Unsetting feelings about, well, everything

I finally read some reviews for Abstract America, a big time show with young american artists in London from the Summer. I was familiar with the opening and some of the artists included, but i didn't know how poorly it was reviewed. So, after reading the clause given Saatachi Gallery;

A message to the artists included in Abstract America:

Apologies for some of our art critics in the UK. A number of them know very little about contemporary art, obviously. But they do sometimes get there eventually, usually by the time the art is no longer very contemporary.

20 years ago they gave the thumbs-down to our Warhol, Judd, Twombly, Nauman, Guston, Marden exhibitions, that included many of their greatest works - if that's any consolation.

Guess they got the last laugh, but... well, maybe some of these angry critics are making correct observations about the lack of originality and purity in these new works.


So far, ive received this review fromThe Independent as most helpful. Especially

Now it is within the context of this almost surprisingly complicated, and almost self-contradictory, mixture of self-abnegation and self-celebration within the various strands of post-war American abstraction that we need to view this new generation of young American artists. And, yes, they are doing abstraction, all right, just like their artistic forefathers before them, but the spirit and the feel of this work could not be more different from what was happening in New York and elsewhere from the 1940s through to the 1960s. Is it correct, then, to call these young artists heirs to all those who went before? It's both true and misleading in just about equal measure. These new ones have been touched by influences unavailable to their predecessors, the most significant of which is cyberspace, whose manifold seductions we can fall prey to at any time of the day or night, and where we can be everywhere and nowhere all at once. Cyberspace turns life into a non-stop collage of fleeting impressions, and the spirit and cacophony of cyberspace permeates this work.

Non-stop. That is a very important idea for these young artists. If you listened in on their conversational buzz, you would probably hear something like this: "Yes, this is something I've made, but it could just as easily be something else, and it may become so in due course. I call myself a painter now, but the fact is that I'm a multi-media guy/gal of whatever I choose to make, and what I choose to make it out of is what happens to become available to me..."

This feels like work which is gloriously impure, and polluted by the world that surrounds it. It's a kind of "snatch it from here, there and everywhere" kind of work. Artists are natural scavengers, but these artists are experts at it. This work contains elements of story-telling, something that would have been anathema to the Abstract Impressionists, who wanted to purge art of the superficiality of narrative to get to the essence of stark sign-making. This is an art which has the capacity to laugh at itself and the art world of which it is a part. It feels looser and freer and, well, funnier too. It makes time for casualness and superficiality because life in part consists of those things. It does not feel sufficient unto itself.

Which brings us to another interesting issue which is seldom talked about by either art critics or artists, because it is a very awkward one. It is, however, very pertinent to this show. What are you supposed to be thinking about when you look at an abstract painting? I once put the question to the celebrated American abstract painter Brice Marden when we were staring together at a particularly gorgeous sequence of looping-the-loops. He laughed, slightly uncomfortably, and told me that he often thought about his daughters. Was he confessing to some kind of act of self-betrayal? But how do you think about patterning which, to some degree, seems to relate only to itself? How long does it take before you start thinking about your daughters?

The fact is that in this new show, you are actively being encouraged to think about the fact that what you are looking at is out in the world because it is so often referring to what happens in the world, whether that be art making, commerce or popular entertainment. Sometimes it is a mixture of all three. A new pact seems to have been established here, whose terms are as follows: we are makers of abstraction in the American manner, but what that means has been changed irreversibly by what has happened in the world outside of us. We are no longer the monks of yesteryear. Nor are we the showmen. Nor do we feel reverential towards the materials that we use. There is no such thing as a material which is either appropriate or inappropriate. Everything is grist to our mill. We, the youthful scavengers of our frenzied world, are proclaiming a new doctrine: our art is constrained by what we choose to do. All ages are present to us. We make of it what we will, when we will, as we will.

I think, shih is getting serious.

Im going to have to think about this a little more before i can make a call. I have been looking at some of the artist's work included in this show with high esteem. Frankly, i want to fall into all that is freah and contemporary. but, am i literally painting myself into a corner with these influences??

im sick with envy joy and inspiration. FINALLY.