Starting over

By Clay Wainscott

So, let me get this straight. You say Abstract Expressionism arose at a time when fascism just defeated, having soiled us in battle, returned to our shores as a rabid fear and hatred of Communism, in contradiction of the most basic tenets of free speech in a free society. It was a time when art, itself, was under siege. Actors, artists, and writers were broken and exiled for less than absolute patriotism, and music was banned from the radio. “This land is your land…,” by Woody Guthrie, was never played.

It was then that a new American art form arose to compete with the classicism of Russia’s cultural catalogue – ballets and symphonies, heroic art and gilded subway stations. It seems our own state department may have helped to launch careers in big international expositions of Abstract Art, may even have helped support the foundations which purchased the art for donation to major museums, tax credits funding lavish galas, and abstract art went up in all of New York’s major banks. So, that was all in the name of cold-war competition with the Soviets, and no crippling of our culture was too high a price just to win, but there is still another level.

Before the war, Picasso had begun to combine the visual eloquence of African art with the plastic articulation of his own tradition. One result was the painting “Guernica,” a visual image so potent a reproduction of it was covered during Colin Powell’s justification of war speech to the UN. Mexican Muralists were forging a new  peasant solidarity, and the simple sign-making trade of screenprinting, taught in the WPA, was evolving into a visual conversation of thought provoking posters, above and beyond whatever words were written at the bottom. These things were happening before the war.

After, we had abstraction – the total negation of communication, and it was on us in a storm. Representational painters with successful careers were exiled, ridiculed back to hometowns, finishing out as high school custodians and florist delivery drivers. Suddenly there was star treatment for a deliriously pickled crew, waking up in the smelly early daylight of NY alleys and all the more mysterious their muse. Practically all of art since then has been derived from this culinary school of mud pie makers, this conservatory of pot bangers, this band of rude anarchists out to bring down the walls of traditional art and dance on the rubble, before staggering and passing out.

Yes, art in post-atomic America is an epic unto itself – the visual expression of a culture reduced to celebrity worship and tabloid sensation. What a perfect time to start over. Visual artists living in your hometown, sometimes working as high school custodians and florist delivery drivers, are using their spare time to create images out of the same general experience you’ve been having, too. In their attempt to honestly depict the world, something of their own character, their own philosophy, and their own experience becomes encoded and can be seen and recognized by others without words being exchanged. Buy their art and live with it, and don’t worry that smears and squiggles go for millions in other places.