Is ABSTRACT art for its own sake still a valid art practice? Hasn’t it all been done? Every day I see another painting derived from the mystical connection between the inner workings of a human mind and a canvas – that endless quest for the ‘god particle’ of physics translated into art terms. Artists talk about being in the zone, of paintings speaking to them, and then put what can be pretentious titles on their work as if to both justify what was in essence a random process and to validate their own existence. ABSTRACT LANDSCAPE is both a basic misunderstanding of the contradiction inherent in Abstract and landscape as well as recognition of the random approach and an after-the-fact Pareidolia. There is nothing new about any of this. Da Vinci looked for suggestions of landscape in moss-stained walls and the like and that was 600 years ago.

At least ‘untitled’ has the smack of honesty. Areas of paint combined with graphic, calligraphic marks and scratchings, usually on a largish scale and destined to complement the furnishings of domestic architecture, should stand on their own without reference to ‘my life during Covid’ or the like. If you are going to work with swinging paint cans [first used as a technique in 1922 by David Siqueiros] or drip painting with sticks [used by Pollock in the 1940s-50s] then at least acknowledge the process for what it is. Process.

How often have I heard that someone was looking for ‘a nice abstract’ to go on the dining room wall. In its early days, abstraction was geared to a seemingly greater purpose. Kandinsky sought to find a pictorial equivalent for music, Mondrian to recalibrate the universe though a minimal palette of primary colour and straight lines, Malevich to reduce the world to symbols and Rothko, among a thousand others, to find the essential harmony of existence through colour. Pollock destroyed all of that. Now I love Pollock’s work but the cul-de-sac he created for painting has never really been resolved – imitated endlessly, yes. Once his approach became mainstream in art teaching establishments across the world, it simply became a facile, meaningless process denying what Pollock brought to the table. There could never be another Pollock or a De Kooning or a Rothko or a Mondrian but everyone and his dog gave it a go and are still doing so. Anyone using the approach of any of these artists can only ever be an imitator.

In his writings about contemporary art, as he saw it in America over two or more decades, Robert Storr quoted Rosenberg, Chicago Institute of Art, who coined the phrase action painter, as describing ‘allover’ abstraction as in danger of becoming ‘apocalyptic wallpaper’.  He saw this as a double-edged characterisation where the quest for the existential became merely ornament. Pollock himself believed that there was a section of the art world that regarded his as a decorator.  In the 1940s and 50s the idea of an immediate apocalypse in the wake of Hiroshima was front page news but whether that was reflected in the art is another matter. The look of any number of non-drip Pollocks and De Kooning’s Woman 1 and 11 present a world of chaos. Given that so many of the artists had removed themselves from war-torn Europe and crossed the Atlantic, this was hardly surprising – that a younger generation of artists took up the baton wasn’t surprising either There was nothing in the American art landscape to generate such angst or anguish but that was half a lifetime ago. Later wars and catastrophes paled in comparison even when just as destructive. Abstract art in its many guises assumed its rightful place in the historical pantheon as a conveyor of inner harmony/turmoil/hope and desperation in the 20^th century.

Why then are we still pursuing its lessons in 2021? There is no wartime equivalent, no mass exodus of artists, no welcoming cultural vacuum as presented itself in NY in the 1940s. Certainly, Abstract art challenges or threatens no one anymore, destined as it is to become wallpaper [a nice abstract]. Can it even be said to reflect current times? Confusion about the purpose of life, the preferred shape of society, autocracy versus democracy, and what holds it together is in the news every day. We are no longer sure of the rules for living, if there ever were any that weren’t imposed by church or state, and the confusion most people live with is that inner search for meaning. Is Abstract Art simply the equivalent of the psychologists’ couch and a panaceaic therapy for what ails you or is it something else entirely? Is it perhaps reflective of an attitude that says that anyone and everyone is an artist and its easy? When you don’t have to be able to draw, don’t need lessons in technique or composition, it is easy. The fuss made last year about a punctured paint can merrily swinging above a surface and producing patterns is hardly new but the endless column inches of praise it generated from an unschooled public was on par with an equal number related to a kitchen mop laden with paint and dragged over a surface [I saw this yesterday].

Appropriation, imitation and facility notwithstanding, making use of the lessons of abstraction is very different from claiming facile techniques as art. There was once a claim that painting was dead [certain Minimalists, Installationists and Performance artists are to blame] but it has survived regardless as a valid process. The question in my mind is when the art quagmire of the mid 20^th century in New York ceases to have the gravitational pull of dying planets. Shouldn’t this be a new age?