Abstract Expressionism

I am not a fan of abstract expressionism..nor mid century American art for that matter.

Many people believe that if they go to a museum of modern art they should give themselves up to the emotions the art works suggest, that modern art is all about expressing and sharing ...emotions! This of course is nonsense.

In a series of Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, The Paths to the Absolute, and in the published book form, Phillip Golding surveyed the work of six modern painters ...Mondrian, de Kooning, Kandinsky, Rothko, Clifford Still, and Jackson Pollock ...and gave us the spiritual, religious, and philosophical life experiences that inspired them to make the work they did. He discusses their concerns with the formal values in painting, ...color, line and form... and how they used those to create a sense of the essence of the human experience...rather like a physicist’s search for the unifying theory. Of course all of those spiritual trends are now considered dated and passe and the work was so widely displayed as to have been identified with a specific time and place...rather than a universal...all now seems dated and passe.

There are many other books with like content. But on the whole I find that there is way too much verbiage concerning the importance of modem art, and especially abstract expressionism. I understand that we learn about painting through the printed word buy my gut feeling is that if it requires a twenty five page document to understand a specific painting then the painting has failed as a visual experience. Lacking that a five hundred page document will be of little avail.

Fortunately the moving finger writes and having writ moves on and mid century American art in all its various isms is a thing of the dead past. Let us be thankful that we have been freed to create the art of our time. However, this raises one big question: what is the art of our time? I remember gowning up in the fifties and seeing mid century American art in Life magazine that had been made by monkeys and elephants. Hopefully the art of our time will not be something that can be equaled by hens and serpents.

Here are a series of found photographs, in the Aaron Siskind manner, that are very similar to mid century American, abstract art. Jasper Johns said: My art is about nothing. Matisse said: I dream above all of an art of balance. And after finding balance I assume we are left with...you either like it or you don’t. And that then raises another question: what does it say about us that we can be so contented with a fine art that means nothing? Surely we’re not all Buddhists or existentialists. Mindless,yes…but...