Post 42 - Lit Review A - ( Essay 1 and 2)
Jan Verwoert
Emergence
On the Painting of Tomma Abts
The central discussion of this essay is to posit the idea that “every picture shows that the result, the reason, and the process of painting, stand in a relationship to each other that is defined in the picture.”1
Verwoert delineates the concept of emergence as a term encompassing multiple interpretations. It includes the notion of navigating out of a situation, extricating oneself from a crisis or state of emergency, and making decisions, perhaps a series of them. In painting, emergence can be viewed as a process where an artist acts on something previously undecided. For instance, a painting materializes what had never existed before until its creation.
Furthermore, emergence refers to the process through which new structures and qualities arise from the interactions among elements within a complex system. A prime example of this phenomenon is evident in the human brain, which consists of countless neurons. Individually, these neurons do not possess 'thoughts,' but through their intricate interactions, the emergent property of cognition arises.2
Verwoert says that “Emergence is its own reason and consequence in itself”.3 In painting this means its irreducible quality which makes the picture what it is, only happens the moment when and if it appears, the painter has no control over this. By ‘quality’ in this context Verwoert means an attribute referring to a characteristic that is inherent to something, often defining its nature or identity. In the context of art, attributes could refer to specific features, traits, or aspects that contribute to the overall impression or essence of a piece of artwork. He describes this moment of emergence to be logical and unpredictable, and declares some paintings are “alive" or “dead.”4 The fact that this happens he says is not irrational but rather a “rationality of emergence, which is the rationality of painting.”5
For Verwoert the work of Tomma Abts concentrates on the “essential qualities and contradictions of emergence”6, that her work deals with qualities, not motifs, themes, or references. Abts refreshes abstract painting by focusing on essentials: colour, line, and flatness.7 Each piece features a subtle yet rich colour palette, blending harmoniously. Through meticulous layering, she creates a three-dimensional effect, hinting at hidden layers beneath. Her works balance without symmetry, depth without tricks, and luminosity without bright colours. Her paintings can only turn out the way they do out of necessity, that making the picture was ‘finding’ the picture as it were. The result could be no other way, which is to say making is a working process.
Abts can be seen as a process artist with a unique approach. While she begins with specific goals and a defined method, she remains open to the surprises that arise during painting. This flexibility means her works evolve gradually, sometimes over years, with the final composition often unknown until the end. (Fig.1)
Fig. 1, Abts, Tomma. Emo. 2003. Oil on canvas, 48cm x 38cm
Revealing how that ending was achieved, through showing previous paint layers, the revisions, and corrections in relief, brings the viewer an understanding that the making of the picture is in the process.
"I develop something without any preconceptions of what it is going to look like, so, to give it a meaning and sense of self-evidence, I try to define the forms precisely. They become, through the shadows, texture, etc., quite physical, and therefore “real” and not an image of something else. The forms do not stand for anything else; they do not symbolize anything or describe anything outside of painting. They represent themselves." - Tomma Abts, 2004.8
Verwoert suggests that making art involves endless decision-making. He highlights that discussing these decisions acknowledges the constant uncertainty artists face, where the sense of necessity in the final artwork emerges from navigating this uncertainty at every step.
Indeed, uncertainty of making the correct decision means that it is implicitly understood that things could have turned out differently. To overcome this crisis of confidence, as I have personally experienced, it is best to introduce criteria, thus helping with decision making and seeing what is right or wrong in the process. Hence, the first thing that emerges from the painting process is the establishment of criteria. Every composition is shaped by these criteria.
Being decisive in painting primarily involves creating one's own criteria, whether it is based on a feeling, a subject, or a specific process one follows. A piece of art that fails to establish its own criteria through this process lacks "emergence," that crucial quality where what initially appeared unpredictable becomes necessary and unmistakable in the result.
If Expressionist painting is a “fast forward” celebration of the unfolding crisis of gestures, Tomma Abts is the opposite, creating an “unwinding” of the moment.9 One must closely scrutinize the painting to see her hard-won battle with decisions that lead to the end. Surface and space compete for our attention. Just as we see that this perception of the finished result and the process that preceded it, we then begin to dissolve our first impressions as she has left so many traces of the decisions, we begin to explore what could have been. In the details left to be seen, they are more intensely experienced for being so slight.
The pictures subtly animate their structures, hinting at endless possibilities behind the sense of necessity they convey. There are also contradictions in her use of the picture space, sometimes she is expressing the imaginary space beyond the canvas, and in the same painting the two dimensionality on the picture plane is pushed to the foreground, both appear to be true. There is a tension in these contradictions, where once again we are drawn into the moment of decision making, and dynamics of criteria that have variations, all this contributing to dynamic instability. We as viewers have been drawn into the process of emergence. Her awareness of how decisions were made and could have turned out differently, becomes the painting.10
To say that paintings focusing on their own possibilities are only self-referential is wrong. They introduce a new way of seeing, feeling, and thinking. Tomma Abts's paintings exemplify this, presenting a different logic – Verwoert calls this the “rationality of emergence.” 11
Each painting must succeed or fail on its own terms.
Footnotes
1 Jan Verwoert, “Emergence: On the Painting of Tomma Abts,” in Tomma Abts (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2005), 41-48.
2 Verwoert, “Emergence: On the Painting of Tomma Abts, 44
3 Verwoert, “Emergence: On the Painting of Tomma Abts, 44
4 Verwoert, “Emergence: On the Painting of Tomma Abts, 44
5 http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/abstractexpressionism/Tomma-Abts.html (accessed 23 March 2024)
6 Verwoert, “Emergence: On the Painting of Tomma Abts, 45
7 Verwoert, “Emergence: On the Painting of Tomma Abts, 47
Bibliography
Asthoff, Jens. "Tomma Abts." Artforum, Vol. 48 no. 6 (February 20210): 213-14. Accessed [24th March 2024], https://www.artforum.com/events/tomma-abts-2-197195/.
Barcio, Philip. “The Rigorous Art of Tomma Abts.” IdeelArt Magazine. August 29, 2018. Accessed [24th March 2024]. https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/tomma-abts.
Verwoert, Jan. "Emergence: On the painting of Tomma Abts." In Tomma Abts, exhibition catalog, Cologne, and London: Galerie Daniel Buchholz and greengrassi, 2005. (“Tomma Abts - Press Release | September 10–October 25, 2014, | David Zwirner”)
Guston Literary review (The Path to Unfreedom)
Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin. Philip Guston Now. Washington: D.A.O/Distributed Art Publishers Inc., National Gallery of Art, 2020
The Catalogue of the Guston Exhibition Tate Modern 2023, 1 traces the path of the unconventional and influential American painter Philip Guston (1913- 1980.) His themes, influences and interests are discussed in essays by art historians and contemporary artists. I am focusing on the early to mid 1950s when Guston becomes submerged in the Abstract Expressionist movement and how he forges his own path through and beyond it. This essay divides the content into coherent sections, allowing for a focused exploration of Guston's painting process, his emotional landscape and influences, and his artistic process of drawing and construction.
1.Unfreedom
In these early abstract works, Guston remarked “It's the unsettling of the image that I want.” ... “I am on a work...until...the paint falls into positions that feel destined, but it is on the path to unfreedom that the unknown and free must appear” 2
This unfreedom was to be found in his process, and yet to start a painting without preconceived ideas of what it was to be, Guston needed to paint “almost from scratch.” He needed to rethink his previous ways of working. 3
Cooper describes Guston standing so close to the painting as he works that he can barely see the peripheries and the painting starts to expand into nothing at the edges, to coagulate in the center, to form and cluster around itself. He searches for the image “becoming, not being, of wandering, not settling.” This breakthrough painting showed it materializing before his eyes.4(fig 1)
Fig. 1. Guston, Philip. White Painting 1. 1951. Oil on canvas, 147 x 157.2 cm. Collection San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The painting may have materialized out of ‘nowhere’ for Guston, but it is crucial to acknowledge his debt to cubism and the importance of the grid; the rectangular outer shape of the picture always affects the field inside or within it. Yet Cooper discusses that what changes in the White Painting is that the grid "has melted, liquid, not solid, all rounded corners and flowing channels” 5
Guston has managed, in part, to detach the image from the edges of the painting. His unfreedom was to be found in self-imposed rules, a limited palette, working on many pieces simultaneously, standing close to the work, dissolving form into a surface of charged atmosphere much like the Romantic painters or Rembrandt. 6
In later works between 1957-1967, Curator Paul Schimmel noted Guston's continued wrestle with the concept of "freedom" in art. Guston saw the blank canvas as both liberating and daunting. Starting anew brought both excitement and trepidation, a common feeling among artists striving for originality amidst past influences. Guston exclaims “unfreedom” as “the freedom of being able to reject and embrace the past. In the beginning, you’re free. When you face the white canvas, you’re free, and it’s the most anguishing state.” 7
2.Feelings and artistic influences
The state of anguish or conflict with what he feels and wishes to achieve in his early abstract paintings reflects a blend of his philosophical and political leanings and his love of painting materiality.
Guston always harnessed his own thoughts and emotions starting from the subjective.8 As artist Amy Silman relates, “You plod to work, eat a sandwich, think about death, call a friend, feel dread, walk the dog, notice some stuff, get an idea, take out the trash, then go back to the painting wall. (And that's if you're lucky.)” 9
We may consider feeling as anything that can be felt. Art Philosopher Suzanne Langer describes "the felt responses of our sense organs to the environment, of our proprioceptive mechanisms to internal changes, and of the organism as a whole to its situation as a whole,” create our thoughts, therefore it is not difficult to understand the flow from thought to feeling and back in a painter's work.10
According to Langer, feelings are at the center of every experience, incorporating sensations, emotions, imagination, recollection, and reasoning. Moreover, some experiences can be perceived as thoughts, which might evoke a sense of comic despair or tragic levity, blending serious and light-hearted elements.
Guston’s art is a world of these paradoxical emotions, where formlessness intersects with volume. As Guston himself admits, “Yet paradoxical as it may sound, the more subjective you become, you also become, in those moments, more critical, hence more objective. There is done a work which is recognized by yourself at some point as a separate organism.” 11
If the work is seen by Guston as becoming a separate organism, then he too would become a separate organism from his many artistic influences. These influences range from the great Italian masters Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, to Watteau, to the early 20th-century works of de Chirico, Picasso, and Mondrian. His preoccupation with the tangled knot of figures and circular composition, as seen in his updating of Leonardo da Vinci’s lost painting The Battle of Anghiari in his painting Gladiators 1940, (fig 2), are echoed in his later abstract paintings.12
Fig. 2. Guston, Philip. Gladiators. 1940. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Medium: Oil and pencil on canvas. Dimensions: 24 1/2 x 28 1/8" (62.2 x 71.4 cm). Copyright © 2024 The Estate of Philip Guston.
Guston was also seen studying a drawing of Mondrian's, one of the Plus-Minus 1914 series. 13 His observation of Mondrian's interpretation of the gothic church façade with its minimalistic and exploratory arrangement of horizontal and vertical lines, are echoed in the searching lines of his paintings. (fig 3)
Fig. 3. Mondrian, Piet. Church Facade 5. 1914. Charcoal on paper, 28 1/4 × 19 1/8 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco.
The colour and movement in these early abstract paintings led critics to dub his work Abstract Impressionism. 14 It is a charge Guston refuted: “I never cared for Monet terribly much” 15 This does not rule out the subconscious influence of Monet. It can be speculated that Guston absorbed many artistic ideas and influences indirectly as all of us do.
In Summer (1954), Guston’s touch may have been light and the colours gentle and complementary, but the ideas behind these “nerve threaded”  lines in part stem from a reaction against the formalism of Clement Greenberg.16(fig.4) These ideas involved Guston’s politically driven and emotionally wrought expressionism. Curator Harry Cooper reflects that there are recognizable palettes: red, orange, green, tarry black, white, sometimes blues, never yellow or violet. “colours coagulate into independent objects even if they are not yet associated with objects.” 17 These could not be less impressionistic.
Fig 4. Guston, Philip, Summer, 1954, oil on canvas, Collection of Marguerite and Robert Hoffman @ Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser and Wirth
Drawing and construction of form
During his life, Guston returned to drawing repeatedly to experiment and stabilize his thought processes. In 1973 he commented:
Usually, I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day, a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear, and I feel the drawing making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me towards painting—anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.18
He experimented with ink and other mediums to explore mark, void, space, and flow. Guston became interested in Japanese aesthetics, engaging in Zen Buddhism, music and graphics interpreting these through mark making, syncopation and minimalism, into his new paintings.19 Musician friend John Cage often discussed the Eastern concept of emptiness with him.20 He emphasized silence and subtle sounds in his compositions, influencing visual artists like Guston.
Yet Guston speaks of how much he felt the impression of the natural world, "forces of natural forms" and observed "sky and earth, the inert and the moving, weights and gravities, wind through the trees, resistances and flow." He set up these basic experiences in opposition to Cage's void.21 Rejecting Cages vision in his search for form, or rather, “structural reflection” 22 Guston would have these forms and object explorations begin to appear out of his abstract work all “tangled up in the painting's construction." 23
These early works prompted him to ponder ideas such as picture depth, dimensionality, and figurative representation. He termed this exploration "dissolving form," seeking to uncover the fundamental nature of form within space.24
Guston wanted to capture the essence of a complete world from the shapeless surroundings. He aimed to craft something cohesive, where its form held everything together. This circularity of form as seen in other works of the same time were to create something that would be held together by the strength of its structure, as novelist Flaubert put it, "just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support" 25
Footnotes
1. Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin. Philip Guston Now. Washington: D.A.O/Distributed Art Publishers Inc., National Gallery of Art, 2020
2. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 1047-1966 Philip Guston Now. Washington: D.A.O/ Distributed Art Publishers Inc., National Gallery of Art, 2020, 44
Cited from Guston. "Statement in Twelve Americans." 1956. In Collected Writings, 10.
The dialectic of freedom and control is the dominant theme in Guston's statements from the 1950s, as it was in Pollock's, who said both: "When I am in the painting, I am not aware of what I am doing" and "There is no accident." Quoted in Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonne of Other Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works. New Haven, 1978, 4:241, 262
3. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 43
cited Feldman, Morton. "After Modernism." Art in America 59, no. 6 (November–December 1971): p75
This article was originally published in Ashton's work:
Ashton, Dore. A Critical Study, 105. Quoted from "After Modernism." Art in America 59, no. 6 (November–December 1971), p 75. Originally published in Six Painters: Mondrian, Guston, Kline, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko. University of St. Thomas Art Department, Houston, February-April 1967, 14-22.
4 . Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 43
5. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 44
6. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 103
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4x0nb2f0/.
7. Alina Cohen, "Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth: The Unfreedom of a Blank Canvas and Pushing Back Against Success," Forbes, April 30, 2016, 09:48pm EDT, accessed [23 March 2024], https://www.forbes.com/sites/alinacohen/2016/04/30/philip-guston-at-hauser-wirth-the-unfreedom-of-a-blank-canvas-and-pushing-back-against-success/?sh=210c060a38cf.
8. Amy Silman. "From Garbage Cans to God." In Philip Guston, 63. Washington: Publishing Office, National Gallery of Art, 2023.
9. Amy Silman. "From Garbage Cans to God." In Philip Guston, 63.
10. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 103
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4x0nb2f0/.
Cited from
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1962).
11. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, 132
12. Cooper, Guston, The Young Professional, 11-25
13. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 44
Cited from Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (New York: Knopf, 1988), 92
14. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 44
Cited from Fairfield Porter, "Reviews and Previews: Philip Guston," Artnews 51, no. 10 (February 1953): 55.
15. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 44
Cited from "Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art," 1973, p. 217.
16. Harry Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 44
17. Cooper, Guston, Then Philip Guston Exhibition Catalogue, 2020. 45
18. Magdalena Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 9, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2146.
19. Cooper, Abstraction, and its Discontents, 44
20. Henry Cowell, "Current Chronicle," The Musical Quarterly (January 1952), pp. 123-36.
21. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston. 100-101
22. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston. 101
23. Amy Silman, "From Garbage Cans to God." Guston Catalogue, 63
24. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston. 101
25. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston. 105
Bibliography
Ashton, Dore. A Critical Study of Philip Guston. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4x0nb2f0/.
Cooper, Harry, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin. Philip Guston Now. Distributed Art Publishers/National Gallery of Art, 2020.
Cohen, Alina. "Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth: The Unfreedom of a Blank Canvas and Pushing Back Against Success." Forbes, April 30, 2016. Accessed March 23, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alinacohen/2016/04/30/philip-guston-at-hauser-wirth-the-unfreedom-of-a-blank-canvas-and-pushing-back-against-success/?sh=210c060a38cf.
Dabrowski, Magdalena. The Drawings of Philip Guston. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988. ISBN 087070351X, 0870703528. Exhibition URL: www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2146.
