This is part two of my critique on POMO abstraction. Again let me say that I have respect and admiration for a lot of these artists and their achievements - but it's time to have a serious discussion about the future of abstract painting. I really hate to do this but I will provide illustrations to make the point. (if you're having trouble reading the blog - formatting problems - click here)

Why isolationist? It has to do with lens based painting. The nature of the lens is that it isolates subjects, it flattens space and volume and presents a pin point representation of whatever it is FOCUSED on. As a subject of a few photographs over my life (like many of us) I realized that photography was a strange way to represent my (really) ordinary appearance. I do not have the square jaw, jutting chin, razorlike cheekbones that photograph so well and make a few of us media darlings and most of us just another facemap in the corner of a drivers license. It always struck me as funny. I think this has been true of painting as well.

Painting after Abstract Expressionism fractured. Those following Greenberg's ideas of physicality became minimalists - those looking for imagery went to Pop. Of course that's simplistic but it will have to do. First there was Rauschenberg and his influence. He drained the brush stroke of it's meaning - essentially giving it the status of material to be used in a collage. And he used it over and over until the idea got through that the second generation of ABEX was incapable of finding reality in the stroke itself. The physicality of the material was tied to the idea of technique rather than expression. Rauschenberg was radical - his work sort of looked like ABEX but it didn't act like it. He was commenting not only on his time, but on the recent history of painting. He had stepped back when everyone else was knee deep in painting sludge.

Roy Lichtenstein, one of the coolest customers to walk the art planet, then went further. By taking the reproduction industry and turning it on painting. He was the first to use isolation to comment on the structure of painting itself. Yes I understand the concept of cartooning, etc, but the basis of this isolation is the lens. The lens isolates and defines certain aspects of the subject and in this case it is the "nature" of the stroke - the essence of it - that Lichtenstein was after. It is the same for Warhol - especially in his later portrait paintings where the ground is sloppy strokes overlaid with the aspects of someone's features. The isolated stroke is the driving force and ground for an empty caricature. Through this lens based reproduction - Abstraction - particularly American Physical Abstraction - was located and drained of meaning - pushing the dialog into the physical.

In the 1970's American abstraction was wholly physical having found itself on the floor after the Post Painterly squishies and OpArt catastrophies - or as I call it - the broken stretcher bar years. However in Europe there was a whole other thing going on. They were working out the implications of Pop and Minimalism in ways we couldn't fathom. We didn't have the pictorial history nor the intellectual base. 1968 saw the academic rebellion in France and the unleashing of a "new" critical/philosphical change all through Europe. Postmodernism essentially is recognized as starting at that time - though it's basis begins years before. Derrida, Baudrillard and Foucault among others started to argue the Postmodern perdicament. For painters these years were spearheaded by Polke (who we've discussed) and Gerhard Richter. Richter's work is the epitome of this time. It is all about isolation - of honing in on the elements of images.

He did it through actual newspaper images - pulling his brushes across the wet surface of a meticulously painted photo-image to make it look as if it had been published - to give it the feel of reproduction - of media. He also made paintings based on mathematical puzzles - slathering a brush with ugly grey paint and creating looping strokes over and over - commenting on the idea of the act of painting, minimalism and reproduction. He was isolating process. Finally the work I came to know and love/hate were the abstractions of the 80s and 90s. They were like blow ups of larger paintings - again using the smearing and flattening techniques of photography to isolate and push the viewer into a disengagement with meaning - and in essence - creating the same meaninglessness as David Salle did with his images. Richter's critique was aimed at the process and the outcome of that process - heightening the experience of physicality while isolating that physicality in an image of a painting. He was the flip side of Polke (who used images to overload and drain meaning.) Richter used the physical/technical to create the same effect.

American abstract painting was bogged down in the 70s - lost in the endless mindfuck of physical meaning - broken stretcher bars. There was no way out. Painters began to paint symbolic images in monochrome goop, but it lead no where (in museums you can still see them - called the "New Imagists.") Finally in the late seventies something happened. I can't stress the importance of the "punk movement" and how it changed the attitude to image based painting here in the States. Suddenly images came streaming out of our repressed conciousness by the truckload, and all those years of growing up in front of a Television came slopping out in buckets of paint. The early 80's saw this energy everywhere - but the problem was that America did not have a painting history of its own. It only went back to the 50s and that came from European Modernism - POP was our first homegrown movement. Which explains - in part - why there was little new with these early works - a distaste for intellectual theory/history and a need to paint equals fuck all (much like our situation today.) But a few painters - those who had been watching - began to pick up on the changes. Bleckner, Reed, Lasker and Halley were really the 4 American abstract painters to understand the European critique and adapt this POMO isolationist critique to their work.

Bleckner began with the stripe paintings - cleverly riffing on Optical Art's failings and opening a painterly dialog with actual photographic vision (much like Richter's hazy images.) In fact as time went on he actually painted in the trippy hallucinations that OpArt hoped you'd see. Lasker went after the process of unconcious thought - zooming in and blowing up the doodles that he conciously put together - a very deliberate brush stroke is suddenly human sized, a pen scribble thick like a Dekooning passage. Halley went after the structures of Modernism themselves, isolating and delineating the systematic procedures of painting - a box becomes a cell, a line becomes a conduit. Again - it is about isolation and expansion of the process. Finally, Reed found that process was procedure and by melding these techniques he created isolated, photographic looking strokes against the structures of a Modernist ground. For all of these painters there is the need to account for the American reliance on painterly physicality - then merging that idea with a self conscious photo-image structure. It is why the paintings themselves are so physically beautiful as things - immaculate surfaces, fetish finishes and customized stretchers. By amping up the finish they push the image into a critique of abstraction.

Additionally there are other abstractionists following this visual thought as well, but I chose the previous 4 because I think they exemplify the movement best. A few of them follow: Fabian Marcaccio who cleverly plays with images and painting strokes. Sean Scully who began with stripes and boxes has now settled into a thick brick oily stroke, Brice Marden trails his brush through the grounds of designer colors. James Nares isolates the process/stroke to ninja-like perfection. Also I'm not forgetting Sue Williams, Suzanne McClelland, Elliot Puckette and David Row, Stephen Ellis, Jon Zinsser, & Leslie Wayne among many, many others. All of these artists have had to deal with the process of abstract painting left over from the High Times Hard Times of the 70s distilling that process down to create a pumped up IMAGE of abstract painting by isolating the physicality of paint through lens based viewing.

This isolationist idea of image carried over into the late 90s figurative painters and even in today's 4th reinvention of POMO abstraction - the other 3 happening in 1991, 1997 and 2001. There are also many of these POMO Isolationists working today - like the POMO Maximalists you can find them across the internet. I am loath to do this but at Saatchi's gallery there is a show called USA Today with a cross section of this 4th generation of POMO Abstractionists. There is absolutely nothing NEW going on here - these artists still claim irony, distance and a critique of technique and physicality - though I will say that I like a couple of the artists involved (I am not a total prick.) Look at the images on the left. Look at the intention in these works and it sets up the same painting dialog as the Maximalists. I keep coming back to David Salle's idea that the images have no meaning, that the viewer brings meaning into the work. Or if you like - Derrida's margins or Baudrillard's hyper-reality. It's as if the painter is pumping up the painterly volume in order to be heard above Serra's steel sheets - and if you look back at our culture of the 80s & 90s especially - it was all about being pumped up. Arnold, shoulder pads, breast implants, SUVs, WWF, stock market, internet, 3000 cable channels, viagara, Shock & Awe I, steroids, New World Order etc etc. Painting did the same thing - the problem is that the emotional base, the point of visual poetry is missing in most of this critique.

Post-Modernism is Mannerism - it is the extension of ideas without a basis of emotional depth. It is like looking at the tomb Vasari designed for Michelangelo. The tomb has all of Michele's architectural design tropes, but absolutely none of the grace and strength of the master's feeling. Vasari - forever enthralled by the master - is doomed to reproduce the parts left behind in order to try to understand the essence of the art. For the POMO crowd - both Maximalists and Isolationists - there is only the reworking, the parts and what remains behind.

We'll discuss some ideas about the future in the next post.