Investigation of the Relevance of Abstraction
Whenever the subject of relevance comes up, I mix a double. First I sip Donald Judd's Specific Objects (1965) - 'The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall' - then I follow it with the chaser of Thomas Lawson's suave sermon Last Exit Painting (1983) This heady art historical cocktail still tastes of 'relevance', providing a useful backdrop for this exhibition.
Currently, abstraction no longer occupies the position that it did when Judd and Lawson were writing. Nevertheless, this exhibition presents a glowing case for its pertinence at the century's end. In this respect, its advocates are as brawny as Judd and Lawson needed to be back then. What is missing is a 'position paper' analysing abstraction's present relevance, an essay that Liam Gillick or Matthew Ritchie should write before some lesser talent gets the idea.
What abstraction has come to mean in the hands of the artists in this exhibition is beyond the traditional incarnations which the likes of Judd and Lawson skillfully dispensed. It is as if they have altered abstraction at its genetic level in order to send it on a marauding expedition, allowing it to carry fresh arguments about style.
Dan Peterman's Benches (1997) are not in the least abstract. They are rather, without being boringly obvious, benches. They resonate by re-making the grand old abstract style into something elastic, abstracted in a literal sense out of recycled plastic. Along the way, Peterman recalibrates the cherished link between transformation and abstraction, giving back to the style a social and political consciousness bleached out in the years following the appearance of Greenberg's Avant Garde and Kitsch (1936). Similarly, Matthew Ritchie's painting Phase Shift (1999) - a combusting universe that raves and swirls before slipping off the wall and convulsing on the floor - is hardly abstract, however much it may appear to be. Ritchie's opus is an accumulating visual index that renders transparent a cosmology in which titanic battles are won and lost as creation spins away. To understand his work as merely abstract is like looking deep into the Rosetta stone without attempting to decipher its hieroglyphic and demonic texts. Ritchie's art is not an enigma, nor is it useful to downgrade it as the self-centred expression of a stable subjectivity; it is the ignition key to amazing legends.
David Moreno makes photographs of natural splendour, but the splendour is never explicit. His photographs, like Ritchie's paintings, only seem abstract. Moreno's concentric circles are 360-degree panoramas stretching from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens to New York Harbour - familiar subjects in the history of the picturesque. The views, however, are unrecognisable because Moreno uses a spinning camera, allowing elapsing time to grind reality down into fuzzy target patterns. Their abstract appearance is due to a simple camera technique that reaches a vision of the world beyond human perception, reminiscent of Jack Goldstein's remarkable paintings of long exposures tracking heavenly bodies arching across a pitch-black night sky.
The coda to this exhibition about relevance is Reversal Platform (1998), Liam Gillick's colourful perspex canopy, an idealised, resplendent, out-of-body experience for abstraction; a retraction of the historically grounded style; a prefab mock-up. On the one hand it is the Big Picture - it is to abstraction what Litchenstein's Big Paintings (1968) were to gestural abstraction: deeply felt emotion reproduced at will. On the other, it is the pretender to the quintessential museum piece. Gillick's use of abstraction is like his use of any other style in his repertoire: ready-made tools, meta-languages at his service, styles that he makes relevant, rather than the other way round. Reversal Platform lends an unflinching perspective on how relevance has bypassed abstraction's earlier canon, but how relevant its new incarnations can be.
