Walk in Closet

Cleaning up after the Postmodernists is the theme at the moment, and we have two retrospectives that are finalizing this time. Brice Marden and his rubber wand and Sean Scully and his gooey schmear. Color is very important to both of these artists and the tasteful GAP colors are really a wonder to behold. One can feel postively entranced by the almost limitless layering of tasty designer hues. In the Scully show one is confronted with walls of light, well more like bricks of color. In the Marden show one is to enter into the spaces of light. Light, light and more Light. At least that's the talk. For me it's the endgame of materiality and post-modernity - say one thing do another. These are definitely fin de siecle paintings for the salon of postmodern abstract decadence. This kind of abstraction, formed in the 80's, has been slowly unwinding through the last twenty years becoming decadent and corrupt, culminating in bodies of work that cosy up to the lobbies of corporations and upscale hotel bar rooms. It is an art for architecture and decoration - lame duck abstraction.
Both artists keep chanting about the light, but what comes across is simply ground, color, and surface. The space in these paintings is claustrophic, untenable, flat and material. Maybe after coming of age in the Minimalist era both artists found painterly salvation through the multiplicity of uniformity - the joy of repetition. One moving from waxy grounds, the other from painted boxes. Marden settled on the lazy loop, Scully on the gloopy brick. Marden opting for the bulletin board ground of Postmodernism overlays, scumbles and scrapes. Scully layers the color on his thick geometry. Both artists refuse to break the bounds of the surface or side of their canvases, politely stopping at the edges and corners as they have done all their careers. Both paint the object, and both claim that the object is space. They preach the word of Greenberg colored by the rhetoric of Western figurative painting. Unlike Stella who said, "what you see is what you see" today's abstractionists use the evangelical double talk of postmodernism. These postmodernists preach light and space while hiding in the closeted reality of surface and side.
This week we saw the end of a political hegemony. It is as if enough history had passed for us to realize that we had to change course. It is a watershed moment. Now new ideas, new thoughts and new experiences can be examined and tried. For painters it is the same watershed moment seen and experienced through these two retrospectives. And the timing is perfect. This sort of abstract painting can no longer define this moment, our moment, and speak to the future. Postmodern abstraction must be retired and new ideas about the future of abstract painting must come to the fore.