The Brooklyn Rail

As early as 1981, when Benjamin Buchloh published “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression” in October, Neo-Expressionism and the concomitant resurgence of texture and pathos within painting was met with almost unanimous critical rejection. The smudge, the scrape, and the brush used to dredge the medium along the surface of the canvas were all hobbled from the outset. Partially from this initial backlash, it remains unsettled and relegated to textual purgatory and is often derided as an uncritical, or aggro-intuitive, form of painting: a phallic and patriarchal language built out of seminal marks and puerile abjection. In Max Werner and Dylan Brant’s group show Wave Pattern, featuring artists affiliated with Neo-Expressionism, as well as those a generation younger, a visual politics of expressionist painting comes into focus—as well as the critical argument to sustain it—and it lies within its deconstruction of the ascendent role of images within culture, the compression of information through mediation, and the role of bravura to cultivate and deny desire.

Buchloh was suspicious of how quotational and nostalgic the Neo-Expressionists’ maneuvers felt. Their “empty mechanics,” to him and others, were a form of ahistorical referentiality that could only end in diminishing returns, dissipating the agency of expression and pleasure within each mark as it ambled to further regression. Buchloh took it a step further, associating it with the worst of Germany’s nationalistic impulses earlier in the twentieth century while also aligning the choices made in the studio with the desires of the art market. What Buchloh seemed not to consider was the outsized role that images occupied during the 1980s in comparison to that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Vulgarity and the reactionary return to impasto was an enclave against speed. The latency of painting in the 1980s was in painting’s newfound ability to extend and deconstruct the lifespan of images. The off-balance bravura of Martin Kippenberger and David Salle were adopted to find what can be generated by painting through discrepancy. Eric Fischl’s Best Western (1983) produces the awkwardness of this discrepancy. Through the private horrors of gated communities and backyards and Fischl’s wariness of the same, he develops a similar suspicion in gesture to painting’s role as easy commodity. Nothing in the painting is handled as you’d expect it to be. The child’s skin becomes the rough and recalcitrant texture of Jörg Immendorff’s wheeling phantasmagoric Cafe Deutschland Hörerwunsch (1983) around the corner. The arm of the child is shaped into jagged disturbances, a meshing of mark that entangles and retains the eye within all of its errancy. Fischl seems to correlate that there is no terra firma—either in images, suburbia, or the cultural demise of painting—to luxury good.

It is this errancy of the brush that the Expressionists of the postmodern era took up, that also made their approach radically different to that of the Expressionists of the early 1900s. Their marks had nothing to do with the liberatory ability of individual expression or the flights of fantasy of dreams. Instead, the artists of Wave Pattern are a congregation of ironists, utilizing marks to jar us into presentness, using each stroke to unsettle the expectations of form, painting, and the painters themselves, to produce a resistance to images, a slowing down, a literal tactile belatedness that each artist gasses up only to demolish. Cady Noland’s Untitled (1990–92) throws this strategy of errancy onto the images of William Randolph Hearst to bury him, while also, crucially, drawing more attention to him. It is using the mark towards psychic repression, and it is no coincidence that her subject of choice bears perhaps the most responsibility for the combination and circulation of images and text resulting in the buttressing of empire in the twentieth century. Noland is not only fragmenting this empire, but also unraveling the joining of image with discursive context. In both cases, the attempt to cover up a blemish makes it glow.

If there is an urgency to painting beyond its visual satisfaction, it is in extending the image for interpretation and embodiment. There’s a wellspring, a reservoir, to these strategies of deconstruction. The artists of Wave Pattern were the first aesthetic resistance to the image, to advertising, to the commercials beamed into living rooms that standardized the desires of culture. They navigated the unsteady passage between the strategies of Pop art and pictures, fulfilling the schematic opposition between painting, drawing, and image that Richard Hamilton and Larry Rivers had been at work deconstructing, while re-introducing the fully loaded mark with all of its haptic pathos. This reintroduction carries with it the ironic tensions of reperforming painterly freedom. Archie Rand’s painting marks the epistemology of this moment well, seemingly asking “Is this still a painting?” with each applied mark. He painted Ornette and Diz (1982) along the narrow hallway of his studio with his bookshelf behind him, moving left to right in a cinematic pan to form a kind of Plato’s cave/Godard montage. The way they barely hold together is the point of it: the expressive zones of color function more as placeholders, as schematic, than the full-arm-swing painting of de Kooning. This destabilizes the authority of painting within culture as it continues through it. Rand’s work feels most like the acknowledgment that painting had finally become the residual culture, falling now behind photography in presence. Just as Yve-Alain Bois noted that Ab Ex painting was intentionally about its ugliness, the artists of Wave Pattern ironically engage with the expressive corpse of the medium. Charline von Heyl paints a smudgy and simple ghost. Julian Schnabel’s massive oil painting on paper feels quixotic and even whimsical more than macho. Each artist equates painting more to a recipe than the dinner, balancing the formlessness of placeholders and provisionality with the graphic execution of images.

What is it that we believe painting can still do? In our current state of painting that seems uncomfortably aligned with the artist’s desire for celebrity and self-mythologizing, Wave Pattern still feels resonant. Present here is a way of embodying images as they scroll past, a way of stopping the eye with unexpected maneuvers to then guide it back through vivid ironies and hyperstition. The authoritarian impulse within painting now has shifted into the indulgent and solipsistic self-portrait, the return to the nude, and the endless entanglement with beauty standards. In relief to their transparent excuses to justify the authoritative gaze of neoclassicism, Wave Pattern offers an important language of critical deconstruction and self-sabotage: a strategy that hopefully, once and for all, can separate it from the legacy of early twentieth-century Expressionism and make its own legacy distinct. Meanwhile, the Expressionism of the eighties and all of its bathos still feels relevant to grounding our relation to the slipstream of information onslaught and our attendant alienation.