Abstract Painting: The Future
I have said many times in public lectures — our view of art today is the media’s view of art or, more specifically, the promotional media. Of course, this is a wide generalization — but, like many such statements, it is generally true. What we read and hear in the media and in dinner-party conversations – being the more elusive extension of the media — is ultimately directed toward promoting the names of artists – some we may know, others we may never know. Regardless of the stakes, everyone wants names! Once you have a name — this becomes the pivot of argumentation, often without any aesthetic definition, without any delectation, not even an impregnation. There are few names without pretension worth putting on the table. Not one ounce of polemical grist!
KASIMIR MALEVICH, BLACK SQUARE
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
So where do we begin with abstract painting? This is a far more interesting question than — where are we now? Even so, there are those who will insist on wanting the names of up and coming installation artists under the age of ninety-two, hypertensive gallery directors from Omaha, fetishistic museum curators from Honolulu, fashionable after-opening vegan restaurants from West 29th Street, the most alluring models from Long Island City, the most insipid and egregious artists from the Heavenly Host Social Club, who spend their time in front of pulverized mirrors, working on those dullard expressions that prove that there is nothing except greed, recalcitrance, and the infinite promise of more vapid art, coming down the pike, as we sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” in bloodthirsty leggings, without a whisper of reflective condolence.
So where are we? In the throes of abstract art? For over two decades, these stretcher bars have been in the saddle of representation, riding off into the sunset, yodeling “Forever Amber,” without a shirt or even a vest, looking for the new revival – of what? Insurgence? Not a willy, by golly. Abstract art? Is that a mongrel leftover from some fastidious levitation – down by the caves of Muddy Gulch, after a garden party on the Lower East End? We can do better than Muddy Gulch, as was once predicted some years ago at MoMA. But why hasn’t it happened?
My prognosis is as follows: The big money in art has gone to the weaklings who made it big before the stocks got high. These bullish incestuous weaklings are supposed to command the big bills, the big toast, and the big send-off? This implies that abstract painting is lost, that it is no longer around, that its consciousness has left the scene, so to speak. But this is not the truth. This is only the media working in compliance with the marketplace. It takes a lot of weak art to make a strong market, that is, an aggressive change machine. If anything else were to exist, it would not be a market. It would have no allure, no media reciprocity. Only hamstrung egalitarians!
Painters unite! I would rather paint than twitch. So they say—but look out, Maestro! The foregoing is bygone. Painting was never about that, anyway. The real question is — how to get abstraction back in the saddle, before singing Auld Lang Syne? But is this the issue, or only the question? Who really cares about such matters? The song was already sung, and it makes no difference. That was the lesson of Postmodernism. And I have no names to mention.
There is only the course ahead, where abstract painting takes hold and restores its ingenuity to the ranks of superb chaos, which is another form of order, that is, what exists beneath the surface of the real, within the realm of the unreal, the unconscious struggle, to make some thing happen, by block or by mark, by gesture or by gestation. There is no clan, no group, and no incisive movement to see us through – There is only the spark in the bowels that propels us into the ether, the abstract longing of desire that was rejected once too often in postmodern times. Now, we have to look sideways, with time-tested angularity, toward a new happenstance where painting opens its threshold to the renewal of begonias, an eternal genesis, without overt lessoning, only the treachery of time to pull it though, to make us damn the praises of forlorn realists, rumpling the last stage of representation. Painters unite! Fight for the lull of temperance. Insist on ambiguity. Open the conduits and reach for liberation. Abstraction needs a good dose of bootleg synergy or symmetry – one or the other, or betrothed by both.
So where do we go from here? I hear the thirst-quenchers cry. What is the next step? The same cry, over and again. Forget the ululations and stick to the mud, the grist. Keep it moving. That’s the reality of painting today – as Philip Johnson once said: “We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got!”
Robert C. Morgan received his M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975 and his Ph.D. from New York University in 1978. Dr. Morgan is Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, the University of Rochester, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Dr. Morgan has written and published over 1000 articles and reviews in more than 50 magazines and professional journals. His essays have been translated into more than a dozen languages. In addition, he has authored books, catalogs and monographs on numerous contemporary artists in various countries. His recent books include Clement Greenberg, Late Writings (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003) edited by Dr. Morgan and The End of the Art World New York (Allworth Press, in collaboration with the School of Visual Arts, 1998).
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