10.13.25 — Academic Painting
Just this year I got to learn more about color-field painting and its continued vitality from a book by Pat Lipsky, an artist. As a postscript, those days may soon be gone, but Shara Hughes and Dana Smith, two younger painters, are still gestural, abstract, and exhilarating. It becomes up to the viewer to take the first step to permanence or illusion. A barrel of dots becomes a rehash of Pointillism while still shining brightly. Is it still fall abstraction or mere tourism? It can still claim the glow and the deception.
Is it still worth arguing over abstraction, Lipsky’s dear friend Clement Greenberg, and his legacy. Dare I call it academic? If I had to dismiss anything as academic these days, it would be the term academic painting. Surely by now art is passed that point. Surely one no longer need make excuses for simply painting. And surely these days it finds its justification less in scholarship than in the market.
Art has indeed had a time which everyone has to graduate from just the right program, not all that long ago, in fact. They have not even had to be all that good at it. Am I kidding? You may still ask to see my resumé. You never know, after all, who might be on it and why. They can only have more authority than I.
Yes, too many at the turn at the end really did have century had the right degrees, first at Cal Arts, then at Yale. The first was dismissive of what still passed as art, the second suitably ambivalent. (What would be the Ivy League be without ambivalence? I should know after Princeton.) Either group could be studying older technique, give or take the irony. Then again, either group could be joking. Hey, you never know.
In two ways at once, modern and twenty-first, an epic period of rebellion was gone. Some take too much pleasure in who they are to suit Trump fans. Others take too much pleasure in art. Abstraction has survived a long time now by trying to find a form, with conceptualism and formalism built right in. Now it is trying to find older artists who pursued it all along. Does it matter if they look halfway alike?
Maybe not always. Two artists open the fall year without hard geometry, and they make themselves at home in galleries with space for more. Hughes goes with the flow, at David Kordansky through October 11 as well. Her paints bleed into one another, for an added richness of color and contrasting color fields. Their colors come together as one. What counts as illusion is left to you.
Smith transforms fields of paint and shadow into contrasting fields, in what she calls “Ink Moon,” at Hollis Taggart through October 11 as well. She leaves, though, more devoted to the eye, breaking into a marching bands or uncertain fate. It could almost be abstraction. Contrasting colors may themselves arise from fields of light alone. You may hardly know for certain what has left you firm or dizzy. Such is fate.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.