Ray Bull impugns abstraction at Ana Cristea Gallery in Manhattan

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When looking at a representational work of art – a piece that represents stuff and/or illusionistic relationships between stuff in the world - there’s a tendency to engage in a specific cognitive process that might not allow for a meaningful experience or full engagement with the piece (Susan Sontag, of course, wrote about this in her essay “Against Interpretation”). 

There is also the tendency to resort to an easy allegorical interpretation based on what we believe certain traditional ‘symbols’ in a piece might mean. So if we look at Rembrandt’s “Polish Rider” at the Frick we might verbalize something to ourselves like: “The horse in this painting is clearly a symbol of the means of transition from one state of being to another.” In this case one’s engagement with the piece seems sorely limited through that process of analysis, realization and verbalization. The purpose of abstraction was, in part, to subvert this interpretive proclivity and allow the viewer to be more deeply engaged through forms and colors and the relationships between them. That was the theory anyway. 

The work of Ray Bull at Ana Cristea Gallery openly impugns the autonomy of abstraction. In the notes accompanying the show it is stated that, “Ray Bull’s paintings speak to the impossibility of abstraction in painting. His compositions consistently straddle the line between representation and abstraction.” So basically Bull seems to be implying that when you look at a work of abstraction, in order to get anything from it, you engage in, basically, the same thought-processes that you use for a representational piece. 

Abstraction is allegory by another name in which you bring the same preconceptions and pre-existing beliefs to the work as you do with representational pieces and subject it to analysis. There is no way to move beyond this analytical process and to believe there is a way to be affected by abstraction without cognitive analysis becomes tantamount to believing, a la Carl David Friedrich, that staring at mountains long enough will integrate you into nature and help you feel the true Christian God. Being directly engaged, without analysis, by a piece of abstraction, is a myth.

Ray Bull also, in his pieces, seems to take this argument one step further. He seems to want to get at the source of our capacity to verbalize meaning and how a type of destructive interpretive feedback loop can be created through this process. If I look at a work of abstraction and can analyze it, it is due to the relationship and effect of the various elements in the painting. It seems that the awareness of the relationships between colors and forms and their effects then inevitably leads to a need to articulate or verbalize which then destroys any further capacity for direct engagement.  

Once one becomes ‘aware’ of what the piece is doing, or how a piece affects one, the real meaning of the piece is destroyed. Indeed, the tension between abstraction and representation in Bull’s pieces points to the fact that in the very process of creation of abstraction, if analysis occurs by the artist, true abstraction is destroyed. In attempting to create an abstract piece analysis of the relationships between colors and forms will, however, occur and, of necessity, the piece will lose its vitality and potential for engagement and merely invite a limited cognitive interpretation from the viewer.

So Bull’s pieces show abstraction in its flawed reality. Yet, Bull could also be pointing to the fact that a ‘real’ type of abstraction might be possible. By extension we can guess that if an artist chooses pure, unadulterated improvisation, true abstraction might be possible and true engagement of the viewer might occur. Yet, Bull could also be saying that in the deliberate choice of improvising there is also analysis and planning, which would then militate against the ultimate goal.

Ray Bull

Get Up With It

June 18 – July 17,2015

Ana Cristea Gallery

521 West 26th Street

New York, NY 10001

www.anacristeagallery.com

Daniel Gauss

Bubble Wrap Art - Bradley Hart at Anna Zorina

Berlin Wall - click on images to enlarge them

Bubble wrap owes its proliferation to the computer industry. Initially it was designed as a type of funky wallpaper (which nobody in the Eisenhower era wanted to buy) but, after lying dormant for a few years, it was realized (in 1959) that this would be the most effective protection for the transportation of computers - especially the IBM 1401 variable wordlength. As folks who work in galleries know, bubble wrap is the de rigueur accompaniment to art pieces when they are transported.

It was, in fact, the cavalier attitude toward bubble wrap at art galleries which triggered a type of moral or environmental awareness in artist Bradley Hart. He realized this material was so ubiquitous and commonplace that even folks in the field of art, who are supposed to be sensitive to environmental and social issues, were not thinking of the consequences of using and casually discarding this material into eternally stagnating inorganic landfills. Using bubble wrap as his means of expression became his response to this situation of wastefulness.

Hart uses bubble wrap kind of in the way a street artist might use a wall. Indeed, the Berlin Wall before its take-down by the people of Germany is even one of the images in the show, as, perhaps, a self-reflective gesture. But Hart’s refusal to allow something to go to waste and his desire to make use of the most useless type of cast-away thing requires that he engage in a super-laborious process of creation. He injects acrylic paint into each cell of the bubble wrap, cell by cell, methodically, in what might even be called a type of proletarian process art. I’m assuming Hart doesn’t pay some guy $10/hr to do the injecting – he himself goes through what most would find to be an incredibly tedious process to get his final result. He’s basically a ‘worker-artist’ or he’s like a Japanese full-body tattoo artist, engaging in a repetitive process of injecting ink over and over again into human flesh. Yet, he could also be considered to be in the tradition of the great tapestry makers of the Middle Ages, who worked with a negative image and who looped thread continually from the negative side to the front side of the tapestry and back again to get large narrative images from thousands of little stitches.

In the gallery notes pointillism is mentioned and he also seems to follow from this route. The whole point of pointillism was to apply unmixed colors in little dots so that the human eye would do the mixing if you stood at the right distance from the painting (three times the distance of the diagonal of the painting). By not mixing the colors on the canvas, you get greater brightness. Yet I’m not sure Hart is shooting for brightness in these pieces; I interpreted his work as, mostly, process art, as a way of taking something valueless and inconsequential and finding a hidden quality and potential in it that lay unexploited due to the extreme effort necessary to utilize it. Hart is, however, motivated by his environmental concerns and is willing, therefore, to take whatever time is necessary and he brings out an expressive potential in this material in a similar manner in which bubble wrap’s protective potential was inadvertently discovered. He reveals that within the bubble wrap itself was a hidden emergent quality for the transmission of meaning allowing this material to be saved from the landfill. Hart’s art is also a type of victory over an obstacle, the obstacle being the nature of the bubble wrap which allows the transmission of visual imagery but only through a laborious effort that ultimately requires the active collaboration of the human eye.

Hart doesn’t waste anything. In order to get each cell full of paint he has to over-inject into each cell. This causes paint to seep out the back of the bubble wrap. Hart then peels this layer off as a second painting. So you get the image of the object and then an abstract, dripping, flowing image derived from the image of the object at the same time, which calls the legitimacy or primacy of the visual image into question and points more toward the importance of the effect of imagery on our inner reality, as it interfaces with our experience, memory and emotional responses. Hart also seems to take excess acrylic paint from his floor, pallet, tools etc. and applies them to a canvas in what the gallery notes refer to as a ‘collage’ style. So at first Hart shoots for realism through a difficult means to convey realism but this process results in more and more expressionistic pieces which impugn the notion of a separation of objective and subjective reality and point, instead, to a unity of inner and outer experience.