Intoxicating Abstraction

by Beth E. Wilson, April 28, 2007

Abstraction just ain’t what it used to be. Back in the (Bauhaus) day, the pursuit of pure form and color seemed to intellectually trump the dogged recording of reality engaged by representational artists—it symbolized the ascension of the human spirit to a previously unknown level of universal transcendence.

Or so they would have liked you to believe. As laudable as that high-flown aspiration may have been, history has not been entirely kind to either its philosophical basis or to the actual products of such thought. My favorite case in point is the work of Russian avant-gardist Kasimir Malevich, whose sharp-edged Suprematist abstractions once epitomized the early 20th century’s desire to manufacture a magnificently rational new order out of whole cloth. Almost 100 years later, the paintings seem betrayed by the very materials they’re made of—what once represented the purest intellectual spirit now suffers cracking layers of paint and formerly pristine white backgrounds slowly yellow, as the strident energy that originally charged the paintings now gives way to the entropy of time.

Of course, in the intervening years the simple joys of abstraction have only gotten more complicated themselves. The pure universality of form postulated by artists like Mondrian and Malevich was rather rudely unseated by the expressive Sturm und Drang of Abstract Expressionism, which in turn gave way to the mute, geometric forms of Minimalism.

Things have been very different since the whole postmodern upheaval, however. Figuration made its return with a vengeance in the ’70s and ’80s, and in the anything-goes carnival of contemporary art, both abstraction and representational work have equal claims to validity. It’s not uncommon to see attempts to reconcile the two, or at least to make work that walks a tense line between them.
A show opening this month at the Livingroom in Kingston presents two painters who seem to be grappling with the fallout of these disruptions in the field of abstraction. The provocative title of the exhibition, “Dopamine,” refers to a key chemical in the brain related to the experience of pleasure. In this case, it’s a demand that art provide the equivalent of that chemical payoff, in the form of beauty—a notion that’s gotten some play in recent years, mostly as a counter to too much heavy-handed conceptualism in the art world.