The Brooklyn Rail

Mary Lum's exhibition, Temporary Arrangements, features fifteen acrylic-on-paper and mixed-media collages. Like those gathered for her 2022 Yancey Richardson exhibition, When the Sky is a Shape, here Lum’s works neatly employ an amalgamation of art historic devices. These include décollage, asemic writing, and post-painterly abstraction, each of which betray a degree of modernist influence. Flat orthogonal eaves cull Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poster designs while monocolor planar oblongs are reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly’s hard edge paintings, and these features are often joined by a barrage of defamiliarized lexical elements that recall Kurt Schwitters’s typographical experiments. Lum noted to me in conversation that she is a card-carrying modernist, but the pluralism of devices on view does not simply recollect the winding arc of modernism’s various movements, it indicates this paradigm’s collapse in the wake of Postmodernist pluralism. For where each modernist narrative—ranging from Impressionism to Dadaism to Abstract Expressionism—was subtended by a discrete art theory and exclusionary style, Lum's works indicate no single unifying orientation.

Such an approach is manifestly at odds with the Whiggish view of modernism espoused by Greenberg and his successors. Rather than indulging the classic narratives of an ever more reductive self-reflexivity, medium-specific purity of means, the flatness of the picture plane, and all their attendant modernist clichés, Lum’s art practice decries the idea that a single painterly language could reign supreme. She denounces any and all normative models of modernism. Her paintings reconcile the hanging, flat geometry of Post-Painterly Abstraction with the snaking letters of asemic writing, coalescing each device into a kind of topographic system. As such, her work pays homage to modernism(s) but does not concede to its grand and teleological narrative. Lum’s work decisively emerges from a moment that delights in the collapse of meta-narratives, allowing the artist radical pluralism.

This is evident in works like L’Observatoire (2024). A rectangular salmon panel is framed by beryl and black scaffolding, evocative of morning windows refracting the hazy morning sun. Below, a prismatic orange form is bisected by a partially obscured line of text reading “ermanences.” This plane is then overtaken by azure panels and a half-cloaked uppercase “B”. Shards of crimson fold over one another and a sinuous ladder-like shape (a recurrent motif in Lum’s recent work) effects a passage from foreground to background. A serrated trimming indicates that facets of the piece are collage. L’Observatoire, like most of Lum’s recent work, is an architectonic byproduct, inspired by the dérive-like winter Paris amblings that Lum has been regularly taking for the last few decades. During these walks, the artist gleans flakes of peeling posters, cuts parcels out of local newspapers and magazines, and sketches abutting architectural forms. In L’Observatoire, we see the makings of window arrangements, open doors, and looming cul-de-sacs beset by letters plucked from signs, newspapers, and the surrounding aural clutter of a foreign language. Her work flattens the mélange of such goings-on.

Other works, like Pushcart (2024), employ hazy blanches of marbleized color that recalls Surrealist techniques like frottage, or rubbings from a textured surface, and flottage, in which paper is dipped in oil and water. In the upper-right section of the image, a small offset panel spotlights a jagged crag or cliff pocked by a gaping crater or pothole. The rest of the foreground balances a coterie of two and three-dimensional cadet-gray tetrominos, rectilinear shapes, and azure triangles. Throughout, Lum’s shapes appear, as Michael Fried said of Jules Olitski in “Art and Objecthood,” “flat but rolled.” Her composition is also reminiscent of Thomas Scheibitz's concatenation of fragments, where representational and abstract elements are combined so that they are separable but, in unison, suggest the structure of architectural monuments. No one optical element or art-theoretical proclivity—neither overlaid planar shapes nor fragmented logos—is given referential hierarchy in any of Lum’s work, just as no one modernist style is privileged over another. In turn, Lum rebukes the telling of modernism as a progressive and unidirectional narrative.

However, it would be inaccurate to say that Lum’s work is summative of modernism. Instead, she presents modernism as a genus. To do so requires a degree of dispassionate distance that can only be achieved after the fact. That this is Lum’s intention is attested by her career-wide engagement with classification. For instance, in her 1991 series of drawings, “Historical Present,” Lum collected and cut out front-page images from the New York Times and categorized the images under subject headings (viz., “fires,” “terrorism,” “natural disaster,” “political figures,” “the environment,” “racial hate crimes,” “domestic abuse") while stripping away each image’s context. Although Temporary Arrangements does not make literal use of subject headings with composite boxes reading “Asemic Writing”, “Surrealism”, “Hard-Edge”, and so on, Lum makes use of classification, at times even using panels to divide different modernist devices within a single work, while elsewhere she allows them to be overlaid. By working in a plurality of variegated modernist genres instead of simply appropriating their sources—and by simultaneously signaling their pastness—Lum has effectively sublated modernism, using its rhetoric to create space for artworks that are both radically new and genuinely insightful in their address to history.