Images, even abstract images, or maybe especially abstract images, take on added resonance from their surrounding cultural and political settings. Matt Chansky's Who's Afraid, 2001 (color image below, or click here for a larger version), created in the aftermath of the WTC disaster, might have a had a different  reading a year ago--assuming the piece could travel back in time and be divorced from the moment it was produced, which is admittedly a big assumption. The little arrow to the left might have been described as a "cursor," the balloon of static an "information haze." That reading is complicated, of course, because the cursor has the archaic, incandescent feel of a carnival barker's arrow and the corpuscular "haze" belongs more to the bio-lab than cyberspace. But forget all that art-critical quibbling: at this particular moment the arrow can only be an airplane and the "static" a fireball. Put most of the TV-watching world on the psychiatrist's couch and that's what they'd see. 
My painting Visceratecture (click here to view) similarly dovetails with the moment in inevitably political ways. What might have been a proud symbol of modernity 80 years ago, when Joseph Stella painted his headlong, high-speed view through the Brooklyn Bridge, has acquired an edge of surgical, Japanimation creepiness. To paraphrase a somewhat ghoulish quote from Survival Research Laboratories' founder Mark Pauline, "The perfect marriage of technology and the human form is death." The struts and girders of our idealized modern Architecture become intertwined with disconnected gobbets of flesh, while dead center, the womb becomes a techno-totemic figure yielding blankness and annihilation.
Much more uncanny, however, is Claire Corey's 2b5a, (click here to view) which was painted a few days before the sky fell here in New York. In an email dated September 5, I described the painting as "a cyber-rendition of Franz Marc's Fighting Forms with one form being the grid." Now it's difficult to see it as anything but a skyscaper with acrid, toxic smoke hemorrhaging out the side. Even the bold, intoxicating baby blues and purples fail to soften this image of collapsing, fragmenting modernity. Like Nostradamus (minus a few centuries), Corey saw the future, a reminder that artists are, as Ezra Pound observed, "the antennae of the race." Maybe we are, but with all the impact of a pair of foil-wrapped bunny ears.
My reaction to your interpretation has gone from “Tom, you need help” to “hmm, maybe I need help.”
All joking aside…I’ll offer up this interpretation:
Static is the corruption of “the known” in an active percolating state, we could call it a metaphor for “the unknown.” But not a dark mysterious unknown of the NY School, it’s been updated.
In this image a cell-like-form has been taken over, like a virus, by static.
A ghostly white arrow directs the viewer over two symbolic leaf shapes (representing nature/normalcy/growth) toward the static of the unknown.
That’s where I think we are in the World today. “Who’s Afraid?” was meant to convey a sense of anxiety, not so much a narrative depiction of events. The title also gives a nod to Barnett Newman’s famous title “Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.”
You are “yellow” you are a “coward” is the expression. I used colors that reminded me of Tonka trucks from my youth—a further corruption of innocence—my innocense about the unknown.
---
If We, as a Country, were teenagers in the ‘60’s—today We are Sophomores in college. We’re fairly affluent and thought that life was about success, but that sometimes evil did exist in the World. The recent events went beyond anything we’ve been taught to expect about the nature of evil. We look to those who gave us all the answers before about life, but they are shaking, too. Even our own President looked a little shaky early on. We shore up our natural defenses, but the uncertainty in our Country now is perhaps more frightening than the A-bomb days of the ‘50’s. In 2001 a handful of people can shake a Nation. They are one step ahead of us strategically and psychologically—this is the core of my fears.
Matt Chansky
There was quite a bit of rhetoric floating around the New York School linking Abstract Expressionist painting to the events, or zeitgeist, of the '40s. After all, 50 million people died in World War II, making it a cataclysmic event as lethal as a comet impact, and the A-bomb injected new fears and uncertainty into everyday life. According to Adolph Gottlieb, AbEx's jittery paint-bursts reflected "the neurosis which is our reality." Of course, critics like Clement Greenberg were having none of this, and kept discussing the art in terms of color theory and compositional push-and-pull. Your comment to me by email--"we'll see how your interpretation holds up in a year"--was a good one. If you go back and read Peter Halley's essay on Ross Bleckner from the early '80s, it's all about nuclear anxiety, because Reagan's arms buildup had greatly increased the fear factor. Now, the consensus is that Bleckner's work, to the extent it has political ramifications, is "about AIDS." Partly this was Bleckner's own spin, in that he began putting faux-subliminal AIDS-related text in his paintings in the mid-'80s; partly it was the end of the cold war, because everyone stopped talking about nukes.
It would be easy to infer from this that abstract painting is a meaningless tabula rasa. But that's ridiculous: artists do things for reasons, not always reasons that can be straightforwardly expressed, like a scientific hypothesis or business plan, but reasons that can be puzzled out through active engagement with the work. Interpretations may change, but it's through the act of interpretation--an act the artist makes a compelling necessity--that the rest of us figure out what's important to us.
In my discussion of your piece, Matt, I neglected to mention the "leaves" at the bottom left. Rather than a symbol of nature or wholeness, I saw them as just one more bit of twisted wreckage flying from the explosion. Of course, they're undeniably leaves, but I saw the shapes as either an accident--the ironic, automatic writing of disaster--or as a corporate mediation of nature (as in a computer-designed logo on the front of a building) shearing away in the blast.
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Images, even abstract images, or maybe especially abstract images, take on added resonance from their surrounding cultural and political settings. Matt Chansky's Who's Afraid, 2001 (color image below, or click here for a larger version), created in the aftermath of the WTC disaster, might have a had a different
My painting Visceratecture (click here to view) similarly dovetails with the moment in inevitably political ways. What might have been a proud symbol of modernity 80 years ago, when Joseph Stella painted his headlong, high-speed view through the Brooklyn Bridge, has acquired an edge of surgical, Japanimation creepiness. To paraphrase a somewhat ghoulish quote from Survival Research Laboratories' founder Mark Pauline, "The perfect marriage of technology and the human form is death." The struts and girders of our idealized modern Architecture become intertwined with disconnected gobbets of flesh, while dead center, the womb becomes a techno-totemic figure yielding blankness and annihilation.
Much more uncanny, however, is Claire Corey's 2b5a, (click here to view) which was painted a few days before the sky fell here in New York. In an email dated September 5, I described the painting as "a cyber-rendition of Franz Marc's Fighting Forms with one form being the grid." Now it's difficult to see it as anything but a skyscaper with acrid, toxic smoke hemorrhaging out the side. Even the bold, intoxicating baby blues and purples fail to soften this image of collapsing, fragmenting modernity. Like Nostradamus (minus a few centuries), Corey saw the future, a reminder that artists are, as Ezra Pound observed, "the antennae of the race." Maybe we are, but with all the impact of a pair of foil-wrapped bunny ears.
- tom moody 9-18-2001 6:27 am
My reaction to your interpretation has gone from “Tom, you need help” to “hmm, maybe I need help.” All joking aside…I’ll offer up this interpretation: Static is the corruption of “the known” in an active percolating state, we could call it a metaphor for “the unknown.” But not a dark mysterious unknown of the NY School, it’s been updated. In this image a cell-like-form has been taken over, like a virus, by static. A ghostly white arrow directs the viewer over two symbolic leaf shapes (representing nature/normalcy/growth) toward the static of the unknown. That’s where I think we are in the World today. “Who’s Afraid?” was meant to convey a sense of anxiety, not so much a narrative depiction of events. The title also gives a nod to Barnett Newman’s famous title “Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.” You are “yellow” you are a “coward” is the expression. I used colors that reminded me of Tonka trucks from my youth—a further corruption of innocence—my innocense about the unknown. --- If We, as a Country, were teenagers in the ‘60’s—today We are Sophomores in college. We’re fairly affluent and thought that life was about success, but that sometimes evil did exist in the World. The recent events went beyond anything we’ve been taught to expect about the nature of evil. We look to those who gave us all the answers before about life, but they are shaking, too. Even our own President looked a little shaky early on. We shore up our natural defenses, but the uncertainty in our Country now is perhaps more frightening than the A-bomb days of the ‘50’s. In 2001 a handful of people can shake a Nation. They are one step ahead of us strategically and psychologically—this is the core of my fears. Matt Chansky
- anonymous (guest) 9-20-2001 3:18 pm
There was quite a bit of rhetoric floating around the New York School linking Abstract Expressionist painting to the events, or zeitgeist, of the '40s. After all, 50 million people died in World War II, making it a cataclysmic event as lethal as a comet impact, and the A-bomb injected new fears and uncertainty into everyday life. According to Adolph Gottlieb, AbEx's jittery paint-bursts reflected "the neurosis which is our reality." Of course, critics like Clement Greenberg were having none of this, and kept discussing the art in terms of color theory and compositional push-and-pull. Your comment to me by email--"we'll see how your interpretation holds up in a year"--was a good one. If you go back and read Peter Halley's essay on Ross Bleckner from the early '80s, it's all about nuclear anxiety, because Reagan's arms buildup had greatly increased the fear factor. Now, the consensus is that Bleckner's work, to the extent it has political ramifications, is "about AIDS." Partly this was Bleckner's own spin, in that he began putting faux-subliminal AIDS-related text in his paintings in the mid-'80s; partly it was the end of the cold war, because everyone stopped talking about nukes.
It would be easy to infer from this that abstract painting is a meaningless tabula rasa. But that's ridiculous: artists do things for reasons, not always reasons that can be straightforwardly expressed, like a scientific hypothesis or business plan, but reasons that can be puzzled out through active engagement with the work. Interpretations may change, but it's through the act of interpretation--an act the artist makes a compelling necessity--that the rest of us figure out what's important to us.
In my discussion of your piece, Matt, I neglected to mention the "leaves" at the bottom left. Rather than a symbol of nature or wholeness, I saw them as just one more bit of twisted wreckage flying from the explosion. Of course, they're undeniably leaves, but I saw the shapes as either an accident--the ironic, automatic writing of disaster--or as a corporate mediation of nature (as in a computer-designed logo on the front of a building) shearing away in the blast.
- tom moody 9-21-2001 8:28 pm