Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Revisiting the Advent of the Abstract

A recent gallery exhibition on abstract art and self-taught artists proposes a new story for the rise of abstraction.

Susan Te Kahurangi King’s “Untitled,” 2022.

In the winter of 2012, New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted a blockbuster-scale exhibition titled “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925”—a celebration of the centenary of one of the most astonishing turns in European and American art. From the Renaissance on, European fine art had been profoundly oriented toward narrative, illustrating biblical stories, the lives of saints, classical mythology, the triumphs and defeats of rulers and their armies. Sometimes ordinary people got a look-in, too, and there was room for more purely descriptive art forms such as still life and landscape, but storytelling was the main act.

That changed in the early 20th century, when a few artists began to believe that art had no need to depict anything but its own forms and intentions. Tracing the origins of this new theory in the work of painters like Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Francis Picabia, the show at MoMA rehearsed a history that had long been familiar but, I felt at the time, still succeeded in conjuring an era when this approach “was still a leap, when it affected certain people like love or revolution.” The advent of abstract art aroused the most vehement resistance, and yet it spread with a rapidity we’d now call viral, from Munich and Paris to Moscow, New York, and beyond.

This winter, Shrine, a small gallery in Tribeca, hosted a similarly titled show whose subtitle tells a very different story. Curated by Jay Gorney, “Inventing Abstraction: Nonrepresentational Self-Taught Art” situates abstract art against its two conventional origins: as either the product of a militant avant-garde intent on overthrowing the old verities, or a historically minded endeavor to maintain and extend what the critic Harold Rosenberg called “the tradition of the new.” Instead, the exhibition shows abstraction as a practice of artists with a closer eye on their own immediate situation—or on the judgment of God—than on the flow of art history. Gorney, who owned one of New York’s most influential galleries in the 1980s and ’90s, contends that for self-taught artists (or, as they are sometimes called, “outsider artists”), “there is nothing to mimic, adulate, or reject; abstraction emerges as a primary visual language.” I’m not convinced that most so-called outsiders are quite as outside the flow of art history as all that—but let’s concede that they have a different relation to it than those who have been socialized and accredited by the art-educational system.

Who is or isn’t an outsider artist? What counts or doesn’t count as self-taught art? These are unresolved questions. Some of the most “inside” artists of all have never been to art school. Maurizio Cattelan—he of the gold toilet and the banana taped to the wall—is one. Another was the pioneering conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, who dropped out of Hunter College in his freshman year, never studied art, and once told me that he owed his education to the New York Public Library. “There is no such thing as outsider art,” Weiner said to the artist-writer Brainard Carey. “It’s a category of people who wanted to discover things that were not part of their structure.” That means people who become artists, perhaps even unknowingly, because of their need for discovery—but it also means the people who are in a position to “find” artists where there were never supposed to be any. The notion of the outsider romanticizes the artist’s discoverer—the one who is in a position to bring attention and value to works that had previously been ignored—as much as it does the artist who is discovered. And yet, Weiner insisted, “an artist is an artist is an artist.” 

The whole point of art, as Weiner understood, was to somehow step outside habitual forms of perception and being: “Every work of art is supposed to give somebody that sense that there’s a moment in their day, in their life, where they’re outside of jurisdiction because of what they see and because of where they are, and somebody built it for them. Somebody made it for them.” The appetite for the outsider has to do with this need; we have to experience a point of view that escapes our own internalized cultural strictures. When we cross the path of someone following the beat of a different drummer, we become more aware of our own assumptions, and maybe more critical of them. In that sense, all artists are somehow on the outside, but those who are recognized as such have been ushered inside a reigning structure of perception and thinking, and thereby alter it to some degree.

So despite my deep reservations about such categorizations—despite my sympathy for Weiner’s “an artist is an artist is an artist” dictum—I am willing to use the word outsider (which in the end seems to me a little more descriptive than the ostensibly neutral and nonjudgmental “self-taught”) for those cases where I sense that someone’s way of seeing things is so radically distinct from my own that I’m not even sure I can understand it; where, as I’ve said before, I can’t help responding to it even though I’m not sure........

© The Nation