Book Review: Naked By the Window by Robert Katz

Naked By the Window:

The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta

      Ana Mendieta fell out a window and died. It happened in September 1985, just several months after marrying Carl Andre. The couple had been arguing. Both of them were artists in New York City. Other than that, not a lot is known about what jappened that night. We do know that Carl Andre was charged with second degree murder, but was found innocent when taken to trial. The author Robert Katz doesn’t accept this verdict and makes it clear in his book Naked By the Window.

This review doesn’t have any spoilers because there isn’t anything to spoil. It opens with Ana Mendieta falling out the window of Carl Andre’s loft in Lower Manhattan. He calls the police, gets taken to jail, and goes up in front of a grand jury who decide not to send him to trial. The case gets reopened twice with similar results and a verdict of not guilty the final time. The rest of the story is non-sequential, alternating between flashbacks and the 1980s up to the last attempt at conviction.

Ana Mendieta was an up and coming Cuban-born artist. After the Revolution of 1959, her parents sent her and her sister Raquel to the United States where they had rough childhoods in foster homes. The racist white Americans in Iowa were not kind to them. While Raquel opted for the hippy lifestyle as she got older, Ana turned to art to vent her anger and ended up in the blossoming Soho art scene in Manhattan. Her sculptures and photography drew on Land Art and Body Art as source materials, examining the connections between the female body and nature. 1980s Soho was the right time and place for her arrival as an interest in both Latino and feminist art were coming into vogue. It was there that she met Carl Andre.

He was older than Ana Mendieta and had already established himself in the art world. From the late 1970s, he was involved in the postmodernist minimalist movement. His most famous works were things like piles of bricks, pieces of wood, and square tiles of zinc laid on the floor. It’s the kind of stuff that art critics love to praise as genius while making people outside the art world laugh. The concept of the “art world” is important because it has a lot to do with how the public reacted to the death of Ana Mendieta at the time of Carl Andre’s trial.

If people weren’t aware of class, race, and gender divisions in the art scene before Ana Mendieta’s death, they became aware of them at her funeral. Modern artists like to maintain a public image of being anti-establishment revolutionaries, but by Robert Katz’s estimate, they are little more than an miniature establishment unto themselves, a closed society of artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and gallery owners that are predominantly white, male, and rich. Ana Mendieta was becoming a leading figure in the Latin-American art scene and also embraced by some, but not all, feminists; her rising popularity threatened the traditional domain of the art establishment and her funeral became a rallying cry for unity among artists representing the Global South. So her funeral ended up being a tense mixture of white people who were ill at ease and Latinos who were outraged by her death. The walls of demarcation grew taller and thicker over the coming years as the white establishment maintained a code of silent defense, protecting Carl Andre from questioning. Those that believed Ana Mendieta had been murdered became aggressive in their public campaign against him. If art is meant to be revolutionary, this revolution is one that failed.

Aside from the artists’ biographies, the death of Ana Mendieta, and the effect it had on the art scene, the other major component of this book is the invstigation and trial of Carl Andre. The man was a minimalist artist and a man with minimal emotions, and if he truly committed murder, it was a crime with minimal evidence. While the police were convinced that Andre was guilty, they botched the collection of evidence and the small number of material witnesses proved to be unreliable. Aside from Ana Mendieta’s corpse, they couldn’t find much else to go on. That meant the prosecution had little more than circumstantial evidence.

What could be admitted into the case was that the married couple were heavy drinkers and prone to fighting. Carl Andre was adulterous and had a known history for verbally and physically abusing women. In Ana Mendieta’s defense, she wasn’t likely to have committed suicide as Andre claimed since she had extensive plans for the future, one of which was to divorce her husband. She also avoided going near windows because of her extreme fear of heights. The defense’s argument was that Mendieta was overly emotional because of her Cuban heritage, mentally unstable because she incorporated elements drawn from Santeria into her works, and obsessed with death because of the color red, representative of blood, she used in her sculptures indicating an unconscious wish to die. Therefore she killed herself. By Robert Katz’s estimation, Carl Andre had more reason to kill Ana Mendieta than she did to jump to her death. But the prosecution couldn’t provide enough evidence to support their case.

Robert Katz tells this story in a straightforward manner. His bias that Ana Mendieta is clear from the beginning. As mentioned before, those who are attracted to this book are probably already familiar with the case of Mendieta. Katz mostly wrote this book to fill in all the fine details for those who want to know more. But whether Andre pushed his wife out the window or she fell or jumped of her own volition is left an open question. Katz makes it feel overwhelmingly that Carl Andre is guilty of murder, but the reader is still left with the possibility that he is just skilled enough at persuasive writing to manipulate the reader’s emotions. He could have made his case by leaving out or altering information. But in recent times, patterns in the response to Ana Mendieta’s death have emerged even though more evidence hasn’t. Supporters of Carl Andre have continued to maintain strict silence in the questioning of the incident and the cause of Ana Mendieta remains a rallying call for feminists and social activists who are convinced of his guilt. Putting all politics aside, I am of the opinion that Carl Andre murdered Ana Mendieta and justice has never been served. Based on my sum of knowledge so far, I can’t see it any other way though I do admit this might be an impossible case to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt. And the two people who would know best are both dead.

Naked By the Window is a good document, probably the best document, of the Mendieta-Andre case. It is also a good portrait of the Soho art scene of the 1980s and some of its problematic aspects. It gives you a look into the darker side of a closed community that most will never be a part of. It should give you something to think about the next time you visit a gallery or sit for an art history class in a lecture hall. The art market is just as cut throat and vicious as any other big business. Don’t let the aesthetics and the mental stimulation of the art works fool you as to what goes on behind the scenes. As for the works done by those respective artists, and aside from the alleged crime of homicide committed by Carl Andre, the works of Ana Mendieta are certainly more visually engaging and meaningful. Her premature death cut short the life of a promising artist who was just beginning to find her stride towards her mature period of expression. Since her death, Carl Andre’s art has grown in popularity with his bales of hay and rows of bricks selling for millions. Some critics still love him, some consider him to be a con man. Although I’m not a big supporter of minimalism, I do know of some minimalist artists who are good. Carl Andre isn’t one of them. Maybe on that night of September 1985 the wrong person fell out of his window.

 

Book Review: Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950 by Helena Benitez

Wifredo and Helena:

My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950

by Helena Benitez

      If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City then you’ve seen Wilfredo Lam’s painting The Jungle. It’s a work of Surrealism, depicting four figures interweaving with bamboo and leafy vegetation. The figures have bodily features that are sharply angular and round simultaneously. Their faces resemble African masks of indeterminate origin, or at least they do for those not knowledgeable about African art. The figures emerge out of the jungle background like creatures coming out of a dream, threatening and enticing at the same time. The rhythmic but disorienting painting makes it impossible to find any place of visual rest.

Wifredo Lam is Cuba’s most famous visual artist. During the decade of World War II, he and his wife Helena lived together, bouncing from Europe to the Caribbean to the United States while involving themselves in the social scene of the most prominent avant-garde artists of the era. Helena Lam, who has since changed her name to Helena Benitez, recounts the most prominent memories of those times in her memoirs Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939 – 1950.

Wifredo Lam was a tall man with a striking appearance. Being an ethnic mixture of Spanish, African, and Chinese ancestry, he was an embodiment of the three dominant immigrant groups of Cuba. In photographs you can see how those physical features contrast and interact with each other in his complex face. As such, he was truly a man who lived between worlds, a theme that defined the meaning of his paintings throughout his career.

Helena was an attractive German woman with a undying curiosity and a fascination with fortune telling and the occult despite her scientific background and career as a medical biologist.

The two of them met in France just before the German invasion of World War II. They spent most of their time in Marseilles then set sail, with a contingent of other Surrealist artists, for the Caribbean island of Martinique. Eventually they moved on to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, finally settling in Cuba as refugees once they got their papers in order.

The course of Wifredo Lam’s development as an artist depended on the place he was living in and the people he knew at the time. His early works were informed by Cubism and his friendship with Pablo Picasso. After Picasso introduced him to Andre Breton, his art matured as he pursed the theories of Surrealism while developing his own visual idiom. Breton and Lam developed a strong friendship throughout their travels and their mutual interest in non-Western art which the Surrealists believed opened doorways into the dreamworld and the unconscious.

After returning to his homeland of Cuba, Wifredo Lam began incorporating elements of the African-diaspora religions of Palo, Abakua, Vodou, and Santeria into his paintings. He added another layer into his art when he began studying the Eastern philosophies of Taoism, Confucianism, and the I Ching.

Helena was all in on the adventure. She developed a good relationship with Lam’s family, was endlessly fascinated with the natural landscapes of the Caribbean islands, and took great interest in the ceremonies the couple attended. She fit in easily with the small circle of artists in Havana and maintained a fascination for Wifredo Lam’s art which peaked in intensity and innovation during their marriage.

In frustration with the perceived cultural backwardness of Havana and Cuba in general, the couple set off for New York City where many of the famous European Modernists had settled as refugees from the war. The art scene was changing at that time because a new breed of young Americans wanted to prove their worth in the world of Modernism. The old avant-garde art movements were receding and the new wave of Abstract Expressionists were taking over. The Lams naturally fell in with this crowd, but sadly Wifredo’s immigration papers weren’t obtainable and he returned to Cuba. Helena stayed behind, advancing her career in the medical field, and stone cold dumped him like a pair of old socks. This last detail is jarring considering the upbeat tone running through the rest of the book.

Throughout these memoirs, Helena Benitez emphasizes the high points in her marriage to Wifredo Lam. As such, it mostly reads like a pleasant diversion. There is a lot of name dropping when it comes to encounters with famous artists. There are nice descriptions of Caribbean travel and the lifestyle of Cuba. The observations of her husband are light, though and without a lot of depth. Taken at face value, you might think that their marriage was almost nothing but bliss. But like so many artists, she mentions he had a manic depressive temperament and was far from being a faithful husband. Other melancholy aspects include the time she spent in a prison camp during the German occupation of France and the days leading up to Arshile Gorky’s suicide. But Helena Benitez mostly keeps the negative sides of her marriage a secret. Maybe it’s for reasons of privacy. Maybe she just wants to remember the best times. In any case, these memoirs won’t entirely satisfy anyone who wants a complete biography of Wifredo Lam.

Taken as it is, Wifredo and Helena is a good introduction to one of the most fascinating, unique, and underrated artists of the Modernist movement. Of especial value are the high quality reproductions of Lam’s works and rare photographs, some of which are not available to the public anywhere else. Let’s hope that somebody somebody writes a full biography and critical evaluation of this painter and he gets the post mortem recognition he deserves.

 

Book Review: Chapel of Extreme Experience by John Geiger

Chapel of Extreme Experience:

A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine

by John Geiger

      If you’ve ever found yourself staring into the dancing flames of a campfire and suddenly realized time has slipped away and you’ve been entranced, you probably were in an altered state of consciousness without even realizing it. Further, if you’ve sat around a campfire with friends with the play of orange and yellow light alternating with shadows in irregular rhythms moving across their faces and the conversation has taken a turn towards more philosophical, speculative, spiritual, or introspective territories, you may wonder why these kinds of conversations flow more lucidly then they do when you are immersed in the mundane aspects of everyday life. There is something primal about the presence of flames, something that taps into the deepest layers of our being, relaxes us, and allows the contents of consciousness to flow freely into our waking minds. John Geiger, in Chapel of Extreme Experience, scientifically calls this phenomenon “flicker” and explains how its effects have been studied by scientists, induced with new technologies and drugs, and embraced by counter-culturalists and artists who turn to it for artistic inspiration and a deeper understanding of who we are and how we connect to the world we come from.

According to Geiger, flicker can be induced in a variety of ways. At its most basic level, a child experiences it when looking at a light and passing its spread out fingers back and forth in front of its eyes. Some epilectics experience something similar before going into seizures and schizophrenics may encounter it through audial or visual hallucinations. In modern times, film reels work through the use of flicker and the invention of the stroboscopic light brings on trance and hallucinatory conditions that extend for prolonged periods of time, making it possibly for psychiatrists to study its effects on brain activity. During his childhood, Brion Gysin, the largely overlooked mover and shaker of the counter cultures of the 1950s and 1960s, had the experience hallucinating when sitting in the back seat of a car that was driving under tree branches during an intensely sunny day. This experience led him to his interest in the Dream Machine, the central focus of this book.

Geiger starts off with a brief survey of scientific studies from the early 20^th century conducted in the field of neuropsychiatry and pharmacology. One major finding, and the one that preoccupies Geiger most, is that flicker induced through the use of strobe lights synchronizes and alters the rate of alpha waves in the brain. Alpha waves are associated with relaxation, dreaming, and fantasizing. The science he refers to is primitive by today’s standards and the hypotheses drawn are potentially suspect, but this isn’t irrelevant in the context of this book because Geiger’s purpose is to demonstrate the cultural impact that flicker has had over modern times.

This brings us to the Dream Machine, a device originally invented by Ian Sommerville, the boyfriend of Beat Generation, transgressive, and science-fiction author William S. Burroughs in the late 1950s. The Dream Machine is made by placing a bare light bulb on a turntable surrounded by a cylinder of cardboard with shapes cut into it. As it spins, the flicker causes trances and hallucinations. Brion Gysin became fascinated with it because it could cause an altered state of consciousness without the use of illegal drugs, without dangerous side effects, and without harmful after-effects. Since the Dream Machine works best with closed eyes because its effects are strongest when the flickering lights penetrate the translucent skin of the eyelids, Brion Gysin called it the only work of art you look at with your eyes closed.

Although anyone with minimal engineering skills can construct a Dream Machine, Gysin tried to market it as a psychedelic alternative to television. He was modestly successful as some big corporations liked the idea but eventually abandoned it for being too difficult to advertise. Geiger claims it posed too great of a risk to epilectics, but this explanation sounds hollow. A simple warning label on the package could easily have dealt with that problem. My own theory is that it didn’t catch on because it requires active engagement from the user. Television is an entirely passive medium that requires absolute submission on the part of the viewer who sinks into a dream-like state and absorbs whatever content is fed to them. You can consciously choose to think about what you watch, but few people are motivated enough to do so. The Dream Machine, on the other hand, requires attention and interaction from its users, demanding a kind of self-awareness and observation of one’s own subjectivity to be of any value. Most people are just too shallow and lazy to derive any benefit from the experience (see Marshall McLuhan on the difference between hot and cold media).

While Gysin failed to bring the Dream Machine into the living rooms of mainstream America, he influenced culture in other ways. John Geiger explores his dalliances with the Beat Generation and the hippies when owning the Beat Hotel in the Left Bank of Paris and the 1001 Nights restaurant in Tangier, Morocco where he liaised with the Rolling Stones and introduced Brian Jones to the tribal mountain musicians who he recorded as The Master Musicians of Jajouka. He explored hallucinogenic drug use with William Burroughs and Timothy Leary after having met with Aldous Huxley to discuss his experiences with mescaline. Gysin’s art never received widespread acclaim among critics although his attempts at incorporating elements of flicker in his paintings of Arabic calligraphy and Moroccan market scenes inspired the Op Art movement and other postmodernists. He was associated with some of the most famous counter-cultural figures and late 20^th century artists, film makers, and musicians so his influence is largely felt yet also largely unacknowledged.

Towards the end of this short tour around technology, art, culture, and psychotropic drugs Geiger returns to the scientific study of flicker in our hyper-technological age. He dips into the realms of parapsychology, telepathy, and other pseudoscientific muck that I tend to avoid. Make of that what you will.

John Geiger’s Chapel of Extreme Experience amounts to being more of an homage to the intersection between technology, psychedelic drugs, culture, and art than a treatise that makes a definite statement. Taken that way, it’s a brief and interesting read. It does, however, show how Brion Gysin acted as a connecting thread through all of those fields, a pioneering psychonaut and maybe even the Godfather of Psychedelia. Maybe he will remain an unsung genius destined for obscurity because he was too authentic for the human species which seems to be passively stagnating in the fake realities imposed on them by digital technology. This is an obscure book probably destined for further obscurity and of most interest for future book collectors more than anyone else.

 

Book Review: Flickering Light: A History of Neon

Flickering Light:

A History of Neon

by Christoph Ribbat

      A century ago, there was nothing that screamed out “modernism” or “high tech” more than neon lights. Even so, there hasn’t been a lot of research done into the way neon impacted culture. A technology that effected urban life, advertising, pop culture, art, and shifts in historical social attitudes deserves some study. The German author and scholar of American society Christoph Ribbat steps into this neglected space in his short work Flickering Light: A History of Neon.

The element neon is one of the noble gases. When charged with electricity it emits a magical glowing blue hue that is both bright in a way that commands attention and soft on the eye. This proprty of the gas was discovered by accident in a laboratory circa the turn of the 20^th century. By trapping it inside a transparent glass tube, it is contained and molded into the any shape desired by the artisan. The name of “neon” got attached to the technology of neon lights even though neon is only one of the gases used in them. Possibly this is because “neon” is rooted in the Greek “neo” which means new, connotating a leap into a futuristic society. Both the name and the appearance of neon lights were mind blowing to a world only just emerging from the 19^th century where electricity was scarce and rarely ever used. Despite the large scale industrialization of the modern world, the manufacturing of neon lights was a craft and an art form. The glass tubes were shaped by individual glass blowers whose hands and mouths were their main instruments. Each neon sign was, therefore, customized and unique with no mass production of any singular design.

Ribbat’s account of the history of neon lighting is mostly social though with less emphasis on its technical aspects. One of the interesting parts of the book is his explanation of the relationship between neon signs and big industrial corporations. Businessmen got a hold of it before anyone else could, therefore its primary purpose was advertising. America’s largest city centers, like New York and Chicago, were transformed into otherworldly atmospheres immersed in the glowing light. Times Square drew even more visitors than usual who came just to see the spectacle. Eventually Las Vegas got the same treatment after World War II and the technology spread overseas as well to major urban sources of power like Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo. But art critics, sociologists, and architects decried neon for turning American appetites towards cheap, simplistic entertainment that dazzled the eyes rather than purveying meaning or deeper reflection. Mostly they hated it because it was the primary medium of advertising, the cheap commodification and commercialization of modern life.

After underestimating the aesthetic appeal of the neon glow after sunset, it fell out of style as it spread out of city centers and into the ghettos, the working class neighborhoods, roadside billboards, and rural towns. It went from being urban chic to low class advertising for cheap restaurants, dive bars, strip clubs, liquor stores, and adult video arcades. By the time World War II ended, the new generaton had forgotten the downmarket trend of neon lights and it came back into vogue for a stretch then declined again for being tacky and tasteless as it had once before. That is when postmodern artists discovered its value for visual stimulation.

The passages of this book covering the history of neon lights are the best parts. The passages dealing with other peripheral but related topics are less impressive. Ribbat’s concerns are with the downtrodden members of society or the people who live beneath the neon lights rather than the people of higher social standing who live behind or above them, often owning them. This means an examination of the poor, the prostitutes, the petty criminals, the drug addicts, and those living on the rougher side of life. This is an interesting subject to explore, but the problem is that Ribbat barely draws a connection between neon and the unfortunate lives these people have. Even worse, he derives all his information from works of literature rather than citing studies done by the sociologists of those times. Ribbat is obviously preoccupied with the aesthetics of neon, but by using works of fiction as a secondary source of information, however good they might be, makes these passages feel disjointed from the main theme of the book. Other sections of the book suffer in similar ways when Ribbat examines the use of neon as metaphor in poetry and song lyrics as well as props in movies. He gets a little too caught up in attempting to define the meaning of neon rather than treating neon as a medium that means little more than the visual impression it makes. Neon lights do act as signifiers of class status packed with meaning, but Ribbat’s analysis is not rigorous or methodical enough to make this clear. He does, however, include a good chapter on the use of neon lights in the visual arts starting in the 1960s.

Flickering Lights: A History of Neon has some chapters that are fascinating and some that aren’t. The best parts of the book do make it worth reading. As I finished, I was left with two thoughts. One is the sense of nostalgia that makes me wish to go back in time to see Times Square and Las Vegas when they were awash in a sea of flickering, glowing, buzzing neon. Those times when artistic creativity, industry, and advertising met in such a unique fashion are long gone and will never come back, at least not in that form. The other thought was how neon signs predated and predicted the gif files we now see on the internet. Designed to turn on and off, making sequential movements, like a flower blossoming and opening its petals or a race horse jumping over a hurdle, repeated endlessly in repetitive loops until someone cuts the power, the best and most elaborate neon signs had a similar visual impact to gifs which we now see on screens in advertising and social media posts. The biggest difference is the sheer, enormous size of neon signs that sometimes covered entire sides of buildings or extended upwards several stories into the sky. I do think society worked better when we were looking outward and up rather than fixating on a small screen right in front of our faces. The former implies growth and expansion while the latter implies shallowness, alienation, and narrow mindedness. Let’s bring those flickering lights back again.

 

Book Review & Analysis: History of Abstract Painting by Jean-Luc Daval

History of Abstract Painting

by Jean-Luc Daval

      Everyone has heard it before. Somebody with little or no knowledge of art will look at an abstract painting and say, “How can that be art? Any child can do something like that.” Of course, some people who really are educated in the visual arts, and even some artists, will say the same thing. Considering how much writing over the past century has explained abstract, modern, and postmodern art, it seems odd that anybody who really cares wouldn’t have any obstacles to investigating and learning what abstract art is all about. Of course, people who say that aren’t really interested in understanding anything other than what they already know which usually isn’t much to begin with. What that statement often translates to is, “I’m better than those snooty intellectual types because I do important things with my life like working, driving, and watching football.” Anti-intellectualism is a tragic trait of the American character. But if you want to set yourself apart from the herd of cattle being led around by the nose hooked on advertising and mindless entertainment, one way to do so is to study art. After all, modern art is all about breaking free from established prisons of perception by altering of visual representation and breaking the rules of technique laid down by previous generations or artists. Jean-Luc Daval’s History of Abstract Painting is one source you can go to in your pursuit.

Basically, this is an art history book and an understanding of art history is necessary to grasp the meaning of modern art. Up tuntil the time of the Renaissance, art primarily served the purpose of religious symbolism and allegory. Subsequent to that, artists took on new meanings, diversifying allegory and symbolism to comment on social and ethical concerns. That style of art depended on photographic realism as a visual style. When photography was invented, photo-realism was no longer relevant and artists began experimenting with technique and materials. With early modernists like Cezanne and the Impressionists, the subject matter began fading into the background as color, brushstroke, perspective, material, and line got emphasized. Various modernist art school were established to work within their own unique techniques. Schools like Fauvism and Der Blaue Reiter maintained representation of objects in their paintings, but the emotional state of the artists in regard to such objects took precedence. Cubists oriented their works toward a more rational manipulation of line and geometric form to create depth and movement without the possibility of visual rest within the frame. The Cubists broke the wall separating representation and represented object by placing everyday objects, like scraps of newspaper, onto the canvas so that the distinction between signifier and signified collapsed.

Eventually, some artists did away with the representation of concrete objects, creating art that represented abstract ideas or feelings. Piet Mondrian made canvases with primary colors and basic geometric shapes on flat planes that corresponded to the philosophical ideas he explained in his writing. The Russian Constructivists and Suprematists used geomterical patterns to represent pure emotions similar to the way music does, particularly when it has no lyrics. When listening to Mozart, you don’t understand it by explaining it; you understand it by feeling it and this is the direct experience the Russian abstract artists wished to convey through their visual medium. These methods of expressing purity through non-representative shapes and colors reached its apogee in the most famous proponent of Abstract Expressionism ever, Jackson Pollock.

Abstract artists were then presented with the dilemma of where to turn next. Modern art had superseded the representation of recognizable objects which faded into the background until they disappeared completely, leaving nothing but representation of ideas and emotions. The only thing left to do was to abstract away from those and make paintings that represented absolutely nothing but themselves. From there, postmodernism was born and abstract painting became nothing but an interaction between the artists and their canvasses.

Daval’s presentation of how art progressed from pure representation to pure non-representation is complete but brief. This is not an in-depth study of the subject matter. At some points he simply says too little, especially in his analysis of Cubism and Futurism; he briefly introduces their theories and then blows off to another school of art. On the other hand, other developments in the timeline are given sufficient attention like in his analysis of the early modernists and Jackson Pollock. He also never mentions how these art schools were all avant-garde movements that published manifestos, detailing their political and philosophical intentions of altering life in the 20^th century. The book is entirely about form with little or no examination of substance. His account also falls short when he brings Dada and Surrealism into the discussion as both of these movements contained a wider scope in their realizations than just the techniques of abstraction he describes. His discussion of the Russian Supremtist Malevich is grating too. For some strange reason, art critics fall all over themselves with praise for his overrated White on White. That painting is the last in a series of canvases that use basic colors and shapes in varied combinations to express the emotions in musical composition. White on White is meant to be the last painting in that series and represents the silence experienced after a piece of music ends. Taken in context, it makes a lot of sense, but taken out of context it doesn’t mean anything. And yet the critics want us to see it in isolation as the greatest expression of transcendence ever created. It is nothing but a white square painted on a white background. Art critics can be so dumb sometimes.

In the final analysis, what is the worth of History of Abstract Painting? It doesn’t serve as a solid introduction to modern art simply because Daval doesn’t go into enough depth about most of the art schools he mentions to make them stand out in any memorable way. It certainly won’t enhance any art enthusiast’s understanding of the subject matter either since anyone familiar with modernism will know everything written about here already. It’s not a bad book though and Daval lays out the historical progression of abstract art in a clear and comprehensive way. It probably serves best as a review for any patron who lost interest in modern art and wants to get back into it. And the glossy, full color pages are nice looking too. The question in the end, which Daval never addresses, is where do artists go from here? It looks like modernism and postmodernism have exhausted all possibilities in their never-ending transgression of all rules. It’s probably time to reinvent representational painting. Certainly digital art will have something to do with that.

 

Book Review

Passages in Modern Sculpture

by Rosalind E. Krauss

     The fine arts in Western cultures had, for thousands of years, been conservative in form and content. Most art, especially in western Europe, was limited to themes of Christianity and judgments of quality were based largely on the mastery of technique. Things loosened up during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and occasionally some oddball like Hieronymus Bosch made something so different that no one could comprehend it. Then Modernism came along and everything went haywire. Rosalind E. Krauss, armed with a solid background in philosophy and art criticism, takes a stab at making sense out of the course that modern sculpture took in her early work called Passages in Modern Sculpture. Through the construction of her own theory, she hones the chaos of modernism into semi-coherent steps along a continuum progressing towards an unknown destination.

The foundation of Krauss’s theory is the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. On the principle of the transcendent I, meaning that an individual’s true nature is not only located subjectively inside their own consciousness but rather is a meeting ground between their own self-perception and the perceptions of others, she builds a critical theory around the idea that modern art has no inherent meaning. In other words, the meaning of art is created by the viewer as they perceive and interact with that art. Pre-modern concepts of symbolism or allegory no longer apply with the avant-garde art movement of the Modernism period.

She also approaches art through the mediums of time and space. Pre-modernist sculpture was about the perfection of physical form whether the work be a three-dimensional statue or a two-dimensional work set against a background relief while suggesting a third dimension. Also, pre-modern sculpture mostly appeared in media res, representing a point in time along a narrative structure, implying the existence of moments before and after that point, suggested to the viewer and not directly experienced. Modernist sculpture broke with these constructs of time and space to create sculpture requiring different frames of reference for interpretation.

The fun really begins when Krauss applies her theory to art objects. She begins with Rodin, then moves on to the Futurists who expose the core of their objects by penetrating their surfaces and the Constructivists who reveal the interior of their sculptures by displacing outer parts, making surfaces that only cover fragments of the interior, or even using transparent materials. The ubiquitous readymades of Marcel Duchamp are analyzed to show a disconnect between the artists’ subjectivity and the art object itself which no longer represents their subjective life. Brancusi eradicates the inner core of sculpture by mi minimalizing the constituent parts of the surface. The Surrealists transform everyday objects into nonsense to reveal hidden unconscious contents and so on.

Her analysis is engaging and logical up to this point. When she introduces her concept of theatricality into the critique, it begins to wear a little thin. She brings theater into the discussion to show how sculpture was used by modernists to break down the barrier between performers and audience, what Antonin Artaud called the destruction of the fourth wall. But this idea barely seems to fit with what she is saying considering that it is a stretch to redefine performers on stage as art objects moving among other art objects. What she is trying to do is introduce the concept of movement into the study and analysis of sculpture. While previously sculpture had been static and unmoving, modern artists introduced the element of movable parts on one hand, as in the case of the mobiles of George Segal, or art that alters in appearance as the viewer moves around it as in the work of Anthony Caro. But the connection she makes is weak and confusing. This is partly due to her attempt at describing non-representational shapes that have no signifiers to properly correspond to the form they hold in physical space. Her argument also suffers because she introduces a large number of works that she never analyzes past the initial mention in the text.

The writing picks up again after that as she moves into postmodernist movements like pop art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, and earthworks. What this all builds up to is the concept of decentralization in art, an idea that originated in Freud’s theory of the decentralization of the ego in modern psychology, and reached its full expression in postmodern concepts of the interplay of surfaces or the lack of inner meaning, a state where symbols no longer symbolize anything unless the receiver of the symbol assigns a meaning to it. Does this critique of artistic progression run parallel to the experience of humanity in the twentieth century or does art now inhabit a space of its own that is disconnected from reality and impossible to interpret? That discussion would take a whole other book to explore, but I am sure Krauss would continue to insist that any art can be interpreted if we choose to put the creative effort into making it mean something, no matter how bewildering it may become.

The verity of Passages in Modern Sculpture is open to debate. Whether the order that Rosalind Krauss explicates is there or whether it is a construction of her own devise that she imposes on the chaos is an open question. There is something quite arbitrary in how she forms her argument and chooses art objects to support it. But if we follow the theory correctly, that is the whole point. It is up to us to create meaning. It isn’t handed out or spoonfed to us the way ultimate religious truths are. It is more a matter of asking the right questions in the first place and on that note, this book is worthwhile for consideration. 

 

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