Abstraction in painting can be a bit unsettling; it often comes across, or is presented as, inaccessible, pretentious, oblique. Even after successive practical and theoretical dismantlings of mimesis, representation, perspective, depth, and all the other hallmarks of what art historians call the “imitative tradition,” abstraction often remains a bit…abstract. What are we talking about, after all, when we talk about abstraction? In the development (a problematic word, but it will have to do) of Western art, abstraction has, in a sense, always been there, teasing out some basic questions about the nature of two-dimensional (generally) visual representation. There were the early Dada games, all arbitrariness, noise (in the best possible sense), and intellectual, heady deconstruction. There was the problematically fascistic, speedy, peripatetic, angular movement-abstraction of Futurism, the dreamy, intense playfulness of the best of the Surrealists, and, later, the testosterone-fueled, soi-disant heroic splatter-canvases and ‘zips’ of Abstract Expressionism and the trippy, throbbing color-field paintings. These successive waves and reinventions have all been so different as to really render the notion of the “abstract” fairly indefinable. Does it refer simply to a rejection of mimetic representation? To a rejection of line and figuration? What I find most interesting about abstraction in painting is its ability, by virtue of eliminating the interpretive and textual/literary process associated with narrative work, to open up a particularly mysterious, opaque, unnamable conceptual and emotional space. Deprived of the anchor of narrative, of the implicit weight of insufficient language, painting is free to elicit a more purely visceral visual experience.

This liberating, exciting, exploratory quality is, I think, one of the main motivators of Night Fishing, on view through the end of this week at Thierry Goldberg Projects, in the Lower East Side. The intention, according to the gallery, is to use abstraction to “track the spaces between the knowable and the unknowable, angling after an ever elusive meaning.” The goal is an admirable one, and the works succeed in varying degrees in parsing this ever elusive meaning. The assertion that there is a meaning to be found, of course, is a fairly weighty prejudice to hand the viewer; the notion of the spaces between the knowable and unknowable is on point and leads to some interesting experiences.

The first canvases to draw the eye are Luis Macia’s, which look to be made of a combination of spray paint, acrylic, and blue painter’s tape (Because neither the materials nor the artist’s name are clearly marked near the work, this is merely my best guess). The tape demarcates roughly-square shapes against a black-and-grey background; black spray paint spills over the edges of the shapes into the background of the canvases. The tape, according to the gallery, is meant to suggest “traces of process…creating an ambiguity between what constitute the signs of manufacture of the work, and what can be defined as a finished piece.” The notion of the unfinished work, and of representing the process within the work, is hardly a new one; in fact, this seems to me to be an abstract version of the age-old practice of the painter painting himself into the painting. One of my favorite (as well as universally famous) versions of this gesture is in Las Meninas. It’s interesting, but hardly revolutionary. This sort of self-dramatizing allusion to the artist is, for me, echoed by the tape, which, in its resemblance to the blocking marks dancers and actors use to guide them on stage, creates a sense of the performative, using a vocabulary of abstract suggestion.

Kadar Brock’s work highlights a similar performativity that, again, hearkens back to dance and music. In his case, he rolls a set of Dungeons and Dragons dice (our generation of artists really seems to find the nerd-culture references inescapable, a clear vestige of postmodern practices—whatever those are) to determine the titles and contents of his work. The choice of Dungeons and Dragons dice carries with it a certain nerd-pride that intersects with the exclusivity/accessibility question in abstract art. As a cultural signifier, Dungeons and Dragons indicates a particular ’80’s and ’90’s subculture and aesthetic, a middle-class world of wood-paneled den walls and station wagons and skinny-white-male Otherness. The resultant culture seems to exult in its own marginalization, withdrawing hermetically into itself, taking pride in its reject status, flirting with camp. In this way the pop-culture D&D reference oscillates between accessibility and exclusivity: everyone knows what D&D is, what it signifies, but not everyone was part of the fanatical clique of players actively engaged in it, who learned, in turn, to scorn the uninitiated. The use of an arbitrary agent to determine the fashioning of a work recalls Merce Cunningham’s “chance operations”, collaborations with John Cage wherein a coin toss would determine the sequence of steps, number of dancers, direction and duration of movement, and so forth, randomly ordering the construction of the dance. Merce was a notorious perfectionist, and readily discarded many dances made in this way. One wonders what Brock’s criteria are for determing which pieces “work.” Again, this explicit calling of attention to process turns the painting into a kind of performance that seeks to reach out beyond genre and medium, so that abstraction becomes an agent of transcendence.

This reaching-out from the image can be fascinating when executed with sincerity and depth, as in Joyce Kim’s brimming, luminous work, set against the back wall of the first room. A careful, but by no means precious, layering of grays and ivories and eggshells gives the painting a complex but disarmingly touching elegance and depth; if you painted Proust’s prose, this is what it would look like. Vague shapes—the hint of an isosceles triangle here, graceful curves, lines arching like limbs there—erupt delicately from the canvas, which itself appears ripped and torn in certain places, undoing its own two-dimensionality. This is intelligent, sensitive, multi-layered painting, and it follows itself to its logical conclusion: the painting literally comes out of its frame, tumbling from the severed lines of wood out onto the gallery floor. The use of abstraction leads the work to the unknowable spaces, where it must, necessarily, transcend the fixed space of painting by literally falling from its frame. The combination of intellect and deep feeling in Kim’s work is astonishing, and it seems to me to accomplish what abstraction is singularly capable of: creating a series of emotional, visceral, visual and intellectual responses that don’t require articulation any more than painting requires figuration. Abstraction becomes inaccessible only when it hasn’t worked. When it has, as in Kim’s (painting? sculpture?), its impact is more emotionally economical, and visually direct, than narrative or imitation.

Night Fishing at Thierry Goldberg

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