Well, each generation tends to see its coming of age moment as the last great event before everything went downhill. Sounds like both critics think that Marden was the guy who synthesized the "formal vs emotional dichotomy" thereby rescuing painting from mere objecthood. To them, he's post-Minimalist. What really has been done since, in terms of rhetorical (i.e. formal) advances in abstract painting? NeoGeo would seem to be the case in point, and Peter Halley the point man. He used the means of Minimalist painting to different ends, (arguably he made caricatures of 60s style paintings,) but I don't see where he made any formal breakthroughs, except that you had to read his texts to really make the paintings work (something Smithson had done for sculpture 15 years before). Sure, there are good abstract painters around, but most seem less ambitious as artists than Halley, even if more sincere as painters. For that matter, there are good landscape and figure painters, too. If any painters are making news, it's on the narrative level, not the rhetorical. Certainly nobody uses the term "advanced painting" anymore, the way Gilbert-Rolfe could when writing for Art Forum 30 years ago. He thinks Mary Boochever is a "very important" artist; what say you? And how about yourself? You use dated tropes: the modularity of Minimalism, the exploded cubist fracture of Pollock, but rendered in a different medium. How do you see yourself in relation to the tradition of abstract painting?
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- alex 5-31-2002 1:39 am