The efforts of the theoreticians responsible for these dialectics formed an aesthetic onslaught that was overbearing. As a result of this onslaught, abstract painting moved away from having anything to do with an expression of the directly emotive, moved away from any attention to spatial matters, or the rendering of a convincing physicality. The work that evolved out of the notions and theorems promulgated by these theoreticians, in the end, proved to be merely illustrative of their theoretical premises. Painters themselves no longer seemed to drive aesthetic progress. Somehow abstract painting was hijacked. Abstract painters had become illustrators of theorems, rather than the questing pioneers they had been.

This loss of independent research and development among abstract painters rested in a denial of the functional precedents of painting as having anything of value for abstraction. These avenues for investigation were lost. Painting methods associated with the special pictorial qualities achieved by abstract painting in its early years disappeared. Painterly tricks of the trade developed over the history of representational painting and applied to abstraction no longer pertained. Painterly skills went by the boards.

It was thought that abstraction needed to find its progression purely. It was to be removed from any sort of precedent. It was as if abstraction had to find its bearings in the ascetic air of some Pure Land School. All elements were to be distilled down to clear water. Expressed in other terms, the possibilities for visual truths evinced through the direct actions of the painter's eyes and hands or through painterly skills were shut down in favor of other exigencies. Abstract painters including those working expressionistically chose the overall effect on the picture plane rather than the gestural, flatness over the spatial. The thrilling and fulfilling experience of putting paint to canvas without limits had been constricted nearly to nothing. Abstract painting was, and in many ways, remains dead.

Yet in all of this we suggest, as Stella suggested a few years ago, that it might be a fundamental mistake to leave representational painting out of our considerations. In fact, it may be that the representational holds many of the tools needed for the rebuilding of abstract painting. We see this as irony as surely as Stella must have seen the irony in going to Baroque painting to find exemplars that might indicate a path forward during another time of doubt about the veracity of abstraction. In his book Working Space (1986) based on his Norton Lecture given at Harvard in 1983, Stella suggested that the plastic necessities of representational painting held more promise for our investigations into abstraction's problems in actionable terms than anything that abstraction itself had brought to the table in recent time.

In the early 1980s, when Stella was searching the halls of Rome for some way to free things up, the setting was little different from where we find ourselves now in terms of aesthetic vitality. All of painting was suffering from a state of exhaustion. However, back then, the act of painting itself was being questioned and indeed abandoned for other modes of visual expression. However, now we find painters of every kind in every studio hallway. Rather than abandoning their craft they are instead being held up perhaps, artificially by an active market. We see that there is a need for adjustment, not in terms of value, but rather in terms of evaluation.

We believe that abstraction is at advantage in the life of painting because it is, as we have said, relatively new in our cultural history. Even given its setbacks along the way, the aesthetic and conceptual platform of abstraction is virtually clear and actionable compared to representational painting. Everything is wide open for our investigations. There is ample room in abstraction for expansion toward fresh positions.

We may find that abstraction is fundamentally suited to showing ways forward for all painting. Thus, for our sample discussions in this essay, we set about to identify some of the things that are lost to us, the things that we no longer sense or see or appreciate or use in plastic terms, in the abstract painting of today. Furthermore, we will add our assessments of the implications of these losses to our findings and definitions. Along the way, we will visit Stella's research on the actionable exemplars for abstraction that he felt resided in Baroque painting and in Caravaggio's work in particular, and we will attempt to find a fit for these things in our situation today. Finally, as we offer our considerations to the ways that abstraction might recoup and develop, we extend an open invitation to all to engage with us in a discussion of these affairs.

David Hockney's Secret Knowledge – The Hockney Dilemma

[The use of optics, the lens in painting] had become so dominant that its image was now the model for all painting. Until at least the invention of photography, its naturalistic look would be the goal of art, and the principal criterion by which pictures were to be judged. David Hockney, (2001)

While all of the concerns expressed in this essay are deserving of focus and discussion, it is Rough Trade's contention that an issue affecting our visual perceptions is of core importance to abstract painting and must be dealt with first. But in order to deal with this issue in its proper terms, we must leave the specific discussion of abstraction here for a moment, concentrating instead on how this issue affects all painting. The issue is a problem that weighs on every pictorial concern because it has to do with what we bring to a picture as a viewer in some intrinsic ways. Yet, having said this, it must also translate as a functional problem for painters as well. Simply put, viewers of painting and makers of painting alike are subject to the very same influences within our culture.

We must look to the influence of the overarching presence of photography in our society for the root of this crisis of perception in pictorial matters as these pertain to painting. As a result of this influence, we seem to have lost much of our ability to comprehend many of the satisfying qualities that are possible in a painted picture. Indeed, we ask, as a culture have we stopped desiring these qualities altogether? Have we lost our capacity to intellectually participate or to psychically entertain the cognitive specialties of painted pictures? We see these problems as being of paramount importance to any discussion of painting and perception and we must place them at the top of our list. Thus, we call for serious investigations into the nature of the internal mechanisms by which we comprehend painting and the influence of photography on these internal mechanisms.

David Hockney clearly showed in his book and lecture series Secret Knowledge (2001) that, as early as the 15th century, lens usage as a graphic help to painting had begun to spread throughout Europe. Looking through a lens and rendering onto paper or canvas what was observed through it brought about a visual revolution in painting, an upheaval in pictorial matters. The effects of this way of working have now become second nature in our creative life. Back then the achievement of a radically heightened degree of realistic illusion available on the picture plane was viewed with amazement. It was as though artists had found a way to work perfectly in terms of line and rendering without the toil of working up preliminary drawings. After the finely observed lens-based realities brought forth by van Eyck, or later, Caravaggio (and many others as well), no one could go back to what had been before. In part, the reasons for the success of this new way of working lay in the fact that portraiture was painting back then, and everyone wanted a good likeness. As a result, the "eye-ballers," as Hockney calls the artists that did not employ the lens, realized a pressing need to be much more precise in their graphic practices from then on.

In many more cases than might be supposed, we find our modern pictorial concerns and problems largely resolved through the functional aspect of the lens, as well. Essentially, this means through the use of a camera. Artists may project images or copy from photographs or use computers to create dead-accurate transferences of imagery to the picture plane. Abstract artists as well often use the same mediating tools in their working processes to create patterns or meta-images (abstract objects) on a computer. These are then transferred to the painting surface. Indeed, through the advent of software the electronic age has hyper-accelerated our lens-based pictorial culture. Hockney says “We thought we saw the 20th Century on the news, [in] film, and elsewhere, better than any previous century, although we could say we didn’t see it all – the camera did.”

Hockney’s conclusions formed through investigations into the use of optics in the painting of the past suggests that by the time photography appeared something final occurred in the way we perceive pictorial matters, especially in painting. Photography's success was total. However, along with the great delight for the new medium, a delight that is with us still as proved by the manifest proliferation of this medium in our culture, we gave up something that has largely gone unnoticed. By idealizing the qualities of photography— its striking truth to the observed, its singular window-like point of view, and its smooth acting quality of surface—we have unconsciously lost much of our ability to participate in painting. We have lost our capacity to realize the intrinsically humanist realities brought to us in communication with painting. As a consequence, painters have been single minded in getting their pictures to look correct, or more to the point for us today, to have them appear photographic. This is not to say that modern painters are necessarily seeking the hyperrealism available to photography, rather, Hockney's investigations understood in another way suggest that rendered paintings tend to be painted within a visual program that is mimetic of the attributes of photography that we have outlined above.

One thing Hockney observed is that the lens of the camera stands at a rigid viewpoint that tends to position all things in the resultant photograph in relationship to the point where the photographer stands. This is basically single-point perspective. This relative positioning of the imagery seen in a photograph, all imagery functioning equally, has become an expected fact in our photographically aligned perceptions. This is a drawback for painting because painting is capable of much more in these terms. A painter is able to give us as many points of view or points of perspective as he or she may fit into their pictorial objectives. As viewers, the limits of our perceptions deny us any real participation in a painting that offers more than one point of perspective because we just are not able to get past our feeling that the picture is not really successful. Unfortunately, this feeling infects painters, too.
Added to this unfortunate fact is that a single viewpoint tends to flatten out the images in a photograph. This is because all things hold equal place with their neighbors. The imagery sits there as if floating on the surface offering little to recommend our involvement, and if we were to inspect this floating imagery, we would be unable to single out any one thing as having more visual importance. One real effect of this might be found to be akin to the visual perceptions of life-long deep forest dwellers. Studies have shown that when these forest dwellers come to the forest's edge and have their first visual encounter with distances farther than just a few meters, they at first perceive what they see in the distance as if it had focal parity with the trees behind them. In other words, they believe the things they see in the outer world are mere suspensions on the forest wall. Finally, it is also the case that the smooth and inactive surface of a photograph does not allow for literal depth. This tamped-down overall-ness in lens-based work can never transmit an experience of depth in the ways that are available to painting.

Clearly our abilities to participate in abstract pictorial realities, and especially painted realities, are determined by our internalization of the pictorial qualities that form at the focal point of the camera lens. This seems to have become a permanent state of being in our consciousness and this situation is not getting better. The fact to face is that a photograph functions as a thing seen as opposed to one experienced and this underachieving in pictorial matters is what we have come to regard as pictorial success. Photography's pervasive influence is everywhere in our society, and as Rough Trade, we point to the implications of David Hockney's investigations into the use of optics in drawing and painting, and his conclusion that we have an "optical art, not a visual art." His work suggests to us that photography now holds such a place of prominence in our culture that its visual properties have become a guiding expectation in our pictorial perceptions and especially our assessments of what painting is and does. Thus, we have dubbed the above concerns the Hockney Dilemma.

Frank Stella and Inner Space

"The sense of shaped spatial presence enveloping the action of the painting...The sensation of real presence and real action successfully expands the sensation of pictorial space. This is the first miracle of Caravaggio…" Frank Stella, (1986)

Abstract painters have not yet dealt in a cogent way with the concerns that Frank Stella raised in the 1980s in Working Space where he provides what is arguably the most reasoned discussion of the problems of abstract painting that has been presented in recent years. Stella points out that abstraction has failed to develop a reality, or perhaps better, has failed to continue from its origins to develop a "world heavy and full enough" to evince pictorial truth, dimensional depth, and emotional movement. Put another way, he wants to find the actionable pictorial concepts that would give abstract painting an ability to project outward to encompass the viewer. As he expresses some of his ideas in terms of the spatial, we feel that it may be particularly in the interstitial spaces of painting (the spaces in between form or meta-form) where we will find some remedy for the substantive issues found in both Stella's and Hockney's observations.

However, first, because Stella relies on the example of Caravaggio's work as a centering point for his thinking, we offer a small taste of what one of Caravaggio's contemporaries thought about his enterprise. The following speaks to our ideas of what the (camera) lens can and cannot give us. In describing Caravaggio’s painting of the crying Magdalene, Giovanni Bellori (an art theorist plying his craft about 100 years after Vasari) could not imagine the painting (Caravaggio's) as an encounter with a visual reality. “…A painting of an everyday girl in an everyday act couldn’t by its nature represent one of the iconic moments in Christianity’s turn against sexuality." The very touching lifelikeness worked against the painting having any larger meaning for him." (Robb, 1988).

We infer that Bellori's misgivings were in part due to the visual efficiencies of the projected lens-based image that Caravaggio employed. The subjective, his particular choice of the living young woman for Mary, was wrong for Bellori, not because she did not fit his idea of how a prostitute of 17th century Rome would look, but because of her treatment in paint. She appeared as wrong not in terms of representational truth, because the lens will always deliver this, but rather in terms of the possibilities painting could hold when it was not conceived by the intercession of a lens.

The picture did not give Bellori the emotional experience that he must have been looking for in his heart and gut because, to him, the girl's image could never have seemed to be a representation of a transcendent manifestation. Her image could be nothing more than a mundane copy from life without some solid painting, without the properties of thick glowing paint, without the extras that non-lens-based painting brings forth in the painter's act of craft and emotive picture building. Lens-based work gives us none of this. Bellori needed a pictorial experience that was mediated not by the lens but by paint and the skill of the painter to move him to faith. Today we have largely forgotten how this sort of painting might appear.

The Importance of the Interstitial

The loss of a sense of the interstitial in painting along with its co-equal partner projection is particularly bad news for abstraction as this loss involves a dialectical that is concerned with the poetics of space. The meeting ground for abstraction's finer possibilities rests in a little known and little used place in today's sense of painterly ambitions. It is in the interstitial parts of abstract painting that we might discover an experience something like "rubber-sheet geometry," an experience of inner touch that can squish into any shape our minds can imagine or intuit. We desire for abstraction all that this topology can convey in a visceral sense as a transformative experience that comes from within abstract painting's deeper ends. For the past 50 years or so, we have been starved for this aspect of pictorial nature, a significant property of which is an ability to transmit a sense of spatial warping.

As we have said, Stella thought he had found saving properties for abstraction's spatial rehabilitation in Caravaggio's work. He suggested that the heights and depths of light and dark in Caravaggio's painting provided the needed apparatus criticus that would help modern-day abstract painters find convincing spatial, and especially projective, truth. However, we suggest that Stella misunderstood the nature of these areas of projective figuration, the light spots, and the interstitial spaces, the dark spots in Caravaggio's painting. We posit that these things are more limited than what he suggests they hold for abstract painting. One wonders if Stella may have suffered from the same visual trouble that is so embedded in us all today?

Caravaggio's work has been taken fully to heart only in our own time despite the fact that many of the other lens-using artists of his time enjoyed great popularity. Most of these artists stuck to portraiture however, where an absolute likeness is greatly desired, while Caravaggio applied lens-based techniques not to portraiture but to work that was thematically religious. To our eyes, Caravaggio's pictures punch up as photographically resonant, high illustration of these religious themes presented on a large scale, and as modern viewers we embrace this reading of his work. However, to 17th century eyes, Caravaggio's work appeared ferociously radical in its intense realism and its scale of figural reduction. These are two of the ultra-modern qualities we expect from pictures today and they are both photographic in nature. Therefore, Caravaggio's paintings were simply not pictorially actionable in the eyes of most of his contemporaries because they lacked visual context. The technical circumstances available to most people, even the well to do, were very limited. Indeed, Caravaggio guarded carefully the secret of his technical means.

Our current embrace of Caravaggio's work has been facilitated by our mediated pictorial consciousness. Contrary to Stella's arguments for the projectional veracity of Caravaggio's work, this photographic look is what we expect, and even admire, in his work, after all. Despite his great gifts for contextual movement and illustrational truth our own mediated sensibilities tell us his figuration actually completely flattens out due to the unavoidable properties inherent in lens usage and mechanical projection. As Hockney points out, the optical instrument only picks up the lighted object, and the artist’s concern is with getting the transference of image to canvas right and true. Seeing images as if down a tunnel, the artist renders only what is seen through the glass, placing these images in an undifferentiated space that is largely the result of lighting and focal length. These effects are characteristic of the photographic, and Caravaggio, whether knowingly or not, merely floated his figures in a similar disassociated and uninteresting space, everything served up co-equal and therefore flat. He made no compensatory efforts to off-put this effect. Indeed, he may not have grasped what the lens was doing.

We agree with Stella in a general way that it is in the interstitial spaces of Baroque painting especially that we may find potencies for enlivening abstraction. However, given all of the above, it is not completely clear why Stella gives the weight of argument he does to the dark areas around the figuration in Caravaggio's paintings. These areas function as mere fill-ins. They are spaces that have no real subjunctive power and therefore are not usable examples of the interstitial as a connective property in painting. Nothing intrudes from behind the images seen through the lens and it is tempting for painters to neglect these spaces in favor of the subjective alone, or at best, to use these areas to display lens-observed minutia such as still life or the odd incidental articles that lend context and positional atmosphere in a composition. Aside from these utilities, it appears to us that Caravaggio slapped in the interstitial spaces in his painting, mostly pro forma, between the flat-acting figures that present to the front of his pictures just at the surface of the picture plane.

Retrofitting our current pictorial expectations requires that the interstitial be accepted back into our perceptions as a desirable and functional tool for creating an illusion of spatial context in abstract painting. It is the example of the non-lens-using artists of earlier times that we look to for encouragement. To give Stella credit on this point, after extolling the virtues of Caravaggio's painting as having what it takes to enliven abstraction, he referred to the work of the non-lens using artists of the Baroque, Rubens, the Carracci, and from a little before them, the work of Titian, in this way:
“…herein lies their most enduring and original quality: by being so completely motivated by painterly and pictorial qualities, these works are very close to the spirit and intent of twentieth-century abstract painting. The basic construction and illusionism…[that painters who employ techniques for the realization of interstitial spatiality in their work] "…create a self-contained, expansive whole that appears accessible to and is certainly instructive for [abstract] painting today."

This is an assessment on which we can wholeheartedly agree. Yet, as we will see, these attributes, and attendant skills, of the non-lens using painters of the Baroque have been largely discounted in our time. We are with Stella in calling them back to use.

A Denial of Working Space?

When Stella contemplated Caravaggio's work in Rome back in the 1980s, he had only parts of it right, as we discuss elsewhere in this essay. Along with this, he did us no favors in his very real equivocation when it came down to definite terms for finding new life for abstraction in past painting. In Working Space, he hauls us back to Baroque painting in order to get some running room for abstraction. Yet he seems unable to intellectually approach a central factor in the development of abstraction: abstract figuration or what might be called the partially representational. Even as he yearns for the representational to show a way forward for abstraction, he reveals his very real doubts as to whether abstraction and representation might ever truly find a common understanding. After all, in his book, he refers to abstract figuration as, "the albatross of semi-abstraction [that] was a reality in 1920 and is still flourishing in the 1980's." To run for a moment with his cheesy epithet for the abstract figurative in painting (or "semi-abstraction"), we can find application for this metaphor in broader terms. Today abstract painting of any sort is very much like an albatross slapping ground trying to find lift. However, if we could get it airborne, like an albatross, its broad wings would allow it to stay on high for a very long time indeed.

Pure abstraction was not formed from nothing of course. The artists responsible for abstract painting's development found their tools in the functional and actionable pictorial traits and processes of representational painting. However, in his equivocal remark above, Stella denies the efficacy of the positions and processes formed in the work of the early abstractionists as they exercised their representational sources. We suggest that these artists never saw their abstract figurative explorations in any other terms than as a means toward some form of pure abstraction. Furthermore, it was indeed the very logic formed by their investigations that pointed the way toward unfettered abstraction. This cannot be denied. Abstract figurative painting had to arrive at pure abstraction.

As the progenitors of abstraction moved their studies through representational modes, they worked to comprehend areas of the subjective that might be altered and formed into unique visual ideas. They forced the limits of the subjective into something that was objectively expansive. By not placing figuration with abstraction as an essential step toward pure abstraction, as Stella seems to do in Working Space, the possibilities for serious work into the future will be sorely cramped due to the loss of this necessary connection. This will be a huge mistake.

What are we to make of the rest of Stella's arguments in Working Space in light of all of this? He claims that “the progressive wing of abstraction has only deferred the day of reckoning; it is clear that abstraction has to come to terms with volume." Stella was right in his call for projective qualities for abstract painting, and he may be right in suggesting that volume may have some value, partly because when seen as mass, volume projects. However, this statement comes from Stella without an acknowledgment that representational attributes will unavoidably come to mind when it comes to volume. In this, we are back to the canard that abstract figurative painting will never lead to anything like pure abstraction.
After all, we are talking about paint on a physical surface, acted on by the human hand. In terms of the observable formative laws of nature, a simple stroke of white paint above and a similar stroke of grey (or any other color) below will always read as creating at least a cursory notion of volume or shape or form. We are hardwired to view these two strokes as a thing—as an object—highlight above and shadow (or shading) below. His statement just above sounds sure and cogent, and we agree with him. He adds, "Abstraction must have a viable sense and expression of volume, because without [this], the space available to abstraction is simply too closed, too dull, too unimaginative?” However, since Stella seems to get a bit itchy in all of this, the question remains, would he allow these tools any real place within the toolbox of abstraction?

Stella thought Picasso’s turn from Cubism (abstraction more or less) could be instructive. The quip about "semi-abstraction" and "1920" notwithstanding, he wrote: “The success of Picasso’s painting [semi-abstraction] from 1920 on comes from the unabashed rendering of volume, and this is what has proved to be the most difficult thing for abstraction to deal with…" We ask, are these calls for an exploration of volume, among the many things he is calling for grudgingly suggestive only or are they real acknowledgement of needs and purposes? We suspect that Stella is unable to come to terms partly because there is no other method of reading the strokes of white and grey as anything other than representational, at least in paint. This fact is deeply troubling to him, we suggest, because of the fact that abstraction is so new. Looking back is a conservative act that is, to him, too close to going back. So he leaves us with far from clear encouragement in terms of a route for our investigations. Is it that he wants the representational things to be handy to abstraction, yet finds himself far beyond accepting the cogency of their applications in his own work, to say nothing of our own situation?

In his equivocation, Stella will never see the wedding of abstraction and representation. Picasso was after all just another practitioner of abstract figurative painting and Cubism was just another representational adventure. However, we cannot be blind to the fact that abstract painting did not come about of itself as if fully formed from the thigh of Zeus. It is a fact of art history that the laboratory for abstraction was founded in the abstract figurative experiment that Picasso and others brought forth, hacked out of the pubes of Bouguereau's nymphs, or as with Kandinsky, as found in the shape of the shamanic drum. Given the fact that abstraction was exposed on a flat plane during infancy, we suggest that now especially is not the time to burn the birthing room. If abstraction is to progress, things have got to open up. We cannot call for one thing on the one hand and then deny it the space to develop on the other.

Finally, our disagreements aside, out of respect for Stella, in acknowledgement of his real acumen in these problems, and his discourse within the representational, we feel this is a worthy direction in which to go, if nothing else to see for ourselves what works and what does not and why. Maybe this is the point.

The Grab Bag of History

"It is not the shape of an idea as it exists in the mind which finally counts, but the marks on the paper, and these are not merely symbols for what is in the mind, as in mathematics, but sensible facts capable of projecting sensation." Mercedes Matter, (1950s)

Certain important motivational ingredients in abstract painting were just beginning to be developed before being shut out of the aesthetic process around 1950. One of these ingredients was a sense of the emotive. This psychically expansive property for painting found its energies in an artist's will to apply paint according to the truths of his or her inner being, mind to hand. These were important primal and motivating forces in abstract painting right through to Jackson Pollock. Embraced as an Action Painter and as an Abstract Expressionist Painter, he himself perhaps had no clearly stated emotional agenda for his work. However, we are fortunate to have film of him actually working, and our eyes tell us surely and simply that with every squint and grimace and supple flick of his wrist, he translated the unspeakable places within himself into arcs and slashes and smacked-down blobs. He exerted a fight club passion with every lunge out across the canvas to deliver his paint to its surface. In every reflexive bend he placed his gonads in proximity to the wonder of what he was accomplishing in his pictures.

However, as the aesthetic tags changed and moved on, anything that even hinted at emotional content in abstract painting became anathema in the minds of the theoreticians and their artist followers. They ruled the aesthetic roost, and as they were advocates of reductive truth to surface, or in other terms, were advocates of flat-acting surface qualities in painting, they denied room for any intimation of space. This was a key loss to the tools for introducing the emotive into painting. This situation solidified and abstraction's progress moved into an ever-tightening ring of purposes that cramped it down to nothing but surface and stroke and field. This situation produced an aridity and dryness in abstraction that found its painters searching for whatever air they could find. In this situation, abstract artists turned to more recent aesthetic positions to find precedents that might help, and in these, they found only more futility because all of the other precedents available to them had been found to want integrity. Within this totalitarian situation, any work that was found to employ spatial qualities was shot down.

We as Rough Trade wonder if this situation was but a natural outcome of accepted perceptions—a photographic-based way of perceiving painting. After all, it seems that no artist knew how to break out of this situation and, until Stella, no one ever seemed to recognize anything was amiss. Flatness was acceptable beyond question and desirable beyond all things and one had to work within its pictorial confines. As we look for reasons why this should be so, we find connection with much of what we have talked about in this essay, and we are led to the following surmise. We posit that Clement Greenberg (1950s), one of the aestheticians who brought us to this current state of affairs in abstract painting, without knowing exactly why, may have been able to deeply comprehend the influence of the camera's lens on our received perceptions of painting. Unwittingly, he must have sensed the resident facts of the origins of our perceptions, that we see paintings as largely needing photographic qualities in order to seem successful. (This is what we call the Hockney Dilemma). Unfortunately for the near future of abstract painting, Greenberg misinterpreted what he sensed, and instead of sending out a warning for painting, he formalized his thinking into a radically new dialectic that said that flat was very good indeed.

A set of abstract painters emerged from the late 1980s through the early 1990s that sought to define abstract painting in terms of a reconnection to the emotive. While the desire to bring back something that Stella regarded as an expansive quality in abstract painting was welcome (and we suggest should be welcome now), unfortunately these artists were tied to recent history, seemingly unable to reach for exemplars any farther back. Some aspects of the old arguments still held sway as postmodern and poststructuralist dialectics. These arguments still tended to find their operative momentum in concerns other than the emotive—flatness and the more newly arrived activity of representing comparative compositional equations. Thus, the pictorial outcomes brought forth by these artists failed to suggest the desired humanist conclusions. It is just that flat will never emote.

Why did the new painters of the 1980s and 1990s not find their bearings in the exemplars that Stella suggested for abstraction's progress? In terms of the contents of the historical grab bag of abstract painting, given that Stella's relatively recent contributions should have been found floating up near the top, we ask then, had Stella failed to communicate well enough back in the 1980s? He suggested that we could go into the way-back and find something fresh for abstract painting today in the projective forms and the suggestive spaces of Baroque painting. Were his suggestions left on the table because of his equivocation about the veracity of his own claims? As we saw, these newer painters never made use of his insights. Were his ideas not actionable because of the drama (and romance?) and the power of the wills that projected forth from the nearly Herculean struggles that took place in the 1950s? These positions still hold our attentions today. The crowds of painters who now tumble out of the art schools across the western world find the same old active properties in theorems that were merely transmuted and reformed into various "Post-isms," and "Neo-isms." These are old ideas recast for current aesthetic consumption.

We Seek the Creole for Our Trade

"The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these "walls around art." Vasilii Kandinsky, (1911)
We live in an age of flattened-out optical confrontation in which all things are seen straight on, as if residing in, or perhaps better, on a photograph. We are up close to everything yet touch nothing because of the effects of the mediation of the camera on our consciousness. Hockney's insights suggest that we entertain a mediated perception of painting in general that constrains our ability as painters and viewers of painting in a frighteningly essential way. Electronically and optically supplied pictorial solutions in the making of an abstract painting are incapable of projecting anything that is viscerally connected to our needs for touch and visual context, the qualities that evoke life.

Rough Trade asks, if all is as if seen through the lens of a camera, with its static boundaries and hermetically flat space, are we lost completely to any enjoyable participation in the plastic and emotive realities possible in painting?

Much of abstraction today is formed as textual reading, or the rote transference of our ideas through mediated processes, rather than through a direct visual encounter with straight unalloyed drawing and painting. We feel that too much of the evidence of our actions as painters are erased and finessed out of our trade for the sake of a clean smooth product. Because this tends toward the flat, we need to reestablish a modus of direct interaction with an abstract painting. We need to find an experience that is an encounter with the visceral and the possibilities of vagary. We feel that this crucial point of development can be rediscovered for abstraction in the “evidence room” of the human hand, where mistakes are made and corrections are affected, where direction is redirected, and all of the messy aspects of life come to the fore for possible inspection and resolution.

Along with the above, we need to reignite the emotional current in abstract painting that was halted decades ago. Rough Trade is about an encounter with feeling brought about by the painter's ability to evince for the viewer the emotional possibilities in an anthropocentric resolution of a painted picture. This does not mean a resolution in representational terms, but rather, in terms of those things intrinsically resident in the human character and psyche witnessed in the likes of the work of Jackson Pollock. As Stella notes in so many words, the emotive is one of painting’s essential tools, serving to pull us into a work. It evinces motion in painting, and this, in turn, indicates the presence of life. We believe that in the service of restoring the emotive in abstract painting, it is not wrong to call for a new sense of romanticism in abstraction through an acknowledgment of the functions of the intuitive and the instinctive, as opposed to a tacit denial of these things.

Finally, we seek the Creole for our trade as opposed to the ethnically pure, the demimonde to the strait-laced. We want the high and the low. We want to project out of our preconceptions, in order to find the other side of abstract painting, wherever this might lead. We want to find a more vital way of looking, of seeing, of comprehending what abstract painting can be. We want to rev our perceptions into the place where Kandinsky's spirit took us when he flew up to some shamanic heaven on the drumhead of his craft. We want to find where the humid spaces in the painting of Rubens take us in terms of his painterly ability to warp space up and out of his pictures. We need to grasp the essentials of a space for abstract painting that is different from the effete Post Modern bulletin board approach to abstraction that has ruled until now. Rough Trade is not about code interpretation, or an assemblage of facts and figures, or the diagrammatic, but rather we are about an investigation into ways of painting abstractly that propel us toward an encounter with the dynamics of vision.

References

Cahoone, Lawrence (2003). From modernism to postmodernism: an anthology. Berlin, DE: Blackwell Publishing
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