|
|
|
|
|
Remotely Abstract
John Haberin New York City
Remote Viewing and Abstract Gallery-Going
Simon Aldridge, Ingrid Calame, and Jean-Paul Riopelle
Worried that Six-Feet Under is nearing the end of its cable run? I have the perfect sequel, based on a funeral industry devoted to abstract art. It may sound silly to declaim yet again the death of abstraction, although no more silly than to look to it for the cutting edge. Yet both dogmas linger on, just when abstract artists are demonstrating less purity of media and motives than ever.
"Remote Viewing" at the Whitney proposes yet another present and future for abstract art, as "Invented Worlds." Thanks to Julie Mehretu and some stunning installation views, it looks less to flatness, color charts, or even painting and drawing in a traditional sense than to museum walls. Meanwhile in the galleries, Simon Aldridge, Ingrid Calame, Valerie Jaudon, Jean-Paul Riopelle revive abstract traditions. 
They encompass not just such old inspirations as landscape, formal invention, decoration, and illustration, but also a range of media from works on paper to Mylar.
Remote control
"Invented Worlds" may sound like yet more of what I like to call the New Surrealism—hyperactive imagery so common in painting now, as at "Greater New York." Worse, it could mean nothing at all: surely any art amounts to an invented world. If insistence on traditional media does not clinch its utter irrelevance, you probably made up your mind long ago anyway about Terry Winters in his biomorphic abstraction, Carroll Dunham with his square heads, and the younger artists who have channeled them. Well, surprise, for the Whitney's summer group show has a focus all its own and, as in the last Biennial, some of the most creative use yet of the museum's flexible display space.
The curators shied away from calling the show "Recent Abstract Painting." Who would wish to speak for abstraction now, and who can? Elisabeth Sussman and her colleagues present an unusually coherent view of abstract art nonetheless, as about not edges but their overflowing. If this insists after all on guilt-free pleasures, that, too, is a claim about contemporary art worth examining. Sussman already deserves credit for the best show in town, Diane Arbus at the Met. She also developed a retrospective of Eva Hesse that skipped from San Francisco to London after, shamefully, the Whitney canceled its New York appearance.
Just eight artists an entire floor, one to a room. All might pass for just plain doodle, like Dunham. All incorporate drawing into painting in ways that, as for Winters, evokes imagined architecture or organic form. As if to underscore the connections, Winters owns a work in the show by Franz Ackerman, and Ackerman sneaks in the only recognizable portrait, like a comic substitute for Dunham's heads. And all suggest that drawing has spun out beyond the limits of paper or canvas. Ati Maier, Matthew Ritchie, Julie Mehretu, and Ackerman as well cross the line between abstraction and installation.
That odd title, "Remote Viewing," refers to government studies of extrasensory perception, but it makes me want to pick up the remote and change the channel. Still, only two artists harp on "real life." Steve DiBenedetto combines clotted paint with swirling landscape, while Alexander Ross appears to have an unreasonable admiration for bell peppers. With others, thankfully, the drawn and painted line grows lighter, tenser, and longer. It projects into three dimensions. It arcs from traditional art objects onto and across walls, in a way that truly does encourage remote viewing.
Ritchie's room centers on a large black sculpture, like a jungle gym. Think of it a magnet for two-dimensional works to all sides. Ackerman hangs his portrait off-center, like the remnant of an imaginary museum, amid a tracery of black-and-white. Mehretu's large works restrict themselves to paper and to the wall, with suggestions of perspective grids. Still, she plays on two dimensions, using pencil alone for the wall and incorporating lamination into the rest. Her fantastically detailed works recall computer architecture run amok, not unlike the three-dimensional fantasies of Sarah Sze or the modular landscapes of new media.
All this may still sound self-indulgent, and much of the time it is. Only Mehretu really cares about old talk of institutions as art and art as installation. The exhibition itself deserves credit for making the mess cohere. It prunes Dunham down to abstraction and Winters down to his most strongly colored, germ-like shapes. It clusters smaller drawings, such that the show progressively opens out from studies to paintings to installations. It helps, too, with sightlines from room to room, so that the exhibition as a whole resembles painting, drawing, and installation.
Artists often known for a static vision look colorful and alive. It could serve as a paradigm for installation art that crosses image, object, and life. I recommend following the show's own lead, letting abstraction deal with limits in its own way. Immerse yourself in each artist, ignore the open sightlines as best you can, and let remote viewing take on an imperative all its own.
Illegible canyons
I could imagine a fuller, denser show, using Mehretu's singular breadth as a jumping-off point to explore other media. I could imagine chasing the boundaries that the show itself excludes, when it downplays imagery. How do Mehretu's maps and border crossings relate to her African heritage? (I first encountered her in "Freestyle" at the Studio Museum in Harlem. (It has another survey of emerging black artists, "Frequency," coming up.) An answer may take following abstraction into other territory entirely—and into the galleries.
Not all invented worlds border on cyberspace or the mystical. Simon Aldridge and Ingrid Calame both create illegible landscapes that leave the viewer suspended exactly nowhere. With both, however, that nowhere provides a very real sense of place.
They use entirely different means to get there, and one could too hastily dismiss both as derivative. Aldrich traffics in photorealism that looks blurry on first sight and dissolves entirely as one gets close, as with James White. In imitating a medium unable to deliver a resemblance or the aura of truth, he approaches Gerhard Richter and Richter's late work. The exaggeration of photorealism's coming undone up close, as in the portraits of Chuck Close, has a touch of conceptual art as well.
Ingrid Calame traces thick, winding lines of colored pencil, often inspired by or traced from found markings, on huge sheets of Mylar. In her reliance on pencil to create a flat pattern with rules that one cannot begin to comprehend, she may sound like Sol LeWitt. Such a fantastic topographic mapping has its conceptual side, too, as in digital art by John Klima, Christina McPhee, and others that manipulates seismic or satellite data. One wants the colors to stand for something, but of course they never do. I looked in vain for the stains, supposedly the materials of actual western landscapes, that Calame claims to incorporate.
The echoes of others are flattering to all parties. They are also only a first stage in taking it all in. Like Richter, Aldrich really does pay homage to traditional realism. The greenery and hints of human presence recall an Impressionist's weekend outings. The vague buildings, perhaps factories or office parks, bow to the documentary side of American realism. Calame trades LeWitt's literalism for the subjectivity of all-over abstraction. Mylar even suggests the old-fashioned transparency of oil painting.
Still, this is neither the workaday world or the here and now of an abstract painting, each with its sense of place. Both seem close enough, but they keep vanishing, leaving one floating above the scene. One might find oneself in the numbing social reality of surburbia or the glories of a canyon after all.
Decoration, illustration, and all that
Chelsea has time for other artists, too, often derided as decorative, like Pat Steir. One even fades to black. Their very caution, though, bolsters the case for abstract drawing that looks beyond the painted image.
Valerie Jaudon, once a star of "new image" painting, still creates symmetric images resembling Gothic tracery, but with ample white. She has long introduced decorative patterning to color-field abstraction, without pomposity or Pop Art. Steps back from her latest paintings, and traces of the palette knife disappear. These new images can look awfully smooth, but they ask to look at her older work anew.
Both heralded and dismissed, Jean-Paul Riopelle receives a gallery retrospective, with ample space for the 1950s and 1960s. And here the resemblance to decorative art arises from a contrary process. The works do not apply the received imagery of the Romanesque to abstraction. Rather, they rely on the palette knife to pack Abstract Expressionism into smaller, thicker surfaces. The transparency of oil paint and the liberal use of black freeze the painterly impulse into lead and glass.
Riopelle's lushness is not just an attempt to overpower viewers. Sure, go ahead, and play in your head an imagined lecture from Clement Greenberg on the prissiness of French postwar abstraction. Riopelle's dense constructions have little interest in line or surface. They cannot offer the clarity of late Modernism or its impulsiveness. Paradoxically, they cannot offer the clarity of decorative art—or its potential to burst the limits of fine art. Greenberg might find new matter in the Whitney's impurity, but not Riopelle.
Still, do not dismiss Riopelle too soon. A Canadian whose significant other, Joan Mitchell, extended American abstraction, he could stand equally well for French or American "second-generation Abstract Expressionism." How like Canadians, to be mistaken for others. Then, too, he has the irony of playing second fiddle to Mitchell, who herself long had to bear with dismissals of her art as feminine. For one last twist, Mitchell discovered her most violent art soon after settling down with Riopelle in a Paris suburb.
Still other abstract artists, like Ernst Haas, work with a literal window onto nature, photography's lens—but here looking is all up to you. I might enjoy the ironies more if the posh gallery did not make such grand claims. As if to rescue Greenberg from the dustbin of Modernism, it followed up a month later with another French abstract artist. Pierre Soulages builds his layers of black even more carefully, but at the risk of resembling floor samples. It makes me thankful for the surprising modesty of Riopelle's smaller work.
"Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing" ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through October 9, 2005, Simon Aldridge at Cohan and Leslie through April 30, Ingrid Calame at James Cohan through April 30, Valerie Jaudon at Von Lintel through April 30, and Jean-Paul Riopelle at Robert Miller through May 1.