1971

A Year in the Life of Color

Darby English

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226274737
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Arte generale

In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a "black aesthetic, " these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color's special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.

Chapter 1

How It Looks to Be a Problem

Each category has its own history. If we wish to present a partial framework in which to describe such events, we might think of two vectors. One is the vector of labeling from above, from a community of experts who create a “reality” that some people make their own. Different from this is the vector of the autonomous behavior of the person so labeled, which presses from below, creating a reality every expert must face.

Ian Hacking, “Making Up People”¹

It was among modernism’s best affordances that through it individual persons could become autonomous of the label “black artist.” But what happens when abstraction arrives in black representational space? The art-historical fortunes of Ed Clark, an American painter born in 1926, suggest some answers.

Clark was probably the first modernist to prepare a canvas by shaping it. He presented his earliest effort—titled Untitled—in 1957 with the Tenth Street–based Brata collective,² of which Clark was a founding member in that year, following his return from a five-year stint in Paris (fig. 1.1).³ Untitled is a painted construction in oil and acrylic on canvas and paper collaged to two improvised wooden supports attached to the canvas at twelve o’clock and four o’clock. At 56 × 38 inches, the picture is large but not outsized. Its true scale originates not in these measurements but in the felt immensity and vigor of the closed and crossed shapes they encompass. Untitled is a welter of structural uneasiness. To be sure, these are lines, strokes, and color areas; but their inhabitation of the support is captured better in a quickened vocabulary of spaces, divisions, accretions, strata, swaths, splashes, and disturbances. For instance, although Clark has covered almost all the canvas with oil and acrylic to work up a picture, he also opens that picture out by varying the paint density from opaque to translucent and the paint surface from matte to glossy. The ranging scales of the color areas constitute real intensities. And the paint application from brushed to thrown to dragged makes Untitled anything but the allover-type picture that it may first seem. Throughout Untitled, pictorial stability, if not quite lost, is certainly under siege. If it retains a unity beyond composition, it is that of a consistent anxiety of form. A picture of stuttering strokes among which none settles into a phrase, Untitled puts one on one’s toes, where one stays until nothing remains to notice.

These disunifying effects find an unsteady anchor in the compromised rectangular field that plays host to all this action. Internal compromises abound, most evidently in the upper and lower fourths of the canvas proper, where ill-defined areas of color (green, backed by yellow and black) and strict ones (black against white shocked by red) suggest depth at one point and utter flatness at another. Between them, a region of rubbed dry blue edged with yellow floats atop a wetter mixture of tan, white, and blue. But any suggestion that the rectangle’s dominion encloses the picture’s most salient activity is totally false. The shaping and enclosing functions of the rectangle are canceled—as is the rectangle itself—by the picture’s boldest tangible aspect, namely those two polygonal papers collaged into an evocative quasi-triangular form, an inclusion that we see as a pair of conjoined fragments of other pictures but must read as a figure of flight from the rectangle’s enclosure. (Imagine a paper stealth, high above the terrain of the canvas, with a northeast heading.) At the same time that it points away, beneath it a packed area of teal pigment extends in the opposite direction, as if reaching toward the green, yellow, and black hues that give it body.⁴

Figure 1.1. Ed Clark (b. 1926), Untitled, 1957. Oil on canvas and paper, on wood, 46 × 55 in. (116.84 × 139.7 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. Restricted gift of an anonymous donor; Samuel A. Marx Endowment, 1999.243. Courtesy of the artist.

In other words, Untitled registers a number of salient events, though none has primacy. In this way the picture becomes a stage for interlocked and clashing forms and color areas that interpenetrate rather than arrest each other: one event makes another one possible. This is not an apportioned composition calculated for niceties of arrangement; the balance struck, if there is one, is at best precarious. In so many ways, Untitled recognizes the modernist truism that what is a contradiction in logic can also be an aesthetic reality, such as a closed picture plane that suggests space and light, or a flight-figure that in no way figures escape.

Importantly, Untitled subjects color itself to a similar opening out. In fact, the picture’s intensive destructuring work privileges color. In addition to its overcoming painting’s conventional rectangularity (an achievement that would be extended in several directions by the likes of Lucio Fontana, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Richard Tuttle, Lynda Benglis), the interaction of color peculiar to painting is the other main operation for which the flight-figure serves as a vehicle. Well inside this figure’s perimeter, just above the center of the overall composition, the edges of two cut sheets run a tangent to each other: one nominally white, the other nominally black. I say “nominally” because the intellectual determination of color at this juncture (and at other less prominent ones) is ultimately an indeterminate, stratigraphic affair. Color is not laid down so much as eventuated, through blends and layers that evoke method and time almost as forcefully as the red streak and splatter (at five o’clock) evoke gravity and hard planarity. On both the ground plane and the flight-figure, underpainting exerts maximum tension against the tentative color glazes that overlay it. If such effects are felt as openings in the midst of closure, this is because the richness of value change, to which an apparently flat and continuous color area submits, opens the surface unexpectedly. For all the evident madeness of this construction, solid form seems to have been atomized in the dissolve of these color areas and the spatiality they evoke at every point.⁵

Now, there’s a kind of thoughtless vision that would see a couple of “reds” at lower right, some “green” at upper left, and “black” at lower right, but this limited perception just won’t do if we want to understand how Clark arrived at the dissolve. To do so, one’s eye must decouple from the urge to fix and identify colors as singular articulations—which would detach Clark’s color from the interchro-matic operations that make it dynamic in the first place. To attain that dynamism, Clark’s color overcomes the historical kinship between color and subject matter denoted by the term local color, already attacked from a different angle by Willem de Kooning’s deployment of wet-into-wet painting, which he used first to perforate the outline of the drawn human form and later to explore light and space beyond the constraints of landscape.⁶ No strictness of attention to hue will prevent Clark’s color appearing decentered, always and emphatically a mixed matter in which colors push through one another without resolving into a known or “new” color. In this way Clark’s color declares as his painting’s subject what we might call the dimensionality of color, precisely because it compels the eye and mind to do a more questing kind of work than color customs typically require or even permit. In such moments we can to apprehend the depth of Clark’s interest in modernist painting as a very particular way to make things happen: “things” essentially nonessential, things as effects of interimplication. At least for me, Untitled is a picture caught up with the modernist notion of painting as a place where real tensions are registered as the possibility of their positive reformation through materialized imagining, thinking, and feeling. Here those tensions have to do with color and whatever structures its relations according to the laws of neighboring, but not interpenetrating, singularities.

Clark made it clear that he regarded color and its structuration worthy candidates for reformation when he adopted a 48-inch push-broom as his chief painting implement. Dissatisfied with the wavering strokes he could not avoid even with the widest paint brushes, Clark sought a painted mark that could confidently traverse the canvas’s entire width, something that manually unified it while being less evidently the result of handwork⁷ (fig. 1.2). With a push-broom, and using only acrylic paint, Clark could propel a sizable volume of combined pigments across the canvas in one long stroke, its sweep indicated by splashes of paint cast off in the broom’s wake. Ted Joans’s helpful description is occasionally sidetracked by the ravaging associations that critics and historians are so fond of bringing to Clark’s broom:

The floors in New York or Paris are his easels. . . . Gallons, quarts, and pints of paint are scattered around [the edges of] his canvas. Each can has colors of prime importance to Clark. His “brushes” are rollers, short-handled brooms, rags, and his hands. . . . The canvas might receive several spurts of different colors, soon followed by the roller or perhaps a sensual thrust of the broom tempered by a hand-held rag used to wipe an unwanted spew or drip away.⁸

Most of the paintings produced with the broom feature no fewer than two (and usually three) path marks. They are predominantly horizontal, evoking landscape. Yet ultimately they showcase the modulation of colors distributed across the push-broom’s path. They reconcile the painted picture to the protean independence of the stroke, which declares the colored canvas to be a thing while underscoring the turbulence within its wholeness.

Figure 1.2. Ed Clark work in progress, 2009. Photo by Lauren Goldenberg. Courtesy of the artist.

Clark thus evolved the stroke into a subject that was neither an image nor a cipher for the impassioned human content of abstract painting. The migrations of strokes across the canvas signal the strident integrity of the activity of abstract marking. The stroke is for sure a trademark of Clark’s work and has been its principal subject since the early 1960s. But it is by no means the signature of an autonomous personality; a given canvas always contains a multiplicity of such marks in an interaction that takes precedence over Clark’s own signatory authority. Clark’s stroke, developed from the far end of a push-broom’s span and shaped in the intermixture of paint between the bristles running along its bar, empties from the stroke-as-device any content born of clichéd, showy abstract expressionist interpositions of the self.

The disinhabited character of Clark’s mark allowed him to insert a real distance—of time as well as space—between his creative decisions, the actions of his hands, arms, and body, and his painting’s record of these gesticulations. Compared with the spontaneity and implied speed of painterly gesture, everything slows and quiets down. Clark’s stroke is better comprehended in terms of modernist art’s move away from statements of a personal nature and toward inquiries into a medium’s natures and its component parts. Clark’s stroke, in the prominence and opacity of its traces, and more precisely in its reluctance to be seen as an image,⁹ confines its declarations to statements about color. The physical and conceptual work in the art is color’s: independent and local to color, not to Clark.

With this, the paintings’ evocation of palette work becomes the more intensive. By palette work I mean two things: the making of color that must precede the making of paintings, as well as the painted figure’s reminder that a playful and purposive blending—creation, really—of color took place before the paint arrived at the picture surface. (Relatedly, Thomas Hess described “the moving flesh of pigment” in de Kooning.)¹⁰ Traditionally, palette work comes before mark-making and is for the viewer a negligible stage in the fabrication of objects for presentation in a painted scene. Now it follows color all the way to the canvas, where outsized, overconspicuous brushstrokes become subject matter. Suspending color in just this liminal zone identified with the “before” of painting forces the viewer to apprehend both the collaborative nature of color relations and the decisions impelling them. Curiously, with Clark this never feels like a triumph or declaration of identity. Rather, palette work suspends the coalescence of color into image: deployed as a specific intensity, abstraction keeps image at bay. Clark’s mark thus communicates itself to be an indefinite protraction of the preliminary, underscoring what Meyer Schapiro would call the “drama of decision” entailed by creative process.

In this way the broom allowed Clark’s color to take a reflective turn that appears the more decisive in light of two shifts in his method. Both occurred around 1961.¹¹ First, he abandoned the lurid, ponderous color chords he had favored since 1957 for more high-keyed shades, many approaching pastel, that had a concentrated spectrum with more subtle and numerous transitions of hue.

Second, Clark adopted a different shape of canvas to support his monumental images of blended color, a buoyant oval ranging in width from 11 to 21 feet, which he used from 1968 to the late 1970s (figs. 1.3 and 1.4). The implicit reference was to the sun, the source of all light (and thus all color). With the sun Clark was declari...