Detail of an installation of Zhan Wang at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2008. Zhan is an artist featured in Karen Smith’s book discussed in this article

David Carrier: Karen, what is the relationship between these two books?

Karen Smith: There’s no direct relationship really. Following Nine Lives I had been working on a second volume (Nine Lives was about the big picture, the birth of the new art movement; the second volume, Bang to Boom, follows a year by year account of the events from 1989 to 2002. I had spent an awful lot of time looking at art in 2010 and 2011; unconsciously it seemed. I realized when I discovered how many images I had been collecting of works I had seen, and when I found myself lamenting all the interesting new developments that I was not able to write about for being preoccupied with Bang to Boom. As I reflected upon the inordinate amount to time that Bang to Boom was absorbing, I realized too that my procrastination and the difficulties I was having in arriving at a confident take, was that the art itself, key iconic pieces, that I had seen all those years ago, were now disappeared from view. I had photographs I had taken of exhibitions but which were tantalizingly restrictive in the views they offered, especially the details necessary to write comprehensively about them. I felt trapped by the absence of these works. That’s when I decided to take a break from Bang to Boom and to use the responses to the new developments in art that I could see as the basis for As Seen.

Unlike Nine Lives, As Seen 2011 includes a number of female artists. When I taught at CAFA and Tsinghua in 2009, the majority of my students were female, but almost all the faculty was male.

The premise for Nine Lives was to identify pioneers, founding fathers (how we are trapped in the trope of language…). The absence of women reflected the real situation of the 1980s. Bang to Boom begins with the women Xiao Lu who fired her gun into the installation Dialogue in the China Art Gallery. It also features a number of women artists: Yu Hong, Jiang Jie, Chen Yanyin, Yin Xiuzhen, Lin Tianmiao, Zhang Lei, Shi Hui, Cai Jin, Peng Yu and others. The proportional rise in the number of women artists at work in China today reflects the changes in society. Women are no longer primarily home-makers and mothers. They also have support from mothers and mothers-in-law to free them from the daily chores of motherhood. They also receive more support from galleries and institutions. But all of these advances are predicated on the fact that society here has evolved and matured to arrive at more open-minded attitudes towards women, which had has a knock on effect on the way that women approach art and the content and subject matter they explore. They have been liberated from the box of feminism.

Recently the Asia Society Museum in Manhattan had an exhibition of Wu Guanzhong. He died recently– and his sensibility seems extremely distant from that of all your artists. There are, however, younger figures doing traditional ink on paper painting in China. Do any of them interest you?

They do, where their work seeks to engage with the present. I have always been interested in the progressive end of art, rather than just what is good art; looking at ideas that will change the face of what is understood to be art, or at least push the boundaries. If this is done in ink—as with the work of, say, Yang Jiechang, Zhang Jianjun, or Qiu Zhijie—then I am looking at the field.

There is a great deal of translation into Chinese of the more esoteric English-language art writing? What role do such translations have?

This type of esoteric writing encourages Chinese readers (artists and critics) to see it as a standard to be matched, followed etc. All ideas, the exchange of ideas, are useful in developing a dialogue or new trains of thought. However, in being written for a Western—European or American—audience, I think that a great deal of this writing presents a challenge for the Chinese reader since its frames of reference lie outside Chinese cultural experience. Thanks to “globalization”, in time, those references will be less “different”, but to date they still exist even though in light of change in China many Chinese readers might feel they are on the same wave-length.

Cover of the book under discussion

Your focus in this book is on individuals, not on broad sociological trends. Is it possible, however, to generalize? What are the shared concerns of Chinese artists of the present generation?

I am not sure it is possible to generalize. Given the framework of the As Seen project, which is do complete a similar volume that highlights works shown in public spaces in China each year for at least five years, I hope that through this approach to documenting a prominent or influential slice of artistic activity, that at the end of this period, certainly in years to come, it will be possible to extract some kind of overview of what the social undercurrents were within the concerns of this generation.

Some of the works in your new book could be by Western artists. Liang Yuanwei’s oil paintings, He Xiangyu’s Man on Chairs or Shi Qing’s Plant Republic are examples. The same is true the paintings of Aniwar Mamat, though your account of their sources might change how we see them. Except when figurative art shows Chinese people or recognizably Chinese street scenes, or uses calligraphy, I have the sense that the ‘Chineseness’ of this art is hard to identify. When, for example, you discuss Zhang Enli’s paintings of utilitarian objects, they don’t look obviously Chinese to me. Often as when you associate Song Dong with Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin and Bridget Riley, the frame of reference plays to the Western reader. But perhaps this is a concession for the English-language readers?

I think you are correct. But I have been in China for twenty years now and I am aware that my take has acquired a degree of localness, meaning that my points of reference relate to ideas abroad in Chinese society/the art world. Also, I find it easier to reference neutral examples as opposed to Chinese contemporaries—this is less for reasons of inciting criticism than of the volatility of artistic careers here. Styles change fast, and at times dramatically. Even those artists who established a recognized motif as their “brand” in the 1990s have moved far from it today.

In the West, Chinese artists seem caught in a trap. On one hand, they must speak in our up to date terms. (No ink on paper paintings.) But they must appear to be Chinese. Hence the tendency of the figures who exhibit here to Sinify familiar art forms- installation, performance, video. Is this an issue for your artists.

This was very much a topic of the 1990s, but it is increasingly less of a consideration today. Conversely, courtesy of the focal point Chinese art has become under “the art market”, China’s artists have a sense that they are beginning to lead; that the days of following are behind them.

Philippe de Montebello has spoken of how very much art is a cultural hybrid. The Chinese Silks of Zhuang Hui & Dan’er are a great illustration of this thesis, for while they are Chinese, they are based upon products designed for the international monument. And Gao Weigang shows imags of the Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley! Could we generalize: are your artists oriented in part, at least, towards the international art market?

That’s true nowadays everywhere! I think the market hit China like a tsunami, a phenomenon for which nobody can ever be prepared. It knocked everyone for six.  Having said that, the majority of artists who are included in As Seen 2011 veer towards the less commercial end of the spectrum. I have been asked repeatedly by artists and interviewers here why such and such an artist is absent from the book when they are ‘so famous and sell so well’. To which my answer is that when that artist has a good show or shows a good work then they will be represented.

When I was in Beijing in 2009, I certainly saw a great many art galleries. But how well developed is the domestic market for art in China?

It’s not. It’s very much at the early developmental stage. A real market, buoyed by meaningful collections can only exist when potential buyers have access to quality information. I think there is still too little of that available—hence one reason for doing As Seen and the approach to describing the art rather than simply locating it in theory.

We see a great deal of contemporary Chinese art in Chelsea’s galleries and in the New York museums. But I have the impression our view is highly selective. In the Foreword you speak in a personal way about why you chose the artists. I wonder, then: is it possible to generalize about the situation of art in China today? In New York, it’s very hard to find trends—there simply are lots of diverse individuals. Your new book deserves comparison the big Phaidon volume Defining Contemporary Art—25 years in 200 pivotal artworks which also reveals the extreme difficulty of identifying trends. From As Seen 2011 I infer, the same is true in China.

That’s rather amusing since it was a similar volume, which provided the original spark to As Seen. I was together with an artist, a curator and a gallerist. Phaidon’s Vitamin P had just arrived in China. They were excited to see a number of Chinese artists included, but we were asking when China would have a quality publication to match Vitamin P, and that reflected the real situation of the Chinese art world. I figured an entire volume on Chinese painting would lack dynamism, but that the approach brought to As Seen might temporarily fill the gap.

It’s impressive to me that you, a foreigner been able to develop this remarkable close-up record of contemporary Chinese art.

I have moved from being student/contemporary to curator and “critic”. The things I have been able to do are things that were made possible by the special characteristics of China, as it changed and matured along the way—by this I mean meetings with important people, with an extraordinary range of art world figures, politicians, tastemakers and industrialists. I can’t imagine having been afforded those opportunities in Europe or in America. There has also been the involvement with artists on a personal level, in being able to further careers through making connections for them in China and abroad, and to contribute to the building of a scene here—working with ascent art spaces and galleries, curating exhibitions both here and abroad, and with the voice that writing about art affords. To be in a position to participate in the activities of this new scene and to make things happen, has been a privilege. The strange thing is that having been involved in so much, having done so much, in China there is always a sense that this is only the beginning. There’s so much more to do.

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February 20 to April 20, 2013
547 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 242-7727

Al Held, Circle and Triangle, 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 144 x 336 inches. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

The titles of abstract paintings can be important. When Frank Stella named his protractor-based Tahkt-i-Sulayman (1967) after an ancient shrine in Iran, he encouraged very different style of interpretation than did Daniel Buren, who titled one early picture Manifestation 1 – Peinture acrylique sur tissu rayé (1967). Stella, it seemed, wanted to associate his art with Islamic decoration. By contrast, Buren presented a much more literal minded way of thinking about his stripes.

Al Held, who started out making classic Abstract Expressionist pictures, in his later career created marvelously elaborate perspectival constructions. In between, in the 1960s, he did geometric paintings, many of them based upon fragments of alphabet letters. The Big A (1962) is a truncated black ‘A’ with a yellow and blue insert; The Big D (1964), a leftward facing ‘D’ with a black center; and The Yellow X (1965) is a yellow ‘x’, with triangles peeking in on the top, bottom and sides. And sometimes he did constructions whose titles refer to their geometry — Circle and Triangle (1964) is a good example. Held wanted to associate his large geometric abstractions with the most rudimentary general culture- the letters of the alphabet; geometric forms or shapes, Maltese Cross (1964) for example; and cultural figures known to everyone—Siegfried (1966), Mao (1967).

The meaning of abstract painting has always been up for grabs. It can be associated with mystical ‘higher experience’— as Kandinsky and Mondrian wanted; with nature, as for Pollock or Thomas Nozkowski; or with materialism—Malevich and Robert Mangold do this. Held, so his titles reveal, was a surprisingly straightforward, even literal-minded visual thinker. He wasn’t interested in Stella’s art historical references, in Buren’s visual materialism or in allusions to nature; but neither was he a materialist. He wanted to create large, relatively simple, simplified, slightly illusionistic images whose meaning was visually almost self-evident. The letters of the alphabet and Held’s other subjects have no intrinsic scale. And so the danger then, as I see it, is that paintings with these subjects become inert, turning into quasi-minimalist compositions. That’s why their size is very important. In reproduction, these pictures look handsome.  But they hold up on the high-walled galleries of Cheim & Reid perfectly—they have a self-sufficient presence. The Big N (1964-66), almost a monochrome, depends critically upon the small notches of black at the top and bottom of the field of white. Untitled (1965) uses four such inserts at top, bottom and the sides to turn the red field into a floating plane. And Upside Down Triangle (1966)—which is more than four meters wide—seems to twist around the small triangle cut into the center.

Without working in series, or ever repeating, and using simplified means, Held created an astonishing array of varied effects. You feel that he is reinventing the art of painting as he goes.

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James Lee Byars, The Angel, 1989. 125 glass spheres, each sphere 7-3/4 inches diameter. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery

For some years, one of my reliably stimulating pleasures was my evenings with Thomas McEvilley.  I would come to the East Village, walk up to his third floor apartment, and then we would talk in his book-filled study before going out to dinner. His large library was double shelved, the volumes of a classics scholar mixed together with publications devoted to art history. On the wall was the Frank Jewett Mather Award given by the College Art Association in 1993—Thomas, not a vain man, was proud of that honor—and his place were filled with many works of art, including a painting by Julian Schnabel . Sometimes I would bring a younger friend along, someone I wanted to introduce to this famous critic. On other occasions we met in the country, at the house of our mutual friend Bill Beckley. Tom was great fun to be with because he could listen; because he had many great stories; and because he always was amazingly attentive, even (or especially) at the end of a long evening.  Once over two happy successive dinners he told me the marvelous story of his career. He couldn’t legally drive and so I had the chance to hear more taking him home.

Tom was trained as a classicist. And so when Ingrid Sischy, who wanted to introduce new writers into the art world, brought him into Artforum around 1981, his essays about his great friend James Lee Byars and a whole host of other figures introduced a challenging new sensibility. Soon his critique of MoMA’s “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” (1984) made him famous. Most art world disputations are of merely parochial interest. This was one of those rare moments when a critic hit a nerve, touching in an exhibition review upon issues with larger resonance. The debate that followed was seminal to ‘postmodernism.’ “When I first met Tom,” Bill Beckley recalls,

it was to negotiate a truce between Tom, [William] Rubin and [Kirk] Varnedoe. I wanted to include the essay and exchange of letters in Artforum in Uncontrollable Beauty.  The problem was that upon the publication of the anthology fourteen years later, all three parties wanted to continue the argument.   It had to stop somewhere, but truly, it never did.

After that–although, or so he told me, he was boycotted by the major Manhattan museums– Tom published a great deal of art criticism, all of it good.  His anthology, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, (2005) gives a great sampling of his discussions of such varied figures as Marina Abramovic, Les Levine and Yves Klein. In the 1980s, there was a seriously felt need for criticism to find some novel grounding, an alternative to formalism, which was exhausted. Most art writers looked to the French deconstructive literature in translation. Tom’s particular perspective, which must have seemed very exotic, was that of classical scholarship. In his critical discussion of the Hegelian conception (made famous by Arthur Danto) of “the end of art,” Tom observed that this “was not a new idea but in fact was known to the ancients—it occurs, for example, in Pliny’s Natural History. . . “

Luca Del Baldo, Thomas McEvilley – The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, 2010. Oil on Belgian linen, 40 x 30 cm. Collection of Thomas McEvilley. Courtesy of the Artist.

Tom was a classicist with an unusual bias- he was also a major scholar of Indian philosophy. “When I was young,” he once explained, “I tried to learn a new language each summer.”  In the early 1970s, sitting naked with a guru in a cave, he seriously considered moving to India, in the way I suppose that a century earlier American aesthetes moved to Tuscan villas.  I was stunned by his boldness. Tom’s magnum opus was his comparative study of Indian and Greek philosophy, The Shape of Ancient Thought, published by the School of Visual Arts and Allworth Press. The philosophers of ancient India, he argued, worked out their ideas in parallel with, though without necessarily borrowing from, their Western peers. He was very pleased when an affordable Indian edition was published. Aware of the pernicious history of imperialism, the many recent art writers who take an interest in art from outside Europe tend to be defensive. Thanks to his travels in China and India, and his linguistic skills, Tom was able, without undue moralizing, to offer a judicious cross-cultural perspective. He loved to tell an anecdote of Diogenes, which nicely comments on this situation: “When asked why he wished to be buried upside down, Diogenes replied, ‘Down will soon be up.’” The authors of every future global art history will owe an essential debt to him.

When in 2006 I invited Tom to a panel on critical disagreement at the New York Studio School, he gave a show-stopping presentation of an example from John Baldessari’s art. I haven’t yet, I fear, fully absorbed its implications. Afterwards I was pleasantly astonished when Leo Steinberg, who was a very critical critic, praised Tom. Tom was a great art writer because he was madly inquisitive; because he loved a great variety of art; and because he was a gifted stylist. His most recent book is the definitive biography of Sappho. Developing his doctoral thesis (1967-68), each layer of this book “represents the poet and her work in a certain way, and each represents my mind and its interaction with a finite body of text at a different stage of my life.” The place where we imagine her, he concludes, “is still somewhat empty—to be filled by other Sapphos yet to come.” Ancients, Moderns, and Postmodernists alike, inhabiting eastern spheres and west, will miss his brilliant and beautiful mind.  He is dearly loved.

January 17 to February 23, 2013
514 West 25 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-941-0012

installation shot of the exhibition under review, courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

What is a painting? For some time, artists have been answering that question in very diverse ways by taking painting apart into its constituent elements. Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray focused our attention on the stretcher; Julia Mehretu and Cy Twombly dealt with the painterly gesture; and Mel Bochner and Sol LeWitt, the role of drawing. Peter Soriano, who in the 1990s made colored sculptures from polyester resin, now is seeking to make his art more portable by doing improvised wall paintings, schematized landscapes based upon plein air drawings. His original contribution to this ongoing artistic dialogue involves bringing a new visual resource into the discussion. A couple of decades ago, New York City’s subway cars were covered with graffiti. This form of wild art, art from outside the regulated gallery world did not long survive. Its presence was generally seen as a political problem: graffiti showed that the authorities had lost control of the public spaces. One marvelous illustration of graffiti appears on the cover of Frank Stella’s Working Space (1986)—indeed it is the source of his title. But otherwise graffiti, like other forms of wild art, has not been given much attention by art world authorities.

Anyone using a ruler and spray can, so Soriano says, “could learn and re-make my work.” Thus Bagaduce #1 (2012), which is nine feet long consists of brown shapes overlaid and connected with blunt spray paint lines in black, blue and orange.  And Bagaduce #4 is composed of circles, dots and points of paint, linked together by dotted lines and a long stretch of sprayed blue. It is striking to see how varied are these wall paintings, which are composed of a relatively few, relatively simple elements. And, also, how effectively they make use of Lennon, Weinberg’s long narrow space, with its natural lighting at the front and back. Soriano means his works to be “mutable,” which is to say that when they recreated by another draftsman in another site they will be somewhat different. Just as Martha Argerich’s Schumann performances differ from Sviatoslav Richter’s; so, if you purchase instructions for one of these Sorianos, the work you then create at home will differ a little from those in the gallery. Only Norman Mailer and a few other visionary aesthetes admired graffiti. But anyone who loves painterly visual art can enjoy Soriano’s wall paintings, which are joyous, truly ‘gay’ in the traditional sense of that word. Seeing his paintings coming from the bitter cold of an overcast winter day, I thought of Henri Matisse’s late cutouts, a perhaps strange but not-irrelevant association. Constructing diagram-like markings, which diagram nothing, Soriano shows how far reaching aesthetic effects can be created by using minimal means. In that way, of course he extends a familiar tradition which now is lengthy. To deconstruct painting, he demonstrates, is also simultaneously to reconstruct this medium, extending its reach in ways which are aesthetically challenging because now, as in the past they remain essentially unpredictable.

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October 25th, 2012 to January 25th, 2013
390 Park Avenue, New York City

David Salle’s Tapestries/Battles/Allegories at Lever House, installation shot, courtesy Lever House Art Collection

Even when the galleries and museums close for the day, there are paintings to be seen in Manhattan. At the Citicorp Center, for instance, on Lexington Avenue at 53rdStreet, you can look through the high windows at Frank Stella’s Salto Nel Mio Sacco (1985). And a block west on Park Avenue there was an installation of six very large recent paintings by David Salle. The glass-walled lobby of Lever House, a private space none the less visually accessible to the public, is effectively open 24/7. Salle’s allegorical scenes are based upon 17th- and 18th-century Flemish tapestries.

Supported by scrims and hung on panels, they are overlaid with his signature-style inset images topped off by brightly colored male and female silhouettes reminiscent of Yves Klein’s nude rubbings.  Standoff faces the street; The River is close to the inner lobby window; and Campaign and the three other paintings are set back further within the building and only partly visible from outside.  On a gray winter day, the high-pitched colors are dazzling, even before you get close enough to identify the subjects. Salle has always been famous for creating visual conundrums, but on this occasion his installation really ups the ante.

In a marvelously imaginative interpretative leap the curator Richard Marshall relates this setting to Philip Johnson’s display of Poussin’s Burial of Phocian (1648) within his classic Glass House (1949). Johnson’s collection of modernist paintings and sculptures (including both Stellas and Salles) is installed underground in other, nearby buildings on his estate, but this one old master painting is visible from outside the house. Salle’s Lever House installation mimics and modifies that effect. Looking through the walls of Glass House you see Funeral of Phocion, which depicts a landscape, set within Johnson’s carefully manicured landscape. Salle’s paintings are also set behind glass, but Tapestries/Battles/Allegories is in the city.

To understand its site you need to step back. Lever House (1952) was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, an American follower of Mies van der Rohe, whose masterpiece Seagram Building (1958), done in collaboration with Johnson, is directly across Park Avenue.  Just as Johnson struggled with his architect-rivals, so too Salle has battled with his painter-frennemies. Trained as a modernist, Johnson became notorious for his postmodern eclecticism. Salle, who became famous in the heyday of postmodernism, uses his site to subtly allude to Johnson’s style of visual thinking. Stella’s Salto Nel Mio Sacco, a marvelous late modernist abstraction, is not hard to understand. Interpreting Salle’s Tapestries/Battles/Allegories is more challenging.

October, 31 2012 to January, 5 2013
4 East 77th Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues
New York City, 212-988-1623

Eugène Leroy, Nu blanc couché au grand visage, 1991. Oil on canvas, 38 1/4 x 57 1/2 inches. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London. cover image, December 2012, shows a detail of this painting

Almost two decades ago the Pace Gallery presented “De Kooning/Dubuffet: The Women,” showing images which the Times reviewer Michael Brenson found “startling, creepy and sometimes painful.” As Brenson goes on to rightly note, at that time the female nude had become an almost impossible subject for contemporary artists. The era in which Manet, Picasso and Matisse could present their transgressive visions of woman’s bodies had ended. This Michael Werner exhibition reawakened my now unavoidably vague memories of that show. Like de Kooning and Dubuffet, Eugène Leroy loves heavily encrusted picture surfaces. Someone might, I imagine, visit this show, look too quickly and leave unable even to identify their ostensive subject, the female nude. Compared with Leroy, the earlier painters I cited presented their subjects with the immediacy of Ingres. It’s of little use noting that Leroy, born in 1910, only became famous in old age—he died in 2000. For who amongst his contemporaries made paintings anything like these? The female figure is visible in Nu vert (1978), but in most of these pictures, Nu blanc couché au grand visage (1991) for example, you need to take on faith the veridicality of the title. When you step back or move close, do the outlines of a human body fall into view? In the gallery I found that question surprisingly difficult to answer.

But Leroy’s dilemma, as I understand it, lies deeper than some concern merely with trendy ideas of political correctness, which did not, I expect, mean much to him. To survive in a culture swamped by photographic images, figurative painters need  some way of defending their traditional manner of art making.  Either they can bracket the seductive figurative references of their images, like Luc Toymans; or present ironical erotic pictures- as John Currin does masterfully; or focus on truthful representations of banal subjects, this being the concern of Liliane Tomasko, for instance. Leroy, who uses the heaviest pigments of any artist whose work I have seen– he makes Frank Auerbach’s people by comparison look like those of Alex Katz—pursues none of these options. That description may make him sound like a traditional figurative painter. But what old master or modernist did a painting that looks remotely like Untitled (1994)? When looking at Nu en fête (1996) I think to myself: How traditional were the techniques of Soutine!  And if when viewing Marina nue (1997), I recollect Giacometti, that is only to emphasize, by contrast, how unclichéd is Leroy’s style. Leroy is an extreme painter because his technique is extraordinarily original; because his painting has nothing to do with fashion, which too often dominates in our upscale art galleries; and because his paintings inspire prolonged, close looking and pregnant, speculative reflection. No wonder I visited this exhibition twice, and came home baffled, charmed, and ready to return.

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November 7 to December 21, 2012
730 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street
New York City, 212.445.0444

Alan Shields, Maze, 1981-82. Acrylic and thread on canvas, cotton belting, Velcro, aluminum pipe, 87 x 219 x 219 inches. Courtesy of Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

Critics sometimes like to imagine they are entering the picture space of paintings under view. In a justly famous extended passage in The Salon of 1767, for instance, Denis Diderot describes wandering within some landscape scenes by Claude-Joseph Vernet. And in his critique of Clement Greenberg’s formalism, Leo Steinberg asserted: “In an age of space travel a pictorial semblance of open void is just as inviting to imaginary penetration as the pictorial semblance of a receding landscape was formerly to a man on foot.” Normally, of course when viewing a work of art, you stand some  distance in front of that object. But if paintings are used to construct a maze, then you can walk surrounded on all sides by art.  Galerie Lelong Chelsea’s exhibition Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables earlier this year allowed viewers to go through a maze at the far end of the gallery which was composed from panels of solid colors—green, blue, yellow, and orange. At the end, you were rewarded with a cup of orange juice. Oiticica intended that Penetrables be a movable penetrable fresco. Shields’ Maze creates a very different effect.

The Greenberg Van Doren Gallery has a relatively large unobstructed display room. And so, filling a large part of it with Maze (1981-82), filled with decorative circles, triangles and rectangles composed of areas of pure color, and some intricate geometric patterns changed completely the way that you experienced that space. Twisting and turning, walking on narrow pathways between paintings hung on frail-looking wood frames using webs of cotton belting, you finally emerged on the far side from the entrance.  The pathway is narrow enough that you need to turn sideways. When you enter, you don’t know exactly where the path will lead. Were someone to enter from the other side, you then would have to back out. At some points, you can see outside, but often when you are within Maze you find yourself immersed in a forest of paintings.

Taught to sew by his mother and sisters, Shields (1944- 2005), became famous in the early 1970s for employing the motifs of 1960s color field paintings in colorful decorative hangings.  He compared Maze to a stage set: “you’ve got walls, corridors, intersections, changes of direction, all directed by a type of architecture within architecture.” The opening for this show featured a performance choreographed by Stephen Petronio “Into The Maze,” set to a piece of music composed by Tom Laurie, which was inspired by a short melody written by Shields. But even without attending, a gallery visitor could understand the power of Maze (1981-82) to inspire these performers. Entering a maze is an essentially regressive experience. Abandoning your normally purposeful walk, you surrender yourself to following the spatial order created by the artist. Color field paintings become walls of a maze – what an unlikely, but aesthetically satisfying fate for an art form that aspired to dematerialize the work of art.

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September 12 to October 27, 2012
32 East 69th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, 212-794-4970

installation shot of the exhibition under review. To right, work by Jiro Yoshihara, 1965. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth, New York

In the early 1950s, a group of Japanese artists saw Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of Jackson Pollock at work and, also, some of his paintings. The members of the Gutai Art Association were inspired to produce a marvelous variety of abstractions. But when in 1958, when they showed in New York, Americans were too much under the spell of the still-unfolding achievements of the Abstract Expressionists to look sympathetically at their paintings. And so this ambitious exhibition of twenty-seven works of art, many of them large, is a revelation. It includes Shozo Shimamoto’s arrows, which resemble Adolf Gottlieb’s geometric compositions; Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Work (1956-57), oddly akin to an intense Helen Frankenthaler; Sadamasa Motonaga’s Sakuhin (No. 54) (1958), a vertically oriented abstraction not unlike Robert Motherwell’s classic paintings; and Shuji Mukai’s Work (1963), which puts me in mind of Alfred Jensen’s gridded pictures.

A branch of history writing is devoted to alternate histories. What if Winston Churchill had died in the traffic accident in New York, 1931, when he was seriously injured? Or what if the plot on Hitler’s life in 1939 had been successful? World history might have been very different. Imagine, in the same spirit, that in 1956, just after Pollock died, that some catastrophe had killed Gottlieb, Frankenthaler, Motherwell and Jensen. The Gutai, I think, might have developed exactly as they in fact did, for once they understood how to use Pollock’s techniques to do painterly abstractions, they would have developed basically the same options as their American near-contemporaries. The famous survey text art since 1900 by the editors of October describes the Gutai’s response to Pollock as “one of the most interesting . . . ‘creative misreadings’ of twentieth-century art.” Judging just by this exhibition, that judgment is absolutely mistaken. In fact, the Gutai independently identified something like the same options as their American peers. Even Jiro Yoshibara’s Work (1967), a black circle on a white field the odd man out in this exhibition, fits into this plan. For just as in response to Pollock’s gestural technique, some Americans became proto-minimalists, so also in Japan a similar development occurred. I certainly don’t want to overdo this parallel between American and Japanese painting. Although Yasuo Sumi’s Work (1955-56) resembles Morris Louis’s pictures of that date, it seems to embody a different sensibility. And I find Norio Imai’s challenging White Ceremony-F/G/E (1966-2012) hard to place in relation to American art.

Nowadays any history of contemporary art has to be a worldwide history, looking at the contributions from every culture. It’s astonishing to look back forty-some years and find serious commentators like Michael Fried writing as if the future of painting depended just upon a few New York artists. This exhibition is a salutary reminder that historians of modernism need to expand their range of examples. Thanks to Pollock’s inspiration, the Gutai worked out quite independently in their own country something like the developments of abstraction, which took place in New York. Maybe, then, the laws of art historical development are (relatively) universal. And so, once a novel style of painting is created, perhaps artists any and everywhere can develop it. This exhilarating exhibition thus suggests a far- reaching vision about how to develop our thinking, about modernism, which deserves further attention.

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June 8 to September 12, 2012
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York City 212-423-3500

Grace Hartigan, Ireland, 1958. Oil on canvas, 200 x 271 cm. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice © Grace Hartigan Estate

When Hilla Rebay, the founding director of the Guggenheim, was forced out of that museum, James Johnson Sweeney became the second director (1952-60). Rebay had focused on collecting Vasily Kandinsky. Sweeney’s wider taste encompassed the classic Abstract Expressionists – Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Jackson Polllock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – and also a host of other figures. This large exhibition of about one hundred paintings and sculptures by nearly seventy artists presents the abstract art he admired. Sweeney collected many Americans, some famous now, and others who perhaps deserve attention: James Brooks, Herbert Ferber, Grace Hartigan, Ibram Lassaw, and Isamu Noguchi. And he purchased many Europeans, Carla Accardi, Pierre Alechinsky, and Karel Appel to name three, and some Japanese abstractionists, Yutaka Ohaski, Kenzo Okada and Kumi Sugaï being examples.

American-style abstraction became an international style in the 1950s, and was presented In New York. But although this exhibition juxtaposes familiar and now obscure figures, it fails to provide an interesting revisionist perspective on this fascinating period. Part of the problem is suspect connoisseurship. Asger Jorn intrigues me, for no less than T. J. Clark called him the greatest painter of this decade, a claim not supported by the two works on display. Sam Francis is, in my judgment, a great, somewhat marginalized figure in the 1950s, but that judgment is not honesty supported by the art on display. Recently we have seen in Manhattan a revelatory Lucio Fontana exhibition (reviewed here). Memories of that show make the two paintings hung here seem sadly slight. The one Clyfford Still on display is tremendous as is one of the Yves Kleins, but the works displayed by Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Emilio Vedova are not going to be admired even by their champions. Three years ago (reviewed here ) an upscale New York gallery presented a serious exercise in connoisseurship of abstract expressionism, with a challenging catalogue essay in a setting, which inspired serious visual reflection. By contrast, this much larger exhibition is a very routine affair. Neither the selection of art nor the hanging is revealing. You don’t come away with a revisionist account of this important period.

In covering much discussed territory, a great museum needs to be imaginative.    Here the presence of minor works by such much-exhibited figures as Louise Bourgeois, Jean Dubuffet, Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt doesn’t expand our thinking about the history of recent abstraction. Nor do the essays in the massive catalogue – which go over now very familiar material – provide revelations. When so much has been said about Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, perhaps there is something to be said for considering Sweeney’s critical judgments. But whatever his importance as a curator, he doesn’t come across as a challenging thinker. It would have been good to view a strong presentation of some once well-known artists who have fallen into relative obscurity. Do Yaacov Agam, Martin Barré or Theodore Roszak deserve serious attention? And what about the abstractionists from outside Manhattan? Was Clement Greenberg right to write off the Europeans, Serge Poliakoff and Pierre Soulages for example, in favor of his American Abstract Expressionists? Focused visual contrasts could inspire reflection about these questions. This exhibition doesn’t provide them. When financial pressures make ambitious loan exhibitions increasingly difficult, it might be interesting to present the Guggenheim’s reserves, in a way that provided novel insights into that institution’s place in the formation of our present taste in 1950s abstraction.  But this show doesn’t. It is a missed opportunity.

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April 29 to August 20, 2012
152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 626-6222

Installation shot of the exhibition under review with, center, Andy Warhol, Camouflage, 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silk screen on canvas, 118 by 420 inches. Courtesy of The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT.

In reaction against Abstract Expressionism, Andy Warhol (and his fellow post-modernists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) inserted content into painting.

No wonder Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were so personally hostile towards him: they believed that he had killed abstraction. More exactly, since a silkscreen may have either a figurative or an abstract subject, Warhol undercut the distinction between figuration and abstraction. That said, some of his subjects – of which the shadows, Rorschachs, and camouflages in this exhibition are examples – look abstract. But as the title of the show indicates, it’s not Warhol’s subjects but his industrial-style techniques of art production which have been taken up by the abstract painters in this show. Hence Rudolf Stingel’s impersonally finished oils and enamels on canvas; Christopher Wool’s blotches—anti-forms made by photographing and printing his earlier paintings on an inflated scale; and Glenn Ligon’s surfaces composed of acrylic, silk screen and coal dust on canvas.  And Urs Fischer’s presentation of gesso, arcylics, silicone and screws on aluminum panels and Mark Bradford’s mixed media collages, influenced by graffiti, on canvas. Julie Mehretu presents monumental abstracted images of urban experience; Tauba Auerbach creates images of folds with acrylic on canvas; Wade Guyton prints inkjet images on linen; Kelley Walker does explosive-looking digital prints on canvas; Sterling Ruby sprays paint on canvas; and Das Institute (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder) creates oil on paper constructions: then they extend this style of abstraction.

Most of the eleven American or US-based artists in this show don’t use brushes. They employ silk screens, electric sanders and industrial sprayers. And they mostly do non-gestural painting. (Seth Price and Josh Smith are the exception to that rule. I like their art but they don’t really belong here.)  It is Warhol’s loss of direct contact with the subject, rather than his occasional use of abstract subjects that makes him a potential source for abstract art. Such factory made abstraction has some affinities with Robert Ryman’s minimalism, but little connection with Brice Marden’s recent gestural painting, Ellsworth Kelly’s clean design or Sean Scully’s romanticism.

Christopher Wool, details to follow

The essays in the usefully lavish catalogue are all over the map. There are proposals to link these artists to feminism or queer theory or accounts of race. But since just by looking it is hard to know that the paintings of Auerbach and Das Institute are by women, for instance, or that Ligon, Bradford and Mehrutu are of African origin makes this seem an unpromising approach. There are attempts to read these figures as political artists. When Goya, Manet and even Picasso painted political subjects, then surely their art was political. So was Warhol’s when he painted Jackie Kennedy and Electric Chairs. But contemporary abstraction resists politics. The desperate urge to make these paintings politically critical expresses the guilty conscience of art writers, who want to believe that praising art they, like me admire, is not merely to write at the service of the art market. But that hope is foredoomed, for it surely must occur to everyone that this is the ultimate capitalist art, arcane in its appeal, and so large that only grand collectors can afford to house it. The catalogue has many photographs of the artists’ enormous studios, which do look factory like.

Recently Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA director, has been under fire. Judging just by this brilliantly challenging show, which is highly adventuresome, those complaints are unjustified. MOCA has always puzzled me. In a city with intense natural sunlight, how perverse that this prominent museum is completely underground and so totally dependent upon artificial lighting. But it turned out to be the perfect venue for this exhibition of industrial scale art. Deitch and the curators have done something original and important. They have identified a challenging novel style of abstract painting and provided a genealogy linking it to Warhol’s art. What remains to be done, in my opinion, is to provide some account of the aesthetic pleasures of this art. Perhaps we should consider the ways in which the seemingly neutral or rebarbative structures of these pictures reconcile us to everyday post-modern industrial environments. How revealing that the most immediately accessible work is Rudolf Stingel’s wall to wall white carpets, which allow visitors to create an all-over work of art as they mark it while walking around viewing the paintings.

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