“This masterpiece is the best example of how craft morphs into ART”
A comment about the above work on Twitter 24.4.2021.
This work is included in the first exhibition at abcrit.org, now in its opening weeks, with more information on the preceding post.
It takes a while to appreciate the achievements of this American quilt, or properly take in its significant differences from other quilts. For sure, it looks straight away like a good work, organised and sensitive, but it takes a little time to engage with its singular achievements of structure. The complex method it fully involves itself with, of putting together hexagonal pieces of randomly pre-sewn, and variously-sized, and differently-patterned and coloured fabrics, into long, pointed shapes, which are then, in turn, sewn with three other hexagonals, point to point, around a tipped-up black square, the whole becoming one of many octagons, then… well, it can’t fail to engage us too. Are they put together this way, like this? What is made first; and what, if anything, is sewn over the top? Questions might arise about the methods, but the questions are soon outweighed by the spatial and physical tug and turn of real materials.
The end result of this convolution is unusual, rare, but it is not absolutely unique. There are other examples to be found in the right books (*), but not many.
The appeal of this work is largely to do with its unpredictability. It modifies its own activity as you examine it, and re-focus and look again. Try to fathom how the pre-made parts physically/visually react when sewn up to and against something completely different in pattern and colour, but the same in shape; with no correlation, but clearly connected; with no hint of a pre-appointed design, but a full grasp of how the fullness of the whole fits together… are you following this? What about the important changes of scale between the different elements, as they go backwards and forwards and you move across…? This complexity appears simple, yet works without ceasing (and if abstract painting and sculpture can’t go down this route, it is perhaps their loss).
The detail below shows instances in which four hexagonal shapes come together to a crucial point, each shape made of several fabrics put together at random (probably) in different-sized “strings” across the length of each hexagon, which are then joined together in an octagonal arrangement around the black squares-on-edge… maybe. These areas of pointed junctions are very idiosyncratic, very dazzling, all very fluent in how they operate differently with/from their neighbors.
Building things together in ways that elevate the unpredictability of new connections, and how they visually operate together/against each other when acting within these new coincidental relationships, compares favourably with a lot of abstract art-making. The way this quiltwork is put together creates its very own abstract spatial activity. It takes you away, as you look, from where you thought you were when you started. The content is right on the surface, fully in view, yet tantalisingly hidden from simple sight.
Written by Robin Greenwood
(with some argument from Sarah Greenwood. I like the opening quote; Sarah thinks it is superfluous – this craft is already art.)
April 2021
* One of the best books on American quilts is “Unconventional & Unexpected – American Quilts Below The Radar” by Roderick Kiracofe, where there are a couple of similarly-organised quilts, plus many other types in a variety of spatial inventiveness.
“Songsmith/Slide”, Robin Greenwood, 2020, oil on canvas, 165x135cm.
“Yclept”, Alexandra Harley, c.1996, wood, H.69cm
“Freeloader”, Harry Hay, 2019, acrylic on paper, 32x30cm. (framed)
Untitled 1, Steven Walker, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 100x140cm.
“Oranges and Lemons”, Anne Smart, 1986, oil on canvas, 61x92cm.
“Canoeing to Kansas”, Sarah Greenwood, hand-sewn quilt, 1991-92, 205x201cm.
Untitled, Robin Greenwood, 2018, steel, H.73cm.
“Turnberry Rough”, Alan Gouk, 1987, oil on canvas, 46x66cm.
If you are unable to visit, full viewing online will be available towards the end of the exhibition.
Some notes on form, meaning and interpretation in abstract art.
1.
The previous heads of two of London’s biggest art institutions, Nick Serota of Tate and Neil MacGregor of the British Museum, were reported in 2009 to be in agreement on the future of our art galleries and museums: “Our future lies on the web, say museum heads”, published in the Guardian, 8.7.09. One can see the attraction; the on-line world-wide dissemination of information about the British Museum’s historic collection; and the ease of access to Tate’s interests in conceptual and contemporary art, which are on the whole compatible with new forms of media. When it comes to painting and sculpture, however, the value of the internet tumbles to almost zero, becoming mainly a source of information regarding background and times of physical access to such art, with some dubious backlit reproductions. No mention was made by either party of the shortcomings of not being in the physical presence of the work itself – disadvantages which make finding meaning in visual art close to impossible.
Serota was further quoted on the Guardian website as saying of Tate that “In the past, there has been an imperfect communication between visitors and curators. The possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now.” If there was to be a “communication” involved in any interaction with Tate gallery, should it not have been between the artist and the visitor? Is not the curator’s job surely and simply to facilitate that process, rather than be the source of it, or indeed even editorialise it? What’s more, in the case of painting and sculpture, the physical presence of the work itself is a primary requirement for the meaning of the work to be “communicated”, if that is the right word. What is certain is that the meaning of a work of visual art is not to be found on a label next to the work, or on a website, or indeed in any kind of contextualisation or mediation or interpretation. The meaning is in the work, which is the point of visual art.
To quote the late, great Bryan Robertson, “Art is many things but it is not primarily a means of communication as we normally understand that utility. There are easier and certainly less laborious ways for one person to express an idea directly to another than by painting a picture or making a sculpture. In itself, the action would be unreliable. Conversely, no written or printed document, film or TV program, the proper media for communication in the usual sense, could ever convey with any compensatory degree of accuracy the true imaginative quality of Piero’s Baptism of Christ or The Moroccans of Matisse. For media is an intermediary device: concerned with visual art, it uses inaccurate or irrelevant language; finally it involves falsification.”
2.
Modernism during and since the 1950’s, comprising of the reductivist formalism of Abstract Expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, and the post-modern anti-form conceptualism in all its many variations which eclipsed it in the 1970’s, can be seen as the two opposing sides of a single inevitable trend towards the literalism of our age. Even the eminent Clement Greenberg, great modernist critic though he was, seemed to favour the literal condition of flatness as an ambition for advanced painting, though stopping short of endorsing Minimalism. He was perhaps correct in identifying flatness as painting’s default state, though it is hard to see how this supposed purity makes it better than the compelling condition of a fully integrated plastic and spatial complexity. Similarly, Anthony Caro, an artist highly favoured by Greenberg, and the creator of much of the best sculpture of the 1960’s, was an early champion of the notion that anything can be sculpture. On the anti-form side, Joseph Beuys declared everyone to be an artist (In direct contradiction to which it is interesting to note how his cult of personality is his biggest legacy). Whilst one might enjoy the sentiments of both views, neither of these truisms has benefitted visual art. Neither achieved real freedom for sculpture, which was presumably their worthy aim; on the contrary, they helped to drag sculpture down into the maelstrom of literalism where most of it now languishes. “Literal” being an antonym of “creative”, it is the destroyer of a properly-visual content in art. Yet literalist art, despite not really being properly visual, has attained recent popularity because it so easily begets a superficial and popular explanation of itself, in the manner of an everyman’s interpretation. This is generally thought to be “what it means”.
3.
Whilst some of the freedoms won for sculpture in the Sixties were real, they are easily confused and conflated with the literal state of “objecthood” which so many sculptors took on board at the time, often by simply calling anything they did “sculpture”. These freedoms can now be seen to be bound up with the much more difficult and complex task of finding a fuller, more imaginative three-dimensionality. The potential for such a truly liberated abstract sculpture is huge, and the possibilities for new and expanded plastic and spatial values so potent that weak form will not contain them; nor will illustration, nuance, mild sensibilities, good taste, literalism or conceptualism – or even, I might add, figuration. All these can be left behind. But complexity, uncertainty, and difficulty come with these freedoms.
As far as painting is concerned, I incline to the rather anti-Greenbergian notion that the convincing realisation of deep “plastic” space is painting’s greatest accomplishment. I’m thinking maybe of the best of Titian and Tintoretto, Rubens, Poussin, Constable and Pissarro (see especially the late series of the quays and bridges at Rouen); indeed, there are many painters of serious ambition who have, since the spatial gains of the early Renaissance, imaginatively assimilated the horizontal spaces of the real world as places where the structures of painting could rewardingly operate, and in ways which meant that the picture plane did not dominate. The best painting has often been an invitation to imaginatively “roam around”, albeit with the reality-check of the passage across and through the medium itself always held in close conjunction. (It is noticeable in some landscape painting how physically arresting a divergence from the norm of horizontality can be – see Pissarro again with The Climb, Rue de la Côte-du-Jalet, Pontoise, or Constable’s Dedham Vale, or the big Rubens View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, all of which establish horizontal spaces only to upset them with the physical jolt of a change of level or incline). It might be reasonably argued that figurative painting since the early Renaissance has rarely benefited from flattening of any description – think of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, full of vertical planes, yes, and yet primarily dependent upon the horizontal interaction and separation of its players and us for its structure and meaning. The same might be said of another masterpiece, Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
There is no doubt that the best figurative painting of the past is spatially more adventurous than the best abstract painting of the present (so far). We should take note of that, and not, therefore, make retrospective judgements on the plastic and spatial achievements of the figurative painting of the past using rather feeble “formal” or compositional criteria often employed in conventional evaluations of art. These have more to do with good design, taste or second-rate art theory. These weak criteria cannot be asked to function as some sort of codebreaker for ambitious painting. Tintoretto, Constable et al were into something far more audacious.
4.
Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, if we turned our backs on all of the shallowly-entertaining sophistry of world art, we could try a more challenging experiment altogether. We could ditch all that literalist thinking and instead focus on the creation of new, robust, imaginative three-dimensional abstract form, ambitious and unfettered. Such a change would be fraught, not least for abstract painters who have clung to a two-dimensionality of ever-diminishing returns for the sake of – what? Purity, clarity, a complacency of thought about the potential of painting, at the expense of serious content? Difficult for abstract sculptors too, who cling to “the object” as their excuse for three-dimensionality. Difficult all round, but it would be an electrifying development.
So, how do we go about making new, more three-dimensional, more imaginative abstract form? How do we go about making abstract art as complex and particular as the best figurative painting of the past five hundred years? And indeed, how did we miss the fact that great painting was always very specific; the best figurative painting really does buttonhole physicality somehow, doesn’t it? How did we let abstract art drift into vagueness and generalisation? The business of making complex abstract painting or sculpture now is a long way removed from the spontaneous abandon and carefree self-expression which constituted the popular myth about being an abstract artist in the second half of the 20th century. That idea still has romantic appeal, but it will no longer suffice to produce progressive results. Having tip-toed all around the edges of abstract art, we now have to plumb its depths. Our modern abyss which we must face up to is the amorphous and vast complexity of possibilities, the endless potential, of empty abstract space. Having ventured there, we will have wondered if perhaps the very emptiness denotes order (see Minimalism again; it still seems a good option sometimes, but only for a moment, until you get bored). There is not even an extant tradition of painting and sculpture in there to pick up on. Yet, that will turn out to be a good thing if we are resolved upon creativity and not literalism. We must enter the abyss; and we must return with our sanity intact and our imaginations loaded with new “form-meanings” which can extend the disciplines of painting and sculpture into the future. We can’t any longer trust the “next new thing” like we did in the 1960’s; what we need is a better new thing altogether. We need progress. The artist has to put him or herself through a set of encounters, of chances, of coincidences, within the constraints of their chosen medium, but without limit to their scope or duration, that show the appearance of interconnectedness, of transformative visual relationships, of structures that mimic thought, that run in parallel with human consciousness. Each artist must find his or her own way to do this, but collectively these endeavours must answer to the future of visual art. The forms, the spaces, the elements that go to make up painting and sculpture are subject to the same recalcitrant and obstinate physicality that we, as human beings, are. We can get ill, we can get lame, we can die. These are real things, and the elements of real painting and sculpture are subject to these conditions too. They reflect what we are. Putting oneself in the way of such discovery and loss is where the hard work is. Chance plays a part, but persistence does too, particularly in dealing with the “loss” part of it. If we can get past that, then the form of the work itself can begin to look spontaneous and uninhibited, rather than simply being demonstrative of a literally spontaneous process. Then we can contemplate the true lucid order and inventiveness of the unconscious. We can feel the thrill of looking into the abyss; but our gaze will be contemplative and steady, our vision measured.
5.
If we can indeed make such new and properly abstract work, we will need to look after it, and exhibit it properly, and look at it properly – that will be very important, and we might have to learn how to do it all over again. We will have to find strategies to enable us to be in the physical presence of the work in order to see it “in the present”. We will have to avoid the ubiquitous tendency in contemporary culture to historicise events, actions and ideas almost immediately, to ascribe interpretations in an instant. All art has, in the past hundred years or so, been re-mediated and recontextualised endlessly; first by books and photography (in blogs like this!), then by film and television, now by the internet and mobile technology. This puts a distance between us and art, and few people seem to believe they can trust their own feelings and responses enough – just watch people in galleries now, who, having taken the trouble to turn up, take a mobile phone shot of the art (then photograph the label) and walk away: they cannot trust themselves to take away in their head anything of the experience of the art itself; nor do they have time to discover what is real in the work.
We are encouraged to believe, by artists, galleries, curators, critics and commentators – and indeed, directors of institutions even – that in accessing images of art via these new media and reading an accompanying text, that we can get a measure of the work. This may be true for art history, where the study of art is about context, and it may work for conceptual art, where the content of the work is literal or literary, but it will not work for real painting and sculpture, no matter what lengths are taken to elucidate it, even if the writing about the art is good. It misses the point of personal contact with such art. It misses out on that moment of entering the same actual space as a great work of art and being gripped to the core of one’s central nervous system by the physical interaction; it misses out on spending time with the work and unpicking that initial encounter and beginning to understand how and why the thing was put together in the way it was; and then it misses out on being able to imaginatively reconstruct the experience with a greater insight than before, such that one can walk away from the work with something very distinctly gained: not an image on a phone, but its meaning – or at least a first go at it. It is easy to think that we have seen a work of art by looking at a photograph or a screen image, but rather hard to remind ourselves every time that this is just not true. Looking at some form of reproduction is now so easy to do that it often seems too big an exertion to experience art unmediated by the “inaccurate or irrelevant language”, to quote Bryan Robertson again, of the media. We really do have to make that effort, though, if we are to experience what Robertson so cogently described as “a convergence of circumstances which enforce an unprecedented act of recognition”.
We can’t, of course, avoid the progress of the internet; but, despite seeming incommensurate with expectations of modern life and the progressive virtualisation of the arts, the continuing value of painting and sculpture will not be denied. We cannot doubt the power and excitement of the best work of Titian or Tintoretto, Rubens or Constable, Cézanne or Picasso, when we experience them for real. And of course we need good new art too; we always need new art, not least to keep alive and extend our understanding of visual form and meaning. For art to be real and free and meaningful, it needs to be experienced in a manner largely liberated of interpretation, whether intellectual or technological. Anything that mediates between you and the work changes and diminishes the nature of that experience. Visual art is not a language, and its meaning is not, therefore, translatable into words. Visual art is, as Robertson says, a revelation.
Robin Greenwood, July 2009, with amendments July 2010 and April 2021
All of these were done in the last couple of months and all in the same way – an old painting covered up with Payne´s grey, new paint applied/scraped with a palette knife, here and there disrupted with a brush.
Although none of them are intentionally one or the other, for me they range from obviously figurative to more or less abstract. For me again, the more spatial they are, the more figurative and the more figurative, the more spatial.
And the more spatial they are, the more engaging too – not because the figuration is in any way interesting (this is what I mean with “bland figuration”) but because the viewer´s projection of virtual space enables (or drags along) a simultaneous projection of subjective feeling, modulated by the surface shapes and colours. The more abstract, less spatial paintings tend to lack that element of “recognition”, not of figures but of some kind of subjective truth. Or that´s my thinking at the moment.
Lockdown has allowed a period of concentrated activity. There is no end result, like exhibiting. It’s just to see where the language of Abstract Painting takes me. I give myself a lot of leeway, as I’m working in an extremely concentrated fashion. I drive up the same lane, past Walter Raleigh’s house every day. I drive slowly and take everything in, looking at the colour, light and shade /a la Cezanne. Then I get to my farm studio and close the door. I stretch up a canvas quite beautifully. I have been a carpenter in NY. Then I stretch a heavy weight canvas over the frame, which has an inch and a half edge. The 5ft by 7ft canvasses are the ones featured here, and I make each one afresh, beautifully stretched anew each time. Then I really try not to plan too much. Improvisation is the key, but inevitably I make a few notes. I then have the weight of paint on the surface. I’m aware of staining technique from Louis and Frankenthaler. I enjoy that, but realise its limitations. Changes or additions can be great or awful, according to choices made. However I’m free to paint out what I don’t like, in a varied way. I’m always varying the surface which I find crucial to a visually exciting picture.
If, on the way towards constructing a sculpture, perhaps starting with two or three pieces of cut and/or shaped steel or wood, joined together in a way that suggests some physical pressure or activity or structure; then is that, in itself, unchangeably and definitely either figurative or abstract, one or the other? Or is it mutable? Is it, after the making of it, an act that can have clarity only once, or can it be expedited in either form, and at different times? Does it need the context of the larger organisation that will include its identity in the whole sculpture?
What about joining these parts together without physicality, just “putting” them together, offering them as spatially conjoined in some way, just fixed together by what is between them (with a weld or a nail?), but nothing further in terms of physicality? Does abstract sculpture need a physical “context” for its content? Is it, perhaps in any case, not a question that can be answered before a great majority of the whole sculpture is built?
There seems here lots of ambiguity; but then again, if you exactly specify the joining together of the parts of the sculpture in order to avoid figuration, there is the likelihood of losing any degree of fluid spatiality… something which seems essential for abstract sculpture to be alive and flourishing.
I stated in Part 2 that the ‘ABOUT’ of a truly abstract sculpture, its ‘content’, would have to be redefined if there was to be any real success beyond that already achieved within its history (of around a century). I also claimed that the only parallel that it (new abstract sculpture) could look to for the conveyance of significant aesthetic feeling, was to be found in how music generates deeply felt human emotion through totally ‘abstract’ means; its ‘content’, therefore, being totally devoid of representational back up.
It generates emotion entirely through these abstract means. Which brings us to the ‘means’ of sculpture.
The means of modern sculpture, that of the last century, involved either some form of quasi or suggestive representation, or, as an alternative, a turning to and associating with, other physical and object worlds for identity and ‘meaning’. The common perception, at present, amongst the audience for sculpture, is that these conditions are satisfactory and laudable.
One has only to turn to the net where one can find literally hundreds of examples of what is called ‘abstract’ sculpture conforming to these parameters and, consequently, not really being ‘abstract’ at all.
Noela James Bewry, untitled No. 5, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 100x162cm.
Some time ago I was invited by Myles Corley, the gallery director of Linden Hall Studio in Deal, Kent, to curate an exhibition of new abstract painting, chosen from my own personal point of view. I thought it was a good chance to consider what did or did not qualify as “abstract”, and to examine the activities of painters whom I thought were moving forwards in original ways. It was intended to publish the short essay that follows as part of a catalogue for the show, along with reproductions of paintings by the ten chosen artists, all to coincide with the opening of the exhibition on 4th April 2020. Instead, due to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, I’m publishing the essay and the ten reproductions here on Abcrit.
This essay was written before I had seen much of the work, and was not intended as an analysis of any of the content in the paintings to be hung. More than anything, it was aimed to demonstrate my own enthusiasms for differences and divergences ongoing in original abstract painting. I was genuinely excited by the prospect of seeing some of these very different works together for the first time. The exhibition will hopefully still take place before too long. In the meantime, perhaps we can begin here to discuss the differences, achievements and ambitions of this work, with an example from each of the artists. There will be thirty or so paintings that will get hung eventually in the actual exhibition, but for the time being, we are reproducing here one work each from the ten artists: Noela James Bewry; John Bunker; EC; myself; Harry Hay; Patrick Jones; Dean Piacentini; John Pollard; Hilde Skilton; and Stephen Walker.
I’m hoping the artists themselves are fit and well, and (in their current self-isolation) will contribute to a discussion of their work on-line, along with anyone else who might find it makes for an interesting dialogue. Reproductions are never as good as the real thing, but it’s a start.
With thanks to all the artists for their enthusiasm in putting together this show; and I look forward to the real thing in Deal, when it happens.
In arguing, passionately, as I have been, for a truly abstract future sculpture, one has to face up to the fact of the ‘content’ of such works being totally devoid of the sort of emotional visual reactions to it that all traditional sculpture had; i.e. recognition, illustration, naturalistic representation, power, glory, sexual titillation, religious feeling, and so on.
What has commonly been called ‘humanism’ in emotional content as conveyed by a work of art, has been erased from the canon of ‘modern’ sculptural form in favour of objective statements of physical fact as form, conditioned largely by the materials in which they have been worked. This has more often than not been achieved either by a vague ‘reference’ (in the forms) to a recognisable source, or most frequently in recent times, by the ‘borrowing’ and adapting to sculpture, of the physical context of other related physical forms, architecture, engineering and object making in general.
This latter overlapping of what sculpture ‘does’ in relation to what other physical forms ‘do’, has caused a sort of crisis in sculpture’s identity; in that the lack of the former humanism has alienated a large section of sculpture’s ‘audience’ in the general public from maintaining any sort of aesthetic empathy associated directly with sculpture. Tragically, sculpture, as an art form, has been, as a consequence, trivialised and marginalised.
