'PHILP GUSTON’

Tate Modern, London

“Probably the only thing one can really learn is the capacity to be able to change.” 
-Philip Guston

A World To Win With Murals

Everyone knows the Guston story. It’s the one about the dissident American Abstract Expressionist, the one who went back to painting… gasp… things, to great controversy. In a style bordering on cartoony, which some also found controversial. Which included depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Which also proved controversial.

But as the opening rooms of this show demonstrate, his origin story was almost bog-standard. He was even a teenage friend of the most Ab of all Exers, Jackson Pollock. He followed the familiar recipe, which as we’ve seen before, was a mixture of Surrealist practices and the scale of New Deal muralism.

We start off with some fairly standard Surrealist works, clearly indebted to de Chirico but with the silkily synthetic painting surface of post-Dali. There’s nothing wrong with them, but nothing particularly right about them either. They’re regular, when Surrealism needs to be estranged from us.

The murals are a different story, however. He’d soon joined the Block of Painters, a group of political muralists in Los Angeles. As these are somewhat challenging to transport, they often get left out of this story. But the Tate goes to efforts, including projecting roving sections of ’The Struggle Against Terrorism’ (1934) on a wall. But let’s focus on a drawing, specifically ’Drawing For Conspirators’ (c. 1930, below.)

Its as politically committed a work as any Berlin Dadaist ever spewed. Had it been given a thumbs-up by the critics and no more, it would have failed in its intent. It exists to make a point. Yet however politically charged it might be, its not a reportage image. In fact its as much a tableau as any Victorian ever painted.

You don’t question this, the crucified Jesus and the black lynching victim being placed next to one another, because there’s no attempt to convey any actual pictorial space. The setting’s a stage, not a place, the figures theatrical. And the creation of works from big, broad symbols… this segues quite neatly into Abstract Expressionism. The symbols just become more general, more universal, that all.

But also… yes, the Klan show up this early. And why wouldn’t they? This period, the inter-war years was their strongpoint. And while this work displays their notorious anti-black racism, they were as much anti-semitic and anti-immigrant. With Guston (birth name Goldstein) a Jewish child of immigrants. In 1932, another mural of his was defaced by the LA Police (then closely linked to the Klan) when they raided the centre which held it. Yet at the same time the era contained a sense of hope, the feeling that old certainties had eroded, that what gave danger also raised possibility. “There was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change” he commented afterwards.

Guston’s personal image bank was filled up then, and he continued drawing on it throughout his life. In his later return to the representational pretty much all that’s new in terms of imagery is the backdrops. (Which are of his adopted New York rather than his original Los Angeles.)

And why shouldn’t this be? After all, when we’re young aren’t we soft clay, impressionable and absorbing? We then progressively harden as we go through life, until our attitudes become impervious.

’Bombardment’ (1937, above) is Guston’s ’Guernica’. Literally so, like the more famous Picasso work it was painted in immediate response to the fascist bombing of that town. The unusual roundel design is used to create a vertiginous effect, explosion placed dead centre, figures flung out at you from it. War’s presented as a kind of ‘big bang’ event, gestating the world we live in.

’Gladiators’ (1940, above) is similarly war-based, only this time it’s not happening to but embodied by the figures, who look inseparable from their masks. The composition’s a swirl of ceaseless combat, your eye never coming to a focus point but forever rolling round. Particularly with the blue angle, the frame seems to be moving down on them. The violence feels menacingly real, but at the same time the weapons are toys, a dustbin shield, a wooden sword. And it's another tableau. The upper left figure outsizes the others, but in so symbolic a work it takes you a while to notice.

’Martial Memory’ (1941, above) is in many ways a successor work, incorporating many of the same elements. (“Guston and the dustbin lid motif, in this talk I will…”) But its a more static composition, working out from the central triangle of the main figure. It’s thing isn’t motion but density. It features, as the indicia puts it, “forms overlapping one another in a very dense manner”. The result is that it neither resolves to either a literal or allegorical reading, inhabiting a kind of ‘between’ space similar to Paula Rego.

In this work the figures have become children, who frequently appear in this period. It’s reminiscent of the way children will repeat back to you what’s on your mind. Inevitably, their response to a world of war is street games of battle. Which easily tip over into true fights of their own.

’The Porch' (1947, above) seems a transitional work into his later abstraction. There’s still some suggestion of pictorial space, but with a cruciform shape imposed upon it. And the figures are stretched, the way a scream is an elongated note.

And 'The Tormentors’ (1947/8) seems almost the next step along in a timeline, the foreground figures fading into inscribed lines, the red-and-black background darkening to dominate the composition. Yet those shapes look not just like they might oncer have been things, they retain some sense of anthropomorphism. (The title suggests we should look for pre-Klan figures.) Perhaps because there’s something primal about the work, as if made from some pre-verbal urge.

All would seem to bode well for Guston’s future abstraction…

”The Process of Creation”

…alas not.

Guston's reasons for turning to abstraction are textbook and exemplary, both the right ones and the best expressed. Briefly, it allowed him to just paint. He made a point of never stepping back from his canvases never pausing work to check on the overall composition, lest that interrupt the flow of paint. “I am not concerned with making pictures,” he commented, “but only the process of creation.” The action of painting the painting is the painting.

But the results don’t particularly honour that noble intent. ’Beggars Joys’ (1954/5, above, is quite typical, with the de-centred cluster of brighter strokes against a paler background. In fact its one of the better works, with its shimmering quality. But this is art for aesthetes.

At the time, with Ab Ex ascendent, these cemented his reputation. He represented America at the Venice Biennale in 1960, aged 47 (a neophyte in painting circles), followed by a Guggenheim retrospective two years later. But the truth is, in the New York School he was but one enrolment among many. There’s no suggestion he broke away for this reason, but the fact remains - if he was going to be Head Boy, he needed to found his own establishment.

The impression’s often given that his return to imagery was some sort of Damascene convention. Like he sat up in bed one morning and went, “hey, everybody - things!” This show demonstrates how slow and tortuous it really was.

In the early-to-mid Sixties black heads started appearing in his work, floating Zardoz-like over clouds of brushy grey. ’Painter III’ (1963, above) is one of the more developed examples, with a brush-sporting arm appended, even reflected in the title. It’s scarcely a great work, and in a room of essentially similar efforts it becomes both repetitive and unfinished. But its significance is in his timeline.

Did those heads just keep arising, unbidden, in his work? And did he break off when he saw what he’d done, alarmed at the forbidden imagery, only to do the same again? It seems a bit too romanticised. Plus these works were apparently shown at the time, not hidden away. Nevertheless, surely something of this sort happened.

From 1966 he then took an eighteen-month break from painting. (“You have to die for a rebirth”, he commented later.) And when he started again, it was with lines. Just lines. Over time these became simple doodles. Blown up to the size of small paintings, but still simple doodles of single objects. As basic as basic can be. But, like the heads, their significance is as steps on his timeline.

The phrase often used for Guston is ‘return to figuration’. Yet he started off painting things, and that’s significant. The first object we see here is a book. And, from an artist’s perspective, what does a book ‘mean’? It’s a repository of words, the alternative to images. If an artist paints a head, he must find a specific head. Even if he doesn’t model the work on a real head, if one comes from his imagination, it becomes a specific head once its painted. While in four letters the word ‘head’ can stand for all heads.

And the stripped-down, iconic way they’re painted is surely to circumvent this problem. A chair or a shoe is designed to represent chairs and shoes as directly as the word would. Significantly, he called these works a ‘visual alphabet’. And a great many items from this alphabet then reappear in his paintings. At the same time there’s something cartoony about them, which makes them least a little anthropomorphised.

Amid Idiot Evil

By 1970, he had fully worked up paintings which were shown at New York’s Marlborough gallery. And this is where the legend starts. Critics raged, former Ab Ex soulmates never spoke to him again, leading to him feeling like he’d been excommunicated. No less than John Cage was dismissive, only de Kooning positive. From that point on, and significantly, his main associates became not artists but writers and poets.

Okay, about time we looked at some…

’Open Window’ (1969, above) recursively hangs some of those 'visual alphabet’ pictures inside a larger work, works-within-a-work. But the window of the title makes them fairly accurate descriptions of a stripped-back urban environment. (And this the New York that classic Modernists were so rhapsodic about!) Downward strokes predominate, suggesting dumbed-down art as a response to a dumbed-down world. It’s reminiscent of the Matisse quote, that the build environment does to our eyes what prejudice does to our intelligence. And we’ll see that stripped-back colour scheme recur again and again, off-whites, chewing-gum-pinks, muddy reds and deep greens, lurid and cheap.

In a similar vein ’City’ (also 1969) reworks city buildings as Klan hoods, narrow windows doubling as eyeslits. As if the city itself was a product of, or perhaps producing, Klan ideology. And speaking of which…

The first room contained a 1924 photo of Klansmen in a car, publicising a white power lecture. An image which reappears in ’City Limits' (1969, above). Guston may not have ever seen it but he must have seen similar things, perhaps in person.

But what’s significant is that they are not depicted in the same way as the Klan of old, as in ’Drawing For Conspirators'. Their appearance, with those sinister costumes, had been designed to strike dread into their victims. But their role as racism boogeymen had waned over time. Racism clearly remained, but it was less embodied in the Klan. And so those pointy hoods started to look a little absurd.

If his personal image bank was filled up in those inter-war years, as he started to draw from it he knew he was spending old money to a changed world. So he paints not malevolent fascist entities but knuckleheads, goons, bozos, neighbourhood bullies. In fact they become a more generalised symbol for knuckleheads, goons and bozos. Their car has gargantuan wheels, yet three figures are crammed into a tiny bubble cab, complete with fag smoke. (You could read that giant car as their externalised self-image, and the diminutive figures as their actuality. If you wanted.)

Adrian Searle describes them as exuding “idiot evil”, and indeed they seem like henchmen without a criminal mastermind, wandering this way and that, often pointing forwards like they wouldn’t know which way to go otherwise. Their nearest comparison in contemporary art would be Crumb’s White Man, with his mantra “I must maintain this rigid position or all is lost.”

Ands the style they’re painted in is as different. Guston had once painted children reflecting adult concerns. Now he’s effectively doing the reverse, depictions of adults in a childlike manner which makes them essentially children. With those huge hoods, the Klan’s heads vanish into their toros, the way child art won’t differentiate head from body. They’re often depicted oversize, both from the child’s habit of ascribing size to significance and as a way of portraying their grasping nature. The banality of evil via the cartoonification of evil.

As is well known, this retrospective was originally planned a few years ago. Then, after the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art in suddenly got cold feet over these images. Whereas of course when they’re relevant is precisely the time to show them! How could anyone get something so spectacularly wrong?

The answer is that the privileged forever mistake their status for smarts, when in fact it’s the reverse. Cushioned from the world’s sharp edges, they cannot see what we see. So they assume that they, the enlightened few, might be able to perceive these were anti-racist images, but what about us, the bewildered herd? As if someone could confuse Guston with DW Griffiths!

The only time either artists or black advocacy groups seem to have been involved in this is to complain it was un-necessary. Plus, all the furore when these works were first shown seems to have been over their representational form and their deliberately crude style. No-one then thought they were Klan-sympathetic. They were wrong - very wrong - about Guston’s art, but that didn’t make them cretins.

Further, the fact that galleries would worry then but go ahead now proves it wasn’t even the images being misinterpreted that worried them but the direction of social media trends. Potential flack coming down upon their own heads was a bigger deal to them than the knee on Floyd’s neck. Now black lives mattering is no longer this year’s thing, it’s safe to go ahead.

(Disclaimer: The Tate seem to have been more caught up in this delay than willing accomplices. And even then co-curator Mark Godfrey resigned from them in disappointment.)

And there another, equally important, dimension to this…

Klan Am I 

The Royal Academy show included a 1971 caricature of Nixon, skipped over here. Which may well be wise, as it can be played on too hard. Guston wasn't a 'political cartoonist'. More significant is all the self-portraits…

…such as 'The Studio’  (1969, above). It’s a painting of a Klansman painting a Klansman, brushes pushed to the foreground to emphasise this is a kind of self-portrait. Because as soon as Klansmen step from the sinister shadows and become regular bozos, we need to accept we are all part-Klansman. They’re our enemy, but not necessarily our external enemy. Guston said “it could be all of us. We’re all heels.” Or at another point, “I am the subject”. He’s shown smoking as he works in the accompanying filmshow, and I’d soon decided that any smoking Klansman was tagged as a self-portrait. (Which means that was also Guston in ’City Limits’.) 

By being a painting of someone painting, this foregrounds the graphic style, Guston painting himself as a Klansman in the way he depicts Klansmen. Klan men in a klan world in a klan style. And as Adrian Searle said, they “look exactly like they were painted by the kind of people they depict… some heavy, slow, intractable goon.”

Further, its significant the way the image is stacked - paint brushes before raised fingers before drawing hand before canvas. It’s not as dense as 'Martial Memory’, but it it feels crammed, claustrophobic, as if depicting an inescapable situation.

And this is enhanced further in ’Painting, Smoking, Eating’ (1973, above), by which point Guston was habitually painting himself as a one-eyed testicle. The horizontal figure actually only has a plate of food on him, the accumulation of objects is behind. But it's painted as if they weigh on him, accentuated by the flatness of the figure under the bedclothes. Guston called this stuff crapola, the detritus of life. And while critics’ claims to find Holocaust references in his work normally feels fanciful, the mass of discarded shoes here may well echo those photos of abandoned belongings in piles.

’Monument’ (1976, above) is like the antonym of those studio paintings, what Guston scuttled past on his forays out to buy more fags and tubs of off-pink. We grant a common identity to the crowd, simply by thinking of it as “the crowd”, while knowing at the same time it has none, its just an agglomeration of individuals. And so we get an apparition such as this, an assemblage of stamping feet without guiding heads, its bestial nature accentuated by the comparison of shoes to horse’s hooves.

There’s a famous quote from Guston: “what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” It’s blown up on the gallery wall, it takes up a page in the booklet. But it’s widely misinterpreted.

Guston was not such a fool as to imagine adjusting a red to an off-pink was a different matter. He wasn’t trying to recapture his politically committed youth, as if you could just transpose from one era to another, and from public walls to a gallery setting. He was using his work to ask himself just that question - what kind of man am I? If you didn’t care about the brutality, you weren’t a human being. On the other hand, if you didn’t care about your art, you weren’t an artist. So the artist cannot help but respond to world events, but at the same time cannot help but feel isolated from them. This art grapples with that conundrum.

Further, its now generally agreed that the New York School retained their leftist beliefs (apart from the occasions where they retained their anarchist beliefs), even when it wasn’t evident in their art. They would have all been aghast at what was happening in America. Which suggests Guston’s motivations were a combination of inner and outer, political outrage and a dissatisfaction with Ab Ex methods. And in saying this we don’t need to place one above the other.

Where did this new style come from? Robert Crumb, mentioned earlier, was soon complaining it had all been stolen from him. Yet he never really missed a chance to be vexatious. Both are really borrowing from the same source, the old American newspaper strips. It’s like arguing my band sounded like the Stones before yours did.

The show refers to this but, as is standard, insists that means George Herriman. Yet Herriman’s fluid, sketchy line could not be further from the blocky things stuck to these walls. Guston is borrowing from lesser-known but more regular newspaper artists, such as Bud Fisher. And he’s not even taking directly from Fisher or from any one of them. He’s taking from them on aggregate, the general way they depicted things, picking up on the common slang. Rather than trying to raise the comics style, Guston lowers himself to its base level. He’s more interested in their crudity, their scuzzy printing, their reduction of objects down to signs. And that’s why his pictures work.

Life After Klan

Though Guston is now defined by the crapola paintings, the style lasted less than a decade and the Klan had disappeared from them well before that. Laster works are more metaphysical, larger in scale and more spacious in content. They’re less fraught and frenzied, more contemplative. Expansive and calm oceans appear, as in ’The Ladder’ (1971, below.)

They’re perhaps best summed up by his comment “there’s nothing to do now but paint my life.” Guston said at the time that while he’s painting something he has no idea what it will be, and he didn’t see why that process should stop just because he’d stopped painting it. He quoted approvingly from Paul Valery, “a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” He wanted back some of the inscrutability abstraction had afforded him.

Still later works swap off-white for much darker and more sombre hues, often full black. The motive for these is mortality, as both himself and his wife dealt with illness. ’Web’ (1975, above) is a particularly nightmarish image, the spiders dominating the horizon, their distance only emphasising how trapped the figure is. Whether his death is near or not, it remains inescapable. The reflections of two of his key colours, muddy red and green, might suggest it’s his art he’s trapped in.

Should we see this as a good exhibition? As you may have guessed from above, it presents a compelling timeline of Guston’s career. But that may be a better thing to write about than walk round, as it gives greater weight to lesser works when we could have had more Klan paintings. (Not something to quote out of context!) The Royal Academy show of 2004 effectively did the opposite, sweeping through his early years, encouraging us only to look for emergent symbols, in order to bring on the crapola. Neither porridge is quite right. And Guston would surely have exulted in remaining hard to pin down.

‘ACTION, GESTURE, PAINT: WOMEN ARTISTS AND GLOBAL ABSTRACTION 1940-70’

Whitechapel Gallery, London

“I paint what I am”
- Etel Adnan

To The Other Half Of the Story

After the Royal Academy’s sprawling, gargantuan retrospective on American Abstract Expressionism, surely that epic tale was at last told. In fact, as the Whitechapel now informs us, it was literally only half the story.

I did mention, if only in passing, the dearth of women artists on its walls. There’s no going back and counting now but, checking David Anfam’s book on the Ab Ex era, of 169 illos five are by women. (Split between Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, who seem the twin exceptions to prove this rule. Krasner got ‘Living Colour’ a genuinely awesome show at the Barbican recently, and Frankenthaler ‘Radical Beauty’ at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.)

In which case you might wonder what Michael West and George Hartigan are doing here. The answer is, figuring there was no other way round it, they took on male names. And if that makes them sound more like Nineteenth century novelists than modern artists, Hartigan even took her adopted name from George Eliot. Lee (born Lenore) Krasner did this too, we’re just more used to hearing her name. While Elaine de Kooning signed her work the less specific but equally un-giveaway EDK.

Not that this worked particularly well. Several reviews claimed more than half of these works had never been publicly been shown in the UK before. I failed to find many images on-line in any form, but did discover several of the artists don’t have their own Wikipedia page.

But, not content with that, this show takes on another wrong by adding another word to it’s title. Abstract Expressionism as a practice preceded the American movement by decades, but they took over the term as surely as they did Hawaii. (And at about the same time.) Much like the Tate’s recent ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ show, this goes for a more global reach. (When artists named below aren’t American, I’ll flag them up.)

And even if you’re some G-beebies viewer who wails at ‘wokeness’ for a hobby, if you like art then surely what you want to see is good art. And if you’re missing out on good art because of some absurd and outmoded restriction, it should occur to you that what you’re doing is missing out.

Without The Intermediary of Images

A quick re-cap on what Ab Ex is… Too often, people’s first reaction is that artists are strangely constraining themselves, restricting what they can do, all to live up to some hifalutin’ theory they’ve devised. But that’s not it at all. Like so many other Modernist movements, it’s more a back-to-basics approach, expunging the weight of tradition, going back to an art which is about making marks on a surface. It had become necessary to, as Ida Barbarigo put it, “unlearn how to paint.” Rather than narrow options it expands possibility. And the boiled-down, doing-stuff title of this show does convey this quite well.

The result is what Else Fischer-Hansen calls “psychological painting”. The artist gets over her state of mind directly, without the intermediary of images. The marks on the canvas act as a seismograph of her mental state. We don’t even need to know what the artist is thinking, we can just see what she is feeling. Such is the stress on this that at times it feels like the physicality of paint is almost fetishised. A little like ectoplasm with mediums, the fluid stuff becomes their link between the intangible and material world.

Was the effect of this good or bad? The answer is yes. As the great Mark E Smith once said about punk: “the great thing is, anyone can do it. And the terrible thing is, anyone can do it.” And as I said of the Academy show “my reaction to the artists here runs the gamut, from absolute awe to total indifference.”

While pretty much every review I read of this show remarked on how many artists there were (over eighty), and how that made things overwhelming, but pointed out that at the same time many of them weren’t much cop. And of course pretty much everyone disagreed with pretty much everyone else as to which were the also-rans. (Including the top two. I can be in absolute awe of Krasner. Yet while this show starts off with Frankenthaler, like she’s a draw for the crowds, my response was absolute indifference.)

But let’s stay on the upside, at least for now. It’s remarkable how this simple idea leads to such a wide variety of approaches. Dusti Bonge’s ’The Beckon’ (1956, above) is a highly composed images, dominated by a series of descending vertical strokes. The fact that it’s so clearly painted makes those descending lines into a statement. The colours are also carefully chosen, with bright white pushing to the front, brown and then black placed at the back.

Whereas Korean-born Wook-kyung Choi’s ’Untitled’ (1960, above) is riotously overloaded. It’s something like looking at an over-flyposted wall, with a mass of shapes and forms half-glimpsed, jostling one another like a crowd where everyone in it is calling out at you. Could that be a black figure, for example, just peering out for the side of that top green patch? (The gallery used a different work by Choi, also ’Untitled’, as their main image for the show. But I preferred this one.)

While Choi takes what would otherwise be static forms and juxtaposes them, British painter Gillian Ayres’ ’Distillation’ (1957) is convulsive - not just dynamic in effect but born out of dynamism. It’s hard to credit that it isn’t moving even as you look at it, blasting out from some point in the lower centre. The term ‘Big Bang’ to explain the birth of our universe was coined in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, and this is the era where it came to win out over the earlier steady state model. Ayers isn’t illustrating such a moment, but the sense of dynamism as fundamental to things is surely not a coincidence.

(I had resolved, in the show’s spirit of discovery, to include only artists new to me. Of which there’s not exactly a shortage. And Ayers appeared in the Barbican’s equally revelatory ‘Post-War Modern’. But her work there, at least the one I picked on, was quite different to the one I’m using here. So my rule’s bent, but not broken.)

Then, in ’Reminiscences’, (1964, above) Chinyee (Chinese) paints shapes as individually indistinct as Ayers, but in amuch more contemplative style. Like a soft-focus photograph taken to extremes, each colour and shape seems to blend into the next, with the result it recedes rather than leap out at you. You could be forgiven for thinking it would resolve into an image, perhaps a nature scene, if you only squinted at it long enough. Combined with the warmth of the colours, the effect of this is beguiling. Notably it doesn’t have the immediate, action-based titles of Bonge or Ayers, and hints at how memory is simultaneously comforting and fallible, each perhaps enabling the other.

Ab Ex was strongly Surrealist influenced, Sonja Sekula among them. But ’7am’ (above, 1948/9) is at least as much Futurist. With a surface of sharp delineating lines in a loose grid pattern, it would look like some kind of blueprint if there wasn’t such a surfeit of them. Then, with the softer shapes behind them, there seems a near-unguessable amount of pictorial depth. Different pictorial devices seem to exist at once, as if clamouring for our attention. To the lower right is a reasonably realised arch bridge, while other shapes are abstract. It seems to lead up to two dominant towers, like looking at a cityscape. But behind them appear the bases for an arched roof.

It’s a classic Futurist device… too much information, delivered in too many different ways, capturing the way the city is itself collage-like. It evokes the city as something dynamic, not built of bricks and concrete but made out of motion. (Like many an artist, Sekula moved to and was inspired by New York. But more than a decade before this was painted.)

…with so many artists on show you could just keep going with this. But by now the point should be made. Ab Ex is an approach not a rigid style.

Art Is A Language You Can’t Read

As we’ve seen, in Ab Ex’s first and strongest commandment, images are ruled out, or at least de-prioritised. With the result many works aren’t titled, titled ’Untitled’, numbered or just named after the colours used. After all, if you can say it, why bother with painting it?

Yet within the picture frame, words are often retained - but made into symbols. As we saw at the Academy show, this often took the form of (normally made up) ancient hieroglyphs. In a kind of illusion born of distance, you could imagine they didn’t just contain wisdom unknown to us but wisdom inexpressible in the humdrum, everyday alphabet we used. In a grass-is-greener effect, the language which sees to say the most is the one you’re not using.

Yet the Argentine artist Sarah Grilo does something different. ’Not Even One More Day’ (1966, above) is so large it’s like looking at a wall. Except the wall itself has been removed, with the signs, posters and graffiti which might have adorned it remaining up. About every form of writing is used, from typeset to outright scribble. Occasionally a complete word can be spotted, but mostly there’s fragments. So our own alphabet, one of the most familiar things we have, is presented back to us in this defamiliarised way. The ‘magic’ of language, which normally just dissolves into its function, is floated before us and so foregrounded.

Is Art Angst?

Let’s circle back to the women artist theme… With this sort of thing, there’s a balance to be struck. Primarily, women’s art is not a genre. (Or men’s art is as well, a claim made by nobody ever.) Women artists are artists, and each should be seen in terms of her own art. On the other hand, if they’re going to do exactly the same stuff as the male artists, only more of it, we’re not really gaining anything.

And here my uncharacteristic dalliance with positivity, which was never going to last forever, hits some hard realities. Because some of the problems with Ab Ex weren’t to do with the hang-ups of individual artists; they were widespread across the movement.

Tom Waits once said “bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering”. And if he’d seen some of the works here, he’d have added bad painting. Noting that much of the Academy show was ‘manpainy’, I wondered if women artists might escape this self-regarding trap of privatised emotional states. And true enough, few of the works we’ve seen so far fall into that. As the show says of Ayres’ art, it “reflected how she claimed to see the world, in ebullient shapes and colours.”

But you could say that for many of the male artists at the Academy show. The problem was recurrent, perhaps persistent, but not inherent. And it turns out we’ve been heading for that fall all along, as the show devotes one of it’s four sections to angst. A movement so fixated on the bombastic business of the artist making her mark, then leaving it there for all to see, perhaps it was never going to entirely escape.

And while there are works in this section which do work, you feel most of them do it by not really belonging in this section. A rare exception is Spanish artist Juana Frances’ ’No. 49’ (1960, above). Part of the appeal is her use of non-art materials such as sand and grit. But more, in a movement fixated upon the touch of the artist, her works don’t necessarily look made. They could have just been subject to some natural process, possibly even by accident.

And this defuses that sense of the grand artistic statement. We can just look at an environment that seems abraded and scarred, ravaged and denuded as a moonscape. (You don’t get anything near the full effect of any of these works from thumbnails. But in this case it may be doing no more than proving the work actually exists.)

Gesticulating With Brushes (Or Sometimes Without) 

Wook-kyung Cho said “I dash into the canvas and develop various situations without any conception or any plan.” And rather than first planning their way through sketches, artists normally found the painting as they worked on the canvas. You improvised in order to compose. You might strike lucky and find your work quickly. If you didn’t you could just keep going, until the point you looked up and liked what you saw. But all of this improvisational method doesn’t stop the work being composed, even if its not consciously thought out. Painting’s advantage is that its a deliberative medium, allowing for pause and reflection, for both creator and audience.

So it’s less a leap and more of impasse between this and the notion of a canvas as a record of an action. Wanting to know the gestures the artist made during composition, that’s like asking how Hemingway typed. So all these works made this way, they’d seem like a category error even if they didn’t overlap so much with all that individualised angst.

Besides, if you’re going to go about recording gestures there would seem to be better options than canvases. (He said, possibly sarcastically.) There’s an extra room added to the end of this show, described as “a sister exhibition”, called ’Action, Gesture, Performance; Feminism, the Body and Abstraction’. Including the video record of a performance Carolee Scheemann gave in 1974, called ’Up To and Including Her Limits’. She swings on a harness around a bare space, drawing on the walls and floor.

Any value this ever had is now lost to time. But the point is - this is the record of a performance. The ‘finished’ walls she decorated look just like a toddler was let loose with a crayon. And some of the works hung here look like someone just pulled a series of grand and wild strokes before a canvas, mugging for the cameras, then the resultant work was somehow exhibited.

Amaranth Ehrenhalt painted ’Jump In and Move Around' (1961, above), which with it’s medley of upfront colours at least looks like someone is having fun. Though as the title effectively confesses it looks like it was more fun to do than look at, successive colours slapped on a canvas without looking much.

Canadian artist Miriam Schapiro's ’Idyll II’ (1956, above), is superficially similar. But looks like beneath that flurry of mark-making there’s some underlying composition. The indicia tells us that she often started by copying more traditional works, over which she’d overpaint her own efforts. Perhaps this gave her a double opportunity, rubbing out the art of old while borrowing its form.

There’s been a few of these shows lately, trying to rediscover the names blotted out by more orthodox art histories. And they seem a better use of everyone’s time than to reiterate the cast list of the greats all over again. While this is more uneven than some of the others, as always the advantage is also the disadvantage. It’s like busting open a prison camp and watching the mass runaround, there’s simply too many suppressed names to be re-released in one go, and the effect is exhilarating but also overpowering. It needs to be the start of something, it can’t restore a balance simply by itself. But whether these newly remembered names will stay remembered, and more work by them will be shown in the future, only time will tell.

NINA NASTASIA/ REICH RICHTER (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

NINA NASTASIA
Komedia Studio Theatre, Brighton
Monday 3rd April

Nina Nastasia is a New York singer-songwriter and longstanding John Peel fave. My previous attempts to see her have not always worked well. She appeared as part of a package tour where she seemed nervous and off. Then I ventured out on a night so freezing I was surprised the gig hadn’t been cancelled. To arrive at an empty bar and the news the gig had been cancelled. This was followed by twelve years of silence.

But now new album ’Riderless Horse’ has led to a new tour. It’s the first release for her to be playing solo. And you can see why, it’s been described as “her barest and most personal work ever.” She’s been open in interview about its origins, so it’s not too tabloidy to mention here. She broke with her manager and long-time partner over obsessive behaviour which became controlling, to find he’d killed himself the very next day. And many songs on the new album are directly addressed to him.

In the circumstances it seemed a somewhat churlish thought, but I wondered if it would repeat my last gig at Komedia, where Emma Ruth Rundle also played solo. Where the intimacy only intensified the intensity, until it became too much of a good thing.

And I always loved her band sound, with the violins which wailed on the edge of songs, like cats refusing to either come in or go out. I tend to think of her lyrics are planspokenly descriptive, with her singing style and musical style throwing the emotional filter over them.

She soon makes a comment about her ill-advised drinking whisky without water on-stage. But the night turns the other way around, and a single voice plus guitar fill the room without overwhelming. Perhaps because the songs were written to be played this way, perhaps because the have some tonal variety to them. ’Go Away’ is about as strong and strident a statement as the title suggests, which ’Blind As Batsies’ is by comparison almost jovial.

I assumed the new album dominated the set list, but checking afterwards it didn’t entirely rule the roost. The old songs slid in quite neatly with the new. Perhaps confirming Laura Snapes’ theory in the Guardian that this poison-laced relationship may have been her rosebud all along. (“This wasn’t foreboding songcraft but often completely literal.”)

So all in all, these songs of loss and despair led to splendid night for all. But my earnest wish remains to see her with a band. Even if I have to wait another twelve years.

From London the next night…

REICH/RICHTER
London Sinfonietta
South Bank Centre, London
Thurs 6th April

Over a decade ago, the Tate staged a Gerhard Richter exhibition. I intended to go, but didn’t. And up till now that’s all I could have told you about his art. In 2106 he made an animation of his art. Though rather than ‘animated art’ the the art’s essentially treated as raw materials for a new work. Starting with horizontal bands of colour, simple yet shifting. Out of which grow mirrored images, sampled sections of his artwork, developing like Mandelbrots. Then it slowly reverts to those strips of colour.

Steve Reich then put a score to it, and as the double headliner suggests we get the combination here. It’s slower-paced and more serene than the standard pulsing Reich, perhaps keeping pace with the film. The feeling is unhurried, late afternoon. Reich is quoted in the programme: “the structure of the music would be tied to the structure of the film”. Initially, when the film’s at its simplest, the score simply duplicates it in sound, then separates later.

Reich's also quoted in the programme on his connection with visual arts, pointing out that in the early days of Minimalism concert venues closed their doors but gallery spaces were more accommodating. And the music’s interest in structure over development proves the truth of this. With both sound and image essentially ‘abstract’ it becomes like a team-up rather than a struggle for dominance, a full-on synaesthesiac experience.

I wondered mid-piece how the sound would work without the visuals, then thought that a silly question to ask when I was getting the visuals. Listening to it afterwards I’d concede Reich has written greater works, but in combination it works very well indeed.

Julia Wolfe contributed what was essentially a modern composer’s version of George Harrison’s ’Only a Northern Song’. Based on a recording she heard of a brass section still very much in learning mode, she wrote ’Tell me everything.’ Which is a rollicking exuberant ride, like a toddler charging across a room, somehow always right in it’s wrongness. She’s quoted in the programme as finding it funny, which it is, but on the laugh-with side of the equation. It seemed to get the thinnest applause of the night, but as the record shows I’m a longstanding fan and was swept up in it.

In tribute to Mira Calix, who died too young last year, the Sinfonietta played ’Nunu’. Which may be her greatest hit, though never was there a more bizarre version of that label. It works its way up from sampled insects sounds, via plucks and taps into a mutated form of melodies. Otherly strange, but beguilingly so, enchanting rather than challenging. Calix’s relentless experimentalism didn’t always pay off, truth be told, but this piece wouldn’t be any more successful.

Julius Eastman was an entirely new name to me. Seems he was on the same New York scene as Arthur Russell, dedicated to eradicating the uptown/downtown demarcation, mostly by exploring the links between Minimalism and pop music.

’Joy Boy’ is a melodic piano pieces augmented by the most minimal contributions from the other instruments, until it’s impossible to hear individual lines apart from the complete work. Though sadly dying aged forty-nine, it seems he was prolific and it would be good to hear more. (Hint, hint, music programmers.)

Anna Clyne’s ’Fractured Time’ perhaps worked the least well for me. It’s agitated flurries seemed to want for something to work against, like a movement from a larger work rather than a piece in and of itself. Though it should be said if this was the weak link, it’s a sign of a pretty strong programme.

‘LEE KRASNER: LIVING COLOUR’

Barbican Gallery, London



“Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking - do I want to live? My answer is yes - and paint."
-Krasner

Artists Make Themselves



Lee Krasner’s ’Self-Portrait’ (1928, above) is a in genre we’re already seen with both Van Gogh and Tove Jansson- the artist’s self-portrait as mission statement, effectively creating themselves. In fact she up the ante on them by incorporating not just her clutching a mittfull of brushes but a corner of the canvas we’re now looking at.

And like them Krasner paints herself assertively. She’s looking into the mirror she worked from, but of course she’s as much meeting our gaze. And if there’s something androgynous in that overalled figure, it was about this time that Lena changed her name to the less gendered Lee. (Leading to one room here being titled ’Becoming Lee’.)

It was painted partly to get her accepted into the National Academy of Design. Which worked, initially. But not entirely sirprisingly she didn’t take well to rules or tradition, and found the place “congealed mediocrity”. The Depression forced her to leave. But by ’37 she’d won a scholarship to study under the Modernist Hans Hoffman, who complimented her work by saying “you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman”. Mmm…

And you can see why this show would start out in such a place. She’s perhaps best known through her marriage to Jackson Pollock, and whatever its other strengths the recent Royal Academy show of Abstract Expressionism sidelined her.

Breaking the Cult of Big

Like many Ab Ex artists, Krasner became involved in Roosevelt-era public artist projects, where she designed quite Constructivist collages for storefronts. (And through which met Pollock). But let’s fast-forward to ’45 where that style was established and they moved to Long Island.

(At which point we need to strike a familiar note of caution. Like most works of this era, thumbnails on the internet are not just a poor substitute for seeing the things themselves, they’re not a substitute at all. Try to at least find larger images of them where you can.)



Born in Brooklyn, Krasner was influenced by the abundant nature she found relocating to Long Island. The impetus for the vibrant ’Untitled’ (1946, above) seems to have been fields of flowers. (It’s displayed alongside photographs of the same, by her friend Ray Eames.) It’s small size gives you the feeling you’d get from a full-size painting, but one you can only see from across the room. You peer into it but it’s almost impossible to mark out any detail. Which seems reminiscent of the way flower filaments can fall apart in your hand as you hold them, as if what you see in the fields is some kind of shimmering mirage.

Krasner called these ‘little images’, commenting “you can have giant physical size with no statement on it… and vice versa, you can have a tiny painting which is monumental in scale.” And she’s not just right but pointing out a recurrent problem with American Ab Ex, where ostentation too often ruled the roost.

But the brute fact remains she used their bedroom as a studio while Pollock hogged the barn for his magnum opuses. His eponymous biopic (released in 2000) includes a dramatic scene where he impatiently busts the lock from it, the creative mind which can’t be kept from its work.

And this has an effect on their respective imagery; as if while she had her head buried in flower beds he gazed up at the night sky. It’s like the artist couple in the film ’Synecdoche New York’, where his work covers city blocks and hers verges on microscopic. Except not done as a parody.

Show the Shreds

Perhaps due to her insistence that she didn’t want to be confined to a ‘signature image”, Krasner was a highly self-critical artist. At some point in 1951, not for the only time, she became so frustrated she tore up her own artwork. She couldn’t return to the studio for weeks, but once she did the “strewn shreds” took her interest.

These led to the ’collage paintings’, made up from torn newspaper and other found materials and Pollock’s discarded drawings - but mostly her own work. She pasted these over her own canvases, sometimes ones she’d already exhibited. And colour field paintings, a style common in American Abstract Expressionism, proved to be ideal backdrops.



This came to be her best-known period, with ‘Desert Moon’ (1955) being used as the poster image here. But let’s take as our example ‘Blue Level’ (above) from the same year. They have the jagged verticality of her Ab Ex contemporary, Clyfford Still, as seen in that Royal Academy show.

But with their strong, bold colours and sense of spatial depth there also seems something of Malevich’s Suprematism.The large white rectangle, for example, seems a looong way behind that shard of navy. They also recall the Matisse who said: “With colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”

The roughness of their construction is unhidden. The browns are bare canvas, not just used as a material but foregrounded. But there’s an enticing dynamic between that roughness and the balanced composition, that leaves it looking simultaneously dynamic and poised. The theory of cut-up writing is that, by rearranging existing texts, it can create a more meta perspective out of them. These works suggest a similar notion. Fairfield Porter described them as possessing “a subtle disorder”, but it’s one which suggests at a greater order.

Night Sight



Then came the car crash.

Krasner’s marriage to Pollock was already troubled, given his alcoholism and philandering it could hardly not have been. She was already at work on what became ’Prophecy’ (above) when, in August 1956, she received the news of his death. Compounding the grief, her Mother died shortly after.

The title must have come later, and presumably from Krasner herself. But the popular notion that we’re seeing some subconscious premonition of that fatal accident is not just mystification, dressing art up as some Delphic Oracle, it simply doesn’t take you anywhere. And, most of all, it has little to do with the work itself.

Most significantly, this marks the return of the human form, but in so distorted a way that human flesh is made monstrous. (The Ab Ex contemporary most similar to her here is de Kooning.) With the feet on the base line, the head lowered and the knee pressing into its side, the figure looks as trapped within the frame as it would in a cage.

But it’s then convoluted beyond that. One eye is outside the head, sketched onto the black background, while the mouth is a downward slash of red. While the collage paintings were ultimately harmonious its this return to the human form brings with it disorder. Other pictures from this time look like a kind of lost property office of limbs and torsos, parts jammed in a drawer. This is the dark and disturbing Abstract Expressionism, the mood we most associate with the style, par excellence. Body in cage is body as cage.

The following year Krasner moved into Pollock’s barn studio, for the first time able to work at scale. Though he’d been drawn there by the natural light, beset by insomnia she painted at night. And in these dark hours she restricted her palette to white (normally off-white) and ‘umber’. (Dark brown. I had to look it up too.) Richard Howard nicknamed these the ‘Night Journeys’.

This bold new direction didn’t take everyone with it. Clement Greenberg, the critic who had championed American Abstract Expressionism, promptly cancelled a forthcoming solo exhibition. Which of course leaves you primed to rate this work. Yet in fact the sudden withdrawl of colour, so integral to the collages, is a little hard to take. And they can at times look a little too Ab Ex-ey, too much a collection of grand and sweeping gestures. Ironically, given her earlier critique of scale without statement.

(Intriguingly Pollock, also known for his use of colour, also had phases of painting in black-and-white, such as the ‘black paintings’ of the early Fifties. Popular response tended to be similar.)



The strongest work is ’Polar Stampede’ (1960, above) which uses a sandy brown as well as umber. Just one extra colour seems to make a huge difference. While a work like ’Blue Level’ showed layered flat surfaces, this is much more convulsive. Each of the three colours seems to be pressing forwards to upstage the others, like a firework display where the bursts keep coming to the point you can no longer conceive of them separately.

Return to Light




Krasner later said “I emerged again into the light and colour. I think that’s like life”. And certainly it gave her art it’s life back. ‘Another Storm’ (1963, above) is described by the show as “blazing alizarin crimson”. (An achievement more remarkable when you hear she made it while encumbered with a broken arm.) If the collage paintings seemed to have great spatial depth this seems to burst out at you.

Most Ab Ex works had definitively abstract titles, firewalls against unwanted narrative interpretations. Krasner sometimes went in for this, we’ve already had ‘Blue Level’. Yet many are are nature-derived. As well as ’Another Storm’ the afore-mentioned ‘Desert Moon’, there’s ‘Bird Talk’ and ‘Bald Eagle’. The nature of Long Island long held an influence on her.

And her interest in nature may have been as the main place where we see stuff created. Rather than suggesting anything being created, it seems to evoke the dynamics of creation itself. Nature less represents the subconscious, as it had in Romanticism. She spoke against “the separateness of nature”, the notion of “nature being out there and I’m here”. To her it was more the way it doesn’t create by building from blueprints but by generating, by letting things develop. Similarly she always launched herself directly into her canvases, without preparatory sketches.

A Rain of Scalpel Blades

In 1977 Krasner stumbled on some of her old life drawings from the Hoffman school. Being Krasner, she’d soon cut them to pieces and reassembled them. They got exhibited at the ‘Eleven Ways to Use the Word to See’ show, the same year, including ’Future Indicative’ (below).



The figure had dominated art since Classicism. If her Ab Ex contemporaries had separated from it, when it returned (as with Guston or De Kooning) it usually resumed its centrality. Like a King returning to his throne.

Here her diagonal slices are neatly aligned with one another, but mercilessly cut across the figures like a rain of scalpel blades. Dada collage had seemed savage when it reduced the figure to its components. (Heads, arms and so on, kit parts ready to be rearranged.) But Kranser doesn’t dismember so much as shred.

And the violence of the image is accentuated by the whiteness of the shard. It’s they who first attract attention, making the subject not the cut object but the act of cutting. While almost all her previous titles had been noun-based, all these take on verb forms.

Krasner was from a different strand of Modernism to Dorothea Tanning, but for all the lack of overlap in their content their careers followed a similar trajectory. Both married a giant of their style, and for too long had their output overshadowed by his. Yet at the same time, both were strong-minded and independent. Both continued to recklessly change their style, often to their advantage but also causing a mid-career dip.

So the show tells such a good yarn you become reluctant to pick at it. Not just a woman in a male art world but Jewish in a Caucasian society, she stuck to her brushes in the face of all adversity. In a filmed interview she says proudly “I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent”.

Pollock was a great artist, certainly, but those who met him normally found him an insufferable jerk. While, in quotes and a filmed interview, she comes across as indomitable, a combination of overpowering and engaging. Somebody you’d love to have encountered, if accepting in advance you wouldn’t be getting a word in edgeways. Which cannot help but add to the sense there’s a wrong to be righted here. Notably, most mainstream reviews seemed to home in on this narrative, in the process saying nothing interesting about her art.

But, as always, distrust most the stories you most want to be true. It’s not wrong necessarily, the problem’s more the way a whole bunch of stray facts get shorehorned into a neat narrative. The radical intent of Self-Portrait’, for example, is almost literally not the whole picture. There’s other self-portraits in this show in which she’s more conventionally feminised. They just get less attention.

This show was not just welcome but a necessary correction to the Academy’s. Yet perhaps significantly the two poster variants were of ‘Desert Moon’ and a photo of Krasner herself. Which seems a little like a coin flipping. We should always see Krasner first and foremost as the artist, that “damn good painter”, before a poster girl for progressive values.

‘SHAPE OF LIGHT: 100 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY + ABSTRACT ART’

Tate Modern, London

“Why should the inspiration that comes from an artist’s manipulation of the hairs of a brush be any different from that of the artist who bends at will the rays of light?”
— Pierre Dubreuil

”Photography is all about finding new ways of looking.”
Gallery guide

To The Essence

The last Modernist photography exhibition the Tate ran, ‘The Radical Eye’, effectively scuppered the standard model. The claim was no longer credible that photography served Modernism by taking from it the rote task of faithfully recording stuff, like a servant carrying out his master’s chores. Instead, it was seized on as a Modernist medium in its own right. As said at the time: “The lens was taken up as an artists’ instrument as much as the paint brush or sculptor’s mallet, if not a tool for modern times which rendered its predecessors redundant.”

But that show’s chief focus was the human figure. Abstract photography might mark a bigger jump. In fact it strikes many as actively self-contradictory. Surely photography is always contingent, always of something. The coiffured celebrity, the scenic view, the significant event… that comes first, and then draws the photographers to it like a magnet.

This is because many define abstract art quite narrowly - as the non-representational. Mondrian’s coloured squares are abstract because they’re not based on an actual scene he happened on, and so on. But it also means ‘to remove from’ or ‘reduce to its essence’. Both of which come up in this show. As Aaron Siskind says: “When a painter paints a picture it can be immediately abstract… A band of paint is simply a band of paint. When a photographer makes nature abstract, an attempt is made to transform a realistic scene into an abstraction.”

So abstract photography does see the real world but only as raw materials, to sift through and utilise. Man Ray’s quoted as saying “instead of producing a banal representation of a place, I’d rather take my handkerchief out of my pocket, twist it to my liking, and photograph it as I wish.”

And it was ever thus. The entire basis of composition lies in boiling art down into a set of shapes and forms, which can then be arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner. These then attract the eye, an eye which only later recognises what those shapes and forms have been made to represent – cylinders resolve into torsos, ellipses become heads, and so on. Abstract art just does away with the unnecessary final stage, and makes the composition the end-all. So just like ambient music is really a way of listening, abstract is less an art style and more a way of looking, where composition is prized above representation.

Photography, precisely because it has to be contingent on something, is a good way of accentuating this. Significantly, Paul Strand named his pieces ‘Abstract’ then gave away their origin in the rest of the title, as with ’Abstraction, Porch Shadow, Connecticut’ (1916, below). The point wasn’t to hide away the way they were made, like in a magic trick, but to display it.

This show is more about the interrelationship of photography and abstract art than abstract photography in itself. Following the example of ’Camera Work’,

a photography journal run by Alfred Stieglitz between 1903 and 1917, it often sets up side-by-side comparisons of photographs with paintings, the labels clustered together. So for example a Mondrian sits beside German Lorca’s ’Mondrian Window’ (1960, below).

Different Eyes

A driving force behind Modernism was that we now live primarily in a made world, so there’s little sense clutching to the aesthetic rules or subject-matters of our forefathers. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s quoted as saying “we see the world with entirely different eyes”. So Lorca’s combination of rigid geometric forms is something we’re likely to encounter, despite its absence from nature. The fact that it’s a window, something you’re supposed to look through rather than at, just emphasises the way it’s about reframing things.

And of course Mondrian was inspired by the geometry of urban environments in the first place, particularly New York. Though I’d suggest Lorca works better than Mondrian precisely because the image is captured rather than composed out of nothing. Things work almost the other way up. Because we’re looking at a photo of a made object not something painted by hand, it’s the imperfections which we notice. And it’s those imperfections which look so glorious.

Also, if the urban environment gave new views it also provided no viewpoints. Such as the sheer towering cliff of a tall building, so regularly punctuated, of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s ’Balconies’ (1925, below).

And once this new way of seeing is established, we bear its imprint. We carry our different eyes with us everywhere. So Bill Brandt’s ’East Sussex Coast’ series (1957, example below), features a human figure in a natural environment, but abstracts from them regardless. In its contrast between the contours of the human form and the flat horizon, it’s similar to the sculpture of Henry Moore.

But the weakness here is the obvious one. Continue insisting that photography is the cousin of painting, and it will only ever be the poor relation. Modernism’s liberating promise to painting was that it could see itself as a thing in itself, it didn’t have to imitate to survive in polite company. It should do no less for photography. However, as the paintings start to thin out mid-way through this (chiefly) chronological exhibition, maybe that story has a happy ending.

As said photography is always of pieces of the world. Yet it contains no inherent sense of scale. Those limbs Bill Brandt snapped on a Sussex beach, couldn’t they be monumental in size? We can, if we want, blow up a pin to wall size or reduce a city to a postage stamp. Cinema jumps between these scales from one second to the next. And the cumulative effect of this show is similar. Our eyes dart continually between all of this - scales, angles and viewpoints - until we no longer even notice.

So a work like Karol Hiller’s ’Heliographic Composition XXIV’ (1936, above) takes on a Malevich-like mysticism. It could be an aerial view of a modern city, a close-up of machine parts, or simply some geometry Hiller himself assembled. It’s not obvious whether it’s bigger or smaller in scale than our everyday senses, merely that it’s outside of them. The forms become idealised, floating in a space not subject to the norms of physics. The term ‘Heliographic’ came from his desire to unite photography, painting and graphic design, ideally within the space of one artwork.

Subjective Photography

Another advantage of photography is that it seemed inherently a more democratic medium. It was simply easier to take a snap than paint a painting. And even those who didn’t, or did so in merely a casual way, might respond less credulously and more critically when presented with a photography exhibition. The Bauhaus for example sought to level hierarchies among the arts, if not between them and the crafts. Which led to them, as the show explains in a slightly Finbarr Saunders moment, “encouraging experimentation in the darkroom”. Their tutor Maholy-Nagy, already quoted above, started as a painter but soon took to photography. And his photos, at least in my view, eclipse his paintings in quality.

This extended to subject matter. Rodchenko’s primary purpose was to capture the modern urban environment. He might well have developed his own authorial style while doing so, but the subject matter was accessible to all - requiring no specialised knowledge. The above should be seen as a range of ideas, and different artists might have adhered to them to different degrees, but which point in a broadly similar direction.

Meanwhile, other works question artistic intent altogether. Take for example Brassai (the pseudonym of Gyula Halász). His series of ‘Involuntary Sculptures’ (example above from 1932) were essentially found abstracts, everyday items he’d photograph in great close-up. What would otherwise seem ephemeral became foregrounded. As he said at the time “There is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.”

Brassai also held a fascination for Parisian graffiti, example above. Rather than try to persuade you of the artistic merit of their subject, his photographs present these scratchings as inscrutably strange as rock art. In one way there’s an overlap between this and the way Abstract Expressionist artists such as Mark Tobey would evoke ancient, indecipherable hieroglyphs. But in another…

Someone, obviously, must have made that graffiti for it to be there. But that’s not where Brassai’s interest lies. Paris isn’t a canvas for his subject, it is his subject. As most of his examples are scratched or scoured into the wall, it’s often hard to tell deliberate mark making from accidental wear and tear. Perhaps one sometimes led to the other, the way cave paintings sometimes exploited unusual shapes of rock.

Aaron Siskind took similar photos in America, such as ’Los Angeles 3’ (1949, above). And with Siskind the notion is stronger of chance discovery as a means of accessing an otherwise invisible underlying process. For at Black Mountain College he taught alongside the Pope of Chance John Cage. (Rauschenberg was one of his pupils, and it shows.)

These photographs reflect the spirit of the magical aphorism “as above, so below”. The vast cities of Paris and Los Angeles are too big a fit for the most wide-angle lens, but can be captured in microcosm. The dilapidation is important, as it contrasts with the artifice of the urban environment and shows a humanised, lived-in space. (Just as there is no rust or peeling painting in those Bauhaus or Constructivist images.)

But it doesn’t work in the social crusading sense of exposing urban decay. It’s inaccurate to read them as presenting Modernist idealism gone rusty. It’s more that they have an aesthetic all their own, the way older people can develop character lines. It’s more that they act as a map of the cities’ spirits just as a more literal map capture their streets.

A different approach is taken by Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé with ’Jazzmen’ (1961, above). The residue of overlaid torn posters is something that has always fascinated me whenever I come across it. It’s interesting to note what this is not. Cubism took a hammer to letters as much as it did bottles, guitars and heads. But it always took a single image and fractured it. Whereas this is clearly multiple images superimposed, as if jostling for space. The show tells us his interest lay not the posters themselves but the act of tearing them, which he saw as “a spontaneous art of the street”.

However he has given this work the title “Jazzmen”, and the image seems centred around the guitar-sporting torso. Like Jazz did with music, de la Villeglé is taking apart and recombining something previously familiar.

And how would we represent a city sonically? The City Symphony films of the Twenties, took their structure, as it says here, “from the movements and motifs of orchestral symphonies… rather than the dynamics of narrative pacing.” They largely assumed a modern city was as grand, as cohesive, as composed as an orchestral work. Morning traffic was like fanfares, and so on. Yet if that high-minded notion ever matched the way we actually experience cities, it didn’t survive that optimistic decade.

Whereas, unlike these films (and also unlike Brassai’s found graffiti), the jazz analogy does not assume a city can be condensed down to a single item. Instead it’s composed of neighbours who do not choose one another but find a way to get along; a city is a collage to its very heart. But, more than that, the analogy assumes a city is in a continual process of being reworked and repurposed, a neighbourhood built for one thing transforming into something else, one façade put up over another but then itself starting to fray.

Anti Subject Matter, Anti-Photography

Let’s do the ‘meanwhile’ thing again, and cut to pure abstract photography. The show describes this as “focused on the tools of the medium rather than real world objects. They used photography to consider the inner mechanisms of the world and explored the possibility of creating photography that could break free from subject matter altogether.” Belina Kolarova enthused over it, “how little is needed for its creation!”

Bronislaw Schalb, in works such as ’Untitled’ (1957, above), burned, scratched and painted straight onto the negative. And the non-title is significant, there isn’t a porch shadow that if followed might lead us back to the world we know. Perhaps what’s interesting is that even as you’re told this your mind recoils from the information, still tries to find a way to associate the photograph with things around us. You try to make it into an aerial view of a parched landscape, an experiment in a petri dish and so on. And, as so often, it’s the art that’s irresolvable which is the art that lingers.

Yet while widespread these approaches weren’t universal. Otto Steinert, despite being part of the Bauhaus, later formed the ‘fotoform group’. Their credo of “subjective photography” re-emphasised the photographer’s role as “decision maker”, essentially reversing the perspective back onto the button-clicker and confirming the photographer had an artistic spirit after all.

Alfred Stieglitz went further, in his ’Equivalent’ series (1927-31, example above). He’d photograph clouds, as we all could, but in much the way a Romantic would have painted them. He spoke of their expressing his “inner resonances”, nature as an externalisation of the self. And these can be effective works in their own right. There’s no requirement for abstract photography to march in a single direction. It’s an approach, not a genre.

Evading Photography

The show is hung roughly chronologically, and as we get nearer to the present day I started to think more and more about getting nearer the exit door. Some of these later works do entertain interesting notions, but to which the actual artworks seem just an afterthought. While others just seem callbacks to earlier ideas, given a Post-Modern gloss. (Admittedly I’d have been more excited by Ed Rusha’s aerial views of sparse Californian parking lots had I not already encountered them at the Barbican’s ‘Constructing Worlds’ show.)

Of course that might sound like something I always say. But painting and sculpture ceased to be culturally cutting-edge a long time ago. While photography could hardly be any less prevalent. But perhaps that’s the problem…

Perhaps the ubiquitousness of the digital camera and its incorporation into the mobile phone, has meant that photography has become too easy, that a Goldilocks moment has been passed and being photographed no longer had any significance. But that doesn’t seem the whole of it.

The two best works (ironically two of the most recent) provide an anti-photography but of a different kind, one which kind of fetishises its limitations. Photography is associated with demarcating, with providing hard evidence. A camera’s version of events trumps a person’s. “Photos or it didn’t happen” is a phrase. Isn’t it time to start screwing with all that? And notably other works attempt a similar thing, just less successfully than these two.

First let’s look at Maya Rochat ‘A Rock In a River’ (2018, above), providing what the show describes as “fragmented pictures of digital textures, geological forms and organic matter.” It covers the final wall of the gallery with a backdrop combined with a projected lightshow. Though appealingly we also see a version of this over the entrance, as if it envelops everything contained within.

Its colourful degeneration of form calls back less to the Bauhaus than the Sixties. Though arguably it’s formlessness is not part of the psychedelic era which gets most recycled, which has more to do with the ‘sharp’ look of the post-mod hippie. It doesn’t just counter resolution with the incohate, it suggests that chaos is the primal state of things. Rochat has commented “each person has an experience that’s unique - just by being there you are activating the show… each moment is there for you, and then it’s gone. You can’t really document it.” Which means, not for the first time, I comment enthusiastically this is something you can’t just cut around, capture and stick on the internet. Next to an internet image of it I've stuck on the internet.

While E.I. City 1’ by Antony Cairns (2018, above), the poster image for the show, takes a modern city image then subjects it to a “complex developing process” I don’t claim to understand, but which seems designed to recreate the organic processes of early film. Contrary to Maholy-Nagy’s futurism, this is like framing our world through yesterday’s eyes. His images are postcard rather than wall size, suggesting a circle being completed.

And what gives these works their appeal? As I said previously “today we’re filmed for simply walking down the street.” Only in May a man was fined simply for attempting to avoid facial recognition technology, despite being on no wanted lists.

It’s not just there are more cameras, it’s that current urban environments are designed to be camera-compliant. Under advanced capitalism, all is not just a panopticon but a smoothed down surface built around observation. The outdoor space we pass through increasingly resembles an open-plan office.

Of course these days people are always photographing themselves, then publicly uploading the minutiae of their lives. This is often used to claim that, if they’re also being filmed, that can’t be considered oppressive. But this misses the insidiousness of the way it works. It’s become a process which turns us into subjects rather than autonomous agents. To be watched, to be viewed over, isn’t an imposition on your existence. It has become your existence. So of course we then subjectify ourselves. Photos or you didn’t happen.

Ironically this may have best been described by the Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem back in the Sixties, before much of this technology existed:

“We think we are living in the world, when in fact we are being positioned in a perspective. No longer the simultaneous perspective of primitive painters, but the perspective of the Renaissance rationalists. It is hardly possible for looks, thoughts and gestures to escape the attraction of the distant vanishing-point which orders and deforms them, situates them in its spectacle.

”Power is the greatest town-planner. It parcels out public and private survival, buys up vacant lots at cut price, and only permits construction that complies with its regulations. Its own plans involve the compulsory acquisition of everybody. It builds with a heaviness which is the envy of the real town-builders that copy its style, translating the old mumbo-jumbo of the sacred hierarchy into stockbroker-belts, white collar apartments and workers flats. (Like, for example, in Croydon.)”

In short surveillance is no so widespread that the Modernist presumption of ‘The Radical Eye’ has now been inverted, the ability to exist autonomously lies precisely in not being photographed, not being catalogued and indexed. But to be outside the frame no longer seems a realistic option.

So our refuge has come to lie in the motion blur, the lack of resolution, the file error, the last few imperfections left. They appeal to us as a hole does to a hunted rabbit. Even the logo of the show is rendered out of register, an enticingly fuzzy glow to convey how homely imperfection can feel.