[Debate] Empire & art

Mon Jun 1 08:14:01 BST 2009

[Of interest are first few paras re CIA, abstract expressionism and  
alienation ....]

  The Sunday Times (UK)
May 31, 2009
Saatchi Gallery's abstract American show

Waldemar Januszczak

Ever since I discovered that, during the cold war, the CIA played an  
active role in the promotion of abstract expressionist art around the  
world, I have unfailingly applied what I call the CIA test whenever I  
encounter a fresh example of American abstraction. It’s a simple  
procedure. You just stand in front of the picture and ask yourself:  
what is this picture telling me about America?

The CIA supported abstract expressionism because artists such as  
Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko appeared, in the  
1950s, to represent values that the commies could never hope to  
understand: a man’s right to paint whatever he wants, whenever he  
wants, in whatever style he chooses. The reality was, of course, more  
complicated. While nobody can deny that the abstract expressionists  
were expressing themselves, the things they were expressing were  
troublesome and dark. Rothko committed suicide. Pollock killed himself  
in a drunken car crash. Newman and Franz Kline died from heart attacks  
and crummy lifestyles. All of them were neurotic and plagued. In all  
their cases, abstraction was the quickest route to the huge lake of  
dark stuff slopping around inside their battered American psyches.

If the CIA knew as much about alienation as it knew about propaganda,  
it would certainly have thought twice about promoting abstract  
expressionism as democracy’s house style. But the bigger point here,  
and the one that gets us to the disappointing show that has opened at  
the Saatchi Gallery, is that abstraction depicts its world as  
accurately as figuration. When you look at a writhing Pollock worm  
pit, you immediately sense the restlessness and disorder of post-war  
America. And if the KGB was really smart, it, too, would have promoted  
Pollock’s art around the globe. I can see the poster now: “Comrade, is  
this really your dream?”

Saatchi’s show gathers together a squad of painters and sculptors who  
are supposed to represent the new wave of American abstraction. The  
catalogue spouts some annoying guff about them embodying an uncertain  
mood that has entered the American psyche since 9/11 — “America has  
shifted beyond anyone’s wildest preconceptions” — but the truth is  
that this bunch was fully formed long before 9/11. Most are in their  
thirties and forties; only a few qualify as spring chickens. These are  
Reagan babies. And the default atmosphere here is not one of national  
remembrance or cultural reassessment, but the same old American mood  
of gimme more. Applying the CIA test to them, I unhappily conclude  
that American art has regressed to the nursery stage.

Some of the art here is so stupid, it doesn’t even know it is not  
abstract. The artist who calls himself, so pretentiously, Carter, and  
just Carter, fills his pictures with heads: scores of them, crudely  
scrawled in black on white, one crammed above another, some in  
profile, some full on, some with eyes, some with ears. Heads, heads  
everywhere. Carter, my boy, since you are now 39, it is time you  
learnt a terrible truth about life. Heads are not abstract.

Jonas Wood is even less abstract than Carter. Whichever way you tip  
his carefully detailed street scene of a typical small-town suburb, it  
remains a carefully detailed street scene of a typical small-town  
suburb. I suppose what is intended is a return visit to that bleak  
middle America that so fascinated Edward Hopper. But where Hopper  
found lassitude and ennui clogging the arteries of the American dream,  
Wood finds nothing. Zero. Nada. His art has the emotional depth of a  
cornflakes packet.

The sculptors dotted about the display are usually as guilty as the  
painters of not being abstractionists. Matt Johnson gives us a life- 
sized Beethoven banging away at a grand piano, created, origami-style,  
by carefully folding up a lurid blue tarpaulin. It’s clever enough and  
fun, but it does show a man at a piano. Johnson, one of the livelier  
presences in the show, has also carved a realistic-looking apple that  
seems from a distance to have had large chunks bitten out of it. Only  
when you peer carefully do you notice the mysterious staircase  
spiralling up around the core and leading to the centre of the pomme.  
Weird.

So much of the imagery here is so blatantly figurative that my advice  
to you it is to forget entirely the fact that the show is called  
Abstract America and to view it instead as a random gathering of fresh- 
to-the-market American artists who took Charles Saatchi’s fancy.  
Seeing it that way does not make it a better exhibition, but at least  
every step of the journey will cease to test your glottochronological  
grasp of English. The point is, if this selection is in any way an  
accurate representation of the current state of American art, American  
art is in deep cultural doo-doo. An inability to differentiate between  
abstraction and figuration is the least of its problems.

More serious than any lexical shortcomings is a truly tragic slippage  
of seriousness and purpose. As a baby-boomer myself, I fully  
understand the urge to bring some youthful buoyancy to the making of  
art. Among Picasso’s greatest lessons was his superb disregard for  
piety. But being youthful and being uneducated, slackerish, unfocused,  
dumb, disjointed, casual, derivative, facile and crude are not the  
same thing. The lack of joined-up thinking here is scary.

Kirsten Stoltmann, in the crassest of nonabstract visual puns, shows  
us a naked woman spraying her pubic hair red, next to a piece of  
tumbleweed that has been painted silver, in an artwork called, yes,  
Spray Bush. Stephen G Rhodes gives us a sculpture entitled Ssspecific  
Object, which consists of a rubber snake that has swallowed a box.  
Chris Martin paints some large black blobs that vaguely resemble vinyl  
LPs on a wall, and calls his picture In Memory of James Brown  
“Godfather of Soul”.

One thing the exhibition is right about is the overwhelming influence  
of the digital age on these immature probings. The days when American  
artists were instinctively in touch with the hugeness and variety of  
their homeland are so long gone. Has anyone here stepped away from  
their computer in recent years? These are viewpoints shaped entirely  
by Twitter updates and a Wiki-education. The entire show resounds to  
the click, click, click of cutting and pasting. The lack of original  
insights, the flatness of textures and interests, the absence of  
meaningful narratives and purposeful compositions — all of it points  
to a world-view that has been sampled rather than experienced.

In the 13 galleries of relentless American twitter, only two and a  
half presences stand out. The half is Amy Sillman, who gets a huge  
gallery to herself and duly looks stretched. As with many of these  
exhibitors, Sillman’s territory is the no man’s land between  
abstraction and figuration. The initial belief that you are looking at  
pale and sensitive abstract painting gives way to the suspicion of  
sampling as you notice a familiar figure here, a resonant seascape  
there. Sillman has actually been borrowing her examples from other  
artists — notably Philip Guston — and her art can therefore be  
understood as a reworking of a reworking of a copy.

Among the sculptors, Peter Coffin impresses, just as he did in the  
regrettable Tate Triennial, where the brilliant light-shows he created  
around the Tate’s own holdings managed to turn old masters into new  
ones: who ever imagined there was such a thing as a 21st-century  
Hogarth? In this show, Coffin’s prodigious powers of reinvention are  
memorably displayed in an extra-large spiral staircase shaped into a  
never-ending circle; and a huge hand, banged together from chicken  
wire and two-by-twos, which has crossed its fingers to form a  
particularly rickety version of the Lotto logo. With good luck like  
this, who needs bad luck?

The other stand-out exhibitor is our old friend Kristin Baker, who has  
already been presented to us as a young American of note in the  
Saatchi Gallery’s last selection of new American art, in 2006. I liked  
her then, I like her now. Baker’s father was an amateur Nascar driver,  
and his daughter grew up with the howl of V8s in her ear and the flash  
of rushing logos on her retina. These noisy teenage excitements are  
what she still wishes to share with us. Unusually, though, among  
younger American artists, she also appears to have a decent grounding  
in art history, and her paintings are inescapably reminiscent of  
Italian futurism. Filled with flashing light effects and tangible  
sensations of speed, her art seems to lift you up and dip you in the  
Nascar experience. Her more recent works are gentler and more poetic  
in mood, but the final impression remains that you are gazing at  
something very exciting through very delicate crystal glasses.

Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture is at the Saatchi  
Gallery, SW3, until September 13; waldemar.tv

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