A recent review by Roberta Smith in the NY Times (Sept. 22) caught my attention. In part, Ms. Smith wrote: "Some younger painters seem to be countering the strictures of Late Modernism by revisiting the early modernist cusp between abstraction and representation...where the figurative, the geometric, the spatial, and the visionary still remain tangled."
Smith's comment reminds me of the situation in Chicago art over thirty years ago. At that time the Chicago Imagist style was at its peak. Less recognized Chicago abstractionists were divided between mainstream formalists (via the Chicago Bauhaus and NY) and what might be called quasi-formal-allusionists. This latter group was actually larger than the former but since the work was idiosyncratic, aside from abstract intent, individuals often went unnoticed.
But in 1974 local critic Dennis Adrian curated a pair of exhibitions he titled The Chicago Style: Painting and Sculpture. He included both imagists -- plus the "Monster Roster" -- and abstractionists. In a brochure for the painting exhibition he wrote:
"...another aspect of Chicago painting [is] intermingled with and inextricably a part of the Imagist contingent. This quality is a preoccupation with formal structure and even completely abstract composition...It developed alongside and even within the more widely known imagistic tradition and is actually at one with it...The thread of this common factor is evident...in the very basic issue of attitude toward form...Simply, then, the character of this preferred language of form is organic and complex."
To me, Dennis Adrian's comment was extraordinarily profound and I believe it remains fresh and relevant, as suggested by Roberta Smith's own observation a few days ago. By uniting imagism and abstraction through "organic and complex form" Adrian articulated the same "entanglement" that Smith speaks of now.
In visual art, organic form denotes aliveness and that leads to spatial and even visionary depiction. Add paradoxical geometry and you have a good map of what lies at the heart of Chicago art, from way back in the 1970's at least. Just as the early 20th C. abstractionists had no fear of allusion through organic form and no fear of the spatial or the visionary through illusion, so have many later Chicago artists forged ahead without fear of theoretical strictures. They make art that explores what early abstractionists pointed to. It is a vital pursuit in the renewal of painting.
With respect to the visionary, the aura of surrealism has never left Chicago. If the New York AE artists sought to excise their surreal histories, Chicago artists continued to embrace a quality of surrealism even as they pursued formalist modernism. The idiosyncratic Chicago abstractionists wanted to put everything into their art, not take it out. Frank Piatek is one of the Chicago abstractionists, whose work -- even from the late 1960s -- mixed imagist, surreal, and formal approaches into a complex organic form. In varying degrees, the same can be said about Miyoko Ito's work and a sizeable group of others. In fact, although much huffing and puffing was made of an artificial split between abstraction and imagism in Chicago, primarily by the editors of the New Art Examiner and a few critics, a review of the most characteristic abstraction of that time shows that Adrian's view was on the mark.
Chicago art has been examining the cusp between abstraction and representation for decades. Look at the work -- past and present -- and you will see that it's true. It's the Chicago Tradition, which is not to say it is a regional or isolated provincialism. No serious artist aims to make purely local art. I wholeheartedly agree with a statement by Peter Schjeldahl: "Conscious, sophisticated art of all times has a profound independence from place." What counts, as we know, is to make something local become suddenly universal. So I'm happy that Roberta Smith is writing about good artists who we can say "Chicagoize" current New York abstraction. That helps to universalize what has been perceived for so many years as merely our local art history.
Is there a distinctive Chicago art? Yes. Does it reach beyond place to become one with a universal modernist-postmodernist art discourse/s? Yes. Does it reconnect to early modernism and does it resonate with contemporary directions? Yes.
William Conger
An interesting post William, and just one more reason for me to suspect that the objective v. non-objective conflict represents a false dichotomy.
Just a few days ago I read the following passage in Jed Perl's great New Art City:
It's interesting stuff, if left a little unresolved by Graham. But it is a question with great currency.
And, interestingly, later completetely opposed by Graham when he evolved himself as an artist from a very talented Picasso-follower into a strange, idiosyncratic figurative artist (the wounded cross-eyed women in ballpoint pen and paint, etc.)
My suspicion is that the dialectic of such a division is far more important than turning it into an all-or-nothing dichotomy.