The new criterion on art.(Notes & Comments: December 2006)(Editorial)

Since 2001, we have included in our December issue a special section on the visual arts. We continue the tradition in this issue with a wide-ranging series of essays and reviews by Eric Gibson, Marco Grassi, Michael J. Lewis, James Panero, Karen Wilkin, and others. As often happens, certain themes suddenly coalesce and unplanned continuities emerge. One such theme in this issue concerns that much abused, much misunderstood term "abstraction." For its partisans, "abstraction" was a rallying cry, a weapon even; for its detractors it was another name for aesthetic futility. Somewhere along the line, the simple truth of the matter got lost. David Yezzi's conversation with Graham Nickson, the painter and, since 1989, dean of the New York Studio School gives us a glimpse into the engine room of some of the most vital contemporary artistic practice and helps clarify the issue:

DY: It's been suggested that your paintings "mediate between representation and abstraction." Is this an important dynamic in your work?

GN: I've always believed that all great painting is essentially abstract, and that the imagery--the figuration--is actually the bonus that makes it more intriguing. The battle between abstraction and figuration for me isn't the issue. The issue is basically whether the image is as powerful as the abstraction. Many of the works I've tried to do combine these two elements so that they synthesize into a powerful image that also has a strong [element of] abstraction.

The real battle, as Karen Wilkin notes in her essay "Abstraction's moment," is not between figurative and non-figurative art but between a view of art that places "aesthetic delectation" at the center of our concern with art and a view that subordinates such pleasures to what Marcel Duchamp championed in his efforts to direct our attention to "regions more verbal." The triumph of that Duchampian model in many precincts of the art world has been tantamount to the sabotage of the aesthetic. "Unfortunately," Wilkin notes,

 
   the minds of many spectators, who include 
   makers of art as well as art historians, critics, 
   and curators, have been carried so far into 
   regions so purely literary (in deference to 
   Duchamp) that they seem to have forgotten 
   that the eye is part of the brain. Like 
   Duchamp, they are made uneasy by "aesthetic 
   delectation" assuming that art that wordlessly 
   addresses the eye, that looks like nothing but 
   itself, is mindless--which is to say, they are 
   profoundly mistrustful of abstraction. 

Which is to say, they are profoundly ...