In his post-formalist
essay titled Painting as Model (1993), the art historian and critic Yve-Alain
Bois asks, “What is it for a painter to think?” This is an especially
interesting comment when discussing the subject of pure abstraction. Since there
is no discernible signifier that one can detect in non-figurative work, the question
that Bois raises is consequently that much more intellectually demanding not
only for the critic, but for the artist who self-reflexively ponders this as
well. Bois challenges one-dimensional readings of pure abstraction where form
is strictly perceived as an embodiment of emotionality. This idealism concerns
notions of beauty and transcendence taken to a level of singularity. Some artists
who work in the mode of pure abstraction can marry aesthetics, poetry and thought
to create something of artistic presence: David Reed and his pictorial insertions
into the work of Alfred Hitchcock, for example; the push-pull of accumulation
and dispersal and the two- against three-dimensionality of the early work of
Fabian Marccacio; the squeegee-like abstractions of Gerhard Richter that engage
painting’s historicity, or one of my all time favorites are the punctuated
and slashed monochromes of Lucio Fontana. Younger artists have been cognizant
of these historical and contemporary examples while taking Bois’ question
to task, occasionally riffing with the modality of pure abstraction into interesting
formal and conceptual avenues. One of these artists is Joo Hyun Kang, exemplified
in a body of work titled Encrustation and Entropy (2003).
Encrustation and Entropy consists of twenty-one panels whose surfaces are textured
with what appear to be detritus and discard. What create these textures are gold
paste and flake medium as well as mica; these, in turn, are allowed to achieve
a delicate patina creating what theoretically is an open-ended work. The work
remains open-ended in that the panels are left to the mercy of the vicissitudes
of time. Similar to Warhol’s “Oxidation” paintings, Kang’s
works are more than just an aesthetic endeavor, of a conceptual convergence of
the spatial and the temporal. She states that they make manifest philosophical
ideas of being/becoming and their other in the entropy of dissolution. Apart
from this narrative dichotomy they can also be hyper-real in their simulation
of geological marvel. This geological trope hits an ironic register when Kang
has installed her work on the ground outdoors as installation. The panels are
placed on the earth and become auto-referential simulacra; the works’ formal
and conceptual punning are made more so in referencing objects of antiquity that
have been unearthed. Patina never sleeps, and as it accumulates and transforms
the panels to a level akin to bronze statuary there is also something almost
kitsch-like in their luminescence. This luster is further heightened by the point/counterpoint
inherent in the panels’ repetitive affect that can be slightly vertiginous
as they oscillate between surface texture and an enveloping chromatic density.
While their delicate minutia beckons closer inspection, the twenty-one panels
have a tendency to over power one when they are mounted on a wall. There is also
a certain liberty taken to their vertical/horizontal display, since one is given
a curatorial license as to what panel goes where. Exhibited in a grid like fashion,
Encrustation and Entropy simultaneously trope and pay homage to one of modernism’s
sacred cows: the gird. Yet the gird has traditionally concerned itself with the
severance of form and narrative, of the aesthetic and the social. This is what
seems to have been lost in overly deterministic readings of non-representational
art, the ideology of transcendence serves to reiterate a New Age version of the
retrograde “art for art’s sake” exegesis; ditto for the discussions
around beauty as it raises its politically ugly head. But Kang seems to be aware
of such metaphysical de-sublimation and its attendant ideological hubris. She
compositionally counters this through the what Michael Podro once called the
“manifold of perception.” For the viewer of Encrustation and Entropy
is engaged between an optical consciousness via the seduction of the panels’
palpable details, and a phenomenological awareness via their sheer physicality;
a materiality that nonetheless shifts between density and levity. Materiality
for Kang is never an end in itself; mimicking a type of random precision in the
quasi-happenstance look of the discard elegantly placed in disarray on the painting’s
surface, one is reminded of a poetic formalism that has not lost its critical
edge. Painting has never looked so paradoxically intuitive yet tactical, so retinal
yet haptic, and concomitantly earth-bound and ethereal.
The work consists
ntology. mYet because the works are so heavily textured, are somewhat monochromatic,
and consists of twenty-one panels, ther Adn it is in these liminal spaces where
pure abstraction begins to achieve y are long lost through oxidation they also
ingenuos through the cial and abreminiscent of what underpinning, es are cocnrte
hci The panels’ surfYet materiality for her is not strictly an aesthetic
decision. This not to imply that her works lack a visual presence; in fact they
shift between a demure sensuousness and borderline ornamentation. Yet the because
the panels are encrusted with an broad array of material sources including oxides
that they , because, It is in these liminal spaces, between form and narrative
only between where painting n gthat between the poetics and Certainly they evoke
a slew these surfaces are reside somewhere between hrerdies : the Russian Constructivists
and their political reading of abstraction which is antithetical to their Theosophical
colleagues, the perpetuity of painting’s discourse, which for some appears
to ebb and flow akin to a “deja vu all over again,” has motivated me
to call this phenomenon as the “return of the return to painting.”
Discussions of usually taken The rereading of social dimension of form, which
was the accumulation and application of social discard and detritus on painting’s
surface is also the formal and theoretical province of a recent group of paintings
by Joo Hyun Kang.
The aptly titled
Encrustation and Entropy (2003) consists of a group of panels whose foci are
not only strategic serialization and random order, but they palpitate between
detailed minutia and enveloping sublimity. But as one begins to visually meander
across the surface of these paintings, one witnesses a kind of planar transmutation,
a poetic, yet socially infused alchemy for these works ina state of oxidationis
neginjg to not unlike lewher binaries of Pure abstraction in this case ainting
in this paintings even the tactilty the tactiltir Therapy Others take : panacea.
Out the door goes the Constructivists because of their politicization of art;
in short, metaimbecilesphysicians nrevolutionary and theornhistorical avant-garde
paiting sort in doing so it fold the possibility of criitcal discussion into
the corner of a redundant subjectivity. atilte le a sort of projection of some
nto the realm of Certainly venture into the realm in the plane abstract The crux
of this inquiry rest on the privileging of abstraction as how certain critics
have valorized the practice of abstraction as some spiritual quest. This sort
of fascist kect of pure abstractionb. Certioanly in the wake of Hubert damis
aks in the wake of yve-Lain Bois ask The crita y ts seminal essay on the painting,
yves Alain ask
