I have been an abstract painter for around 25 years, and have taught painting and drawing to undergraduates for nearly as long.
From both perspectives, I've concluded that painting, in terms of its influence on modern culture, continues to be marginalized -- it's a wallflower at the postmodern art celebration.
Take a prominent example of painting's situation as we approach the 21st century: The lists of last year's finalists for the contemporary art world's two Oscar-like awards -- the Turner Prize, in Britain, and the Hugo Boss Prize, handed out from the Guggenheim Museum -- included not one painter. In actuality, among non-painters, painters and many artists alike, it is quietly acknowledged that the impact on the culture of painting is nil. Painting is seen as, at best, an esoteric activity for a few diehards. At worst, it's considered destructively elitist, a part of the"oppressor culture" of dead white European males. The public -- attached to computers, television, and movies -- hardly registers painting . The only question is if there is any audience at all for painting and, even if there is, how to preserve it.
This essay is a defense of painting, painting's original abstract art seemingly irrelevant and most difficult to understand kind that exists. By limiting my topic to abstract painting -- which focuses on structure and builds an entire flat reality from color, surface, shape, traces of the hand, mistakes, and changes -- I can best address the question of why anyone should continue to create paintings, when so many more visually powerful media are available.
In defending abstract painting, I need to toss overboard some extra baggage. I take the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, who thought that the other Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and'50s' claims amounted to poppycock. To give painting back its dignity, he put forth, both in his own paintings and in a collection of"dogmatic" statements, what abstract painting is not. Allow me, in the spirit of Ad Reinhardt, to put my list of what painting isn't forth:
Abstract painting isn't a vehicle for social or political change, even though its leaders believed it was. Today, even more than in Reinhardt's day, if a figurative painter paints a picture that asserts a specific social or political perspective, its effect -- in a society flooded with books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, movies, television, video, and computers -- is ridiculously tiny. The possibilities are fewer with abstract painting.
Second painting is not avant-garde. It isn't anymore, although it was in 1915. With regard to its ability to shock anybody -- the rallying cry of this now-defunct avant-garde -- painting now is feeble when compared with the power of the media mentioned above.
Third, abstract painting has never been, and likely never will be, widely popular. Yes, its leaders -- Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian held utopian hopes for its universal appeal, but they were proved poignantly wrong. Abstract painting turned out to be too subtle, too self-referential, too slow, too demanding of the viewer's patience, and too easy to poke fun at ever to attract a mass audience.
Abstract painting cannot offer you a lot of what we call Deep Hidden Meaning, in the way that philosophy or religion can. Put bluntly, abstract painting cannot provide a replacement for God -- of whom is the earmark of modernism, the reduction. Indeed, the ability of painting to move people at all is considerably weaker than that of other arts, such as theater music, novels, or poetry.
To keep at a spirit than that of Reinhardt -- here's what painting could do:
It offers what I'll call Small Hidden Meaning. To a viewer that can look at a still image (for some, a tricky prospect), and who is knowledgeable enough to put an abstract painting in the context of contemporary art as a whole, abstract painting provides a de facto philosophical viewpoint on life. A notion is, coming out of our attachment and out of our own narcissistic age, that abstraction is always about self-expression. In the broadest sense it is, of course, but it's also about ideas -- that the complex battle between order and chaos, for instance, or how the flux of the organic world influences the rigor of geometry.
Secondly, abstract painting can empower us to be quiet. Abstract painting makes for a room in the arts, allowing for a slow waltz.
Third art offers a counter to our society's glut of items. An abstract painting is part of the material world, a thing, of course. But it reminds people of a world. It suggests the old idea, now hardly remembered, that there may be a hidden, underlying order, which the transience of life's things can't affect.
Fourth, abstract painting is often, quite simply, beautiful -- although that assertion is subject to enormous dispute. Artists from the birth of modernism on have substituted the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of beauty -- truth in understanding, truth in shape, truth in materials. Many artists -- rightly -- are leery of the very idea of this beautiful, as it so readily petrifies into some rigid standard. Once locked into place,"attractiveness" obliterates the wide selection of subtle variations inside. Additionally, politics encircles beauty, making the subject difficult to talk directly: For many, notions of the beautiful are simply"cultural constructs," used by dominant cultures to suppress"the Other."
Most problematic of all, folded up and hidden within the notion of beauty are values. Beauty implies an inequality in how things look. If there is beauty, there's everything in between, and ugliness. That kind of ranking offends our democratic sense of justice, because we moderns have defined justice as that which most closely approximates equality.
A fifth virtue of abstract painting is that it is not a story, especially none from the most readily accessible facet of culture, which is all stories. We are bombarded with endless stories -- in television shows, advertisements, books, movies, and virtual-reality games. By way of telling stories, We're always teaching and preaching, persuading and dissuading. Picking up on that facet of our civilization, many non-abstract painters have inserted stories, or"narratives," into their paintings.
A final virtue of painting is its very uncamera-like nature. The camera is so powerful that lots of individuals have gotten to the point where they can see the world only photographically or cinematically, and have lost the ability to see it in other ways. Before long, people will see the world only digitally.
It defies translation to information, information, entertainment, rational image, or any type of narrative. It presents an ineffable equilibrium of sensation, experience, and knowledge. In the midst of a world where everything we see is morphing into something different, abstract painting is among the few things left that allow us to see the prospect of something's staying constant.
If what I'm saying about the virtues of abstract painting is true, then why isn't there more interest in this artwork? It will not do to start listing all the abstract painters around, because the point is that few people pay much attention to them, compared with either figurative artists generally, or new-media artists working with sound and video installations. Yes, abstract painters still exist, however they are an aging bunch, for the most part ignored. More worrisome is the seeming absence of a new generation of youthful and passionate abstract painters. How can it be that abstract painting, a major participant in most of 20th-century artwork, has arrived at this sorry point, where it is barely a contender?
The invention of photography enabled anyone, even someone who had no drawing or painting skills, to resolve an image of the real world onto a level surface quickly and correctly. The painter suddenly seemed slow and insignificant in his method of replicating the appearance of reality.
More important, photography threw into question the entire raison d'etre of painting. For if the camera has been recording the world through light rays bouncing off objects, then painting, by comparison, looked subjective, even fictive. If painters could not compete with the camera in mimicking reality, they would argue an alternative objective reality: All individual perceptions are accurate -- to the perceiver -- and therefore equally valid. Impressionist artists in the 1870s and 1880s, for all their stylistic differences, shared the conviction that it was the individual artist's eyesight that was objectively true.
Telling the truth about individual perception (Impressionism) quickly broadened to become telling the facts about individual feelings (Expressionism), reaffirming the fact that a significant shift had occurred. That fundamental change in outlook changed the look of art in the modern era. It was a change which is, faking, telling to aesthetic intent, which relied on telling the truth, as being sincere, known by artists.
But what -- in this kaleidoscope of individual"truths" -- would become of beauty? After Freud and Darwin, artists did not concern themselves with beauty anymore, except as an aside, or a byproduct, as they manipulated and played with form. It would protect beauty by separating it from damaging scientific analysis, and leave it alone as a"subjective" judgment. Philosophy yielded its primary position as interpreter of the world to science. Science broke loose, leaving everything behind, including philosophy that was poor, as subjective rubble. That rubble reconstituted itself as relativism's substance -- the notion that aesthetic and moral judgments are subject to continual flux. Relativism was around at least since Plato, of course, but the age marked the victory of the relativist position.
The relativist reply to any pretension to universal truth, beauty, or power is, in effect,"Oh, yeah?" Relativism's hatchet man is irony. To condense an awful lot of the background of 20th-century artwork into one sentence: The past 80 years have consisted essentially of a struggle between the ironists, who have reveled in the impossibility of universal truths, and the holdout universalists, who've tried to rebuild classical philosophical truths in a modern visual language. In other words, it's been Duchamp versus Mondrian. Although sacrifice than by knockout -- and Duchamp is the winner.
It took Duchamp a while to win -- until the 1960s. Until then, when Pop Art burst Abstract Expressionism's bubble, it had been coasting on its inflated standing; at that point, Pop Art sprouted in the smart, witty seed which Duchamp had implanted a half-century earlier. By simultaneously mocking and celebrating the contemporary culture of"stuff," Pop made the abstract painter's self-absorbed retreat look equally elitist and silly. Pop Art consisted of paintings on canvas to be certain. However, they were self-destructive. Pop Art's implied message was that it was the appropriated images that counted -- the Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe -- rather than the manner in which paint was placed on the canvas. Painting had been profoundly centered on the artist's signature, but painting worried the content or picture.
Since World War II, our civilization has steadily evolved into what we recognize as"mass culture" -- one in which millions of people's interests are simultaneously and speedily gratified through popular music, movies, sports, and actors. Fewer and fewer people care about the slow action. Beginning in early'70s and the late'60s , young musicians, attracted to installation, performance, and video art's art forms, abandoned painting. They'd grown up with TV and stone'n' roll; they were stylish, smart, and sharp; they knew and embraced the seductiveness and power of popular culture, and they wanted in on it.
We have arrived at a branch in the art world: fashionable and trendy on the 1 hand, reclusive and out-of-it on the other. How do remain at the face of that?
First, they must aggressively distinguish themselves from popular culture, rather than strive to be players. Abstract painters need to become, philosophically speaking, difficult and cantankerous, because to survive, they must reassert the distinction -- discredited by postmodernists -- between"high" art and"low" art. They have to reargue the case for art -- an art requiring a viewer that is subtle, sensitive, experienced, and even exceptional. Artists are creating . They need to admit that to find meaning in abstract painting takes some work, and even some aid.
And painters need to celebrate loudly, rather than apologize for, the artwork's nature. That moment is forever over, although the revolution itself -- the early-modern second that invented abstraction -- must have been electrifying. For contemporary abstract painters and their viewers, the experience is different from what it had been due to their revolutionary forebears. Art is a pleasure rather than a dizzying thrill. The conventions are established, just as in baseball, and to derive pleasure from abstraction requires accepting its fundamental rules rather than deconstructing them.
Yes art is elitist, and abstract artists should be up-front about that. But you don't need to stop loving The X-Files or the struggles to understand and like abstract art. Nor do you need to be a white male of European royal blood. Yes, it's a product of culture, but so are computers airplanes, penicillin, and this essay. There are patrons of abstract painting, and abstract painters, of all races and both genders.
Today, many, if not most artists hoping to get up a rung don't care one whit about painting or its tradition in Western history. The issue for them is more identity than aesthetics, although young artists refer to their own heritage in their artwork. The point is, most young musicians (whatever their race or sex) prefer to view history, especially art history, as a massive amount of information that at times is helpful for rummaging around in for ironic references, but which mostly is a pain in the neck and best left ignored.
If we pull back from the abyss of Nietzsche's picture of our condition, one premise: It's history, used correctly can be taken from him by us. But what is the use of history? People now emphasise it. Because they are convinced that knowledge is a smokescreen for power they want to know who is doing the telling and why.
However, it is only when history's non-ironic use is coupled with the particular desire to produce images that the young artist, in particular, can learn the visual language of images and the meaning of painting. Regardless of what, some people -- even some artists -- will never"get" abstract painting, for reasons that vary from their belief that all art is political for their poor visual aptitude. In the long run painting will attract an audience more likely than to watch Sarah McLachlan on MTV to read the Aeneid.
But small because its audience may be painting can say something. As a colleague of mine from Hofstra University, the late Michael Gordon (himself a painter), frequently argued, it sets up a powerful moral parallel to the manner in which we lead our lives. Abstract painters don't begin their paintings . They build on the foundation of abstraction. Paintings are caused by an accumulation of wrong turns errors, corrections, and settlements. Abstract painters paint the way we lead our lives -- rebelling against the givens and the choices, the purposeful actions and the injuries and building on. An abstract painting offers the perfect visual metaphor for life.
George Orwell said that every guy at 50 has. In space and time, there is no 50-year-old face. Since all evidence of it is concurrently retrievable and destroyable in a computer image, of course, there no longer exists the notion of a mistake. The last image does not have any wrinkles when we take away the ability to make a mistake in art, one which can't be wiped out. It carries a rigid veneer, such as the continuously stretched faces of Park Avenue matrons. In a glance, those ladies look nice. But a appearance yields that are longer blankness. It is through our sins our mistakes and, indeed, both in art and in life, that we get the capacity for advanced improvisation and redemption.
Painting was the sound in the culture, since it attracted attention. Now, the culture is the noise, and painting -- especially painting -- attracts little attention in the art world or in the culture at large. The saving virtue of abstract painting is that it provides us silent, not sound, today. There's indeed the flux of everything: a cultural catastrophe at the end of the century, and the passing of stillness. Abstract painting can not change our culture, but neither may installation art, computer art, nor new-media attempts at appropriation, however informed and smart they are. Those art forms that appropriate the media are doomed to seem forever pale in comparison to them, or worse, to be sucked down into their hole that is enormous. Abstract painting's ability is this: it's a world beautifully from our materialistic, morphing, ironic, age that is hip.
Laurie Fendrich is an associate professor of fine arts at Hofstra University.