James Little: Reconsideration of an Engagement
Horace Brockington
Over the
last twenty years James Little has exhibited extensively in group and solo
projects at museums and galleries around the United States and Europe. He has
is the recipient of several awards and honors, including the prestigious
Pollack-Krasner Foundations Award. The artist over the years has held true to a
rather formalist mode of abstraction that has allowed him to mature into a
dynamic painter. As oppose to challenging or commenting on the rhetoric of
contemporary painting, over the last twenty years James Little has stayed
focused on types of geometric abstraction that are reflective of his personal
convictions. His approach, containing little discipline, is based on his
ability to assert his own vision of what constitutes “post- modernists”
painting within traditional painting, as opposed to an ahistorical construct.
As a young
painter emerging in the early 70s, James Little was too young to fuse the
Minimalism and abstract painters from that era. During the 70s, he studied at
Syracuse University where his formalist outlook was solidified. From this stage
his paintings would appear to have formal parallels to elements of Abstract
Expressionism and Minimalist preoccupation with components. This is not
surprising given Little was never interested with conceptual practices of the
70s, being part of a generation of artists who rejected the mannerism of
conceptualism and minimal art. In the absent of an accepted canon of abstract
art, either Abstract Expressionism or color field painting, he is among several
artists in the late 70s and early 80s who engaged in abstract painting to make
a hybrid form of these two tendencies. Little’s painting continues to operate
within the context of American formalist discourse and modernism.
By the end
of the 20th century, painting, especially of the abstract sort, no
longer seemed to be the place for radical artistic practice. Part of the
problem with art during this period was its considerable reliance on theory and
criticism. Critics and writers lead and artists followed. The pluralist nature
of painting also tended to marginalize it between polarities: the decorative
and neoexpressive mannerisms. Little throughout this period remained removed
from much of the posturing and, while exhibiting on a regular basis, he
gradually joined the “underground” collective of painters working quietly away
in their studios.
James
Little paintings represent a constant reinstatement and an ever-present nostalgia
for expressionism and formal late Modernist color theory. But while his art is
driven by formalism, it functions essentially as means for pictorial
composition. Little embraces formalism mainly to transcend it. Little is not
simply interested in the issues of modernism, but the history of painting
specifically at the point between minimalism and abstract expressionism. Such a
dynamic is reveal in Little’s painting as a dialogue somewhere between Kenneth
Noland’s use of circles and chevron, Jasper John’s stripes, and geometric
abstraction that embraces Barnett Newman while extending to Brice Marden. His
paintings revisit these moments, not in a tradition of retro-mode but rather in
order to reinvent the modern: giving it a new purpose and reality in a
contemporary context. Like a true modernist, Little believes explicitly that
the artist’s role lies in the connection between the individual soul and the
ultimate reality of experience. He is equally adamant that abstraction can be
seen as continuous as such that his “new painting” makes pictorial references
to other examples of abstract art. However, despite the importance of his work
operating within a historical framework, it must simultaneously emphasize its
uniqueness.
Little
takes the rather codified simple mannerism of the geometrical abstract, color
field paintings of the l960s, painting exemplified in the work of Kenneth
Noland, Barnett Newman, and more immediately Ellsworth Kelly, and re-invents in
a radically simplified but bold manner. Despite the historical sources, the
aims in Little’s works remain to comment on formalism as a potential for a
continuum to challenge or reiterate its formats. James Little’s work evolves as
it became apparent that the formalism was seen as less flexible for his
pursuits. So while his paintings appear to align to its condition on the
surface, it is a far more radical form of formalism that the work now operates
and aspires to. Thus the aesthetic concerns that shape the more recent
paintings are greatly expanded.
Little’s
art aims to adhere to universals through memory, where the artist must turn
inward for his images. However even for an artist as formal as Little, in a
contemporary context the notion of a purely visual abstraction has to be
rejected. The artist’s strive towards spirituality aligns his paintings towards
the universal concept of abstraction. However, the work is far removed from any
autonomous notion of metaphysical pure abstraction. Little’s paintings speak to
the relationship between philosophy and art, and the legacy of American
abstraction. Little is a highly intellectual artist and wants his painting to
be discursive in the sense that he aims to fuse the different ways Clement
Greenberg, Theodor Adorno, Michael Fried and more recently John Rajchman have
understood abstraction and painting.
Little
desires that his paintings both historically and conceptually function as part
of a broader philosophical and social context. Little’s abstraction synthesizes
memory and experience with a profound affect to a detailed and discipline
approach to the handling of materials. Such approach also endows the work with
a certain artistic freedom rather than limits its possibilities.
Although
he remains interested in tradition he is equally an artist deeply invested with
the dialogue about the role of abstract painting in a 21st century
context. However, his work does not preach a new aesthetic. Rather his
paintings propose a continued link with modernism that is relevant and possible
in a highly technology-driven 21st century context. But his art is not
nostalgic nor does it aims to mimic modernism. Little’s paintings are centered
within the context of modernism in strictly his highly contemporary terms.
James
Little’s paintings evolve around the historical, conceptual, theoretical
relations between abstract painting and notions of painting in a post
modernists context in what is essentially a post-painterly abstraction.
However, Little rejects the notion of an affinity with post modernists painting
in crucial ways, most specifically the post-modernist preoccupation with what
can be described as type of “impurity “in painting that appears to go directly
against Modernist quest for purification. Still the abstraction in his work
that derive from a rather “impure “ mixture of different approaches and
processes in formalist modernism is closer to post-modernist painting then the
artist cares to acknowledge.
What makes
Little painting ahistorical, is the emphasis on it thematic and structural
links with what the artist has described as plastic articulation of an African
American cultural values in a visual context, and the artist own re-collective
re-interpretation of his own development towards abstraction. While much of
modernism is some factors has been reliant on adaptations of in non-western
sources in its development Little’s use of these sources are highly
personalized. His paintings are invoked in the dialogue to present a model of
social and cultural inferences and individual perception. However, he is less interested
in delimiting abstraction within a specific set of conditions.
Little
insert into his canvases metaphorical and ideological sources in an African
Americanism that removes it from a purist notion of abstraction. These
paintings are in spirits aligns itself to jazz, and dance. Pictorially,
compositional elements in the works have been found in such sources as the
woven textiles of North American natives, Mexican shamans, and West African
nobleman, the result-a type of Third World Modernism. He rather interested in
how these elements with their implied notion of the anthropologic, and can be
expressed in his paintings, but not merely as appropriation of superficial
decorative elements but as the basis a type of hybrid or new abstraction.
Little
trans -historical intent in his work is essentially the deliberate fusing of
modernism and ethnicity moves the work into uncharted domains that only a few
young artists are attempting to do within painting in a contemporary context.
Many of the works of younger practitioners attempt to fuse the modern, the
abstract, and the subjective appear rather superficial meandering of
subject/context whether political; gender; racial; or social placed in what can
best be describes as an “abstract grid”. Unlike this younger generation of
artists, who appear to want to paint rhetoric, and while their works may share
visual similarities and approaches, Little’s aim is to re-materializes elements
of these experience in strictly abstract forms, colors, and motifs such that
their ethnic sources remained essentially “veiled”. Little is interested in
getting the structure of his compositions and surfaces of his paintings to
operate on a more metaphorical level where the paintings leads the viewer to
ideas rather than merely demonstrating or illustrating them which have been the
road taken by many emerging young practitioners of color attempt to fuse an
ethnic cultural context with abstract painting. What the artist aspires in his
work is to bring the strategies of creating a new form of painting in the in
the direct linkage with early abstract painting such that its very definition
takes on a new contemporaneous.
Little’s
abstract then must be viewed as a discursive exploration of his notion of art
and the “real world” which he fuses into one complex homogeneous
enterprise-painting. Thus the use of abstraction in his painting operates
within the context of a didactic use of imagery to underline the point that
abstraction becomes a means by which the artist is able to offer a fundamental
infers to reality and memory. Thus, Little’s paintings can be equally viewed as
statements of recollections. Memory and painterly marking in his work speak to
the need to transform not only art.
However, Little
paintings are equally been formed by the counter argument that Modernism is
best characterized by the interventions into social and political praxis.
Little ‘s his art possess no romantic notion of art as social agent namely to
transform the world for the better. Specifically, his works attempt to bridge
the opposed conditions-namely the formal and the political. But his is not an
overt political art, but one of cultural inferences. Rather than change
society, the artist aims to inform society of these cultural links outside the
perceived western frame that impact and contribute to the re-definition of
Modernism and a more specific abstraction.
Little
collapses cultural experiences into a series of lines and color in the context
of detailed compositions such that these experience become abstract form.
Little seeks the plastic equivalents of these cultural experiences. But
defining Little’s sources is not an easy task, for his references are never
stable, rather the source are subjected to re-interpretation in his paintings
that often leads to visual construction that appear completely different.
Little wants no literal interpretation of his paintings. But rather he wants
them to embody a dualistic character that speaks to tradition and self, with implications
for his perception of the history of art and art’s social role. The subtext of
his art becomes to speak to both the historical and individual through the
materiality of painting. By turning to self – both the creative and
biographical Little’s painting break from the historical and the dialectical
oppositions inherent in modernism, and the possibilities available in
cultural/racial dynamics Little art moves out of the historic.
Still,
James Little’s art remains essentially an intellectual fusing Clement
Greenberg’s theories as fundamental source upon which Little’s outlook are
formed, with decisive notion of abstract that leads him to selectively arrange
colors and forms resulted in series of powerful abstract motifs. As such most
of Little conceptual basis to his paintings are informed by Greenberg’s theory,
and his argument about the “purity” of art-essentially that art moves into the
search for a pure, self reflexive absolute as an historical and social strategy
in order to facilitate the evolution of culture. However in later writings
Greenberg’s appears to reject his own ideology in support of what has come to
be seen as his preoccupation with the formal “ essence” that characterizes
purity, expressed most clearly in his l965 “Modernist Painting”.
While
Little mines the rhetoric of modernist abstraction by looking to himself he
moves away from the rigorous confined of abstractions as essentialism. As such
Little’s treatment of abstraction must be seen as both a re-affirmation of this
category of painting in a post modernist context in which an abstraction of the
past becomes for the artist a means to an end than the result.
Little is
an artist who has always been interested in the physicality of painting and
potentiality of the medium. His is a decisive and deliberate process of
painting He is also not what can be described as spontaneous painter. A single
work often entails a series of preparatory small-scale works, whose only
similarity to the final large-scale work remains a point of entry at best. . He
is an artist that strives for good design and good craft. Because Little is
both interested in the “how and “what” of art his compositional approach is
constantly speaking to these two concerns and their possibilities.
Technically,
Little’s approach to the materials has always aimed to achieve a certain degree
of triadic equilibrium in surface means: horizontal and vertical, color, and
plane. He wants color to open up the space rather than contain. Little aspires
to bring these terms into a state of dialectical interaction such that color
and form become the essential components of his language. In Little’s paintings
the systems of form and color relationships are both cerebral and expressive. .
Color in the works functions as both surface and space. In the paintings his
compositional devices ultimately culminates into a type of fragmentation of the
viewing experience while maintaining a certain degree of coherent unity. In
Little’s work the combination of terms are never static and change based on the
need of the particular painting. Such an approach reveals Little’s ability to
manipulate painting elements to the dictates of his “plastic vision”. There
indicates that despite his formalist orientation he is not lead by any strict
formula but rather the painting dictates what is needed.
In the
recent paintings geometrical polychromatic patterning remains but the palette
is lighter. Scale and movement are important elements. These work radiate with
a powerful and explosive visicality. The simplicity of the compositions
subverts rather intelligent undertaking. Little wants to involve the viewer
with multi-points in the process of looking at his paintings. For these are
painting that evolve through a long process of intellectual and technical
exploration. The movement is multi-directional but usually moving top to bottom
or bottom to top opening what has been described as “vast fields of internal
spaces” created by a series of diagonal breaks that appears to float between
zones of colors that divide the canvases into a color masses. . He deliberately
plays his stripes in the painting against the rectilinearly of the canvas. He
avoids curves because they would do something completely different to the
surfaces.
There is a
new sophistication of the work with their slashing diagonals that supply a
dynamic interaction of color and shape. Metaphorically, the breaks in the
painting as types of signs for intersections- both artistically and
biographically. By this approach the painting contains multi-interpretations of
space
The new
flat canvases with their waxed surfaces are devoid of any presence of the
painter’s hand, almost Minimalist in their simplification. Still surface have
an implied physical immediacy. The artist achieves a topical spaciality and
illusionless surface devoid of any adornment that speaks to a geometric
abstraction against the parameters of Minimalism while equally re-iterating the
potential of color field painting and structure with a new interpretive
freedom.
These are
not simply mimetic large- scale paintings. These syntactic structures and
wonderful scale move architecturally beyond surface paintings such that they
become structures that command space. Still, one can not help but think of the
heroic scale of these paintings in terms of the notion of “Sublime Scale” found
in Modernist abstract painting that carries with it a certain gender inference
of a type of “masculine space”.
Little’s
wants his paintings to move outside the “self-referential” of modernist notion
of painting. Modernist painting, especially Abstract Expressionism emphasizes
the center as the point in which the viewer notion of self is achieves in front
of the painting. Lewis works are partially opposed to such a notion. Part of
this outlook has to do primarily with contemporary reality. The very notion of
a center has lost all validity. Most of our lives are de-centered by rather
nomadic realities and experiences. In approaching these new paintings the
viewer becomes immediately aware of their fragmentary, and thus gradually must
negotiate the paintings’ wholeness through looking over time.
The
dilemma remains for many painters of the abstract, its next manifestation its
next language, and what form that will be. Little offers only one potential for
that new abstract painting, one which attempts to make a connection between art
history and the history of a culture with profound political and social
implications. He is less concern with assigning his art to ‘now” but rather
remove the boundaries between modern and post modernist notion of painting that
allows painting to move in the context of a future. The notion of the
avant-garde holds little interest for the artist. Little’s paintings must
therefore be included in the dialogue of practice and potential of contemporary
abstract painting. For Little post-modernists seized to exist but rather modern
practices simply went underground for a brief period. James Little painting
seeks to speak to new possibilities of abstraction through a revision of old
Modernist techniques to ambitious effects. However, it would be erroneous not
to see Little’s paintings in the context of post modernism—namely the post
modernist preoccupation with play, historicality, and the political, that is
are express in strictly plastic terms in Little’s paintings.
James
Little’s painting talk about a contemporary search for perfection that is both
romantic and noble but not idealistic, a more but human perfection. However the
artist is aware that such a concept exist purely in the ideal, that the point
at which no more questions need to be ask of painting would essential means no
need for art, It partly this concept that pushes his work, given the
unobtainable perfection opens up possibilities in his art remain open, an is
art that ultimately about itself.
He has
never been a static or absolute artist, in either his outlook or approach
rather his work has evolved through a consistent approach of the artist siting
himself between experimentation and system. What has remained essential over
the last twenty years in his art is the investigation of the history of
painting, both a critique and analysis concerned with the essence of
abstraction and the multiplicity of its meaning in a contemporary context.
While visual his paintings point to new abstractions, contextually they evoke,
past and present. They are works that aims to invite a discourse, but these
paintings are never meant to be mere illustrations of theory. It would be a
mistake to view his work as simply mimicking the premises and processes of a formalist
abstraction, rather it can be seen as almost reactionary, to the overpowering
media driven art and installations of the present, a host of work that appears
formula, decorative re-interpretation of conceptual based matrixes, and
posturing academics.
While on
the surface Little’s painting appears rather straight forward, they are however
very complex abstraction that ultimately absorbs and confronts several notions
of painting and tradition. Little paintings points to one of the profound
current discussion of abstraction, it definition and purpose in a 21st
century context. His work implies both an acknowledgement of its Modernist
foundation that it must also be rethought. Abstraction is no longer viewed in
terms of the avant-garde marker of as it was for the 20th century
modernism. Little’s art is acknowledges the need for a new abstraction can be
placed not in strictly a historical affinity with it varied and associated 20th
century models, but be re-defined as expanded to fit a contemporary situations
that innovate and alter both the concept of painting and perhaps in the process
the notion of the art object.
As an
artists James Little new paintings are an affirmation that new modes of expression
will certainly come from the practitioners themselves, and no longer the
theoreticians. The notion of abstraction as against figuration and narration is
as dated as notion of abstraction merely an embodiment of surrealistic,
geometrical, rectilinear, or the expressionist. James Little’s recent paintings
point to only one of new-realities of abstraction, but a vital and essential
interpretation.
In a
period when “recent “ painting appears decorative and surface posturing an
artists such as James Little, one with a passion for materials, interest in
handling and surface his art would appear rather formal and traditional however
his paintings are profound possibilities for non-objective and hard edge
paintings that have been described as part of a new context of the social and
spiritual dynamics of American art. Given the notion that all painting is to
some degree referential, it would be mistake to offer his work as pure
autonomous plastic explorations. Little’s painting can be located between old formalism
tradition of late Modernism, and the quest for the “new” in recent painting.
His is an art that is constantly engaging the dialectic of the philosophical
and the social.
However
unlike many of his contemporaries he doesn’t purpose to transforms society
through his art nor critique its values, Little is rather continuously looking
for new representations that can inspire discourses. Little has always aimed to
engage the viewer in his work; thus he has created a pictorial language that is
simultaneously about process and meaning. His chief concern remains how does
the contemporary painter connect the parameters of abstract painting with its
history. Despite his arguments to the contrary is the binary aspects of
tradition versus the new, the very essence of a type of artistic schizophrenia
that can at times describe his work that –very opposition of terms in recent
art-that makes his work very postmodernist.
