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reviews late liberties
LAte Liberties
John Connelly Presents, new york
12 July – 24 august
work’s stretcher bars, leaving a fringe of canvas onto which the painted
geometries often bleed, thereby materialising something like an out-of-
focus depth of field just behind the picture plane.
Together with Elizabeth Neel’s The Theory and Picked Over, two
paintings that demonstrate Neel’s comfort with paint’s full capacities as a
viscous solution, Fisher’s crystalline works describe one axis of Late Liberties:
artists manipulating paint as a corollary of brute nature (in this case, mineral
on the one hand, organic on the other). A second axis is described by two
positions on the image of technology: one advanced, as with Jeff Elrod’s
Untitled painting-as-digital-drawing and Michael Zahn’s in and out (not up
and down) iconography of the computer ‘desktop’; the other archaic, as
with Tauba Auerbach’s L and Dana Frankfort’s GUTS (yellow/gold), both
of which hypostasise the atoms of language.
The question now is not whether one axis is more successful than
another, but what kind of artistic field or terrain these axes, when taken
together, describe or delineate. Or more succinctly: what kind of abstraction
is this?
It is certainly not the kind of which Clement Greenberg was thinking
when he turned to the figure of the ‘tacked-up canvas’ as the limit case of
abstract painting. Such a thought issued from an understanding of artistic
modernism as a process of stripping down and laying bare, an exercise of the
mind through which one might break through to pure forms unburdened
not so much by matter but by content. There is a different figure we could
turn to, however: ‘When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form,
a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the
egg.’ The statement is Pablo Picasso’s. And between Greenberg’s ‘tacked-
up canvas’ and Picasso’s ‘egg’, we might do well to consider the egg. Not
The organisers of Late Liberties, the summer group exhibition at John because it is the more successful figure of the modernist project, a purer
Connelly Presents, curated by Augusto Arbizo and John Connelly himself, form, or a more irreducible essence, but because it is less so.
have some claims to make about contemporary abstract painting. They One does not ‘arrive inevitably at the egg’ from ‘successive
hold that ‘abstraction’ went on hiatus at some point in the early 1990s and, eliminations’ when beginning with a portrait (and by ‘portrait’ I think we may
as with all such aesthetic absences, a whole generation of new artists, not take Picasso to mean not only the image but also the idea of someone);
to mention curators and dealers, grew fond of it in the interim. There are one arrives at the egg – ‘inevitably’, as it were – when one turns back the
two problems with this outlook, however: first and foremost, it isn’t history, clock on that image and idea: we might characterise the difference as the
it’s fashion; and second, ‘abstraction’ never went on hiatus: yes, modernist one between a being’s ‘essence’ and its ‘conception’: the one is reductive,
abstraction may now seem ‘outmoded’ (a favoured term), but that’s because the other, generative. And even then the egg is not a pure form but a pure
it was modernist, not because it was abstract. potential, a multiplicity, which is a different kind of ‘abstraction’ altogether.
As an exhibition, though, Late Liberties does demonstrate that Does this second notion of ‘abstraction’ (as potential, as multiplicity)
the organisers have some understanding of this distinction. As Arbizo offer a productive way of thinking about, understanding or working through
explains, “What I see in Late Liberties… are artists who have a daily painting the kind of contemporary painting on offer in Late Liberties? For that
practice, one that somehow manifests into a kind of painting that is defined, answer we will have to wait, I think; for just as the reductionism that came
by context, as abstraction.” That “by context” is an important caveat, to characterise modernist abstraction had its roots in the social, scientific
conceding that abstraction, as is so often the case today, remains in play and technological upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
by the sheer force of something like semantic inertia. What Arbizo and the generative abstractions in which this new art may indeed take part have
Connelly suggest, then, is that there should be other ways to think about only begun to grow. Jonathan T.D. Neil
their artists’ practices.
First among those practices is Kim Fisher’s. Her Set 55 and Damaged
(pink), 46 (all works 2007) offer signal examples of Fisher’s exacting, hard-
edged but irregular geometries of paint set off against the pristine duct
above: kim Fisher, Damaged (pink), 46, 2007,
oil on linen, 213 x 191 cm (with fringe).
of thick, untouched linen. That linen itself remains ‘untucked’ behind each Courtesy John Connelly Presents, new york
Artreview 148
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 2 4/9/07 12:21:51
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