside the work, or compositional constructs dealing with form which is where I would locate Wool.

The point for me is whether to read these works as intending to insert themselves into an historical narrative or not. I think a lot of decisions Wool made in his work were about picking up the things from the past and trying to weave them together to get his painting located within a grand narrative. I don’t mean to imply that he was the only painter working in New York at that time. At any given time there are lots of artists working in similar and also very different veins.  From the point of view of an art historian I can see how what I wrote makes it seems like I’m trying to claim some primary role for him, but that was not on my mind. I’m not going to argue for Wool’s importance over other painters, or that he was the only one doing this.  Or that he “saved” painting or anything like that.  I’m just trying to figure out what is going on in these works so we can talk about them — what is Wool basing his decisions on, what’s he exploring.

Initially I think that what is going on in these works is kind of a mystery, because they give so little and are in some ways so self-involved.  I want to blow that up in order to get a glimpse of what they are about.  I can find a lot of stuff on a formal level that is interesting to me, as the nuts and bolts of formalist abstraction were being overhauled at that moment.  I think that is what Raphael Rubinstein was getting at in his show last summer at Cheim & Read.  He found 15 artists whose work he felt was making important contributions; he mentions in our interview in The Brooklyn Rail that there could have been many more.

COHEN: Worringer’s opposition usually applies to the maker as much as the viewer, from my recollection; the people who had a rapport with nature produced organic and naturalistic art of empathy whereas those whose outlook on nature was bleak retreated into geometry and abstract patterning.  But if that’s not the sense you were interested in we could just drop this point. It would certainly seem that if Wool’s intention were indeed to dialogue with the bigger narrative of abstract painting, or painting per se, then his career success plays nicely into that as once one occupies a position within the canon connoisseurs will look for, and likely find, connections between an accepted newcomer and the masters.  I just see more negative attitude towards the possibilities of paint than positive ones in Wool, as his impulses are primarily deconstructive and iconoclastic.  Almost anything he touches, regardless of its size or degree of workmanship, seems dismissive of big energy, the creative spirit, any sense of urgency or purpose.  And I think this accounts for his success because the system is still so heavily invested in an end-game mentality.  It is still an era that privileges Duchamp over Matisse (to use a very rudimentary short hand) at least in the top ends of patronage and scholarship.  To those looking for an extension of the Johns/Richter line Wool is perfect.  And I have no trouble, by the way, David R., in reconciling nihilism with productivity.

GRIFFIN: To me, Wool is not a “classical modernist painter,” as David R calls him, which is perhaps why it looks funny to see his paintings hanging like icons, suspended in air with no wall behind them as much of the work was in the Guggenheim. I completely agree with Joan that it’s reductive to pit Wool against the masters of modernist painting, and I too try to find out the “terms” that the artwork has set forth. I do like the idea of the image of the city as a device for abstract composition. But the fact that Wool’s photographs are so expressively abject, and visually mottled by their translation into grainy photocopies, makes them an almost too obvious counterpart to the paintings.

I do think there is more fluidity and movement in the post-2002 paintings, where color splashes and a mixture of media creates a slight sense of spatial depth and movement. But I would never call them “lyrical,” to me they start to work only when they can approximate the unintentional harmony of a graffitied wall.  To end on a positive note, I do think a painting such as Last Year Halloween Fell on a Weekend (2004), hot pink and black spray-painted snaking lines on a lushly grey wash background, is a kind of perfect little street image. If I saw it all on its own in a gallery, or better yet, If I came across it leaning against a dumpster on the Bowery I think it would start to command some real visual attention.

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April 29 to August 20, 2012
152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 626-6222

In reaction against Abstract Expressionism, Andy Warhol (and his fellow post-modernists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) inserted content into painting.

No wonder Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were so personally hostile towards him: they believed that he had killed abstraction. More exactly, since a silkscreen may have either a figurative or an abstract subject, Warhol undercut the distinction between figuration and abstraction. That said, some of his subjects – of which the shadows, Rorschachs, and camouflages in this exhibition are examples – look abstract. But as the title of the show indicates, it’s not Warhol’s subjects but his industrial-style techniques of art production which have been taken up by the abstract painters in this show. Hence Rudolf Stingel’s impersonally finished oils and enamels on canvas; Christopher Wool’s blotches—anti-forms made by photographing and printing his earlier paintings on an inflated scale; and Glenn Ligon’s surfaces composed of acrylic, silk screen and coal dust on canvas.  And Urs Fischer’s presentation of gesso, arcylics, silicone and screws on aluminum panels and Mark Bradford’s mixed media collages, influenced by graffiti, on canvas. Julie Mehretu presents monumental abstracted images of urban experience; Tauba Auerbach creates images of folds with acrylic on canvas; Wade Guyton prints inkjet images on linen; Kelley Walker does explosive-looking digital prints on canvas; Sterling Ruby sprays paint on canvas; and Das Institute (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder) creates oil on paper constructions: then they extend this style of abstraction.

Most of the eleven American or US-based artists in this show don’t use brushes. They employ silk screens, electric sanders and industrial sprayers. And they mostly do non-gestural painting. (Seth Price and Josh Smith are the exception to that rule. I like their art but they don’t really belong here.)  It is Warhol’s loss of direct contact with the subject, rather than his occasional use of abstract subjects that makes him a potential source for abstract art. Such factory made abstraction has some affinities with Robert Ryman’s minimalism, but little connection with Brice Marden’s recent gestural painting, Ellsworth Kelly’s clean design or Sean Scully’s romanticism.

The essays in the usefully lavish catalogue are all over the map. There are proposals to link these artists to feminism or queer theory or accounts of race. But since just by looking it is hard to know that the paintings of Auerbach and Das Institute are by women, for instance, or that Ligon, Bradford and Mehrutu are of African origin makes this seem an unpromising approach. There are attempts to read these figures as political artists. When Goya, Manet and even Picasso painted political subjects, then surely their art was political. So was Warhol’s when he painted Jackie Kennedy and Electric Chairs. But contemporary abstraction resists politics. The desperate urge to make these paintings politically critical expresses the guilty conscience of art writers, who want to believe that praising art they, like me admire, is not merely to write at the service of the art market. But that hope is foredoomed, for it surely must occur to everyone that this is the ultimate capitalist art, arcane in its appeal, and so large that only grand collectors can afford to house it. The catalogue has many photographs of the artists’ enormous studios, which do look factory like.

Recently Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA director, has been under fire. Judging just by this brilliantly challenging show, which is highly adventuresome, those complaints are unjustified. MOCA has always puzzled me. In a city with intense natural sunlight, how perverse that this prominent museum is completely underground and so totally dependent upon artificial lighting. But it turned out to be the perfect venue for this exhibition of industrial scale art. Deitch and the curators have done something original and important. They have identified a challenging novel style of abstract painting and provided a genealogy linking it to Warhol’s art. What remains to be done, in my opinion, is to provide some account of the aesthetic pleasures of this art. Perhaps we should consider the ways in which the seemingly neutral or rebarbative structures of these pictures reconcile us to everyday post-modern industrial environments. How revealing that the most immediately accessible work is Rudolf Stingel’s wall to wall white carpets, which allow visitors to create an all-over work of art as they mark it while walking around viewing the paintings.

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June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

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In the 1980s, when painting was commonly said to be dead, many group shows were devoted to abstraction. Although some individual artists emerged—Sean Scully was the best—none of these exhibitions had much effect. But even when Dave Hickey and the philosopher Alexander Nehamas proclaimed that beauty was back, abstraction still was marginalized. The interests of the art world had shifted. Bob Nickas’s book takes up this story, without much concern for the longer-range perspective. “Paintings that are clearly made from the point of view that abstraction is always in a sense an assisted readymade” he says at the start, “can be seen to reanimate rather than recapitulate the histories of both abstraction and the readymade” (p. 5). He doesn’t develop that suggestive claim. What concerns him is not the pioneering abstractions of Kandinsky and Malevich, reproduced in black and white in the introduction, but eighty contemporary painters, some senior, but many younger, mostly relatively obscure figures (Robert Mangold, Brice Marden and Robert Ryman are not in the book) who paint abstractly.

“Maybe,” Nickas suggests, “abstract painting has become a form of imaginative fiction” (p. 7). An interesting idea, but what exactly does that mean? After all, Poussin, too, painted imaginative fictions.  When he describes Philip Taaffe’s appropriation of Bridget Riley’s Cataract 3 (1967), as “more of a refraction . . . rather than a mirroring of the earlier painting” (p. 10) he doesn’t take analysis very far. His categories, Hybrid Pictures; Rhythm and Opticality; Color and Structure; Found/Eccentric Abstraction; Form, Space, and Scale; and The Act of Painting serve to organize chapters containing elegant commentaries on studio visits. Judging by the accounts of the few figures I know, Ruth Root, Alan Uglow and R. H. Quaytman his analysis is reliable. Nickas is very good at doing a difficult job, summarizing briefly an artist’s career. And the publisher has generously supported him, providing marvelous color plates.  But because the commentaries are relatively brief, inevitably the images overwhelm his text.

Once Clement Greenberg’s genealogy of Jackson Pollock leading to Morris Louis collapsed, it seemed that abstraction was merely one genre of art, and perhaps not the most important one. The problem in my opinion is that an account of contemporary abstract painting needs a theoretical framework replacing Greenberg’s.  Otherwise it is just a laundry list of artists whose relationship to each other and the history of art is unexplained. What, is “Hybrid Pictures” is the connection between Wayne Gonzales’s paintings, based upon crowd scenes; Elizabeth Neel’s images, which are appropriated from the internet; and Chris Vasell’s paintings with eyes? Going on to “Rhythm and Opticality,” I like Karin Davie’s loops; Xylor Jane’s playful uses of geometry; David Malek’s forceful expanding grids; and James Siena’s elegant plays with “orgiastic abstraction” (p 96). And it’s marvelous to see Philip Taaffe’s recent decorative pictures, which draw on his library images of plants. But Nickas doesn’t explain how these very diverse figures are connected. When he links Ruth Root, whom I admire, to Gordon Matta-Clark, Lee Bontecou, Ellsworth Kely, Le Corbusier, Dorothea Tanning, African-American quilts, Sonia Delaunay and Allan McCollum then it seems obvious that Nickas is imprisoned, as it were, in a slide library. “Her paintings can be seen to have a comic, deadpan personality that is as serious as it is irreverent” (p. 164).  How these extremely various influences yield that result is not explained. “As abstract as (Julie) Mehretu’s paintings are,” he writes, “they are meant to represent, or have come to represent . . . individuals and groups caught in violent conflict and upheaval  . . . global economies, advertising, markets, and their relation to power and control . . .” (p. 258). Here we find some hint of the dilemmas posed by her much-discussed mural for Goldman, Sachs. But just as Nickas doesn’t offer a developed historical perspective, so he doesn’t deal at all with the old, still relevant question: What are the politics of abstraction? Greenberg’s enemies said that Louis and the other color field painters were merely producing plush decorations. Nickas doesn’t give any reason to think that his abstractionists are doing anything more. He tells the story of Olivier Mossel, who recently made spray paintings in Beijing employing “local car painters, who, to his amusement, saw no real difference between painting a car and a canvas” (p. 266). Were they missing anything? Christopher’s Wool’s paintings, he writes “are about one thing, and one thing alone: they are about painting” (p. 336). One would hardly know that Thomas Crow has written interestingly about Wool’s politics.

Painting Abstraction, a lucid, well-illustrated account, performs one real service. By gathering useful information, it opens the way for a commentator who would discuss the relationship of contemporary abstraction to the grand tradition of Abstract Expressionism. Such a book would need to explain how the great minimalist painters, Mangold and Ryman, and the most significant figures of the next generation wrestled with the pop artists and, in the 1980s how abstraction had to combat the postmodernists. And it would need to discuss sculpture, for you cannot understand abstract painting today without dealing with Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Jessica Stockholder. In 1964 Clement Greenberg curated “Post Painterly Abstraction.” “A new episode in the evolution of tasteis what I have tried to document,” he wrote in the catalogue.  The show was a failure, for no one was convinced that Walter Darby Bannard, George Bireline, Jack Bush and the many other painters displayed were Jackson Pollock’s successors. Nickas’s book is “Post Painterly Abstraction” writ large.

Bob Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting. London: Phaidon, 2009.  ISBN 978-0-7148-4933-1, 352 pages, $75

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