A Note on Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism has been mentioned on a number of occasions throughout this blog. It is perhaps America’s stand against other media. The purity argued by Clement Greenberg is interesting, but at this moment I favour something anti-formalist.



I take pleasure in John Squire’s exuberant appropriation of Pollock or Ralph Rucci’s homage to Cy Twombly.

John Squire, Bye Bye Badman, 1988, oil on canvas

Cy Twombly Untitled 1970

"Twombly Swan" white silk gazar gown with embroidery and beading by Lesage
Chado Ralph Rucci, Ready-to-wear spring/summer 2002
Collection of Ralph Rucci

I am drawn to abstract expressionisms scale and grandness: scalessness? It is also its all overness that is also very effective in both painting and photography: a wholeness of gesture.

Abstract Cinema 3: Hans Richter

Hans Richter is still an important chronicler of the Dada movement. His first-hand account of Dada, Dada: Art and Anti Art still stands today as an important document despite it’s the silly and appalling treatment of Hannah Höch. It’s a book that still appears on many a reading list in art schools today.

Hans Richter’s Rythmus 21 is an important early abstract film. It sometimes, quite wrongly apparently, referred to as the first abstract film.

According to Esther Leslie, Richter’s “abstract films were conceived as a light-play of positive and negative” (Leslie, 2002p.37). Leslie compares Richter to Malevich in his aim to “reduce form to its simplest element”, which Richter claimed “to be the rectangle or square” (p.37). However, she points out that unlike Malevich and others, there was no “assumed metaphysical importance” to these elements (p.37).

Sources:

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde, London and New York: Verso.

Abstract Cinema 2: Viking Eggeling (1880-1925)

Eggeling was an early contributor to the Dada movement. In collaboration with Hans Richter he worked on abstract picture scrolls. The works are notable shift in (Zurich) Dada’s aesthetics away from Expressionism towards Constructivism. Although it can be argued that historically “the impetus for the production of the first abstract film seems to come from music and paintings rather than cinematography” stimulated by the “Blaue Reiter almanac’s call for a theory of painting” (Lynton, 2003, p. 119).

Eggeling was concerned with “‘rhythm in painting’ through all the possible permutations of certain linear and spatial relationships” (Kostelanetz, R., 2001, p. 189): “a general concern for line and surface” (Michaud, 1996, p.23). Above is the classic Diagonal Symphony from 1924, in which Eggeling produced more than a thousand drawings on his own.

Bibliography:

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes 2nd Edition, New York and London: Routledge.

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon.

Michaud, Philippe-Alain, (1961) “The Haunting of the Subject on Dada Cinema”, in (2005) Dada Cinema, Paris: Re: Voir Video.

Mark Rothko

Simon Schama on Rothko:

"One morning in the spring of 1970, I went into the Tate Gallery and took a wrong, right turn and there they were, lying in wait. No it wasn't love at first site. Rothko had insisted that the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low. It was like going into the cinema, expectation in the dimness. Something in there was throbbing steadily, pulsing like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple. I felt I was being pulled through those black lines to some mysterious place in the universe. Rothko said his paintings begin an unknown adventure into an unknown space. I wasn't sure where that was and whether I wanted to go. I only know I had no choice and that the destination might not exactly be a picnic, but I got it all wrong that morning in 1970. I thought a visit to the Seagram Paintings would be like a trip to the cemetery of abstraction - all dutiful reverence, a dead end. Everything Rothko did to these paintings - the column-like forms suggested rather than drawn and the loose stainings - were all meant to make the surface ambiguous, porous, (and) perhaps softly penetrable. A space that might be where we came from or where we will end up. They're not meant to keep us out, but to embrace us; from an artist whose highest compliment was to call you a human being."
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/rothko.shtml

Black on Maroon, 1959

Rothko reached his mature style around 1949 and the early nineteen fifties. Rothko’s work features “large hand-shaped rectangles, usually staked one above the other, together filling nearly the entire field of the canvas”, with each rectangle having “slightly different hues, while the background color (sic) differs only a little more from that of the rectangles” (Kostlanetz, R., 2001 p.530). Rothko’s work can be seen as an important precursor to monochromatic painting that we have seen since the nineteen sixties and seventies, which explore “surface tensions, color (sic) relationships and ways of negating suggestions of ‘depth’” (p.530).

No 14, 1960.

Rothko was part of the “theological” wing of the abstract expressionists. He was “obsessed with the moral possibility that his art could go beyond pleasure and carry the full burden of religious meanings- the patriarchal weight, in fact, of the Old Testament” (Hughes, R., 1991 p.322-323). His attempt to fulfil this ambition culminated in a series of paintings from 1964-7, commissioned by the de Menil family as “the objects of contemplation” in a non-denomination chapel attached to Rice University (p. 323).

Centre Tryptich for Rothko Chapel, 1966, Houston

The monochromatic paintings have “all the world…drained out of them, leaving only a void”: the Rothko Chapel therefore represents "the last silence of Romanticism” (Hughes, R., 1991 p. 323).



Bibliography:

Hughes, R., (1991) The Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.

Kostelanetz, R., (2001) Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, New York & London: Routledge.

Schama, S. & BBC, Simon Schama on Rothko: Available from World Wide Web: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/rothko.shtml [last accessed 24/03/10].

Braque

Le Guéridon

Le jour (1929)

L'Atelier III, 1949

The Classicism of Braque’s painting of the twenties and thirties and beyond are interesting for a number of reasons. The works “reactionary nature” is connected to Braque’s “collapse into calm” (Wheeler,D., p.64). The works representation of calm is partly due to the process of the “reassembly” of the still-life tradition that Cubism “helped to shatter” (Hughes, 1991 p. 146). His subject was the studio. For Braque “the studio is a sanctum, imagination’s cave, and its clutter of bottles, pots and oddities suggests the alchemists cell with its alembics and stuffed crocodile” (Hughes, 1991, pp. 146-49). The studio or at least the image of it is one of “a privileged place of transmutation, memory and contemplation… the key to the paintings of Braque’s old age, the Ateliers of 1949-54, with their calm transparency and baffling layers of images” (Hughes, 1991 p. 146).

A further discussion on Braque is available here.

Sources:
Hughes, R., (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art since Mid-Century, London: Thames and Hudson.

Current Developments: 9

Works: 2009-10

The use of real substances: glue papers and paints have purpose. Oddly, Braque seems to be someone of importance in relation to this use of substances in the case collage and paint.

The use of real substances: glue papers and paints have purpose. Oddly, Braque seems to be someone of importance in relation to this use of substances in the case collage and paint.

His still lives of the twenties and thirties offer some solutions to the problems of digital imaging. “Post Cubism”, Braque remarked, “There is in Nature, a tactile, I almost mean ‘manual’ space” (Hughes, R., 1991 p.146). Braque’s aims are interesting. His shift away from “Cubist uncertainty” towards “the structure of calm, overlapping planes and transparencies” (p.146) was a manifestation of his desire for the spectator’ attention to be evenly distributed across the painting. To further achieve this he “took to mixing sand with his paint to give it more body, a more resistant surface, like fresco” (p.146): Braque’s aim to slow down the eye.

The use of collage in the digital images is an attempt to develop a mysterious, silent and sometime grainy surface that “insists on gradual inspection” and “immense deliberation” to the act of seeing (p.146)

The digitization of the collage and the overlaying of images on its surface give substance and weight to the final imagery, while the unification of media is a deliberate attempt to slow down the act of looking.

The choppy surfaces recall Jasper John’s paintings and Rauschenberg’s early abstractions. However, the style and surface of the pictures are more in tune with Abstract Expressionism and Surrealist automatism that led to its development.

I have been looking at the cool abstractions of Ad Reinhardt, but it seems to be Motherwell whose collages and collage paintings that have affected me more at the moment. The dominance of black in the work does echo Motherwell and Reinhardt.

Some of the imagery recalls Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman's canvases, albeit in a very casual way.

Of course the work re-presented here is sometimes terribly clumsy and nowhere near in quality to the classicism of Braque. I remember after one presentation I gave Adam O’Mera made reference to Malevich, when discussing my work. To paraphrase a critic’s description of Franz Kline work, some of the “painting” shown here are like melted Malevich’s.

The result is the production of some useful textures and shapes that can sustain numerous applications of layers via Photoshop. Some give a subtle texture to the imagery that can be emphasized or disappear via the use of filters and the montage effects on the computer.

Bibliography:

Hughes, R., (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.

William Latham Interview

This is an interview from a documentary series called Secret Passions, from Channel 4 in the early nineties.

William Latham

Hopefully in the course of writing this blog I have shown the relevance of abstraction to my own practice. Michael Rush in his book New Media in art shows us that "abstraction is still very much alive in computer art" (2005, p. 209). William Latham's Evolution of Form is a "computer sculpture" that draws its inspiration from complex natural forms like seashells and the work of "Surrealist painters Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy in his quest for forms that can be manipulated, reshaped (or 'carved', in virtual sculpture within the computer (2005, p. 211).

Rush claims that "Latham was amongst the first to create genetically alive forms that resemble living organisms, though there mutations only occur inside the computer (2005, p. 210)

Clip from The Evolution of Form, by William Latham and Stephen Todd, from 1989; work done at IBM UK Research Labs. Details of sotware can be found in the book: Evolutionary Art and Computers, Academic Press, 1992.

Latham and Todd have now joined Frederic Fol Leymarie (since 2006) at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and created the Mutators Research Group: http://www.mrg-gold.com

Was presented at SIGGRAPH'94 and Imagina'93 (funded by the British Arts Council and Channel 4). The sound track is from Michel Redolfi (www.audionaute.com) famous for his underwater music.

Biogenesis shows the evolution of artificial life forms in a synthetic universe where 'survival of the fittest' is replaced by 'survival of the most aesthetic'. We see cellular evolution and the replication of mutations forming chain-like structures resembling coral. The artist is like a gardener, breeding, selecting, marrying and steering the course of evolution for creative ends. The film is a record of this evolutionary process. It can be viewed as a psychedelic experience or a more subtle parody of a man's relationship with the natural world through modern technology.

This line of work is being pursued by the MRG group at Goldsmiths College in London, led by Latham, Todd, Fol Leymarie et al. (www.mrg-gold.com).

Char Davies: Ephemere

Char Davies: Osmose

"The medium of 'immersive virtual space', or virtual reality- as it is generally known- has intriguing potential as an arena for constructing metaphors about our existential being-in-the-world and for exploring consciousness as it is experienced subjectively, as it is felt."

Charlotte Davis "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of the Embodied Being" (1997).

Charlotte Davies, artist, painter and film maker achieved international recognition for her artworks that employ the technologies of virtual reality. Her transition from traditional materials: paint and film began around 1985 when Davies began to explore 3-d computer imaging techniques. In 1987 she became a founding director of Softimage, a 3-D software company that created special effects for Hollywoods films , most notably for Spielberg's Jurassic Park.


Davies adopted the Softimaging programme for her own artistic purposes culminating the immersive multimedia work Osmose.



Osmose (1995):

Caspar David Friedrich

The Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was the chief exponent of German Romanticism. His imagination lay in Northern Europe and had very little to do with the dominant culture from the Mediterranean: the Neoclassicism of imperial France. The brooding melancholic landscapes he constructed populated by Gothic ruins, set themselves against Neoclassicism's order, rationalism and authority.

The Abbey in the Oakwood 1808–10

The Chasseur in the Forest, 1814

The Evening, 1820-21

Moonrise Over the Sea 1822

"One of the great themes of of nineteenth-century Romantic painting was the interplay between the world and the spirit: the search for images of those states of mind, embodied in nature, that exist beyond or below our conscious control" (Hughes, R 1980 p.269).

The Tree of Crows
1822

The Sea of Ice 1823–24

The Oak Tree in the Snow 1829

Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, 1830–35

Seashore by Moonlight, 1835–36


Friedrich would influence a diverse range of artists from the New England luminists to the Symbolists and Munch to Expressionism and Surrealism; notably the work of Max Ernst. Surrealist would view Friedrich as a precursor to their movement.


In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime" Robert Rosenbloom would draw comparisons between the work of the abstract expressionists and the artists Turner and Friedrich.