The above shots were taken at the Opening of TN Abstract Painting.
A really great night!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Conversation
Horowitz: Is there something about the special in-betweenness of Tennessee that makes the question of abstraction alive for us?"
Buffington: For my part, as a painter I've always thought of myself as engaged in a conversation. I'm reminded of MAK Halliday, who tells us that "language is a social fact." Painting as a conversation is centuries old (we speak with Giotto), making it timeless. Painting as a conversation also spans the globe (we speak with Hiroshige), making it placeless. At the same time, painting is a conversation that is ongoing, and we are all trying to contribute to this conversation today, to move it forward in some small way. Moreover, there are most assuredly interesting pockets of dialogue in any given region; intense collaborative exchanges, regional quarrels, etc. So although I work hard to maintain ties outside the region within so-called art centers like New York or Chicago, more recently I've begun to seek out vital relationships with artists living and working in the Southeast. And my practice has benefited greatly.
In short, abstraction itself lies "in between."
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Questions From Gregg Horowitz
(1) Why abstraction? Why now? Why in Tennessee?
In the history of modern painting, abstraction has long been a central part of the process whereby artists make pictures. In emphasizing process, I underscore the sense of abstraction as ‘abstraction from’ the forms, techniques, genres and subject-matter that gave shape and direction to the history of the visual arts. But at some time around the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, abstraction became not just a means but an end, not just a process but a product of art. In the figures of Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian, artists began not only to make pictures by means of abstraction; they began to make abstract pictures, pictures either with no identifiable subject-matter or, less extremely, in which the subject matter warred with the formal elements of the picture for control over artistic meaning. And from that point until the 1970’s, it is no exaggeration to say that abstraction, not just as a means but as an end, represented the leading edge of the adventure of the visual arts.
But abstraction died. Or, at least, its primacy withered, and with it the idea of a cutting edge also faded. Since the 1970’s we have lived through an era of artistic pluralism, in which the question of what art should be and do has been replaced by the mad scramble to invent or respond to new media. Pluralism, of course, is another name for randomness, for anything goes, but it is also the name for a condition in which every artist needs to figure out for herself what she will do next. In a pluralistic age, there is no longer the urgency to produce abstract paintings, but nor is there the possibility to make paintings merely by abstracting from the history of visual art. Been there, done that. So: what’s next? Or, in other words: Why abstraction? Why now?
Can these questions be separated from the third of my questions: Why in Tennessee? As long as abstraction was regarded as the leading edge of painting, as painting’s way into its own proper future, painting had a direction – but it also had a center. First Paris, then New York, perhaps, for a very brief moment, Düsseldorf, served as the cosmopolitan centers of art from which the rallying cry ‘Be abstract’ rang out across the globe. And to heed that call was to be cosmopolitan wherever one worked. Agnes Martin left New York for New Mexico and Cy Twombly for Rome, but they took with them the cosmopolitan spirit of abstraction. Abstraction, one might say, was placeless, homeless. And in that respect, the opposite of cosmopolitanism was provincialism, or, worst of all, ideological regionalism. Now, the idea of a center for contemporary art is, I think, passé. New York and London stand as the center of the art market, but they no more represent the center of art-making than they do its future. Abstraction, then, can happen anywhere, so: Why in Tennessee? Is there something about the particulars of this region that make it especially favorable for living abstraction? Does our local identity as a blend of the regional and the cosmopolitan, as no longer a province but not yet a center, encourage artists to take up, again but in their own terms, the question of placeless and homeless images? One cannot imagine a show in 2009 called “New York Abstract Painters” (no more than one can imagine a show called “London Regional Painters”!). Is there something about the special in-betweenness of Tennessee that makes the question of abstraction alive for us?
(2) Why call attention to the surface of the image? Why now?
This show is full of such wonderfully worked surfaces. Paintings are always surfaces, of course (even though some of the works - John Tallman’s, especially – seem to challenge the flatness of their surfaces). When paintings are representational, however, they are also windows open on to the world. Abstract paintings, by contrast, are like closed windows; they are exclusively, emphatically surfaces , which we cannot see through but can only look at. It has been a longstanding challenge for abstract artists to make their paintings compelling visual experiences despite that fact that they offer our eyes nothing but themselves. This is why the failure specific to abstract paintings is that they become merely decorative. But perhaps this contrast between a window, which is interesting to look at to just the degree to which the world it discloses is interesting to look at, and a surface, which is interesting to look at in its own right, is too old-fashioned. For we live in the age of digital images that are offered to us on screens and monitors, which are bearers of images that are part window (we see the world through them) and part surface (there is nothing behind them except their supports). Is there something different about abstract painting in the age of the screen? Is a practice of painting that calls attention to the surface of the image different in an age when the most ubiquitous surface is not wall or canvas or sheet of paper but monitor? Put another way: when so many visual artists have turned to video, has sticking with abstraction taken on more or different social and aesthetic significance?
(3) Why paint? Why now?
If its right to emphasize the worked surfaces of the paintings on display here, it is equally important to pay attention to the ways they are worked. And in this light it is interesting to note how many different materials and tools these artists are using: paint and graphite, brush and pencil, styrofoam and photodeveloper, knife and pour. To pay attention to these paintings is to pay attention to the way individual hands have laid down unique marks. Even if a painting begins its life in a photographic or video image, its emotional and aesthetic interest cannot be disconnected from the idiosyncratic touch left by the artist in the manually applied material. To have noted of an image in the past that it was handmade would have been unnecessary, but these days it is downright unusual. In fact, one might well ask what function handmade images serve in the contemporary world. The curator and teacher of photography John Szarkowski once chastised a student who had taken to playing with the surfaces of his photographs, “There’s nothing interesting about the materiality of photographs.” Perhaps true, but if so then he might as well have added: “There’s nothing interesting about the materiality of images in the age of photography.” Yet the artists on display in this exhibition emphatically disagree. So a question they no doubt all have interesting answers to is, “What is interesting about the materiality of paint in the age of photography? Why keep making paintings? What can you do with a knife and some acrylics that you can’t do with a machine? What is the purpose or value of calling attention to the hand and eye of the artist, and by extension the body of the artist, when our world is overflowing with images that come from nowhere in particular and are addressed to no one in particular? Does the materiality of painting give us something compelling, something beyond doubting, that other media of image-making do not suffice to provide?” These may not be questions specific to abstraction alone, but they are questions that keep circling around the process and product of painting.
In the history of modern painting, abstraction has long been a central part of the process whereby artists make pictures. In emphasizing process, I underscore the sense of abstraction as ‘abstraction from’ the forms, techniques, genres and subject-matter that gave shape and direction to the history of the visual arts. But at some time around the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, abstraction became not just a means but an end, not just a process but a product of art. In the figures of Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian, artists began not only to make pictures by means of abstraction; they began to make abstract pictures, pictures either with no identifiable subject-matter or, less extremely, in which the subject matter warred with the formal elements of the picture for control over artistic meaning. And from that point until the 1970’s, it is no exaggeration to say that abstraction, not just as a means but as an end, represented the leading edge of the adventure of the visual arts.
But abstraction died. Or, at least, its primacy withered, and with it the idea of a cutting edge also faded. Since the 1970’s we have lived through an era of artistic pluralism, in which the question of what art should be and do has been replaced by the mad scramble to invent or respond to new media. Pluralism, of course, is another name for randomness, for anything goes, but it is also the name for a condition in which every artist needs to figure out for herself what she will do next. In a pluralistic age, there is no longer the urgency to produce abstract paintings, but nor is there the possibility to make paintings merely by abstracting from the history of visual art. Been there, done that. So: what’s next? Or, in other words: Why abstraction? Why now?
Can these questions be separated from the third of my questions: Why in Tennessee? As long as abstraction was regarded as the leading edge of painting, as painting’s way into its own proper future, painting had a direction – but it also had a center. First Paris, then New York, perhaps, for a very brief moment, Düsseldorf, served as the cosmopolitan centers of art from which the rallying cry ‘Be abstract’ rang out across the globe. And to heed that call was to be cosmopolitan wherever one worked. Agnes Martin left New York for New Mexico and Cy Twombly for Rome, but they took with them the cosmopolitan spirit of abstraction. Abstraction, one might say, was placeless, homeless. And in that respect, the opposite of cosmopolitanism was provincialism, or, worst of all, ideological regionalism. Now, the idea of a center for contemporary art is, I think, passé. New York and London stand as the center of the art market, but they no more represent the center of art-making than they do its future. Abstraction, then, can happen anywhere, so: Why in Tennessee? Is there something about the particulars of this region that make it especially favorable for living abstraction? Does our local identity as a blend of the regional and the cosmopolitan, as no longer a province but not yet a center, encourage artists to take up, again but in their own terms, the question of placeless and homeless images? One cannot imagine a show in 2009 called “New York Abstract Painters” (no more than one can imagine a show called “London Regional Painters”!). Is there something about the special in-betweenness of Tennessee that makes the question of abstraction alive for us?
(2) Why call attention to the surface of the image? Why now?
This show is full of such wonderfully worked surfaces. Paintings are always surfaces, of course (even though some of the works - John Tallman’s, especially – seem to challenge the flatness of their surfaces). When paintings are representational, however, they are also windows open on to the world. Abstract paintings, by contrast, are like closed windows; they are exclusively, emphatically surfaces , which we cannot see through but can only look at. It has been a longstanding challenge for abstract artists to make their paintings compelling visual experiences despite that fact that they offer our eyes nothing but themselves. This is why the failure specific to abstract paintings is that they become merely decorative. But perhaps this contrast between a window, which is interesting to look at to just the degree to which the world it discloses is interesting to look at, and a surface, which is interesting to look at in its own right, is too old-fashioned. For we live in the age of digital images that are offered to us on screens and monitors, which are bearers of images that are part window (we see the world through them) and part surface (there is nothing behind them except their supports). Is there something different about abstract painting in the age of the screen? Is a practice of painting that calls attention to the surface of the image different in an age when the most ubiquitous surface is not wall or canvas or sheet of paper but monitor? Put another way: when so many visual artists have turned to video, has sticking with abstraction taken on more or different social and aesthetic significance?
(3) Why paint? Why now?
If its right to emphasize the worked surfaces of the paintings on display here, it is equally important to pay attention to the ways they are worked. And in this light it is interesting to note how many different materials and tools these artists are using: paint and graphite, brush and pencil, styrofoam and photodeveloper, knife and pour. To pay attention to these paintings is to pay attention to the way individual hands have laid down unique marks. Even if a painting begins its life in a photographic or video image, its emotional and aesthetic interest cannot be disconnected from the idiosyncratic touch left by the artist in the manually applied material. To have noted of an image in the past that it was handmade would have been unnecessary, but these days it is downright unusual. In fact, one might well ask what function handmade images serve in the contemporary world. The curator and teacher of photography John Szarkowski once chastised a student who had taken to playing with the surfaces of his photographs, “There’s nothing interesting about the materiality of photographs.” Perhaps true, but if so then he might as well have added: “There’s nothing interesting about the materiality of images in the age of photography.” Yet the artists on display in this exhibition emphatically disagree. So a question they no doubt all have interesting answers to is, “What is interesting about the materiality of paint in the age of photography? Why keep making paintings? What can you do with a knife and some acrylics that you can’t do with a machine? What is the purpose or value of calling attention to the hand and eye of the artist, and by extension the body of the artist, when our world is overflowing with images that come from nowhere in particular and are addressed to no one in particular? Does the materiality of painting give us something compelling, something beyond doubting, that other media of image-making do not suffice to provide?” These may not be questions specific to abstraction alone, but they are questions that keep circling around the process and product of painting.
Abstract Painting in Tennessee
This blog has been created to function as a open forum parallel to the exhibition, "Tennessee Abstract Painting", which will open on Thursday March 12 at the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville and run from March 14 to September 20. The exhibition brings together 14 artists from across the Volunteer State working in the territory that can loosely be described as "Abstract Painting".
It is hoped that this forum will be informative and enlightening as to the processes and philosophies of "Abstract Painting", as well as dispell some nasty rumors.
The artists:
Ron Buffington
Dwayne Butcher
Hamlett Dobbins
Melissa Dunn
Richard Feaster
Carol Mode
Brady Haston
Rocky Horton
Hans Schmitt-Matzen
Amanda Rogers-Horton
Jared Sprecher
John Tallman
Terry Thacker
Lain York
It is hoped that this forum will be informative and enlightening as to the processes and philosophies of "Abstract Painting", as well as dispell some nasty rumors.
The artists:
Ron Buffington
Dwayne Butcher
Hamlett Dobbins
Melissa Dunn
Richard Feaster
Carol Mode
Brady Haston
Rocky Horton
Hans Schmitt-Matzen
Amanda Rogers-Horton
Jared Sprecher
John Tallman
Terry Thacker
Lain York
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