KAREN WILKIN
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from much recent abstract painting.
And there is a surprising amount of amb itious abstract painting out
there just now. (I didn't say "a surprising amount of
good
abstract paint–
ing," nor, alas, is it clear that the ambition is for the art itself.) Probably
the most talked about shows last November were, in fact, two group
exhibitions of recent abstract painting, "La Metafisica della Luce," at
John Good Ga ll ery and "Conceptual Abstraction," at Sidney Janis
Gallery; many of the same artists - the new abstract painters to be reck–
oned with, we are told - were seen in both shows. They occupy the
opposite end of the spectrum from Diebenkorn, Strautmanis, and the
kind of faith in the raw power of painting that their work posits. Passion
gives way to a "coo l," or more properly, chilled-out abstraction: hip,
sophisticated, detached and fully equipped with supporting theory,
explication, texts - even, it appears, built-in critics. According to the
artists' statements in the catalogue of the Janis show and the curiously
incestuous autumn 1991 issue of the magazine
Tema Celeste
(Italian
speakers take note: that's what American artists mean when they say
"Teema Sell-Est"), their work is markedly different from other abstract
art.
Tema Celeste's
editor, for example, describes them as making paintings
"totally devoid of recognizable images, wh il e producing something that
does not simply repeat, in a sterile manner, what has been done in earlier
decades." How does it differ? Earlier American abstract painting was
empty, arbitrary, hermetic, about its own history, shackled by rules - that
it was dictated by Clement Greenberg is often implied; the new "post–
historicist abstraction" is unprecedentedly free, inventive, and despite its
refusal to admit overt emotion or signal choice, loaded with significance.
How can we tell? Because the artists and the critics who support them
(who are, incidentally, often one and the same) say so.
This is not the place for an analysis of the articles in the fall
Tema
Celeste
or of the relationship of the magazine to the two shows, but
someone has to point out that conflict of interest is rampant when the
editor of a magazine who devotes a special issue to a "movement" de–
fined largely by that magazine also selects a commercial gallery exhibition
of the artists he espouses and then fills the issue with ads for the galleries
that represent them. (This was how the John Good show was chosen,
and rumors abound as to how the special issue was funded.) There is also
the matter of artist-critics writing enthusiastically about each other -
wives, husbands, and significant others included.
It says something about the state of art today that the work of these
new abstract painters looks far better in reproduction than it does in re–
ality. If all you saw was the magazine, you might be convinced. In the
flesh, issues of scale and surface that are irrelevant in photographs fre-
