Manifesto by Jonathon Keats
In the twentieth century, painting was saved from extinction by abstraction. The suprematism of Kasimir Malevich, the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and the minimalism of Robert Ryman all prevented an ancient tradition, challenged by the depictive power of photography, from surrendering itself to mere decoration. How is it, then, that nothing today looks as moribund as abstract art?
You see it in hotel lobbies and airports and the boardrooms of global corporations. You find it in restaurants and banks. Almost too innocuous to be noticed, it's the optical equivalent of muzak. The intent may be to add visual interest to functional spaces -- to provide ambiance by the yard -- but the effect is to make all walls look alike.
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Nevertheless, the waning vitality of abstraction is by no means inevitable. On the contrary, several young artists are producing work as vigorous as the contemporary figuration of John Currin or Elizabeth Peyton. The genre in which they're working -- to give it a name -- is abstract literalism. And their most significant forebear, improbably enough, is Andy Warhol.
Amongst Warhol's most underappreciated bodies of work are his camouflage paintings of 1986. For this series, he covered massive canvases with camouflage patterns, in both the conventional palette of browns and greens, and the pop palette of purples and pinks. The work is both abstract and not abstract: It's not abstract because it's a painting of camouflage. It's abstract because camouflage is itself abstract. (As with most of Warhol's work, the idea goes deeper than that. In effect, camouflage is a depiction of nature, abstracted to disappear. It's a sort of landscape painting, which Warhol reclaims for the museum by making it, absurdly, impossible to miss.) At the same time, the camouflage paintings are remarkable for what they accomplish visually. Because they declare themselves unequivocally to be something everybody has seen before, the question of what they resemble is foreclosed upfront, leaving the viewer with nothing to do but to peer at the formal arrangement of color patches, their varied shapes. To understand why these paintings work as abstraction, one need merely recall Richard Tuttle. A painting of camouflage is camouflage. Warhol has painted something that looks, perfectly, like itself.
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And then there's Sarah Coleman, a San Francisco artist who supported herself for several years in the faux finish business, and has emerged with a dazzling group of large-scale paintings of wood grain. Coleman's insight was to recognize abstraction as a readymade phenomenon, and to construe her job as one of discovering and presenting natural beauty. In a sense, her approach reaches back to the Equivalents series that Alfred Stieglitz undertook in the '20s, in which he photographed clouds as a means of achieving abstraction with the camera. Indeed, abstraction in photography, from Stieglitz to Weston to Sugimoto, is an important corollary to abstract literalism, and has in common with it the effect of sending viewers back out into the world, newly sensitized to the compositional potential of everything around them. Yet the uncanny power of paintings such as Coleman's comes out of their inexactitude. Coleman usually paints on wood, covering up the perfect grain with her own imperfect representation (just as Higgins covers up canvas with depiction of fabric). Something is gained, another lost. These paintings are an impertinence. An intrusion. Their failure to be exactly what they say is what gives the artifice of abstract literalism real traction.
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and writer based in San Francisco.