"Die Critic, Die, Die"
James Kalm
We seem to be caught in an age of sequels, prequels, and remakes. This isn’t just about the Lord of the Rings II, or The Matrix III, but our whole culture, which seems to be, like the characters in Groundhog Day, stuck in an ever repeating recycle of time. We’ve got Bush II. We’ll probably see the Persian Gulf War II, and the ‘60s peace movement is seeing a revival as well. And in the art world there’s a renewed interest in the impact of that great polemicist and critic, Clement Greenberg. Opinions vary as to Greenberg’s influence, his power to make or break careers, and his grumpy and curmudgeonly persona, but not about his importance to American art. I, for one, am not disposed to disdain this current revival. Hopefully it will displace the Duchampian revival that, over the last five years, has permeated every aspect of contemporary art, and thank goodness, seems, to be lurching into its final death throes. As a usual policy, I’m not a follower of any generalized aesthetic or movement, but I can enjoy this rehashing of Neo Marxist precepts purely for its entertainment value. After WW II Greenberg, almost single handedly, established the criteria for what became known as the "New York School." This canon was subsequently promoted (with some covert government backing) by the victorious Americans, and signaled not only a military but also a new cultural hegemony. Whether you agreed or disagreed with Greenberg’s dialectics, (elimination of all but the optical and maintaining the integrity of the picture-plane, etc.) he fulfilled a position not unlike a Marshal Tito in the New York art world. A party line was promoted, party members were kept on course, and dissidents were squelched. This may seem a bit severe, but it did present a unified image of American painting that was easily digestible for world consumption. And like Tito’s creation of a unified Yugoslavia, with the Fearless Leader’s passing, the federation collapsed into its previous Balkanized tribal state.
The influence of a force can be measured not only by what it acts upon but also by what reacts to it. Since Greenberg’s heyday in the early sixties, much of the activity of American painting has been a refutation of his ideas. William Fares sees Greenberg as "something valuable to respond against." Fares has been creating paintings that derive their forms from the process of skinning the geometry of the picture plane for thirty years. Using the circle, the most perfect of shapes, Fares devises compositions by pealing back underlying layers of pigment, and slicing and folding the membrane. In the process new configurations and images appear, images that the artist says he didn’t create, he merely released from inside the paint. A by-product of this procedure is the exposure of the underpainting, the textural scrapes of the skinning knife, and the narrative of the folding and selection of crease patterns. With the last coat of acrylic, the paintings generally have a cool color scheme of grays, blues, or greens. It’s only with the cutting and pealing that the buried hues of rusty reds and browns are revealed, as if warm pulsing flesh were under the surface. A stark dichotomy is presented between the disciplined Pythagorean geometric diagrams, and the ritualistic folding, scraping and pealing that loosens the paint skin.
If you have an interest in painting that is as extravagant in its material exuberance as it is unique in its painterly preparation then you must make a point of seeing this selection of recent paintings by Geoff Davis. Though working on a modest scale, these paintings have rich textural surfaces, some with built-up areas 3" thick. This conscientious style of accumulated surface incident, though in opposition to the concept of the integrity of the picture plane, may provide yet another stake in the heart of Greenbergian superficiality. Subjects include landscape, animal studies, glyphs, and blocks of Ethiopian Amharic text, each encompassed within a painted border or frame. Once the subject is established, Davis then begins the extraordinarily time consuming process of painting and overpainting. Line and plane are submerged in a cluster of strokes that are lashed and spiked to the appearance of whipped cream or frosting. At the point when a rational painter might accept his mediums limitations of texture, Davis simply strokes ahead, layering on still thicker networks of pigment that seem to challenge not only the constraints of gravity, but the historic perspectives of the accepted objectives of painting! It is a paradoxical painterliness that has coaxed an illusionistic medium, through the force of will, to emerge as a concrete three-dimensional manifestation of form. Just as the paint grows interminably thick like a mutant fungus on these panels, so too does the impression of these paintings ripen in the petri dish of the viewer’s memory.
The spiritual and the metaphysical could also be classified as constituents of art that exist somewhere outside the edge of the frame, or hovering over the picture plane. Phong Bui has curated a show of over twenty-five artists who seek to express a connection with that ineffable presence. "The Incredible Lightness of Being" is a selection of works on paper that is as varied in its results, as the participant’s concept of the "spiritual in art." The two artists who form the foundation here are Alfred Jensen and Forest Bess. Jensen’s "Untitled" 1975 is a mendala based on a hand drawn grid. It’s enlightening because it shows Jensen’s process and development of an idea. The two small Bess gouaches are treats, being extremely rare. One "Untitled 1968?" has a typed poem attached to expound on its intent. A beautiful drawing by Dawn Clements called "Roll" depicts a huge bundle of firecrackers. The spiraling composition and delicate coloring would seem to belie the explosive potential of the subject. A colorful watercolor by the late Andrew Forge looks like a pointillist study of a watery horizon. Perhaps it’s a rendering of that division where the physical meets the mystical. Tim Casey’s two small works also picture divisions. In Casey’s case they’re vertical and painted as if by some act of nature, perhaps erosion on slate, or the wear of wind on wood. "Disclosures" by Kristen Jensen (no relation to Alfred) are pages of a book with beige threads sewn over all but a few words. The selective choice produces a minimal poetic statement, with the covered words having a presence like rows of masked witnesses. Beyond the physical or spiritual lightness of the work, to me, there is a quality that might also be understood as lightness. That is, timelessness, or the ability to transcend temporal trends, brackets, or classifications, to float above easy chronological classifications.
And so there are endless actions and reactions that echo down the halls of American art since Greenberg’s dictums on painting. I’ve seen several movies with that guy in a hockey mask who chases kids with a butcher knife. Every time you think he’s finally dead, he pops up again, and I’m still scared. Greenberg may not have a big knife, but are you still going to open those art world closets without thinking about him?
