Jeannene Przyblyski

Jeannene Przyblyski, claims that In the Modern and contemporary period, in terms of – isms. there is one – ism that we should perhaps confront directly, since, still, many of its assumptions inform our contemporary understanding of art today.

And that -ism is Modernism as a whole. The image of Alfred H. Barr's wonderful and terrible diagram for the exhibition catalogue “Cubism and Abstract Art”, in 1936, that set out to try to make sense of the real welter of influences and interventions in art practice that characterize the late 19th and early 20th century, and to do it in such a way that it conformed to a progressive notion of history.

That is to say that history, in teleological terms, means one thing after another, and that those things hopefully add up to progress, add up to a place that values improvement and what comes next, rather than tradition and what has been known.

And, in that sense, also values novelty and newness, as well. So, all of the sometimes contrary and competing influences and interventions in Modernism, in Barr's view, boiled down to two possibilities in 1936. And they are sort of reassuring possibilities, in a weird way, for people who want certainties.

That is to say that he saw art moving toward abstraction in either case but a kind of geometric investigation of abstraction, on the one hand, or a kind of non-geometrical anthropomorphic investigation of abstraction, on the other hand.

This is an artificially neatened up version of history. It's a version of history that privileges one particular perspective, that of European and, by the mid-20th century, American artistic production and aesthetic points of view. And it's worth saying that it is not a version of art history that would, by and large, sit easily with artists. And so, it's not surprising that we find, in relatively short order, the American artist Ad Reinhardt, whose production included both abstract painting, and a pretty aggressive and pretty interesting practice as a kind of caricaturist, illustrator, commentator, in visual form, on the circumstances of Modern art production and reception in the United States and elsewhere. Precisely as a rejoinder to Barr's diagram, Ad Reinhardt pictures modern art as a sort of really unruly ancestral family tree, with its roots in various categories of production, with Braque, Matisse, and Picasso becoming the strong trunk from which many branches and leaves might ensue. But all of that is weighted down with preconceptions of what art ought to and ought not be, with the interventions of a public that is more or less sympathetic or questioning.

And those are the circumstances of the value of newness and novelty, as well, that an artist working to further traditional conventions might expect a comprehending and mutually reinforcing relationship with his or her audience or community.

But an artist and art movements that are always looking to what's next, always looking to the future, might then reasonably expect to encounter, from time to time, uncertainty or derision. And, certainly, Matisse was burned in effigy at the Armory show in 1913. And some of Barr's efforts, while they can seem really flattening and homogenizing, were also efforts to diffuse that kind of tension around Modern art practice.

Well, so what is the self-identified Modern artist to do in the face of the apparent contradiction between these two versions of newness?

On the one hand, the notion of advanced thinking, of advanced practice, of being ahead of the game, of being always on the lookout for the newest rejoinder in a grand conversation about the conditions of contemporary art. And on the other hand, mere novelty, the newest or merely fashionable as nothing more than wanting the latest automobile model or make, or the latest cut of a suit in a department store.

In that context, abstraction takes on a new value because abstraction is precisely not the language of advertising and the language of novelty.

The language of advertising and the language of everyday novelty is the language of an increasingly hyper realism, the language of commercials, the representational language that will show you a bottle of beer, for example, and every single drop of moisture clinging to that ice cold bottle of beer, to make you want it even more.

So, if a kind of hyperreality is the language of novelty, then abstraction becomes, in response, the preferred language of advanced art.

But it's not sort of like, Abstraction, it's worth saying, is equally hard to organize as a visual field, and especially as a painting, and it needs to have its own kind of motor force and its own set of questions.

So, one of those questions might be the very basic question of how do you keep a mere novelty out of the frame, especially as it is manifested through the language of realistic, illusionistic representation, when every time you put a mark on a canvas, you create a figure ground relationship?

You're almost always verging on the realm of representation and, in fact, it is a really hard thing to make a purely abstract painting — a painting that doesn't set up some kind of relationship of being something.

And so that's why, when we look at — this work is, perhaps, one of the grandest and notorious examples of mid-century Modernism.

This is Jackson Pollock's, No. 1, 1950. Lavender Mist, it's also called, given that title by the critic Clement Greenberg, who was a great interlocutor of Jackson Pollock's work.

We can see these paintings as, on the one hand, a sort of random collection of drips and drops, and that's certainly how they were often satirized in the press.

Satirizing of Modernist practices, 'Oh, my child could do that.' 'Oh, anybody could do that.' 'Oh, this seems to be some kind of prank that's being played on us by those cranky and arrogant Modern artists.'

But on the other hand, one could look at these paintings as precisely records of the great effort it takes to cancel figuration, to negate it within a practice of painting.

So that all of that web-like criss-crossing of schemes, of painted drips and lines, can be seen as an effort to repeatedly cancel out those figure-ground relationships until they become absolutely undecipherable and untangleable, until they become a kind of immeasurable and all-encompassing, all-over kind of experience.

So, on the one hand, one can read a painting like, Lavender Mist, as a really principled and labored rejection of the conditions of representational painting, an effort to absolutely refuse to give the viewer a thread of illusionism by which to anchor themselves in certainty in confrontation with this painted field, and to insist, instead, that it was the absolute unrepeatableness of this performance, in many ways, it's absolute boundedness to the unique hand and body of the individual artist, that gave the painting its authority as abstraction.

And, on the other hand, that sort of relationship to newness was carefully managed by the artist himself.

And we see it as nowhere more apparent than in the very well - known series of photographs of Jackson Pollock that were done by the photographer Hans Namuth.

Photographs that insistently picture Pollock as a heroic loner, isolated in his studio, doing battle with the canvas as if it is a battlefield lowered to the ground to be traversed and subdued by the artist with the mere materials of stick-like brush and bucket of house paint.

And yet, after this battle, when the painting is elevated to the wall, a wondrous kind of optical field of infinite complexity remains for the viewer's experience.

Yes, but that other side of newness — in mere novelty and kitsch, haunts Pollock's work, as well. It haunts it in the incessant caricaturing of his practice that is a part of the popular press.

This is another confrontation between the human subject and Pollock's painted fields, not the artist alone in his studio at work, the painting in process on the floor, but the painting finished, installed in the gallery and become a backdrop for a photo shoot by Vogue magazine in 1951.

But why does an artist and his dealer present their work in this way?

Well, because, on the one hand, paintings – Modernist or not – are luxury objects in a modern economy. And it takes a moneyed consumer to go into the upper and high-end galleries of New York, or Paris, or Mexico City, or Beijing, or Shanghai, and come out with a purchase of substance.

So you have to cultivate those viewers, and Pollock was willing to do so.

So, this in some ways, I have to give credit to the art historian T.J. Clark, who introduced me to these photographs, and whose work on Jackson Pollock I find really important. He said, 'This is Modernism's worst nightmare, in a way”, that after all of that principaled grappling with the very premises of painting, it becomes sort of mere wallpaper for the fashionable set. And it does its job pretty well, in that regard. That, on the one hand, this is a painting that could stun the perplexed viewer into a kind of fury over what art might be.

'Does art amount to this?'

And, on the other hand, it can go quietly into defeat, right?

The mural wallpaper for this lovely model with her amazing architectural dress that's colors turn out, lo and behold, to be quite complementary to Pollock's, Autumn Rhythm.

What is it to be?

Is Modern art yet another form of novelty?

Or can it take its principal distance from precisely the world that it must engage in to perpetuate itself in terms of the artist's career?

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the rejoinder to abstract expressionism as a form of Modernist practice will constitute a fork in the road for Modernism, if you will.

That, on the one hand, some artists will entrench in more extreme examples of abstract work, more conceptual practices that principally refuse to create high- value objects in their wake. And on the other hand, a group of artists that will plot themselves, for lack of a better term, right in the midst of this dilemma about the kitschy and the commodity form, and begin to interrogate the status of those images in terms of both process and practice, and in terms of subject matter. And, probably, the example of that that first comes to mind is the work of Andy Warhol.

And this is his, 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, from 1962, a work that says, 'Well, if art is due to be wallpaper, if there is no holding at bay the relationship between elite culture and popular culture, then I am going to put that dilemma squarely on the wall.' 'I am going to create works that are not about the celebration of individual creative genius and uniqueness, but about the factory-like replication of familiar forms.' 'I am going to refuse, almost insistently, to have that kind of existentialist artist's struggling, heroic personality that was so much a part of the discourse of abstract expressionism, and I am going to fantasize that I could be merely a machine.' 'And I am going to refuse to believe that I could make an end run around kitsch, but, instead, I am going to confront the viewers squarely with it again and again and again, in nearly endless repetition, to almost the point of numbness.' I do think we can look at Warhol's, Soup Cans, as one rejoinder to Modernism's bad dream, that is to say, the image of the fashion shoot in front of the heroic abstract expressionist's paintings.

I also want to turn around and ask a different question of that image of, Vogue magazine, of the image of the female model in front of abstract expression. But I want to say this: certainly, another dilemma that has been much written about, in terms of the rhetoric of abstract expressionism, was the urgency with which it aligned abstract expressionist process with a mode of creativity that was insistently gendered as male.

And I think we can see that in the real gender tension between the Namuth photograph of Pollock as a kind of heroiccreator whose practice is almost a form of prolifically and generatively ejaculating on the canvas, the brush being a sort of extension of the phallus, and, on the other hand, the negation of those modernist heroics by the positioning of the body of the female model in front of the painting, which neutralizes it as a kind of wallpaper.

There were other female interrogators and female tests of abstract expressionist rhetoric, and I think Pollock's wife, the artist Lee Krasner, was perhaps one of the most illuminating, and yet sometimes overlooked.

The painting by Lee Krasner, Three in Two, from 1956, which I think is an address to abstract expressionism and the question of how to deconstruct figuration as a practice of abstraction, is an address to Pollock's testing of himself against the work of the artist that he revered as a kind of master Pablo Picasso.

And I think this is Krastner's address to Picasso, as well. And I think, in a strange way, also, it's a deconstruction of that fashion imagery, that test of the female proximity to abstraction as a kind of undoing of it's painterly agency.

And so, Three in Two, is a work that allows its traces of figuration, its traces of relationship to the body, to be seen and yet not precisely named. It allows the painting to exist in a process of simultaneous becoming and undoing at the same time.

A becoming of abstraction, and an undoing of figuration. It plots it's art historical linkage to Picasso's great unfinished work, the Demoiselles d'Avignon, and in it's fleshy tones and the kind of pointed triangulation of the composition, it seems, to me, to have a lot to do with the Demoiselles d'Avignon and, instead, it asks that confrontation between representation and illusion, figuration and abstraction, fermininity and masculinity, to be understood as completely contained and renegotiated again and again on the surface of the painting as a matter of process, and not as a matter of a circuitry of looks and desires.

And that circuitry of looks and desires is the circuitry of commodity fetishism, and of the desire for novelty. And that is not, most vehemently, what this painting is about.