Driven To Abstraction, 1999
Blake Gopnik, Visual Arts Critic, Toronto
The Globe and Mail Visual Arts, Saturday, Jan. 23, 1999
(excerpted)
In the past few years, art world prophets have been proclaiming an imminent Second Coming for abstraction, after its death and disappearance in the early eighties. (Though abstract art always made just enough splashy reappearances to keep hope in the hearts of its acolytes.) But now that even YYZ is willing to give wall space to the New Abstraction, you know that its moment has truly come, again. Consider Squareheads, the name of its current show.
In fact, YYZ isn't in the vanguard. Other players got there first. Last September's issue of Art in America, the biggest and most popular of New York art magazines, featured New Abstraction on its cover. And already in 1996, the Art Gallery of Ontario's Annual Perspectives show of emerging talent had been dedicated to four Canadian abstractionists. Last summer, Montreal gorged on abstract painting as the city's commercial galleries put together a big spread of the stuff. And at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a show called Weak Thought gives a glimpse of the West Coast's take on figure-free art. “There's a kind of trendiness attached to abstraction right now,” said Grant Arnold, who curated the VAG show.
But for something so trendy, abstraction's long history risks making the new stuff look old hat. The great figures in abstraction - Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian in the ‘teens; Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko after the war - seem at last to have achieved old Master status, even among the general public. In New York this fall, big retrospectives of Pollock and Rothko pulled in the kind of crowds you'd expect for safer bets. (The Whitney Museum had more than 100,000 visitors during the 54 days that Rothko was up, and the catalog sold out completely; the Museum of Modern Art’s Pollock show has another week to go, but so far as averaging almost 4,000 people a day.)
Popular taste and avant-garde interests don't often fall into step, but there may be good reasons for why it’s happening now. Decades of exposure have begun to soften the public's resistance to abstraction. In the art world, the same passage of time has given artists room to stand back and judge abstraction on its merits. In the Cold War art world, abstraction was the mainstream that pushed everything else to the margins until it triggered the eighties reaction against it. But today, abstraction no longer seems like an aging parent ripe for Oedipal slaughter. The bossy dad has turned into a sweet old grandpop.
“One of the things that has made it attractive, to younger artists especially, is that it doesn't have the kind of baggage that it did for previous generations,” said Arnold. Today's artists are coming to admire abstraction as just another sexy, sensual idiom to play with. And they want to push the form beyond where grandpa left off.
That's what seems to be going on in the pictures now up at YYZ. One of the clever pieces in the show is an irregular grid of rectangles about the size of foolscap pages, covered with rows of finger length lines that zip and sparkle in bright colors. But 35-year-old artist Gregory McHarg hasn't simply painted an eye-teasing picture and hung it on the wall, the way a first generation abstractionist might have done. Each of his rectangles is, in fact, a kiddie box of 64 crayons, melted just enough to hold together but not enough to hide what they really are. McHarg said that he's always loved abstraction, but has needed to “make it speak to the age I'm in... I've tried to update it, mutate it into something a little different, by bringing in a pop sensibility, a found object sensibility.”
This is abstraction with a human face, tongue always slightly in cheek and eyes kept sharply focused on the world around us. It's typical of what the New Abstraction is all about, according to Arnold: A love of the simple visual play of abstract art, along with an ironic take on the overblown metaphysical claims that used to go with it. Even a working abstractionist like McHarg is willing to admit that the whole thing may be about “eating history and regurgitating it in new ways. It doesn't say much for the possibility of originality but it's one way to look at what's happening”. One reason for all this retrospection is that it offers an excuse for hanging deliberately good-looking art on gallery walls. McHarg said that there's a real temptation to go back to “trying to make a contemplative object, working with a formal language.” Arnold explained that “visual pleasure is more okay now” than it was in the eighties. “Abstraction was taboo, so that makes it attractive as well.”
Rebellion that looks back rather than ahead doesn't necessarily get you very far - it can turn out to be reactionary rather than revolutionary. Maybe it's too much to hope that the latest movement in art will always point in a new direction. As Arnold put it, “I don't think it's a great revelatory moment - but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting or important.”
