Asking for More

John Haber
in New York City

Fall 2022 in the Galleries

Alix Le Méléder, Sara Garden Armstrong, and Abstraction

How did art recover from those stern old days when theory and politics ruled and, they said, painting was dead? In no small part, it just kept going, and is has again since the pandemic. In no small part, too, it kept asking for more. And that demand drives much of the mad rush of 2022 September openings.

This site has kept returning to painting, especially abstract painting, for nearly thirty years—even as abstraction itself began to ask for more. First, though, a quick look around, from William T. Williams to Luis Zerbini. But also why? Just how did genres outgrow their definitions? What about Alix Le Méléder, who might equally well seem to be asking for less, if only she can have more color. And what of Sara Garden Armstrong, who came to flowing abstraction through wide-open installations?

Sometimes less really is more. I encountered Sara Garden Armstrong in 2009, at a gallery dedicated to book art. Like the medium itself, her contribution had all the comforts of the familiar. Based on the changing depth of a body of water, its stains flowed across the page like the tides—or like the stained canvas of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and color-field painting. Its rule-driven composition and restriction to shades of gray also link it to Minimalism. Earlier series track shadows and folds on handmade paper.

There is something comforting about an artist's book. In a scene of public statements and public spaces, art can still be private and intimate. One can imagine having it all to oneself, turning its pages and holding it in one's hands—and every so often one can. What changes, then, when Armstrong works on the scale of a room? To answer, consider whether she is now asking for less. I have to ask, what with so many artists straining at the limits of abstraction and asking for more.

But why?

Just for starters, art asks for more of the past, like black abstraction and painting by women—and rediscovery is still the order of the day. Just now, a show of William T. Williams, the African American artist, has some of his largest and most ambitious works, from the late 1960s, while Thornton Willis looks stronger than ever in mid-eighties by paring back. Art also asks for painting as excess, with more brushwork, more motifs, and more color. Who can resist show after show of excess, like that of Liz Lacroix? Who can resist, for that matter, her gallery's new building on Canal Street. It has three floors for exhibitions, also including political art by Ken Lum and inviting but ominous photos of cameras by Chason Matthams, like lab experiments or the reality of the surveillance state.

Painting, it seems, need not shy away from "the derivative." Hey, Postmodernism itself kept revisiting Modernism. That "postmodern paradox," I have argued, is central to Modernism's continued relevance and painting's rebirth today. It also need not shy away from imagery. The collision between abstraction and representation began in the 1970s with the New Image painting of Susan Rothenberg and Jennifer Bartlett, if not earlier—and Donald Sultan is back as well. His dark fruit have become more schematic as they multiply, to the point of all-over abstraction.

Soon, though, the collision itself became the subject, often gendered, starting with such artists as Cecily Brown and Amy Sillman. It can make the imagery more obvious or more elusive. It can take up every inch of a painting, as the image in New Image painting cannot. It is just one more part of the demand for excess—for what Lacroix calls "You Whores in My Heart." It also adds a back story to abstraction, even if you never see it. So much for "what you see is what you get."

Here, too, the examples keep coming. Paintings by Rick Lowe are less distinguished, for all their enormity. (Again, more, more!) A white grid out of Minimalism crosses a field of solid color, but angled to suggest a work in progress in three-dimensional space. (Again, the derivative is half the point.) He takes off, though, from the ultimate in grids, that of urban planning across the globe.

Why these strategies, apart from attention getting? I keep returning to them, but can I ever explain them away? On the one hand, art has learned from the past, including but not limited to late Modernism. It would be delighted to deliver the sheer pleasure of Abstract Expressionism and the objective reality of Minimalism. On the other hand, it would hate to settle for self-expression and "pure painting" by American white males. Maybe "theory" was not so bad after all.

You really can have it all, or can you? Luis Zerbini can, with some of the most colorful art out there. It does not take long at all to spot the flowers and native patterning from São Paulo, overflowing their assigned cells. When it does begin not as a grid but as still life, it spills outward as well. He knows the cost of colonialism and native practices to people and the planet. Yet even in Dry River there is room for growth.

The theater of simplicity

Not everyone sees painting as an excuse to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. There has been a renewed interest in the bare bones of the everyday in sculpture and installation—what I have called Neo-Minimalism. So why not in painting? Yet it, too, can insist on scale and color. Just in case you missed the point, Alix Le Méléder calls her work from 2003 and 2004 Les Grandes Rouges. She is thinking big and thinking red.

Still (speaking of kitchen sinks), it was for her a cleaning house. Her gestural abstraction from the decade before may have felt like a release. Yet she must have come to feel that she had lost herself in her work in the interest of self-expression—and lost precisely what all-over painting promised, an embodiment of color and paint. It was accomplished enough, and her gallery has exhibited it before. Still, if it has you thinking of it as (oh, my) derivative, of Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, and perhaps France's most noted Abstract Expressionist, Pierre Soulages, it must have nagged at her, too. So she settled on one bright color, taking one brushstroke and one side of the canvas at a time.

Le Méléder had a track record of starting over and helping others do the same. Born in 1956, she took a studio in La Villette, in northeastern Paris—a neighborhood gaining recognition for its park and the arts. She had already given up her studies in sculpture in order to paint. And then, in 1990, the warehouse burned down. Still, then, too starting over was a gift. Paris helped her with a new studio, and a friend introduced her to the gallery that represented Mitchell and Francis as well. They must have given her the confidence, too, to set them aside.

She would park herself in turn beside each side of the canvas, at its center, and paint a broad mark close to and parallel to the edge. Sometimes it extends almost the length of the edge, the four strokes converting the straight edges into a bulging circle. In the work here, though, she leaves plenty of white space—partly filled by a grainy cloud of red extending out from the stroke in both directions. The cloud, too, stands for color, for paint, and for the canvas as object. One might be zooming in on a single stroke. One can appreciate its simplicity, the marks of the brush, and the spatters it leaves behind.

Naturally that, too, is an illusion, a creation of an artist with a loaded brush. Does "The Big Reds" sound like a casino or a theater for showy productions? Is it, too, in its own way throwing in everything but the kitchen sink? Surely just four strokes could not account for what one sees, neither the big red marks nor the cloud of splatters. It shouts color, paint, and canvas all the same. It also has the constraint of geometry—and the restraint to leave the ground white.

One might still dismiss her as late for the party, and Le Méléder has had little exposure in New York. Still, she found a personal motif that derives from repetition, four times over, and repeats itself throughout the exhibition. One can focus on the spareness or the splatter. They convert Minimalism itself into excess. Like the first stirring of painting on the Lower East Side around the same time, they point to the messy state of the art today. One can sigh, celebrate, or just wait to see whether "anything goes" has a future.

From book to installation

When Sara Garden Armstrong sent me a retrospective volume of her work, she meant it as a thank you and an invitation. It felt, though, like a massive correction. From the very start in the 1970s, she had been working in three dimensions, as a student in Alabama and in installations tailored to the Birmingham Museum. One hardly knows whether to call them conceptual art, architecture, or sculpture. Some take the modular form of Minimalism, with thick, flat pillars in bright red. Work ever since all but leaps off the floor.

Thin wood risers might outline the hull of a ship or the curves of the human body—a pun that appears more recently in the African American art of Kerry James Marshall, Roy DeCarava, and Hugh Hayden. Other open frames look like antenna towers, and Armstrong engages the space with sound as well. These works include speakers, and titles riff on space, structure, and sound. The red steles respond to their environment physically, too, by bending toward the viewer. Lighting plays its part as well, picking out the highlights and casting their shadows. They have one surrounded.

A long-running series, her Airplayers, began in the 1980s, when Armstrong moved for much of the year to a succession of studios in New York. (She has since returned full time to Birmingham.) If the antennas have her on air, these works are filled with air while doing the filling. Air keeps on pumping through creased tubes, like vacuum cleaners or the clean-up after a flood. As they fill out, paper sacks look vaguely humanoid but also fragile, like enormous paper dolls. Needless to say, they leave their irregular shadows on the wall (and I may well have seen one years ago in New York at Condesco/Lawler gallery, which has long since shut its doors).

Why would she give all that up for something more like fine art? Even back then, painting was no longer the most ambitious game in town. Yet installations, too, come cheap, especially when made of paper, and intimacy still matters. She calls her new volume Threads and Layers, and one artist's book has translucent pages so that the layered image keeps changing. She also closes in on color stains in Airplayer for the volume's cover, evanescent but shining. Could she have set site-specific work aside to dwell on her love of drawing and texture?

Then, too, she might insist, not all that much has changed. She returned to large work in 2021, in a selection of her work at FATVillage in Fort Lauderdale, yet the handout's cover is again awash in color. Conversely, the retrospective volume devotes a good third to works on paper, but they can overflow the page, too. Laura Lieberman describes her books as "hand-crafted casings," and drawings have both led to and derived from sculpture. More generally, Dan R. Talley stresses her interdisciplinary practice. What might look at first like another artist's book contains video, like a finer tablet computer.

Works also share the notions of chance, flow, and transience. (Armstrong remembers vividly a meeting with John Cage.) These ideas bridge art and nature, and those gray waves appeared in "Natural Histories," a show all about art and science. A foreword by David Ebony opens the retrospective volume with a comparison to studies of the flow of water by Leonardo da Vinci, and the introduction by Gail C. Andrews sees another work an abstraction from the central nervous system. The Airplayers could be enormous lungs. Silkscreens based on repeated black marks could depict birds in flight.

So could a transformation of those marks into short pipes protruding from the wall. The regularity of Minimalism has become modular but maximal. The large volume itself was slated for a university press but ran over, now with a dozen strong essays and interviews. It ended up self-published. She deserves better, and she has an exhibition at the Gadsden Museum of Art in Alabama in progress. At home now, I could start to see book art itself as site specific.

jhaber@haberarts.com

William T. Williams ran at Michael Rosenfeld through November 6, 2022, Liz Lacroix at Magenta Plains through October 22 along with Ken Lum and Chason Matthams, Donald Sultan at Ryan Lee through October 22, Rick Lowe at Gagosian in Chelsea through October 22, Luis Zerbini, at Sikkema Jenkins through October 15, and Alix Le Méléder at Zürcher through November 6. Sara Garden Armstrong began her book in 2018. Her exhibition at the Gadsden Museum of Art ran through January 26, 2023.