The Gulf Beyond Plausibility
a discursion on the wider-than-ever gap between good and great abstraction
By Michael Cavendish
Look at the artwork at the mast of this essay. Rather than guessing the identity of the artist, spend a few moments considering the medium.
As an abstraction, is it good?
Most of the people I’ve shared it with think so. Good, interesting, very pleasant, an attractor and intensifier of their curiosity about the artist. I don’t know many people who would disagree that, as an image offered as an idea within contemporary abstraction it is at least plausible.
In 2014 there is a national art conversation underway about art whose, not chief, but most immediate credential is a similar radiating plausibility.
In recent weeks Walter Robinson and Jerry Saltz have written well-mannered but fervent opinion pieces against a trend in current abstract painting they critique as “zombie formalism.”
I might take up the defense of today’s formalist abstract painters by comparing their work against that of an innovating progenitor, Mark Rothko.
I might compare Rothko’s discovery of his color field abstractions with a major theory in science, say Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein’s quantum mechanics theories.
After a major breakthrough in science occurs, there are yet to be found many smaller—or less shockingly new—but still important discoveries that build on or iterate from the big one. In the same way, major breakthroughs in painting typically leave scores upon scores of opportunities for artists who believe in the new theory the progenitor discovered to ‘fill in the gaps.’ And that is important stuff. In science, the fill-the-gaps work took us from exhilarating theory to exhilarating space station visits.
While I don’t feel (and neither do Mssrs. Robinson or Saltz, I suspect) that the current two generations of mature American contemporary painters producing work that is both abstract and formal have anything to apologize for in terms of concept, I do agree with the incipient criticism these writers both seem to head for: it is all too easy these days to make abstract art that is plausible enough to be shown but not close enough to great for the enthusiasm of the experienced eye.
In a world of art where money courses along the upper canyon walls like dam-released fury and MFA programs are legion, the trenchant problem is the problem of plausibility.
A truth was revealed in Steve Martin’s delightful art-world novel An Object of Beauty. Martin writes the real-life, non pareil art critic Peter Schjeldahl into a ‘power dinner’ scene in Miami during—yep, the big fair—and, as the capper to a building point Martin is making in prose about how in today’s art there are no fewer than 10 or 20 or 100 valid ‘schools’ or ‘isms’ or constructs an artist can straight-facedly ply within, the fictional Schjeldahl says:
“All the cocksure movements of the last century have collapsed into a bewildering, trackless here and now.”
It is a dynamite synthesis of the experience of reading last month’s or this month’s or next month’s Artforum. And, I think Martin would agree, what fictional Schjeldahl’s insight means is that, before you even get to the individual work, in the world that any new artwork is released into today, it has never been easier for that work to be plausible.
It’s minimalist. It’s hard edge. It is post-post expression. It is neo-naive. And since none of the new art theories that have come along since the Pollock, Rothko, Reinhardt BANG! seem to have managed to replace—dead—what came before, then it is a legitimate thing for an artist to be doing to explore the unfinished folds of those decades-old styles. Just ask the Baroque; it is a plausible thing.
Martin’s authorial ‘Schjeldahl geography’ is a natural habitat for very serious, very correct, very earnest even, continuations of Rothkoist, or Kellyist, or Motherwellist, what have you,ideas about abstraction.
And with today’s technology, it has never been easier for a practicing artist to make a big example, or legion examples, of an image that is original in at least some mild way, and discernible as a ‘next step’ past the most recent extrapolation from the canon of the painter’s influences.
Look at Wade Guyton and his Epson-printed monochromey ‘paintings.’ You could look at the image and find loads of progenitors to his correct, and modestly original, visual ideas. Guyton—unless I am way off—is making a type of painting Robinson and Saltz are speaking out against as ‘dead.’ Guyton is surely as careful and as formal when he takes up where Pierre Soulages left off as Soulages was when he exhumed the pallette of Malevich and tried some new directions. But the fact that Guyton is grasping the style he’s chosen and the fact that he is using the most current technology available to him make his practice plausible, highly plausible.
Time was that making art was so difficult, and the epochal changes in theories of painting were so drastic and, at least as concerns the avant garde, so fatal and final, that the great gulf in the land of art and artists was the leap from a poor painting to a good painting. From 1290 to 1890, if you could paint a good painting, you had, at minimum, an income for life and a devoted following. Today there are so many good, plausible artworks out there, and through technology it has become so much easier to make an agreeable image in an agreeable but still serious pallette, that there are fewer and fewer poor or shabby paintings entering the contemporary scene.
The big gulf now is the leap from good, from somewhere along the gradient of the plausible, to a painting that aims at the sublime, which old fashioned souls like me would call ‘great.’
And oh, you ask, the image at the mast? It’s from the zoo. It’s the plumage of a roseate spoonbill, captured on an Apple 5S phone, enlarged, image cropped, and then run through Instagram.
Isn’t it alarming that something so tossed can look so plausible? Just imagine how it would seem if I printed it as large as I could on one of Wade Guyton’s Epsons.
n.1. All content copyright the author and DIADEM Art Papers.
n.2. DIADEM Art Papers is a project of Cavendish Projects.
n.3. Find Cavendish Projects on Twitter and Medium @cavprojects.
