Totality (2)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach.

Barnett Newman, Cathedra, 1951, oil and Magna on canvas, 96 x 214 inches, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

First, an apology to Michael Schreyach and my readers: this is coming out much later than I had intended. The events of October and their aftermath seemed necessary to address as they were happening, and we had a death in the family on top of it. The dust jacket on my copy of Totality is battered from traveling in my backpack for months. But in fact, this is the kind of high-level art discussion that I intend to emphasize going forward. An announcement about that is coming soon. By request, the next book for ASBC will be less dense and available at a lower price point, but for the book after that, I may select something just as hairy, philosophically if not economically. For the time being, here are some responses to Chapter 2 of Totality, organized by section title.

The Beginning

Schreyach has hit upon an effect of abstract painting, in which the viewer is invited to feel what it would have been like to make the marks. It is a somatic invitation to dance along with the painter’s working body. This is perhaps an even more significant difference between gestural abstraction and illusionistic painting than the illusionism or lack thereof themselves. Page 48:

Closely inspecting the surface to either side of the orange band reveals fine strands of paint, likely made with a single brush wide enough to be unevenly loaded with pigment so that Newman could release the paint in varied densities depending on the pressure of his touch. Directly below the truncated band, he used a smaller brush to fill in an irregularly shaped, opaque passage. Its trailing, curvilinear marks suggest that he made them by rolling the brush or rotating his wrists as he pulled it down the plane, causing the involutes to appear as if turning inside out, or toward one another on coiled trajectories.

An involute is a “curve traced by a point as if it were on a taut string being unwound from another curve.”

The Picture Plane

Page 52:

[A] picture plane, while notionally prior to the painter’s activity, is not a given fact about paintings, nor is it guaranteed to exist for all flat, painted surfaces…. “Picture plane,” rather, names an enigmatic aspect of a painting’s appearance or self-display. Intangible, it escapes indication and even strict definition, as [Clement] Greenberg’s elliptical terminology demonstrates: in his description, the picture plane appears as a mode of flatness that is “recaptured,” “reconstructed,” or “reinvoked.”

That the picture plane was not reducible to the surface of a painting would never have occurred to me, and I’ve read a lot of Greenberg. Schreyach cites Greenberg’s 1948/1957 essay on Kandinsky in Art and Culture, which I pulled down from the shelf and reread:

Cubism, according to the internal evidence, furnished [Kandinsky] with the clearest indication of this possibility; but the nonrepresentational tendency was a by-product and not the aim of its reconstruction of the picture surface. Kandinsky’s failure to discern this led him to conceive of abstractness of a question down at bottom of illustration, and therefore all the more as an end rather than a means to the realization of an urgent vision—which is all that abstractness as such, like illustration as such, can properly be.

Schreyach elucidates that the picture plane’s “‘flatness’ is of a different order than that of the actually flat canvas: that is why, to both [Hans] Hofmann and Greenberg, it is flatness ‘re-created.’” A footnote offers that Greenberg revised his own thinking about the problem between revisions of another essay, obliged as he was to account for “altogether untactile definitions of experience.”

This is at once obvious and profound. While I wasn’t looking for Totality to solve any of my painting problems, it pertains to some indecision I’ve been suffering about surface in my own work, the description of which would be too long a digression, but related to whether the viscosity of coats I’m putting down is serving the goals of the picture.

Symbolism

I am reluctant to attribute more than the usual share of wisdom to Native Americans. The idea that they have particular experiential access to the workings of the cosmos strikes me as reductive, precious, and fetishistic. I assume instead that they’re like we are, in that a few of them have extraordinary insights and the remainder are just trying to get through the day like the rest of us.

The notion of the Native American in supernal harmony with nature and free by birthright from the taint of whiteness has profoundly influenced art world progressivism, however, so I’m additionally suspect about Newman’s interest in the Kwakiutl.¹ Nevertheless I accept that they provided a contrasting tradition of symbolism to the European one. Page 59: Newman “praised their artists for creating symbols, ‘abstract shapes’ in his charged sense of the term, that ‘directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding.’” How this differs from Christian veneration of the cross is not clear to me, but suffice it to say that it informed Newman’s conception of the ideograph.

That leads to an interesting discussion of what, exactly, is a symbol, and why Newman was so captured by Kwakiutl imagery. Page 61:

Newman considered the “plasmic” or “ideographic” symbol to transcend the diminuitive form (“merely a symbol”) described by [Paul] de Man. His engagement with Pre-Columbian stone sculpture and Northwest Coast Indian art foregrounds the manner in which their abstract symbolism overcomes the alleged division of thought and reality: the living, abstract shape embodies, as it reveals, the “metaphysical pattern of life.”

Page 62:

The symbol, in this view, should be understood as advancing a proposition or idea about a unity or totality that it does not necessarily exemplify or manifest. And that view, by further extension, entails drawing a distinction between what the symbol is and what the symbol means.

Moment

Also page 62:

Greenberg offered… “The best modern painting, though it is mostly abstract painting, remains naturalistic in its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It refers to the structure of the given world both outside and inside human beings.” That is a potent revision of “abstraction” traditionally understood.

Darby, from the Aphorisms: “I have always felt that the much-discussed structure of Cézanne’s paintings and the cubist pictures that came out of them, which are so full of staccato impressionist marks, is really just a visible foundation for the living vibration that the structure supports.”

This leads to a differentiation between illusion, which captures visually how something feels, and illusionism, which captures how it looks. Again, an obvious distinction, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to me.

This section repeats something for us inattentive kids in the back of the class, on page 66: “Plasmic art is ‘philosophic.’ Plastic art is simply ‘decorative.’” I admit that at this point I understand the distinction but I don’t entirely appreciate its import. I think I’m much more patient with the idea of decoration as such than some of these original cats in the modernist circles, and don’t see it as a denigration. I’m less patient than they were with the idea that specific thoughts can inhere in a shape that doesn’t have some kind of common cultural reference. It’s one thing for the Kwakiutl to share an iconography that connects to religious wonder. It’s another for a handful of artists on Tenth Street painting incomprehensibly to the wider world to make claims of metaphysical import. But four more chapters are coming and I will give the argument its chance.

Impressionism

Speaking of impressionism, I didn’t appreciate that it had been so slighted as a source of modernism by the likes of Thomas Hess and the Museum of Modern Art more broadly. It’s the sort of nostrum that a curator might get lodged in his skull but an artist like Newman wouldn’t put up with. I understood that American abstraction had borrowed heavily from impressionism as soon as I saw de Kooning “landscapes” from the 1950s, but by then those paintings were forty years old and anyone who had a dog in that particular fight was long gone.

Laforgue

Newman made a serious if not entirely successful attempt to translate an essay by 19th-century literary critic Jules Laforgue. (Schreyach described it as “accomplished but still amateur.”) Laforgue’s condemnations of the “aestheticians” in the institutions reflected Newman’s complaints about the curatorial regime of his time, MoMA in particular. Laforgue called for the “suppression of schools, juries, medals” and for artists to reject the salons in favor of the “show windows of the art dealers.” He longed for a great, cleansing wave of commercialization to wash away the cliches.

Given the commercialization of visual art that exploded in 2002, which solved nothing aesthetically and created problems of its own, one might pity Laforgue. But I’m not sure he was wrong. A commercialization that gutted the institutions might have been salutary. Instead we got, 120 years after Laforgue’s manifesto, a commercialization that leveraged the institutions for credibility, resulting in what amounts to a system for laundering high-end luxury goods as shared cultural patrimony. Someone at this point will wag his finger at me and say that thus it ever was, but the aesthetic chasm between the aristocracy and the plebs is narrower regarding, say, Pissarro than Ugo Rondinone. The latter ending up in the museum does not accomplish the same as the former doing so.

Now one is tempted to long for a cleansing economic recession, though that will likely prove disappointing as well.

Greenberg in 1958

Greenberg, quoted on page 76:

[Newman exhibits] a particularly noble and candid splendor. His art is all statement, all content; and fullness of content can be attained through an execution that calls the least possible attention to itself…. [If] you look at and not into pictures… you will be aware of shaped emanations of color and light. This kind of painting has far more to do with Impressionism than with anything like Cubism or Mondrian.

There are a lot of jewels in this section, but I point to this one in defiance of a common but wholly wrong conception of Greenberg’s attitude toward content. Greenberg is often called a formalist or a practitioner of formal criticism, but that designation hinges on a distinction between form and content that Greenberg regarded as incoherent. I wrote an essay on this topic in which the dramatic foil is one John Yau.

There is also this on page 81, by Schreyach, and I present it for admiration:

[The] openness-that-absorbs-color-in-the-act-of-being-created-by-it must be of a different order than, and irreducible to, the canvas surface that does, in fact, support and in some cases appears to absorb pigment. Here, the paradoxical suggestion that openness is “almost” literally there to absorb the color, but is at once created by color, makes me want to say that Newman’s color-space advances, within an idiom abstract pictorial representation, a proposition—call it a thought or idea—about the conditions for creating meaning while creating it.

Conception

I have a Google Alert attached to “Clement Greenberg,” and Yau’s recent review of “David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991-2023” at Greene Naftali caused it to ring. As the gallery describes the show, Diao’s “experience of displacement has informed his career-long reckoning with the levers of power that govern the art world. The Newman paintings serve as a fitting introduction to his practice as a whole: as acts of homage that also question the canon—who it admits and who is excluded.” It’s the kind of exhibition I wouldn’t review even if I was invited to pan it. I can’t stand charts presented as visual art. To my mind no version of this would work, so there would be no value to my observations about why it doesn’t. But Yau, via Diao, plays into the present analysis of Newman.

John Yau is a racist in the same respect that an adherent of the views and practices of Jainism is a Jainist, or—more analogously—those of Satanism a Satanist. Identitarian art criticism of the kind employed by Yau requires significant meaning to inhere in race. Bob Marley sang, “Until the color of a man's skin / is of no more significance than the color of his eyes / Me say war.” For Yau, on the contrary, race is explanatory, ultimately so—once he exposes the racial rationale of the work, or merely declares it present, he deems his analysis mostly complete.

It is possible to over-identify with one’s own ethnic cohort. In Yau’s case, this means aping a pattern of excessive regard that he believes white critics lavished upon white artists. This causes him to fawn over Asian artists in a manner unbecoming an art critic, in much the same way every time: not only are they engaged in a project supposedly made significant by their race, but they are doing so in defiance of some canard of Western artistic thought. Invariably, Yau supplies no examples of who is stating such canards as fact, and one struggles to think of who it might be. The beliefs are only held, it seems, by the rather inadequate white people living in Yau’s imagination.

A recurring trope in Yau’s racism is the Evil Jewish Critic, thwarting Asian success in the arts in all places and times. Sure enough:

In his diverse explorations, Diao exposes a deeply held American art world prejudice, which is that the pursuit of the optical precludes an interest in cultural upbringing and biography. This is perhaps why Jack Bankowsky, writing for Artforum (March 1990), felt compelled to characterize Diao’s career as an “extended bout with abstraction [that] constitutes one of the longer, stranger sagas in the annals of recent painting.” Diao’s bout with abstraction looks decidedly less strange when you realize that it preceded Kerry James Marshall’s engagement with Newman in paintings such as “Untitled, Red (If They Come in the Morning)” (2011).

If you want to understand what might irk the art world, you need only go to the exhibition David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991–2023 at Greene Naftali…

The nigh-34-year-old review is here. Bankowsky hardly seems irked. I would characterize the tone as nonplussed. He is not at all interested in “the optical,” and notes that “Malevich may have come to stand for art’s utopian hopes while Matisse has gone down in history as the famously unapologetic bourgeois sensualist, but the best message of Diao’s paintings is the call to consider these myths and how they figure and inform current artistic practices.” That would be another way of describing the redirection of viewer attention toward cultural upbringing. The difference in quality between Bankowsky’s essay from early 1990 and Yau’s from late 2023 exemplifies how thoroughly art criticism has tanked in the meantime.

We’re back to wondering who holds that “deeply held American art world prejudice.” The last section of Chapter 2 of Totality indicates that it was not even entertained by Diao’s subject, Newman (emphasis Schreyach’s):

To express, as a pictorial idea, the sensory and emotional dimensions of “thinking” is to offer a counter to a typical dogma prevailing in societies that privilege rationalization in all its forms: the presupposition of thought’s difference from, and even opposition to, making and feeling. If Newman’s emotional and symbolic expression remains unavailable to cognitive reflection—if it remains unthinkable—then his paintings will have failed in the communicative possibilities that he thought, and felt, they promised.

There is a significant implication to seeing Newman’s symbol as advancing an idea: what the symbol means has to do with what the painting is about, not how it is experienced.

To be scrupulously fair, Schreyach likewise cites no examples of who adheres to that “typical dogma.” He may be pointing to a phenomenon that contains the one described by Yau: an assumed contradiction between opticality/feeling and thought/content. But Newman’s work, as Schreyach explores astutely, relies upon facture, specifically of oil paint, even at its flattest and most monochromatic. Diao works squarely in the privilege of rationalization. Diao’s semi-homages to Newman in acrylics and screenprinting imply that he cannot simultaneously pursue the optical in a Newmanesque technical mode while exploring cultural upbringing in the conceptual manner that he’s attempting. If the prejudice described by Yau exists, Diao is affirming it. He has at least proven it true in his own case. I don’t view that as a defect in Diao’s work, but suspect that Yau is mischaracterizing it for the sake of ideology.²

Yau’s gloss on this work is patently rationalizing in that it doesn’t deal with feeling or symbol at all. It concludes, as Yau concludes repetitively, that the subject “is a major figure in art” and that “It is time we recognize and celebrate that.” And who would be recognized and celebrated as such already, the reader infers, if not for the Jack Bankowskys of the world.

There are, of course, pronounced tensions between materiality and illustrative content. But reducing this to an American art world prejudice, held by no one in particular, that they’re mutually exclusive contrasts Schreyach’s subtlety with Yau’s nastiness. It would have benefited Yau, on the occasion of the Diao exhibition, to spend time with Totality, which is the most important writing on Newman to emerge since that of Michael Fried. But that would have entailed attending to yet another superior intellect with a Jewy-looking name, and we know how Yau feels about that.

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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in.

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1. Kent Monkman, for one, built an art career around entertaining this spiritual failure among progressive whites, who don’t know their own rich religious traditions and wouldn’t dream of pursuing them with enough vigor to experience the transmundane. A shaman is less a product of ethnic predisposition than a willingness to put so much tobacco up his ass that he hallucinates. What the mystics of Europe and the Levant did was no less extraordinary.

Monkman’s two murals commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art picture Native Americans helping the beleaguered peoples of the rest of the earth out of the water and onto the safety of land, and into a boat steered by Monkman’s womanly alter ego past a rocky island where white men in military armor cartoonishly brandish firearms.

Monkman’s tribe, the Cree, survived for centuries by pillaging the Inuit and did so with increasing brutality once they obtained European rifles. The rapine finally stopped when French colonists showed up in the region in significant numbers in the late 18th century and offered the braves day jobs. I have no interest in Monkman’s unfounded moralizing, expressed as it is through a European painting idiom made possible by Photoshop.

2. Yau’s claim that Diao is “Eschewing the postmodern strategies of citation and parody” is as hallucinatory as anything witnessed by that tobacco-stuffed shaman. An artist with a whole series of paintings that reference the career of Barnett Newman is eschewing citation?