Marriage of Silver and Gold, Richard Anuszkiewicz, painted wood construction, 1992, 110" x 116"

There's an immense smorgasbord of contemporary abstract art on view now at Yellow Bird Gallery in Newburgh. A group show of work by some 65 members of American Abstract Artists (and a few guests), it's an at times overwhelming experience, crowding the walls of Yellow Bird's unique, multilevel space.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story actually starts almost 70 years ago, when American Abstract Artists (AAA) was first formed in 1936. At the time, abstraction was seen primarily as something of an elite, avant-garde European practice, one that opposed in many ways the down-to-earth pragmatism—and fundamentally representational—nature of American art. Thomas Hart Benton's robust paintings and murals celebrated a vigorous, populist myth of America that easily charmed and delighted its audience, one that could hardly have been expected to respond quite so favorably to the introspective philosophical and intellectual rigors demanded by nonobjective painting and sculpture. (In the 1920s, for example, there was an infamous court proceeding in which the Museum of Modern Art appealed the decision of a customs official that Constantin Brancusi's sleek, abstract sculpture Bird in Space was not a work of art, and that the museum should pay a tariff on the importation of raw materials—the brass—that makes up the work. MoMA won, and abstract art had its first legal foothold in the US.)

Making abstract art was, and remains, something of an uphill battle. It's work that challenges many commonly held perceptions about art, negating the representational and narrative "hooks" that normally provide a point of entry into the work, instead presenting a reductive, purely visual experience, one that is often hard to figure out. (Who would guess that Mondrian's colorful Neo-Plasticist geometry was predicated on his fervent belief in Theosophy, and its emphasis on the use of abstract form to elevate the spirit?)

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this group show, given the AAA's history, is seeing the way in which the context and raison d'etre for abstraction has shifted—quite radically—over the past 70 years. Formed as a kernel of resistance to the dominant representational paradigm, by the late '40s it looked as though they were winning the argument, as Abstract Expressionism emerged as the first internationally successful, American-born art movement.

But of course the pendulum began to swing back after a bit, as Pop Art in the '60s brought back representation through the familiar imagery of newspapers, magazines, and television. Minimalism emerged as a sort of entropic response to abstraction (and was not much loved by the now "establishment" taste of critics like Clement Greenberg), but by the '70s all bets were off, as the age of postmodernism caught hold.

As I write this now, abstraction has morphed from being an oppositional aesthetic, to being simply one possibility among many in the infinite toolbox of visual effect. Bad boy Damien Hirst blithely shifts gears from pickling sharks to painting polka dots to having studio assistants execute (bad) photo-realist paintings in his name, and somehow it's all the same to the collectors who vie to purchase the work.
But the artists in AAA today seem to be a different sort—less flash-in-the-pan, less obsessed with fitting in with the current artworld fads, and more interested in pursuing their own thoughtful paths through art, in an abstract mode. Don Voisine, the president of the group, sees its role as a steady, safe place for artists to come together to share a common affinity. "Whatever goes in and out of fashion, it's good to know there's always a community of people working along the same lines," he told me at the Yellow Bird opening.

Yet even with this common starting point, the 65 artists represented in this sprawling exhibition are difficult to summarize. While primarily an exhibition of painting, Voisine says he's interested in having the group promote abstraction beyond just two-dimensional work. The range of approaches here range from Voisine's own untitled immaculately rendered, geometric painting to Raquel Rabinovich's River Library No. 21, a collage of Indian paper encrusted with sediment from the Ganges River, to Manfred Mohr's untitled geometric computer animation, to Tom Doyle's large sculpture Innishkeen, a dominating presence in sassafras and oak.

While much of the work depends largely upon disinterested, purely visual/aesthetic criteria for its comprehension, there are a few works that push the envelope toward referential (if not representational) meaning. Compare Julian Jackson's Bill's July, a field of fuzzy, muted squares and rectangles in a number of shades of light yellow and yellow-orange, which plays Hans Hofmann's old game of push-pull with a beautiful sense of shimmering summer light and luminosity; to Roger Jorgenson's Democracy, which presents the viewer with a large field of overlapping, angular white forms—with alternating red or blue triangles at their inner corners that makes the work an overtly political statement on the last election.

In organizing this exhibition, AAA has attempted to create something more cohesive than has traditionally been the case in their democratically-run group shows, where each member could submit one work across the board. This time, they've invited an outside curator, Jill Connor, to weave the work together into a more meaningful whole. While only 65 of the organization's 85 members are represented, the sheer numbers and the wildly disparate approaches to abstraction in use throughout the show seem to constantly test the logic of Connor's tentative curatorial groupings, resulting in something of an overall grab-bag effect—although granted, one that offers some nice moments of flow between the works in certain passages of the exhibition.

Perhaps the problem lies not in the work, but in the radically altered field(s) of meaning within which abstraction exists today. It seems unfair to even put on the same playing field works like Cecily Kahn's small but beautiful Intercept, which gracefully combines intentional geometry with accidental biomorphic effect, an exercise in pure painterly expressiveness, with James Seawright's Orion, a cubic sculpture in metal and plastic that includes two constantly swiveling concave mirrors/radar dishes, and that speaks to a much more futuristic sensibility. If modernism can spawn post-modernism, is it possible that abstraction is birthing "postabstraction" as well?

In conjunction with the exhibition, Yellow Bird will be hosting two panels this month: one featuring a group of artists in the show (on October 1), the other a roundtable discussion by a group of critics (on October 30). It should be interesting to hear these two panels weigh in on the challenging issues facing the very status of abstraction today.