Paragons
New Abstractions From the Albright Knox

i have kept an eye on the Knox for a while because their interests in abstraction, and Edmonton’s have a close history, in fact their weather, their industrial core, their general isolation, and even in a sort of poetic way, their relationship to major centers of culture, make Buffalo fairly close to home. (ie New York vs Upstate, Edmonton vs Vancouver).

Their aesthetic and their relationship to modernism all have a distinct parallel. They both took to modernism very early, and left it very late. Non representational abstraction was popular in both capitals long after it became personae non grata elsewhere. Greenberg was visiting Buffalo and Edmonton long into the 70s, where his influence had waned elsewhere. They even collected the same work including Noland, Olitski and Poons.

Now with a recent upswing in interest in abstract forms (ie the 2006 show at the AGO about Colourfield, the Truitt and Louis Retrospectives in Washington, Amy Sillman on the cover of Art Forum, and all along the Queen Street Strip dozens of painters working thru colour and form just like they used to, I wanted to see what was new about it vis a vis the Albright Knox, Edmonton has failed to keep with abstraction, they have not collected widely or deeply the new work that are near them, even with the oil money flowing in and a new building that will cost in the tens of millions. If this slight show, full of artists who are all basically post Warhol, tells us so much both about where non representational art is heading and where it has been.

Whoever coordinates acquistions for Buffalo is wise, s/he knows what to buy, and who not to, which work fits in their history, and which work will explode the assumptions of that narrative. It is a show that does not destabilize as much as it re-taxonomizes, choosing people who are less famous, but who work well within the corpus of modernism. Before I talk about the work in question, there were some artists missing, and that might be budget. If it is, I look forward to a show next year with work by Polly Apfelbaum, Yek, Amy Silliman, Anne Appleby or Grant Hamilton, just to name the Americans.

What is in there, though, is often difficult, often brilliant, and absolutely gorgeous, with 15 works by 15 separate artists, all working through the edges of what formalism, and abstraction can mean, there is a history here, and a tenderness towards material, not so much a fetish towards materialism, as a long, loving seduction, a marriage that refuses to end. Quick run thru of the work in question:

David Baechlor. He wrote the defense of decorative and cosmetic, Chromophobia, a book that is one of my favourites, and a book that has deeply influenced what I thought about art in general, and my practice specifically. In one page he decimated the minimialist narrative of purity, talking about how Flavin’s use of white was not pure, and how his use of colour was explicit—how it pooled around the cold cement of gallery floors: “(Flavins) work was more often than not made in pools of intermingling coloured light : red blue green orange yellow and white” (Chromophobia 12) Here, he took Flavin’s colours and medium (fluorescent tubes in purple, yellow, orange, plus green) and used them in a highly localized context. Called The Spectrum of Hackney Road, the tubes are hidden under ready made dollies, the rough dun coloured wood hiding and reflecting the flourscents, the floor slick, like rain sodden ashplat, the only way that one can see the work is thru reflection, misdirection…like a flanuer moving around the city, like how broken glass used to be called Cockney Diamonds. The work is abstract because of this reflective, it is a highly concentrated, highly formalist, meta-work, about seeing, and colour and about living in cities.

Tim Bavington—huge painting, 11 feet long and more than 5 feet high, a stripe work, starting with greens, with a middle of pink on black, and ending with orange on orange, sort of like creamsicle on crush. He grew up in England, spent time in Vegas and lives now in Pasedena, and worked with Bridget Riley, so the work is a California, Western American Noland, but more narrative, more pop and less pure.

Andy Collins weak work, black lines intersecting a mild field of sage and cream, polite, and slick. A Dentists Office Mangold.

Karin Davie—Neo-op painter, with those loops of muddled colour, oranges, blacks, browns, and yellows. Choleric. The most interesting thing about the work in question ,and the thing that I wouldn’t have noticed unless I saw her work live (And I have seen her work in reproduction several times, is that the work is very explicitly messy, there are drips, trails of paint into other lines, awkard transitons in the top of the loops, places where the works have been painted again, radical changes in brush stroke---its not quite gestural, and I keep wondering looking at the painting that was shown here, if the work was sort of a working out of what it meant to be an op artist, and like their work, it functions much more cleanly as a repro then a painting, (cf Rileys paintings in the mid 60s, vs Rileys prints). I like that shock of the messy, of the unpure, and I think the painting in a way that makes one wonder if the reach has exceeded the grasp is a bug and not a feature. (That the work is titled Pushed, Pulled, Depleted and Duplicated #7 suggests that printers terminology is v. much in her mind)

Jim Ismerman

It wasn’t one on the floor, waiting to be rolled around like some kind of toy. V. much about his craft aesthetic, and about his reclaiming high and low, the weaving was tight, and the foam core underneath was invisible, it was well crafted, and crafted in such a way, that you knew that his concern was a sort of showing off, a way to indicate how good he was at the manual dexterity required to (hand) braid something that large, that seamlessly.

Jim Lambie

It’s a leak painting, and I like anything that explicitly makes fun of the drip process, or the automatic writing fetish that comes thru with so much gestural abstraction. 6 plastic shopping bags, nailed very low to the wall, almost touching the flour, with 6 v. small lines of paint leading to a puddle on the floor—a humble, witty work, not only about gestural abstraction, but also about the workaday markmaking that occurs when we move about, in the kitchen leaks for example. They are so low to the floor, because they are meant to be about where the bag would be if carried home---in the hanging then, it becomes performative, or at least becomes the working thru of performance. I also like the pun of low, hanging low on the wall, hanging low on the arm, low to the ground, low as in hi/lo populism—the performative and the abstract, attached to walking, was v. similar to the Baechlor, and it was a nice theoretical matching, which susggests that Lousi GRachos, the curator was doing his job.

Roxy Paine:

Made by a machine, so t he work is the building of the machine and not the painting in question, and I think that showing the machine in progress would have been a more interesting show then showing the after effects of the machine---what I said about drips and Lambie applies here—though the fact that it reminded me of Whipped Cream and Other Delights made up for something.

Sue Williams

The reason why I went to the show really, and I am glad I finally saw a work of hers. It was as naughty as I was expecting, and as polymorphus, how a leg moves to look like a ducks webbed foot, how a arm becomes a streak of red, and the like—but the thing that amazed me was how careful it was, I always thought her work would be much messier then that—it is all carefully, almost drawn, the mark making delicate, and highly sophisticated, so that there is no splatter, and for example the drying of paint is attached to the opening of a white space. The colours—teal, crimson, peach, salmon, lemon, almost clashed, and their was no attempt to lead the eye—it was a cacophony of competing forms—which worked, because the unprimed linen canvas (normally brown) was painted a thick, creamy white, before the figures went on—the tension b/w the colours, the lines, and the shapes only pushed farther the tension between representation and abstraction in her work.

ChanSchatz

Two Artists, one Japanese, one American, both born in 1968, painting on silk. The tonal similatiries between the silk and the paint, the slickness and sheen of one and the other, were incredible, that it contained almost 40 colours (including everything from dusty rose to scarlet, from aquamarine to emerald, from swimming pool aqua to navy plus black and white), shapes blossoming and falling apart, and large s paces where nothing was happening except the taut fabric, suggests a intertextual historical envisioning—I could see wyld style graffiti, murakami esque backgrounding, anime landscape, English garden textiles, Japanese paintings on linen, kimonos, vasserly op art and others. This was a painting I could have spent hours looking at—and with the sheen of the silk, the reflection of the acrylic, and the utter (super) flatness) a painting that was so slick to be impossible to reproduce.

Mariko Mori

Her work, when it does not feature her, is sort of formless SF kitsch.

Lisa Stefenelli

Red abstraction, built up, like a pyramid, with plenty of white space, using delicately placed, and sinuous lines—arabesque and Arabic, reminded me of the painting nad decoration schools relationship to Arabic calligraphy, and how the long awaited revival (at least by me) of their work and their people will come to fruition—Its good that younger artists are paying attention to this work.

Jessica Stockholder

Standard Cady Noland assemblage, unsure why people considered it abstract at all.

Joesph Maroni

Green on Green, lots of building up layers, lots of dropping, like a morris louis as a monochrome, the surface tension between the rising of various green tones, and the scuttling on the last third of the painting, indicated an excellent technical painter, and that he is working on board makes the work seem much more rigious for some reason—overjoyed that the work is modest, 4x3, and that he has not moved into the 20 foot giant paintings of doom, what works as small and intimate on this scale becomes a tedius disaster on a large one.

Rachel LEckowitz

Red bumps rise t o the middle of the canvas, almost like latex, obviously fleshly, and sexy/creepy in a david lynch parasites taking over the body kind of way—actually one of the few artists that reminded me of flesh, and the only artist whos work confused sculptural and painterly conventions. One of them is just the latex, the other has stripes, that look like a circus tent, or something worse—I was really unsettled at the power of them. Held their own, in a quiet way, against the poppysch overdose by chenshan.

It’s worth a trip to Scarberia, though you missed the shuttle bus, and really an excellent tiny sequal to their under looked, and historically important Extreme Abstraction show from 2005