Canadian Abstraction
"Canadian Abstraction" by Robert Linsley, Spring 2008, pp. 58-61
Roald Nasgaard’s thoroughly researched and very generous book-length history of abstract painting in Canada meets with a pretty well insoluble problem right from the start, namely that it faces two empty categories—abstraction and Canada.
Anyone familiar with contemporary art knows that the term “abstraction” is more or less meaningless. Of course that doesn’t stop most of us from using it, nor from assuming that we and whomever we are talking to do know what it means. In normal conversational use, it means painting or sculpture without reference to real things in the world. And yet such a usage is clearly misleading, since much if not most abstract art does contain such reference. Furthermore, there is a contradiction built into the word itself; significant abstract art since the Second World War is distinguished precisely by its lack of abstraction, by its concreteness and particularity. This alone is enough to prove that the ambiguities of the terminology are not just a matter of fussing about with the dictionary—they have consequences for our understanding of what art actually is.
So the first term is bad enough, but the difficulties of the second one are even worse. I have to confess that my own position is an extreme one, because for me nationhood is nothing other than an abstraction anyway. As such, it is something that properly has no place in modern art, which must concern itself with concrete particulars. We don’t even have a definition of what makes a person Canadian, so what could it possibly mean to denominate art that way? At best a geographical coincidence, at worst nothing. Or let’s put it this way: a person is a Canadian by virtue of a bureaucratic form—an official document with their name on it, a passport, birth certificate or citizenship papers—that they have chosen to take up. Bureaucratic formalism and personal choice make a citizen. We will see that this has great relevance to recent abstract painting in Canada, for it often comes down to a very abstract notion of art as worked through by some personal intention.
Actually, the problem of the validity of a national abstract art is real for Canada, because we have a completely legitimate example nearby, in the United States. Although the Abstract Expressionists were the most fractious and jealously individualistic group of artists imaginable, it is still possible to talk, as Clement Greenberg did, of “American-type painting” and say something meaningful. The tradition that they established is still valid, right through Minimalism and Post-Minimalism and Neo-Geo and whatever else is going down in Chelsea today. We can identify a distinctively American stance across the most diverse range of practices. It may not be absolutely definable in an airtight way, but it feels real. American artists accomplished this by putting their own very individual slant on fundamental aesthetic problems, and the lesson here is that a national art can never be made directly, but can only come about as a by-product or secondary effect of something else, in this case an ambitious cosmopolitanism. Of course, most of the artists discussed in Nasgaard’s book have nothing to say about Canada or national identity, and rightly so, but the book is very enlightening concerning the degree to which abstract art in Canada has become ever less ambitious and ever less concerned with matters of substance. The history is one of decline.
I have to reiterate that one cannot fault Nasgaard with respect to research or sympathy for the artists he discusses. There is no need to rehash the high points of the story—Les Automatistes, Harris in the ’40s, Jack Bush, the Regina Five—or its array of very interesting oddities—the bizarre and original Bertram Brooker, hard-edge in Vancouver, David Cantine. Nasgaard gets them all right, as how should he not? Some of these moments were also moments of national self-identification, and yet they all deserve a place somewhere in a global history of art. Again, ambition directed toward fundamental questions is the important thing, and often we have it. It is the recent examples that are the most problematic, and the falling-off seems to start somewhere in the 1970s, with the later formalists. Somehow, problems of composition, facture, reduction and surface lost traction. The Zeitgeist said, “Sure you can do that, but who cares?” As a formalist myself I find that difficult, but I can’t deny the truth. Why should anyone care if paint is put on thick or thin, if the edges are denied or accepted, if the composition is made of straight lines or curves? Personally I think those things are of great importance, but the job of the artist is to convince us of that. The Edmonton formalists and the so-called “third-generation” Toronto abstractionists didn’t pull it off, in my estimation.
All art history works as a comment on the period in which it is published—it could hardly be otherwise—so the part of the book that most needs to be read and reviewed is the last. The most compelling question for us is always the future. Those who want a reference book that gathers Jack Shadbolt with Ron Martin and Françoise Sullivan could hardly do better, but surveys as voluminous as this face another difficulty—it is very hard, if not impossible, to make the right choices when it comes to contemporary works. I can’t think of a single survey publication, covering any area of art history, that doesn’t get it wrong when it arrives at the present or the recent past. So the extreme weakness of the concluding section of Nasgaard’s book at first seems unremarkable. I couldn’t do any better than Nasgaard, and I have no alternative list to offer, but the more I think about it the more I suspect that Nasgaard has done the impossible and really made the best selection. It is at least partly because his book is so good that the art he discusses comes off as so bad, but that is not because he wants it to. He has described the situation today, namely that abstract painting really is dead, dead due to a lack of ideas and vision. Of course this is a great opportunity, but only if we can be specific about what is failing.
Harold Klunder says that his painting is “not about subject matter as much as accumulation; and through accumulation, something happens.” The image of the artist stumbling about blindly looking for “something” is embarrassing perhaps, but I can take it seriously because I don’t see why the outcome of the process of painting has to be known ahead of time. But in abstraction only three things can happen. First, the artist might arrive at an aesthetically resolved, harmonious and integrated arrangement. This is the normal professional accomplishment, and it has an intrinsic value, but it can also become a little dull. The problem is that there have to exist commonly agreed-upon criteria to measure the result, and no serious artist is content to leave such criteria unquestioned. Second, he or she might break open the aesthetically beautiful whole and find new kinds of beauty in the unfinished, the off-balance, the arbitrary or the failed. This is obviously preferable to the first outcome, but can also go pale because it depends on the prior existence of aesthetic conventions to work against. Ultimately it is only the back face of the first result, but the better face. The third result is what I can’t find in the latter sections of this book, namely a moment of insight that puts the whole enterprise in a new perspective. Granted it isn’t necessary to break the sound barrier every time one paints, but there have to be some moments of enlightenment to keep the practice alive. Beauty is not a fixed quality: it has to be created, and both aesthetic wholes and open works need changes of perspective to keep them vital. This kind of insight is intellectual, though it comes in a sensuous form, but to work it has to be, above all, non-conceptual. Conceptuality might be the defining characteristic of all the worst art with claims to professional legitimacy today. What I mean by conceptuality is the use of painting as a vehicle for pre-existing ideas. I might be talking about a representational work, or even a piece of expressionism or a search for the spiritual. Certainly the notion of a conceptual painting hasn’t worked very well, yet I have no quarrel with the genre of conceptual art, but only with the artist who adds a content to a form and then sends it out into the world like a message in a bottle. Sadly, judging from the many artist statements quoted by Nasgaard, this seems to be the rule in current abstraction, but even worse is the vagueness of the ideas espoused. We hear that artists want to respect the past but still be part of the present, that they are concerned with “authenticity” and “mediation,” or that their works are “ironic and authentic.” There seems to be a widespread desire to make an affirmative art, full of “exuberance” and “faith” and “spirituality.” All I can say is that talking about it doesn’t make it so. Many seem to be suspended between some need to believe in painting and a critical and ironic doubt. Here I’m just bewildered—I don’t know what this fake dilemma is supposed to mean. The insight that brings painting alive is an intellectual one, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be verified in words or by an argument; the recent paintings are in themselves sufficient evidence of the flabbiness of current thought. But then flabby thought oozes out of paintings that can’t bring forth a concreteness that we can care about; the paradox is that where thought is weak, conceptuality is at its strongest. For my money, the only current contemporary in Nasgaard’s book with a grip on something real is Angela Leach.
Nasgaard’s book is an oddity. It is broad in scope and comprehensive about something that may not even have a meaningful existence, a category, well, a little too abstract to be useful. Its value for historians is limited because there already exist many individual studies of the important historical moments covered in this book. But it is particularly valuable as a document of the lassitude and uncertainty that reside under the rubric of abstraction today.
Abstract Painting in Canada, Roald Nasgaard, Douglas & McIntyre/Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 432 pp, $85.00.
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