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PARTISAN REVIEW
quently pose serious problems in these pictures. Many of the paintings
have a hard, slick feel that makes them look like life-sized reproductions
of themselves. Randomness and anonymity prevail. You start wondering
how a particular effect was achieved, rather than connecting with the
picture itself. Text seems to count for a great deal, more perhaps than
the experience of the actual object. A lot of heavy hitters - Arthur
Danto, Leo Steinberg, Donald Kuspit - have contributed to the fall issue
of
Tema Celeste,
seemingly in support of the artists in questions, although
it is only fair to point out that they have written about general issues of
what abstraction can mean in the nineties rather than specific endorse–
ments. The most pretentious rhetoric, generally larded with modish allu–
sions to Baudrillard and company, comes from the artists themselves and
their in-house critics. If I am reading their singularly fuzzy and opaque
prose correctly, the argument goes roughly like this: the randomness in
their work is deliberate, a function of the unprecedented freedom post–
historicism affords, provoked by the sensory and information overload of
present-day, media-dominated, urban life. The content and appearance of
these works also depends on a refusal to negate absence. (No kidding.) I
kept thinking of that ancient
New Yorker
cartoon: ''I'm disenchanted.
He's disenchanted. We're all disenchanted."
There were some plausible paintings in the two exhibitions, some
dreadful ones, some pretty good ones, and some peculiar inclusions. I
wasn't certain what Sean Scully was doing in this company. His painting
at John Good, a moody wall of blocky strokes, brushy texture and
earthy color pulling energetically at deadpan basketweave structure, was
one of the strongest works in the show and one of the most felt . It was
obvious why one of Gerhardt Richter's slapdash abstractions was at John
Good, as a sort of ur-text of "conceptual abstraction," but what was Per
Kirkeby, an old-fashioned European-style painter doing there, apart from
his connection with Josef Beuys? Come to think of it, much of the
younger painters' work also looked rather old-fashioned; David Row's
large, irregularly shaped abutments of rectangular canvases, with their
gi–
gantic "brushstroke" sweeps, clearly traced their ancestry to Frank Stella
in the sixties, both in terms of composition and in their sour Day-Glo
color, although their rough surfaces and economy of means owed more
to Scully. Stella's acid palette and geometric imagery of the sixties and
early seventies, as well as his icy detachment, haunted a good many of the
works exhibited - Peter Halley's arrangements of hard-edged rectangles,
for example. Some looked like reprises of that short-lived fad, pattern
painting, while others achieved the desperate incoherence and self-con–
scious novelty of art school efforts. There were a few exceptions. At first
acquaintance, Jonathan Lasker's pictures appeared to question the expres–
sive possibilities of touch, playing thinly applied calligraphic scrawls
