A couple of things struck me about the Adrienne Farb exhibition. The first is how the temptation to identify her work as some sort of neo-Color Field painting doesn't really work. To pick on the most obvious case, it's easy to look for the first time at a painting like this one, for instance, and immediately think, oh, yeah, Morris Louis. And that's understandable, but ultimately that doesn't reflect what's actually going on in the paintings. While Farb isn't a gestural painter, her work is definitely and visibly brushed on primed canvas, sometimes in broad strokes, other times in small, built up marks. The thing about Louis always was the pour, his famous impersonality, paint alone soaking into the canvas and no sense of the artist's hand. Different technique plays a role in creating different compositions as well; Louis might use his pour to create arrangements of roughly parallel colors aligned in different ways in relation to the edges of the canvas, Farb does much more of a sort of drawing in paint. With all due respect to Louis, the sort of complex arrangements found in her recent work have no really important point of comparison in his oeuvre. One essay in the exhibition catalog points to Brice Marden's recent work as a better point of reference, a possibility that intrigues as long as one keeps in mind its not really reflective of any actual influence--and that the business of finding reference points itself can inhibit really understanding an artist's work. She may be doing abstract, colorist painting, but she's doing it on her own terms.
What are those terms? While it's accurate enough to call her work "untheorized" in the sense that she herself doesn't care to follow or find inspiration in current critical theory--you won't hear her talking about what she learned from The Truth in Painting or postmodern debates on the sublime--that's not to say that she doesn't have a sort of theory underlying her practice, or that said practice isn't capable of being theorized. I may (or may not) go into this in greater detail later, but the catalog contains an essay by Christopher A. Dustin, professor of philosophy at Holy Cross, that argues for a different idea of the relationship between modernist art and abstraction, and the meaning of the latter, than found in other accounts, notably Arthur Danto's. It's an interesting argument, one that builds in part upon a book Dustin wrote with a co-curator of the exhibition, and goes against Arthur Danto's reading of Clement Greenberg in ways that seem potentially productive in terms of pointing to a different path forward. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the essay relies heavily upon Emerson, whom I find near-impossible to read in any way that makes real sense. When reading him, I feel like so many others seem to feel when reading contemporary French philosophy, as if nothing is ever quite there or capable of being grasped. In any event, it's a different approach, and one that deserves more careful consideration than I'm capable of giving it here.
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