Abstract painting – not the ‘endpoint’ of modernism after all?

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The Indiscipline of Painting

Eleanor Robbins reviews the catalogue of a recent show of abstract art

Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of the New York School of the 1960’s, wrote in an essay entitled ‘Modernist Painting’ that the self-reflexive language of abstract painting  could only lead to an exhaustion of  possibilities for the artist; he then predicted an eventual death of the medium. Years later he expressed some regret for such an overall dismissal of abstraction,  but many critics, even now, are concerned  with what has been called the ‘endpoint’ of modernism – when artists seem to have reached an impasse in ‘monochromatic  minimalism’.

The exhibition somewhat awkwardly called ‘The Indiscipline of Painting’ and its accompanying catalogue attempts to refute Greenberg’s dire words to prove that abstract painting is alive and well and that the messages it delivers today are just as ‘urgent and relevant’ as they were in the 1960s.

Daniel Sturgis, a painter, chose these 49 artists and their representative works to demonstrate the ‘indiscipline’ of painting. In an ungainly and tortuous essay we discover a definition for the use of the word ‘indiscipline’.  It refers, the writer says, to ‘the porous borders that the current practice has re-found in the discipline of painting’. He declares that abstract art today, especially because of its use of commercial design and contemporary culture, relates to the world that the artists inhabit. He is acutely conscious of the history of abstract painting, that it belongs to modernism and (very vaguely) to ‘the ideas of progress, freedom, certainty and mastery’ and he aims to show that contemporary painters can both use abstraction and present new forms and ideas.

Employing a pretentious tangle of words in repetitive paragraphs Sturgis asks the viewer to consider two things; ‘How do these paintings address both the contemporary world and the history of their medium?’ and ‘How does each of these artists re-write and interpret the history of their medium so that they can create a space in which to work?’ It is sometimes difficult for the reader to follow the writer’s lengthy concerns in this essay but, generally, it would appear that abstract painting seems to be moving towards a more geometric, post-Minimalist approach than what was offered in its earlier phases. 

A second essay, ‘The agility of abstraction’, first wrestles with what we mean by abstraction in relation to today’s painters. The writer provides a quasi-philosophical reading taken from a critic writing in 1984.  ‘All painting,’ he says

…is abstract insofar as it represents anything….But all painting is also real…composed out of its own materials.  This is the legacy of modern art.  The essential question is whether or not painting still has value.  If painting continues to be valuable…the search continues for where that value is located.

He concludes his discussion by praising the persistence of abstract painters, and by leaving viewers themselves to discover if, and where, the works have ‘value’.

The exhibition was shown at Tate St Ives and at the University of Warwick (The Mead Gallery of the Warwick Arts Centre) in early 2012.  According to the directors’ foreword the Tate welcomed the exhibition because it allowed ‘the institution to reframe readings of the abstract paintings that were made by a small, international colony of artists in the middle years of the twentieth century’.  For Warwick it presented an opportunity to relate and possibly add to its collection of abstract paintings.  The directors acknowledged the richness of the subject calling it a ‘most complex and exuberant enquiry’, and encouraged the painter to devise and present an exhibition that would demonstrate the continuing significance of abstract art.

Sturgis chose individual works, he says, ‘not as objects for art-historical scholarship but as possessing a living, real engagement with ideas’. The paintings came from both public and private collections, in the UK and abroad.  Some are what Sturgis calls ‘signature pieces’ or  illustrate an aspect of an artist’s career.  They range in date from the 1950s to the present.  The writer adds that all paintings are made by hand; some of them show a direct or self-expressive use of paint while others may ‘represent a different type of negotiation with [the] material’.

All the works are illustrated, full-page, in colour, each one with a short discussion of technical aspects or other works by the artists. These are useful notes to have because they are up-to-date, and interesting.  We see some familiar names: Frank Stella, Sean Scully, Jeremy Moon, Andy Warhol, Bridget Riley and one by the author, Daniel Sturgis, but most of the artists are less well-known. 

Using the criterion of ‘value’ mentioned by one critic, and remembering the phrase a ‘negotiation with the material’, we note a painting (but really it is a collage) made by Bernard Frize (b. 1954).  The painter opened the lids of cans of paint to allow the paint’s surface to acquire a skin.  Then, very carefully, he lifted the skins’ surface and applied them to a canvas.  The resulting work is visually interesting, with wrinkles and bubbles, the coloured circles overlapping and subtly arranged. 

There are some delicately spray-painted canvases and several new Op art works.  One of the latter, by Peter Young (b.1940) is a canvas completely covered in dots with delicate shapes and trails established by dots of one colour.  Although the dots are very slightly irregular, perhaps blotchy, the effect is visually mesmerising (and more complicated than a Bridget Riley) as the dots seem to be hovering over a hardly-perceptible coloured ground somewhere above the canvas itself.

Works like this are challenging to see, and, of course, better seen ‘in the flesh’ than when reproduced on paper.  One critic, writing in an exhibition catalogue for the Contemporary Art Center in New York where a work by Young was shown, wrote that he‘… preferred to practice a kind of what you see is what you don’t see’.  This is the painting the organizers chose to use, quite dramatically, on the cover of this ‘Indiscipline’ catalogue.

The Indiscipline of Painting – International Abstraction from the 1960s to Now, exhibition catalogue, Tate St Ives, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, with essays by Daniel Sturgis, Terry R.Myers and others,  is published by Tate Publishing, 2011. 124 pp. many coloured illustrations. ISBN 978 1 84976 000 3