|
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Remember abstract painting? It used to be the living end of modernity in art. Now it's just one variety of produce in the supermarket of visual culture. Two shows stir thoughts on the subject: new work by the paladin of white paintings, Robert Ryman, at PaceWildenstein, and "Comic Abstraction," representing thirteen contemporary artists inspired by comics, cartoons, and other mediums of demotic fun, at the Museum of Modern Art. Ryman, seventy-six years old, is a Tennessean who came to New York in 1952 to be a jazz musician, and encountered the art world while working, for seven years, as a guard at MOMA. He matured as an artist in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, between the decline of Abstract Expressionism and the dawn of minimalism. He conjoined and, ever since, has stayed true to features of both movements: expressively pure painterliness and blunt matter-of-factness. His works are as much mute essays in aesthetic philosophy as objects of pleasure. They delight, if you let them, by clarifying the material givens of any painting: shape, scale, paint texture, underlying surface, and attachment to a wall.
Most of the works in "Comic Abstraction," by younger artists, derive inspiration--albeit remote and attenuated, and, at this late date, perhaps unconscious--from the same era that formed Ryman, when abstraction was still a reigning imperative and self-consciousness in and about aesthetic experience became an iron law. But they yoke those ideals to pursuits of frisky entertainment or earnest politics. Has abstraction, since the sixties, fallen from grace, or been liberated from...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
