Against the Grain: Rebecca Morris and Peter Bradley’s Art ‘About Nothing’
“Art should be about nothing,” my friend, the abstract painter Liam Everett told me recently. “It should be an encounter with a U.F.O., an unknown object you have to work out how to come to terms with.”
It’s a provocative, hard-line position, one more fitted to an artist than a critic. But given art’s recent turn toward the figurative, the literal, and the narrative, I too often find myself hankering for art that doesn’t try to tell me things. What the critic Peter Schjeldahl, writing on Piet Mondrian, recently termed “obdurate mystery.”
Two exhibitions of abstract paintings are currently up in Los Angeles that fit that bill. At the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), “Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022” is a tour though this L.A. artist’s joyful and tenacious pursuit of invention and reinvention in abstract painting — a genre considered, when Morris set out, to be moribund.
Morris first caught the art world’s attention with another deeply unfashionable move: In 2004, she wrote a manifesto, and published it as an ad in Artforum. “Abstraction never left,” she declared, appending an expletive. The manifesto reads like a bullet-pointed pep talk. Some of her points are tongue-in-cheek — “When in doubt spray-paint it gold” — while others are universal: “Fight monomania,” and “Wake up early, fear death.” She concludes “Campaign against the literal” then, in capitals, “ABSTRACTION FOREVER!”
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the NY Times website.
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