Many years ago I visited Ron Kitaj, still, then, in his studio in Chelsea, London. I asked him about abstraction in his painting. The extreme literalness, the geometrical rigours of some of his prints and drawings seemed to beg the question. His edgy recuperation of the art forms of the Russian Revolution, in particular, prompted the thought that they were far more than mere decorative nostalgia, a beneficial  adjunct  to the lyrical imagism that marks all his works. Perhaps, I thought, Kitaj could help explain the subtle links between form and substance, politics and impasto, drawing and desire that repeatedly usher art making, especially painting, into abstraction. His answer was unexpected, abrupt but evidently long considered,

“I don’t believe in abstraction, I can’t conceive of what it might be!!”

Kitaj had a point, several points in fact. Abstraction in art always requires belief, it cannot exist without commitment to a lazy, low rent metaphysics. This in turn nearly always leads to an attempt to construct  a credo, to cook up one sloppy aesthetic dogma or another as substitute for first hand experience of the work. Abstraction like its country cousin aesthetics turns out to be the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Another rerun of this tired congeries of clichés is underway at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery. Rather than ask directly what artists are doing here and why, the gallery and its acolytes are ponderously absorbed, like a dinosaur taking a crap just as the meteor strikes, in the pointless business of taking abstraction seriously, (oh so seriously!).

We shall review the conditions necessary for this peculiar project later. For now

Lets DO The Abstract - One More Time!

The abstract is commonly conceived as the opposite of the figurative, an art which consists of recognizable images of things. There are many ways to prove that this dumb brained dualism has always been nonsense. For a start all paintings are an abstraction – you can’t make love to the Mona Lisa or eat the fruit in a Matisse. In a sense then all painting is abstract. On the other hand all paintings represent meaningful images, even a panel of pure flat blue, is unavoidably,  an image of the sky or paradise, brushstrokes speak of the hands which made them and so on and so on and so on . . .

[You will have noticed that I am playing with words. Nothing I have said is much help when one addresses the facts of the case in work by Howard Taylor, Brian Blanchflower or Jurek Wybraniec,  nor will it explain the absence of Taylor from ‘In the Abstract’. This requires  a far finer filter, one woven in and by our local cultural  economy.]

Yet for over century this persistent logomachic conundrum has driven artists who should have known better to all sorts of doctrinaire frenzy. That is because it has an immediate practical correlative, any mark shape or colour  an artist makes is at once, like Hamlet’s cloud  ‘mighty like a whale’, unavoidably present as itself and inescapably present  as ‘what ever you desire’. The over-optimistic Gombrich thought that this was entirely a problem in the psychology  of perception – vide the famous duck/rabbit trick in Art and Illusion .

Artists know better, their marks can become any thing you desire, hence painting, all painting worthy of regard, remains the residue of an intolerable struggle. That other popular optical ‘illusion’ “What’s on a Man’s Mind” got nearer to the truth. The nonsensical figurative/abstract  dualism, might be dismantled if we begin by thinking of it as a problem in the psycho analysis  of desire, which,  as always, will redeem art from the slimy black hole of the logos and return it to the active substance  of history and memory . It is ultimately, for instance,  the shaping power of desire that ensures a black square by Malevich is, always and forever, completely  different to a black square by Ad Reinhardt.

If you’re with me so far try to hang on to the idea that abstraction and figuration are a singular duality, like a horse and carriage, you can’t have one without the other.

We’ll get back to desire.

Minimal Effort

Of the many attempts by artists to circumvent that duality only one matters in Perth, New York Minimalism,. That is because four central figures in the local art world, all with north American backgrounds, Alan Dodge, Gary Dufour, Trevor Smith and John Barrett Lennard the chief curator of In  Abstract cut their curatorial teeth on the environment that it promoted and for the most part continue to accept its premises as the point at which all critique and pronouncement begin. Crucially they continue to promote the essential rhetorical stance of the key advocates of New York Minimalism, which inherently eschewed dialogue, as if mumbling the magic words of Don Judd over the stiffening corpse  of WA. Art will cause it to straighten up and fly right. This is enough reason to treat New York Minimalism as a special case , for Perth eyes only .

New York Minimalism’s attempt to collapse the abstract/figurative duality was of mind numbing Wittgensteinian audacity. It declare d that any tension between the immediate material presence of  the work and anything it may represent was redundant to the work, as art. Material, form and content could only be identical. Are you still with me?

The point is that Minimalism did not take sides between the abstract and the figurative. It declared no contest  and changed the rules (or so it thought,  remember ‘whatever you desire’! ). A minimalist  work of art could only come into existence when the artist had abolished this dualism in the process of creation. Hence a painted steel cube made in exactly the right proportions  in relation to the human body or a column of air one mile wide, one mile deep and one mile high over New York City were both minimalist works. The minimal in minimalism was a product of reductive logic not simplicity  of means.

New York Minimalism was necessarily, resolutely anti metaphysical – low or high rent. .Judd the critic possessed ‘the best bullshit detector in the business’. Precisely because its aim was to abolish all tensions, all dualisms, all differences within the work of art, New York Minimalism also tends to the abolition of all dialogue about art, which it took to be self-evident. It adopted Wittgenstein’s logical positivist motto “whereof one cannot speak it is best to remain silent.” On occasion New York Minimalists also seemed to become slaves to probability accept the proposition of Alpha Soixante, the lugubrious computer that ruled Paris in Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Alphaville.

The acts of men carried over from past centuries will gradually destroy them logically . . . the essence of the so called capitalist world or the so called communist world is not evil volition to subject their people by the power of indoctrination or the power of finance but, simply, the natural ambition of any organization to plan all its actions in other words to minimis e unknown quantities.      

The scandalous absence of dialogue with the wider WA art community that characterises most of our art institutions may have its origins in similar sentiments, in the de facto abolition of the very differences, the critical possibilities of art making that first gave rise to minimalism and their replacement by an oppressive performative index. Another part explanation lies in the latent capacity even of minimalism to be whatever you desire.

New York minimalism was also radically democratic. Carl Andre, he of the bricks and railway ties for instance helped to found a group of American Marxist Artists whose ‘Marxism’ stemmed from the possibility of an absolute materialism in art that required no intermediary aesthetic notion of form beyond common human praxis – a stack of railway ties, a stack of bricks. This democratic, communitarian, materialism did not travel to Perth where minimalism arrived as set of abstracted premises, merely a mode of art making.

Ultra conservative, ultra provincial, Perth tends to preserve ideas in the form in which they were first encountered, locked into endless layers of memory and circumstance, each hardwired to institutional power bases. When Alec King and his colleagues at the WEA organised public debates about modern art they set up the abstract/figurative dualism as the mode of reception and evaluation of local visual art. This dualism was the container in which the idea of “abstraction” entered Western Australian culture in the 1930’s. It was never integrated into the development of local practice and, consequently, was never challenged through practical creative experience.  Many influential collectors, most artists and certainly the Perth public still think in terms of a banal confrontational choice between abstract and figurative, of the abstract as one pole of the painter’s universe. 

One way to comprehend the stunning absurdity of In Abstract is to think of it as another round in the perpetual dialogue of the deaf and blind that drives the presentation of art here. It is the product of a slow motion collision between two outmoded ultra provincial versions of the other – the abstract/ figurative duality and the reductive rhetoric of minimalism as it arrive d here.

The faux commonplace title, with its lounge bar geniality, suggests the natural place of the abstract in Perth culture as a foil for the practical - another indissoluble duality. By the common provincial arse first logic, it also sets up the abstract as a separate if delusory metaphysical realm capable of investigation for its own sake. Vide the gut wretching low rent subtitle “form and essence  . . .” It follows that Perth art must be strip mined for examples of this essential ‘Abstract’, however partial, however ‘contaminated’ by landscape or other ‘figurative’ visual codes. This ‘method’ characterizes, albeit perversely, the reductive rhetoric of minimalism. No one it seems is willing to look at what is there, for its own sake and for that of the local visual art community.

A cynic might suggest that most exhibition making in Perth takes place ‘In Abstract’ at an imaginary site never touched by the history of the real place or by a sense of its specific location in time or space. That is to say a site produced by a despairing careerism, by the need to occupy a territory defined solely by the ambition of the exhibition makers, which is, nearly always, to be elsewhere, to be ever ready to move on up the star-spangled stairway to heaven which leads to MOMA NY, Dokumenta or wherever your wet dream lies.

So far we have a delusory, collusive debate carried on in a cultural space shaped only by the ambition of the immediate participants. The collision of entrenched attitudes to abstraction with ambitions formed by the forty-year-old rhetoric of minimalism sets this stage perfectly. It is possible however to offer an account of In Abstract which unites its apparently wide range of art works without using either of these banal positions, relying instead on a detailed forensic origin of the work on show and its origins. This would be a sceptical disbeliever’s account  - with no metaphysics, with heaps of history and a clear awareness that this is Perth 2002 not Manhattan 1962.

It requires a consideration of abstraction in action unconstrained by dualisms. In Perth the most common abstraction in daily life is money and its affiliates, stocks and shares, property values and so on. The key to the operation of the money system is the notion of exchange. A$500.00 might be exchanged for a new hard disc, a night with a beautiful woman, a small painting by Janis Nedela, whatever you desire, you get the general idea. If the value of my house rises I can, in theory, have more evenings with beautiful women Therefore I am, apparently, better off.

Much has been written about the implications of universal exchange and infinitely variable equivalences for culture and human rights in general. One effect, commodification, has generally had a bad press – vide blind sided feminist arguments against commodification of the person and righteous crusades against people trafficking. Despite this the last two decades have seen an exponential growth in the acceptance of exchange as the only coherent test of worth or value whether of people or objects and in the ‘rational’ efficiency with which these experiences are grounded in everyday life. Big Brother for instance essentially legitimates the (willing) commodification of the person Most artists and institutions in WA now pursue art as a cultural version of Big Brother a means to greater power of exchange, not as a primary goal nor as a means to metaphysical revelation, never as a simple pleasure.

In other words every day life has never been so completely about exchange, about one’s place in ‘the market’ what ever that is. We are told that the market is dominated by desire, that levels of desire determine rates of exchange. We are also told that this is rational. Someone is lying but all that matters here is that abstraction and desire are locked together as one by exchange. In Perth at least the psychic tensions produced by the attempt to conflate reason and desire are paralleled in the making of abstract art

It should also not come as a surprise that the received notion of abstraction, the dominant expectation which informs the reception of so called “abstract” painting is one of profitable exchange , the excess gratification gained from giving and getting in front of a work and from owner ship of it. To make this as clear as possible, in provincial Perth, 

So-called ‘Abstract’ paintings function as Desire Exchanges

To recall our argument above paint marks can be ‘whatever you desire’ but within a system of exchange conflicting desires coexist, they do not cancel each other out in the way that metaphysical systems must. Nor can they be purged from the work in the way the minimalists hoped. The twin towers of that temple of exchange the World Trade Center are occasionally described as a giant minimalist sculpture. Certainly those two identical uninflected towers packed with busy people were an excellent image of the supremacy of exchange, of its independence from any further point of reference.

The challenge in considering the works on show in In Abstract is to construct a common model of their emergence  and presence based on the premise that so called abstraction is essentially  about  a free trade in desires located in the history of art making here, much as the stock market  is located  in the history of trade in goods and services.

A glance round the galleries in whichiIn Abstract is installed engages the usual spectacle. This is definitely art, you can tell by the packaging.  It is striking that the rhetorical equivalence between one work and another, its relatively large scale,  its will to be present, sustains  a sense of continuity  similar to that found in a car sales room or a Harvey Norman mega store. Its new, its shiny, a miracle of well tuned sensibility but we’ve seen it all before and we know what to do. Decide on your desires. Shop around for whatever you want. 

A quick walkacross the carpet adds another impression, another more poignant metaphor, a nursery suddenly abandoned while the children were still at play. We know the children’s marks textures, colours, were being arranged for an elaborate game – a half built card board castle, a fantasy rocket built in wooden blocks , a submarine  made of cushions and broken furniture, a drawing of a house with no walls but we will have to reinvent that game ourselves with our own desires . So it is with the artists in In Abstract, with Wybraniec’s Untitled (target) made from painted pieces of pegboard or Trevor Richards multi-coloured Ironing Boards. In each case a domestic object is used as matrix for a system of coloured variations that consume its common identity. Multi dimensional symmetries and the patterned lineaments of desire submerge its functions, to produce  a different state or rather states of presence. One is invited is to complete the game with whatever desires one has brought to this space, to exchange them for the goods on offer.

It is important that desire is recognized as the subject of the exchange, not objects, ideas, images or material. Like the children’s ‘toys’, the art in In Abstract acts as a medium a container for infinite unconsummated desire.  The disturbing sense of déjà vu that pervades In Abstract - Richards  ironing boards, panels  and other objects  are redolent, in their object hood,  of Kosuth and Johns, Trevor Vickers Untitled 1968 of Richard Smith, Alex Spremberg’s ‘Ascent’ 1993 of Judd himself Cathy Blanchflower’s Axis II 2000 of Vasarely is linked to this sense of incompletion of the game that never ends, the immortal game that is so important to the mediation of childhood desires and adult longing.

These artists are not engaged in a coherent ever developing problem solving project that has been going in Perth for a mere couple of decades. They are victims of a permanent common circumstance, a shared problem, provincialism.- permanent kultur interruptus. It is this, not any sense of a shared aesthetic purpose that gives the show a worrying consistency. The artists have chosen to expand a particular moment in the development of minimalism and its affiliates as a container  for their own local desires. Surprisingly the work of European émigrés Karl Wiebke and Alex Spremberg are amongst the most inflected by the strain of memory expressed as incompletion. For instance Wiebke constantly courts it with his working methods.

Yet Spremberg in particular is spectacularly successful. His objects especially, One Moment Twice, have the strongest sense of presence in the entire exhibition. It opens up a space between two ‘identical’ events left as over layered patterns of translucent golden resin across the work. It is in the ‘dialogue’ that takes place between them as we look that the possibility of an exchange of desires is created. – Remember the twin towers. They too could be seen as one moment twice. Richards’s ironing boards could be one moment four times!

Jurek Wybraniec’s, Surrogate Doppelganger  - yellow and pink soft edged discs spray painted in a diagonal grid across transparent acrylic corrugated roofing and stacked at an angle two deep with a partial overlap is also about doubling. It invites the viewer to match the dots in the two layers. When stacked against a window as it is currently it also opens up a double vacuum, a gap of incompletion in the perception of the space beyond it. This effect could be compared to Galliano Fardin’s heavily impasted Directions and Choices, 1993/1994. This a set of informally arranged vertical lines with short left and right horizontal sprigs that produce a set of informal fragmentary grids nested in increasingly well defined rectangles each more defined than the one which surrounds it. This painting could be seen as one moment hundreds of times so could Wybraniec’s Doppelganger  despite their manifest differences

Doublings and multiple doublings can be found in most if not all the works in this show sometimes disguised in proportion or pattern or even gesture. Their relation to the viewer opens up each work as a Desire Exchange through their requirement that a choice, specifically an empty choice or multiple choices between two overtly indistinguishable equivalents must be made if one is to relate to the work .

Doubling is always code for infinity and hence for incompletion.      

The choices the viewer makes are, of course, attempts to resolve the incompletion of each work through a ‘subjective’ particular, individual engagement congruent with whatever they desire.  They are not definitely not a quest for any kind of essence. They are linked to the fundamental mechanisms through which identity and desire are installed early in our developing psyches.  That at least is how that famous and fashionable Lacan sees it. Desire springs from an awareness of absence and presence and the wish that it should or could be otherwise then, hopefully, it attaches itself to real world objects and, perhaps, among them, to paintings. It is easy, and perhaps a little facile, to point to the way in which amnesia and spatio-temporal dissonance scripts provincial desire, figures its forms in the quotidian and, thus, frames the possibilities for provincial artists in terms of incompletion. Otherwise desire in art would be a free-floating nightmare.

At this point history and a detailed forensic analysis of individual works in In Abstract would produce a full account of their emergence. It would then be possible to trace the multi-variant scripts  of desire that can be ‘found’ within one work bound together by incompletion. This however would require a thesis and much research. Enough has been said to show that a thorough going non essentialist account of these works, their emergence and relationships is possible.

It remains to stress once more the hopeless irrelevance of the striptease calculus of sensibility , form and essence, through which In Abstract has beenstructured. There are some magnificent works in this show but they   are about here and now, about what we really, really want.. Currently in Midland Mic Hender and Alana present an installation at which flushes out everything wrong with this approach neon tubes burn brightly in scrap tin boxes vertically stacked in two shop windows.  Their artistic  affiliation with  the minimalist  neon sculptor Dan Flavin is obvious  but  irrelevant. As the artist makes clear this is work for the real time quotidian of Midland. work to be noticed to be part of the place  day and, especially, night when we can window shop for our most secret longings. Nearly everything in the Lawrence Wilson gallery was once conceived in the same spirit .