Abstract Art Anyway

John Haber
in New York City

Pete Schulte and Edie Fake

David Diao and Stanley Boxer

What is abstract art anyway? The question keeps coming up, from young artists in galleries to year-end blockbusters of Jasper Johns and Julie Mehretu in museums. Who would have guessed when I started this Web site, when painting was all but officially dead? Who would not be grateful?

So here we go again, with just one more inadequate attempt to keep up. Can art really just be itself, and should it? Pete Schulte looks back to abstraction as a discipline and nurtures it in charcoal. Edie Fake sends it every which way in decorative living color—but with stories to tell about climate, gender, and mysticism. David Diao is still giving abstraction a back story, only the story is its own. Last, back when abstraction ruled but never quite joining its ruling class, Stanley Boxer shows how it was done.

The shape or the symbol

At what point does a shape become a symbol? Immediately, I might argue, from the moment it appears in a drawing or painting. From then on, I want to say, the mark of the artist's hand stands for something worth seeing, the work art. Or maybe never, if the symbolism never quite gets past the artist's private obsession. Maybe it remains just some lines in a press release that never quite ring true. You may just have to take the work as it is, with the added charge of knowing that everything in it is charged with elusive meaning for the artist, for others, and maybe even for you.

Pete Schulte and Edie Fake could stand for the alternatives at their starkest, the immediacy and the storytelling. Schulte is rigorously but subtly abstract, at a gallery that holds the line for geometric abstraction not just as Minimalism redux, but as an exploration of art's designs and surfaces. Working in graphite with touches of color, he invites one to linger over his small compositions, to watch as textures and shadows leak out from shapes to the rendered space as a whole. Fake is wild and crazy, in the contemporary fashion for anything goes, while seeing art as "a vantage point on climate catastrophe," from home in the Mojave Desert. The artist is also a transgender activist, and if Edie sounds plainly female, the surname is after all only a fake.

Schulte is nothing if not patient and sincere, and the work could be all about exactly that. Its quick notation and slow working both contribute to its pleasures. If a formalist is right, one may always have to take the work as it is, because only a work that speaks for and stands for itself will do. Some drawings bring out the symmetry of the paper, with horizontals like the sparest of architecture. Others foreground repeated wave crests or containers, in a show of "The Train and the River Braid." Neither the train nor the river is going anywhere fast, but just fast enough for the drawing never to sit still.

Fake takes over his Tribeca gallery without really trying, even before a gilded wall painting in back rising, dipping, and heading somewhere else again—where Sarah Cain had taken over the joint just as boldly not long before. Nested tears, hearts, diamonds and other shapes bring abundant color to deep black. This is unashamedly decorative art, an art that plays with and against symmetry even when doing without. The nod to Symbolism (with a capital S) recalls the pioneering abstraction of Hilma af Klint more than a century ago, with much the same feminism and gender bending. If some works have stacked horizontals instead, like the older body of work from Schulte, it subsumes into mysticism and astrology as "Twelfth House." And if all that sounds fashionable indeed, not long after a nearby show of Gee's Bend quilting, it is also joyfully contemporary.

Is one just a holdover from old formulas and the other an exploiter of new ones? They could not be less alike, and they may well have little patience for one another. (I apologize to them both for mentioning them in the same review.) They have only the accident of two bodies of work apiece with those parallel motifs—or is it an accident? One has waves, the other the climate catastrophe, including braids for Schulte and central circles for Fake of night soil and cracked mud. No wonder both artists find a particular resonance in black.

Maybe the opposition has lapsed between art as itself and as something else. Modernism promised to place art above language and postmodernism to place everything within language, but good things can hardly help meaning and being. Schulte seems incapable of show but puts on a show worth remembering. Fake seems capable of nothing else but show, but in paint. Old formulas are new again, and the new formulas are already tired, but one can always keep trying. One embodiment of that climate catastrophe for Fake is Dry Run.

Take a chair

"Almost all my work has a back story." You may find yourself reading the press release more than once, to be sure that you did not imagine it. Few have done more to sustain the legacy of abstraction than David Diao, and few have had to do more. When I caught him in "Abstraction Since 1970," in 1997, the subject had fallen so far from fashion that I found myself at Snug Harbor on Staten Island—which itself has all but given up on exhibitions by now. And yet he based a particularly ambitious show just a few years later on his first childhood home, in China before the revolution. Where have his stories taken him in the eighteen years since?

A back story is the story that an artist tells about the work, and one can only ask for the evidence. It might prove elusive, like the myths hidden in abstraction for Ilana Savdie. On returning to China, Diao found the house demolished and not even a photo to picture it. He could rely only on memory and the dimensions of its tennis court—set not by his father but by the rules. Which would prove more relevant and reliable? The question gets at the whole point of abstract painting, which at different times has sought a measure for art in self-expression and Minimalism's rules of the game.

His own clean lines have mocked Action Painting and paid tribute to Philip Johnson's Glass House, and he has found a literal home in modernist architecture, too. His latest work has little hint of anything but high Modernism. He spoke of rubbing his nose in his history in China, and here one has to take care not to butt one's head against a replica of a chair, suspended by wires from the ceiling. Gerrit Rietveld crafted one in right angles and primary colors in 1918, but Diao (no surprise) prefers one from 1923 in shades of gray. He has mentally disassembled it, rearranging its stark rectangles thirteen times on canvas, for "Berlin Chair in Pieces." One might never imagine the original, but then he is no ordinary storyteller.

The shapes may line up side by side, but not in size places. They may form a circle, each element directed radially. They may occupy a single field of color or span two or three fields, which need not stick to red, yellow, and blue. He neither emphasizes his brushwork nor altogether hides it. He could be refusing to tell a story, at least a linear one, or "deconstructing" one. Then again, that once fashionable label played fast and loose with what a proper follower of Jacques Derrida might mean by deconstruction—or the "truth in painting."

Diao, then, cannot help telling stories, if only to himself, and sharing them with others. They just happen to be Modernism's stories. Nothing else can take him home. Rectangles on color fields make him think of still another private home, a villa in Tokyo with sliding doors. They also remind him of the logo for BMW, although Diao is as far as it gets from Pop Art. He can celebrate ideas, text, and memories, but only as a celebration of painting.

He loves that legacy so much that he calls the 1918 chair De Stijl's most famous image, although museum-goers might disagree. When it comes to the Dutch art movement ("the style"), what about Piet Mondrian? Mondrian painted Broadway Boogie-Woogie, along with sparer images in black and white not so very far from Diao's, who is not one to boogie-woogie. The stiff wood chair and its wire suspension may look like punishment by comparison, and that may resonate with him as well. His global reference points including China, Berlin, and the Netherlands may suggest not just many stories, but also the pain of abandoned stories and lost memories. He can always rearrange the pieces to tell more.

Tied up in a bow

Stanley Boxer was never one to leave well enough alone. He made thick paint his hallmark and its application his obsession, until one can almost feel it between one's fingers from halfway across the room. One can also bask in its glow. Well past forty, in the early 1970s, he even wrapped it up with a bow—not literally, of course, but with his ribbon paintings. At the same time, though, he was taking stock and paring back. For skeptics, and count me one, it gave him his greatest claim to the art of his time.

Was it merely a phase? Boxer was nothing if not consistent. If anything, he just dug in harder until his death in 2000, at seventy-three. Before this series, he stuck to all-over paintings, in pale colors and thickly worked surfaces. It earned high praise from Clement Greenberg, the champion of Abstract Expressionism and formalism. It also earned the label color-field painting, a Greenberg coinage that he disliked. Others have called it lyrical abstraction, which he might have disavowed as well.

Did either apply? He was always in an awkward position at an awkward age. He studied at the Art Students League, increasingly conservative but where Hans Hofmann had nurtured Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Michael West, and Albert Kotin, and one could easily dismiss him as second-generation AbEx or welcome him into a museum. Both happened, and after the 1970s he doubled down, with his thickest and brightest work yet. By the end the work approaches geodes, crusty and shining. His shows drew admiration, even as they often escaped attention. Painting, after all, was dead, or so right-thinking people said, and he was a creature of the past.

As a color-field painter, Boxer had more in common with Jules Olitski, whom Greenberg also praised, than with Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Nolan, and Morris Louis. No targets, veils, or unbroken fields of color. No wonder that, for many, he has not worn well. His paring back is all the more welcome, then. Yet it offers insights into where he was heading all along. It, too, hardly shies away from covering a canvas to its edges—or from calling attention to the application of paint.

It does so with the ribbons, which vary in width and direction, like all his paint. Each could pass for a single brushstroke—or represent it. They come more than one to a canvas, roughly parallel but wiggling along the way. Close to vertical or horizontal, they help define a painting's surface as well. Compared to his earlier and later work, that surface also runs to deeper and more acid tones, and titles are revealing. He runs a few words together, suggestive of sea and sky, but the combination also something ineffable. I may balk at the literalism or mysticism, but the canvas for once seems rooted in a signature motif.

It is never easy these days to sort out the promise and clichés of painting. It is everywhere, even when it seems too unstructured or too familiar. Can any of it be so far over the top as to stand out? I love a broad red canvas by Cecily Brown in, for now, the Brooklyn Museum lobby just months before Brown in retrospective at the Met, and I loved the excess in Cain at the fall art fairs—and did I mention Jasper Johns and Julie Mehretu in the museums? I never know just what to review, and I failed to cover her solo show in Tribeca. Paint did not just flow into more paint, but spill out onto the floor as well. Amid so much political and conceptual art in the present, who knows what to call the past or the future?

jhaber@haberarts.com

Pete Schulte ran at McKenzie through December 19, 2021, Stanley Boxer at Berry Campbell through December 23, and Sarah Cain at Broadway through October 16. Edie Fake ran at Broadway through January 15, 2022, David Diao at Postmasters through March 12. A related review looks at David Diao in 2004.