Making art appear more meaningful and relevant by relating it to some other field of study is a strategy that’s become all too common among artists and curators of the postmodern era. But what [curator] Capasso’s exciting title and rhetoric can’t disguise is that the kind of neatly crafted, mildly idiosyncratic, optically catchy, all-over pattern painting his exhibition mostly presents is not the rebirth of abstract art he claims it to be, but a familiar, commercially and academically well-established style…
So what if anything does ‘‘Big Bang!’’ tell us about abstraction today? One thing it shows is how commonplace has become the impulse to read abstraction representationally. Unlike Frank Stella, who said of his obdurately nonrepresentational paintings, ‘‘What you see is what you see,’’ contemporary abstractionists often try to fold into their works all kinds of non-visual meanings, references, and associations — sociological, psychological, philosophical, religious, scientific, and otherwise. Too often, as in ‘‘Big Bang!,’’ this becomes a way to encourage interest in painting that is formally not all that thrilling.
Ken Johnson reviewing the abstraction show, “Big Bang!” at the DeCordova Museum
The Boston Globe
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February 5, 2007 at 1:58 am
Elatia Harris
It’s all a question of whether you care to know what the artist was thinking, isn’t it? A title can be a big clue, or a profound miscue. Magritte was so detached from the meaning of his paintings once he’d finished them, so content that they remain cryptic, that he refused to give them titles. Instead, he had friends — a coterie of Belgian Surrealist poets — visit his studio and think up the titles by which his works are known. Richard Diebenkorn had to be convinced by friends that his “Ocean Park” series of abstractions needed titles, so without overthinking it he named the series for a local landmark.
Who would be better served if Magritte’s paintings had remained untitled and could be denoted only by number, if the “Ocean Park” series had been capriciously named for an object that did not suggest space, calm, water and sky? How different would these works look to us? Would they be perceived as less good with no handle, or as even better because the artist was allowed to keep his secrets? The biggest difference might have occurred within the realm of art marketing, since Untitled is a hard, hard sell. How art is marketed ultimately becomes peripheral to the painting itself, however. Although how a painter’s work is marketed has much to do with whether it enters art history in the first place.
Perhaps a mythology around a painting, a mythology that fills a viewer in about the artist’s purpose and provides information about the deep background of the painting — as the artist understands it — is just a more enveloping kind of title. A highly inexact determinant, that is, of the painting’s meaning, and of its fate. “The Raft of the Medusa” would not be very meaningful to anyone now if it required a viewer to possess knowledge of a tragedy at sea more than a century and a half old. Its power lies instead in its being an unsurpassed image of hopeless abandonment, of dread and despair beyond telling, though not beyond showing. It is Gericault who has given that distant shipwreck emblematic meaning, both timeless and particular — not the other way around.
Must representation and meaning in painting must be considered together, when representational painting can be utterly meaningless despite the artist’s intentions, and abstraction filled with meaning despite the artist’s denial or even lack of them? When you paint, you let the genie out of the bottle, and your work may be richest of all in unintended meaning. It’s something to shoot for, anyway.
February 5, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Deborah Barlow
Perhaps the question can be asked, who is driving this proclivity to “meaningize” abstraction? Curatorial creative license or artists being opportunistic? Or maybe a simple case of mutual collusion. What struck a chord with me was Johnson’s dismissal of the overused proclivity to view abstraction through a representational lens. That tendency does in fact short circuit the bigger experience possible with non representational art, an experence that needs an abundance of ambient mystery and magic.
February 6, 2007 at 1:48 am
Elatia Harris
I am reminded of a story about Stravinsky, being interviewed after he ceased writing music that had any kind of story element. He was asked about “mood” in his present music, for the interviewer could discern none. He agreed there wasn’t any. What, then, the interviewer wanted to know, is mood in music for? “For girls,” Stravinsky answered. I think he meant, for attracting girls, rather than that listening or composing for mood was a girlish preoccupation. The interviewer then asked, What does your music express? “It expresses nothing,” Stravinsky replied. “It expresses itself.”