Donald Kuspit Review

BIZARRE FORMALISM

Donald Kuspit

In the 1980s, it became apparent that “flatness” had become sterile and bankrupt, and along with it “purity.” The medium was no longer satisfying in itself, however much satisfaction it continued to afford. Modernist painting had become decadent – it had become overintellectualized, losing its expressive power in the process – and the question was whether it could break out of post-painterly abstraction, which came to seem more like a cul-de-sac than the consummate, perfect articulation of purity it was supposed to be.

Ian Harvey belongs to a younger generation of abstract painters who have tried to move beyond modernist painting, without forfeiting its respect for the medium. Harvey has done so in an unexpected, unavoidably ironic way: he has restored its rabid gesturalism, but without the idealistic claims that accompanied instinctive painterliness in the past; and he has focused that volatile painterliness with geometrical markers, axiomatic sources of spatial stability. On the one hand, the difficult struggle to achieve spontaneity, with its aura of undifferentiated, irrepressible energy – to regress to an intensity that has become historical and nostalgic, and thus to regress self-consciously, that is, with the awareness that painterly rawness has become more intellectual sign than emotional substance. Nonetheless, Harvey tries to recover its material primordiality in the act of acknowledging – indeed demonstrating – that it has become an intellectual game. And on the other hand, the equally difficult struggle to make geometry once again convincing without mystifying it, as Malevich and Mondrian did, in recognition of the fact that it is impossible to make a good painting without some suggestion, however tenuous, of a coherent, cohesive, differentiated space, which geometry automatically conveys.

The greatness of modernist abstraction was that it essentialized gestural force and geometric form, in part by keeping them apart and isolated, thus making each seem radical, and giving it a domain of its own. (Adorno, an archetypal modernist, held that they were irreconcilable, and thus to bring them together was to falsify them.) But there separation has become self-defeating, however much it eventually led to the perfection of both. But what seems perfect soon becomes an academic cliché – a hollow autonomy: gestural and geometric abstraction became equally formulaic and matter of fact – equally banal.

Harvey shows that gesture and geometry can only be restored to life when each contaminates the other, in a kind of perverse reconciliation. The result of this ironical cooperation is a bracing new impurity and absurdity – a new sense of unintelligibility and unfamiliarity, made of the dregs of an abstraction that had become all too intelligible and familiar. Thus Harvey makes hybrid paintings ­– paradoxical compromise formations, as it were – by fanatically (and fatalistically) pursuing the contradictory clichés of abstraction, which both renews their visionary credibility and transforms them into bizarre caricatures of themselves. Harvey’s paintings are mercurial experiments in synthesis, and like all such experiments they seem freakish, enigmatic, and peculiarly anguished, especially because they imply a search for new artistic values, whose nature cannot help but be unclear and uncertain. Indeed the sure sign that Harvey has successfully used the ruins of old abstract ideas to build new artistic meaning is the air of unpredictability and recklessness that each painting breathes, giving it an uncanny expressivity. The fact that it is impossible to specify the meaning in Harvey’s paintings, only to feel their intensity, gives them a magical credibility.

Thus, gesture and geometry, instead of being at odds, as in traditional modernism, wildly and wittily merge in Harvey’s postmodern formalism, generating a new sense of explosive chaos – the perverse painterly pudding, at once morbid and exuberant, that is the proof of expressive innovation. The result is at once manneristic and maximalist (Harvey’s term), that is, manneristic expressionism. Harvey’s paintings are mannerist in their sophisticated, encyclopedic, ironical knowledge of the past, suggesting déjà vu – which is countered by expressionist drive and terror. Thus Harvey is at once anxious and knowing, free-spirited and bound by the past, unsettled and archly playful. His attempt to reconcile abstract opposites is necessarily inconclusive ­– both mannerism and expressionism belong to what has been called the tradition of the irregular and imperfect – which makes it all the more refreshing, especially because it is not ideologically rationalized the way modernist formalism was. (Such rationalism was no doubt initially necessary to justify abstraction when it was novel and seemed incomprehensible, and above all to soften its threat to traditional artistic values, which was all the more reason to distrust it.)

As Harvey says, quoting Greil Marcus’s description of listening to and watching Sonic Youth in concert, each painting is “a moment in which everything is present, and nothing holds,” that is, each painting is a performance in which everything is in action, but nothing hangs together, certainly with no semblance of conventional coherence. Nonetheless, Harvey’s punk paintings are charismatic puzzles; their relaxed discrepancies convey a weird cohesiveness. And however apparently violent, disruptive, and arbitrary their gestures seem individually, in the often cathedral like space of the pictures they become contented gargoyles.

The grandeur of No. 77, 1997 (page 27) epitomizes Harvey’s mannerist-expressionistic complexity. A construction of op art type stripes – they form a kind of fence around a void – covers two thirds of the painting. More or less ribbon-like or curlicue gestures twist through or over the stripes, erratically alternating with equally odd, thinner lines, sometimes converging to form idiosyncratically shaped planes. The stripes float on a field of murky orange, and are sometimes overrun by a flamboyant blur of gestural splash. The right third of the painting is barren, apart from a strange image-like configuration, unreadable but magically meaningful – richly moving if unspecifiable. The image originates in the matrix of stripes: one curling gesture rises, like a snake charmed by weird music, from some murk at the bottom of the painting, and then lurches across it into the empty space, dropping in a sexually suggestive way, into a kind of crevice, its crude curvilinear shape repeated in concentric ripples. Materially, the image has the look of a quick ghostly study, in contrast to the gestural abundance of the rest of the work (for all the “threadbareness” of the third segment). The stripes signal structure and control, the often angry, thrown gestures, and the strange image they mysteriously generate, signify uncontrol. The whole discombobulated – uncoordinated, kinetic – mannerist result is uncanny and unnerving, which is why it is expressive and convincing.

No. 51 (Fence Post) (page 9), No. 53 (Sign Post) and No 55 (Stump), all 1992, are ancestors of the later work. In them geometry still seems secondary to – a hidden underpinning of – gesture; parity between them has not yet been achieved. Ostensibly derived from landscapes, these works are already abstract hallucinations – vigorous displays of unchanneled energy with imagistic moments of ironical stability and clarity. In some works such as No. 63 and No. 65 (page 10), both 1994, tokens of structure are more evident, but equally unfunctional, that is they are not part of any grand construction, however much they contribute to the grandeur of the space. As one goes back in time, one can trace Harvey’s idiosyncratic abstractions back to their landscape source, but the landscape always seems secondary to the painterly process, which slowly but surely undermines its stable features and finally overwhelms its space. In one year – 1990 – Harvey moves from the fixed structures of No. 38 and No. 39 to the wildly torn structure of No. 42.  Thereafter, while while certain themes of nature recur – perhaps noteworthily the stump (No. 44 and No. 45, both 1991), which is filled with unhappy and perhaps all too obvious symbolic meaning (is that why Harvey must rage against it with his gestures?) – the over-all effect is of gestural intimidation, even insanity. In one furious, crazed work after another – beginning with No. 50.4, 1992, and continuing at an accelerating, breakneck pace to the present day – all the gestural, coloristic, textural stops are pulled and orchestrated with daredevil abandon. Harvey is a genuine risktaker, and the risk is worth the esthetic result, which is of startling in-your-face energy and precarious acrobatic control.

Stump is eventually resolved into Suprematist square – thus art conquers anxiety – and Suprematist square is resolved into everyday tile or domino, in a way reminiscent of Sigmar Polke’s ironical response to Minimalism. Add to these building blocks frenzied, richly colored, translucent gestures, punctuated by gloomy moments of black, white and gray, all in richly inconsistent relationship, and one has a Babel-like buildup of uncanny, amorphous surface, mysteriously saturated with meaning. Thus, Harvey’s combination of reprise and passion, parody and high purposiveness, ironical innocence and emotional urgency, historicism and excess, show postmodernism at its best, and indicate that it can be vitally imaginative not simply intellectually decadent.

New York, 1997

(from Ian Harvey, Recent Paintings, 99 Commercial Street, Brooklyn, New York. self-published catalog, 1997)