The Brooklyn Rail

Phyllis Tuchman’s questionnaire has a wonderful historical resonance, echoing Irving Sandler’s classic 1959 questionnaire “Is There a New Academy?” and its 1967 sequel, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” for which Sandler recruited Barbara Rose to help him pose an expanded list of questions.¹ Contemporary art has been transformed multiple times since the sixties. Abstraction, once seen as the cutting edge of the contemporary, is now just one tendency among many. So it is a good moment to revisit these questions.

I’m going to postpone question number one to the end and instead start with number two.

2. Is there an avant-garde? 
The idea of an avant-garde emerges in French literature in the 1820s and in French art in the 1850s. The procession of avant-gardes from Claude Monet to Eva Hesse constituted a century of nonstop invention, like the 150 years from Masaccio to the death of Titian. The greatest painters of the following era—Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer—mixed and matched different elements of Renaissance painting. Similarly, contemporary artists discover new expressive possibilities within the visual languages of modernism. But they are no longer an avant-garde.

3. Has the sensibility towards abstraction become academic? 
Art academies emerged in seventeenth-century Europe art as state-sponsored institutions, replacing traditional painters’ guilds. By 1959, when Sandler circulated his first questionnaire, the only art academies in this strict sense were in Communist countries where socialist realism was compulsory. In Europe and the United States, “academy” had become a metaphorical term, expressing the belief that, at a given moment, there was a single, historically necessary avant-garde style.

Today’s dominant visual languages run the gamut from installation and montage to realism. There is no academy. Abstract art is academic only in the sense that abstract artists and their critics are likely to be aware of the history of abstraction since 1910, whereas artists and critics concerned with figuration often seem to think that modern art began with Warhol.

4 (a). Has social media affected the abstract artist? 
Social media has unquestionably changed the art world. People research new art on Instagram before going to galleries to see it in person. To attract attention, art needs to look good when reduced to a 3-by-3-inch image on a digital screen. This privileges realism over abstraction, where the essential aspect of the work may be its facture, invisible on a tiny screen.

4 (b). Does the growth of art schools affect the abstract artist? 
I don’t see art schools as pushing contemporary art in one direction or another, but this may just reflect my ignorance. I haven’t taught in an art school since 1995.

5. How has the relationship between abstraction and representation changed? 
The iron curtain between abstraction and figuration collapsed some decades back. Many contemporary artists, such as Amy Sillman, Chris Martin, and Guillermo Kuitca, move freely back and forth across this border.

1. Is there a sensibility to abstract artwork at this moment? 
There are numerous sensibilities evident in contemporary abstraction.² Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford, Tomashi Jackson, Yanira Collado, and other Black artists have inspired a rubric, “social abstraction,” describing work that is formally abstract but that evokes social and historical experience. The association between the abstract grid and woven textiles—powerful relics of social experience—has been explored by artists such as Suki Seokyeong Kang (South Korea), Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic (Panama and Serbia), and Jeffrey Gibson (USA). It was also the subject of Lynne Cooke’s recent exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, at the National Gallery.

Since the rise of semiology has made it possible to see abstraction as signifying without resorting to figuration, painters such as Valerie Jaudon and Wade Guyton have made abstractions from the conventions of typography and the machine language of inkjet printers. Mary Heilmann draws on the architectural environment and the memory of movie screens. Joanna Pousette-Dart and Ingrid Calame incorporate forms found in natural and man-made environments. Terry Winters combines what seem like scientific diagrams with tactile paint handling.

Finally, it is important to mention artists discovering new expressive possibilities in historic styles, such as Joan Waltemath and Christopher Hewat in the asymmetric grids of Piet Mondrian and Irene Rice Pereira; Mary Weatherford in the numinous washes of Helen Frankenthaler; David Reed and Jamie Nares in the gestural brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning. There is no such thing as “zombie formalism.” There is good abstraction and bad abstraction.