Before you ask: Yes, I am thinking of re-titling this blog "Complaints." Or perhaps "The Complainiac." "WhineBlog." "Whingebag." I haven't really decided. Thoughts?
A couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of July, I saw the "Color as Field" exhibit of paintings at the Frist. Now, I recognize that I am a cad and a rank philistine of the lowest kind, and that my perceptions of what I am seeing may not be the same as anyone else's, but frankly, I think this last is true of everyone. No one sees "it" the same as anyone else - you brought too much into the room with you that no one else can even, or would think to, carry. We are at right angles to the rest of the human race so often that any time we click, so to speak, we're tempted to call it "friendship" or "community." And maybe that's what it is. Most of what unifies us though, is the banal, the everyday. We are not unified in our appreciation of, or reactions to, art. Clearly. Because I absolutely do not fucking get it. Moreover, I find I am slightly annoyed by the movement and it's subsequent product. And it does feel like product. Digression, sort of. New paragraph.
Apparently, the movement had two motivations, and neither, to my mind, has been well executed. Idea One is to allow the color to speak for itself, to present it as abstraction of the highest order, open to interpretation. This is so broad, because of the myriad differences of viewers, that it subsumes any expression that the artist may have intended, and has about as much resonance as a fading wall. The same idea is executed equally well by a swatch book. There is always context, and if it is not effectively contained within the work itself, then the surroundings, from the room the work is in to the world entire become the context. It would take a blinkered, near-autistic view of the world to circumvent this.
Idea Two was to strip away the rhetoric of the [art] world so that pure expressionism could be finally experienced. If this was meant to be had by the artist or by the viewer is a point upon which I hover, which is unlike me, because I am heavy, and hovering takes effort. Coming down hard - I do that effortlessly. You've noticed this. Based on the volumes of writing about this period, and the various conclusions contained therein, the success of this is spotty at best. For instance, I am forced to engage with several hundred words in order to properly convey that these paintings, while technically (in some cases) interesting-to-impressive, have no emotional content, are an intellectual void (but at least that's deliberate), and at the end of the day - suck. They're a huge disappointment. Enjoy your presence of rhetoric.
I knew I didn't get it before I went in, but I was with people, and didn't want to be a dick. Since the first time I saw a Rothko up close at the Chicago Art Institute, sat down on a bench and almost immediately thought, "Well, I'm done with this," it has been an elusive period in art for me. I ended up stalking from gallery to gallery, worrying my hat brim and squinting a lot, trying not to mutter. There is an argument made about this kind of art: "the longer the viewer engages with a piece, the more will be obtained from it." I call bullshit on this notion with regards to this stuff - my mind begins to wander if I spend more than about five minutes focused on one of these. Nothing is being done here, and if that was the point, than it seems like Minimalism did it better, and doing nothing at all would have eclipsed the whole movement, if only nothing were easier to exhibit. Almost every other movement in art has had to more to offer than this twenty-five year period of self-indulgency.