WHERE ARE WE GOING?
By Matthew Collings
And where did we come from? A bunch of paintings contain lessons for the future.
Experiment with materials
What will art’s new direction be, following the onset of global economic crisis, with the inevitable effect on art production and art culture? What clues are there in the remnants of the old direction? I found positive messages in some painting shows in London. Two of them were from the beginning of the era we’re just leaving, the time of money, luxury, and false confidence: Painting from the 1980s at Tate Modern and Sean Scully: Paintings of the 1980s at Timothy Taylor. I expected them to be bombastic and they were, but they had some other levels too.
Julian Schnabel Humanity Asleep 1982
In the first one, a painting each by a handful of neo-expressionist stars was featured. A work by Julian Schnabel (acquired by the Tate in the early ’80s, but not shown much since) was partly an amazingly impressive marriage of materials (shards of china and sputtering, gloopy oil paint), and partly incomprehensible. This painting (Humanity Asleep 1982) was one of his works done with smashed plates. It was large, mostly blackish, with a painted image or set of images in the middle: a bloke with a sword standing on a raft; and an out-of-scale portrait of Francesco Clemente — the head hovering on the raft, maybe, or just hovering and the raft being somehow in the same space.
The indeterminate illusionistic space, together with a total lack of visual association between it and the overall formal elements of this work (the jagged surface and stuttering edge contours, the spatters and drips of the paint), amounted to a difficult experience, but not something you could easily dismiss. A sort of central impenatrability meant that you had to stand there, impressed but baffled, even though — if you thought about it, and were of a certain age — there was a rationale. The generation born in the ’50s grew up in an artworld where abstraction reigned; for them the use of figures in the late ’70s was iconoclastic.
The presence of representational imagery in paintings that showed sophisticated awareness of recent abstract traditions, but ambiguity about the rules, communicated a lively aggressiveness. This central visual oddness — whose resolution depends on insider knowledge of certain introverted ideas about the history of style — hasn’t stood the test of time. But Schnabel’s fresh approach to materials definitely has.
Risk ugliness
A painting by Sandro Chia (Three Boys on a Raft, 1981) in this show was exciting too: an expanse of undulating linear abstract shapes, and a cluster of vaguely comic — not comic like clowns, but comic-odd, like Surrealism — male figures. Two of them pointed into an unknown distance. One was sleeping.
Sandro Chia Three Boys on a Raft 1981
The decorative colour field was something like the colour of carpets. There was no real narrative but the figures weren’t meaningless; they were vaguely antique, like cherubs, or vaguely heroic, like Mussolini-era mosaics, and they stood for an ambitious, deliberate clash of differences: like Surrealism meeting Raoul Dufy. The smaller sleeping figure was stoked-up with layers of colour giving it a tawny redness that jumped out of the register of the rest of the painting slightly horribly: the jarring effect seemed part of the experiment. In this work Chia risked ugliness and the unknown, breathing unexpected new life into visual traditions that were simply too taken for granted for anyone to ever bother thinking about them in a fresh way.
Be earnest
I walked into the Scully show: chunky, boxy, rectangular structures, large scale, with muted colour and a format of broad bands echoing the outer edges of the painting. The feeling: loose and congested at the same time. The marks making the bands all go in the same direction, echoing the sides of the bands. It looks like fast, fresh, simple, enjoyable abstract art. The grain of the canvas, the texture of the paint, heavy substance and hardly any substance -- he keeps them all in play.
There were different approaches to the outer edges of the paintings, which were of course invisible from the front but, since the stretchers were so deep, highly noticeable at any other angle: they were painted in different ways or left unpainted. One of the edges of Heat (1984) had a free, careering broad swipe of gray about half covering the edge-area, with the rest just white-primed canvas, while the other edge on the same painting had nothing but the white primer: Did the main painting surface just skid over on one side and not the other? Yes, but he made the decision to leave it. He draws attention to the edges, making you think about them. In an art of limited means everything is a decision, even the apparent arbitrariness of two edges on the same painting having a different treatment.
Sean Scully Swan Island 1982
The look overall was a mixture of Robert Motherwell, Henri Matisse, and Mark Rothko: the depicted patterned fabrics of Matisse,the large-scale simplified geometric divisions of Motherwell, and Rothko’s smouldering color. Scully deserves respect for his earnest exploration of form, his treatment of color as light and his attempt to create an inner glow. All this could come back strongly in the future after the soul-searching that both artists and art audiences are currently going in for.
Henri Matisse The Moroccans
Robert Motherwell Elegy to the Spanish Republic
Mark Rothko Black on Maroon
He comes up with a metaphor for depth based on simplicity, but you could sometimes ask for the results to be a bit more richly complex. Swan Island (1982), the smallest painting, is also the most intricate. It offers a convincing analogy for the heightened emotion we get from nature. He attempts the same all the time but he sometimes shows you design decisions that are bound to work, rather than experiments. It’s not that Matisse, Motherwell, and Rothko can never be thought of as designers, or that painterly decisions are different from design decisions, or "above" them, but that when Scully is disappointing it’s because the design decision isn’t surprising enough.
Find the place for everything
The Persian-born artist Y. Z. Kami is basically a painter, but he brings different things together. His show at Parasol Unit in London is an installation of different things created over the past ten years. The dominating element is monumental painted portraits based on photos he took himself. There are also very large assemblages made up of photos and watercolors, with an imagery of architecture and portraiture.
Y.Z.Kami installation at Parasol Unit
Y. Z. Kami Untitled (The Gardener) 2005
Y.Z. Kami Endless Prayers 2007
Finally there are some elegant minimal abstracts: spiral designs made of little rectangular pieces of paper with words written on them. (It turns out they’re excised from books.) The whole thing is called Endless Prayers.
'Fayum' style portrait of a woman 170 AD
The press release tells us the big paintings have certain qualities that cause them to 'resemble' Roman-Egyptian funerary images from late antiquity. They don’t look anything like them, but in a visually corrupt age, which is at the same time concerned with everyone having an equal say, you could see how someone might want to say something looks like something, and then who would someone else be to hurt their feelings by saying it doesn’t? Small and lively, those late-antique portraits known as 'Fayum' portraits, after the geographical region where most of them have been found, have fresh loose paintwork. The faces are realistic but also full of expressive distortion, the eyes big, the other features stretched. (It isn’t known if they’re really portraits from life or variations on a set of standard portrait 'types.') They have a solemn purpose (they were attached to mummified bodies), but they express a range of emotions. Kami’s paintings by contrast are narrower. They express a certain recognizable mood of mystical inwardness.
Kami’s subjects often look downward. The press release says they are 'absorbed in their own world.' This is an observation about subject matter but the success of the paintings is to do with a fresh-seeming unity of subject and realization. Kami has studied Sufism, and one of his collages has words in it relating to a particular Sufi poet.
Kami’s collage aesthetic is very highly developed, so every structure sympathetically relates to every other one and seems to comment on it and amplify it. A "mosaic" feeling in his brushwork also applies to his photo-watercolor works in which an urban apartment block (which could be anywhere in the world) appears to be pictured in fragments, which are interspersed with photographic images of people of many different races who might live in the building. And the cosmic circular abstracts, with written words, suggest prayers but also the abstract structures in Islamic art in mosques, which are always about a unity of many different parts, pattern and order endlessly affirmed.
Born in Tehran and now living in New York, Kami is actually of the same generation as Schnabel. But where Schnabel and the other ’80s expressionists are romantic-heroic, Kami is quietist. Where they are painter-geniuses looking at painterly issues, his work is fashionably wide-ranging; it has globalism and realism, photography and abstraction, urbanism and mysticism: it seems to be about the place of everything. I was moved by the way the ’80s works refused to stay in their negative stereotypes, but Kami doesn't have any negativity to begin with. The concerns of his work are so of the moment it’s easy to miss their underlying principle. I think it’s basically an inspired sense of design. The lesson he may offer to art once we enter the new postcrash age is that artists should have the ability to develop design skills that are sophisticated enough to back up fashionable ideas.
The work of the ’80s is far from merely offering an opportunity to laugh at out-of-date attitudes, and suggests real lessons for a refreshed idea of painting: the willingness to be ugly not just for shock value but to push an experiment (Chia and Schnabel); and the ability to be earnest, not in the sense of solemn, but in relation to a practical idea of painting — to understand that experiments should be seen through over a very long period (Scully).'
