Zombie Formalism

In the Trenches of Art War

By: Martin Mugar - Sep 13, 2024

Martin Mugar.

I wrote three blogposts on Zombie Formalism over a five-year period. The first at the end of 2012 described my encounter with John Yau’s article in Hyperallergic where he sensed a failure in new abstraction to cut out new territory remaining solely imitative of High Modernism. I then tried to bring the style under the rubric of nihilism and akin to the work promoted by Raphael Rubinstein under the title of “Provisional Painting”. These two chapters are a hugely edited version of my online posts. The following is the genesis of my thinking along the trail of Zombieism.

1. The first use of the notion of Zombie Abstraction

In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Ernst Tugendhat and other the Twentieth Century philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of Western metaphysics. First Charles Taylor, in a heading, states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model, and its basic error is to construe conscious- ness as a relation to an object.” The author in the first paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: “the subject as starting point, just as orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective communi- cation in language the new universal system of reference.” A few paragraphs later he says: “The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.1 It is interesting to unpack this in relation to the transition to abstrac- tion at the beginning of the last century, and in particular a rather recent recycle of minimalism that is cropping up in New York gal- leries and has received an imprimatur by the Whitney Museum with a mid-career show of Wade Guyton, one of its practitioners. It pro- vides an insight into the endless politics of suspicion that permeate so much of Western culture over the last century and in particular painting.2 The ambition for the thinkers quoted above is to liberate our consciousness from a subjectively based consciousness that for various reasons is beholden to visuality. The first manifestation of this subjectivity or the “mental eye” was first seen in the realism that commenced in the Renaissance with the use of perspective and then in the Baroque with chiaroscuro. It reigned confidently over painting

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until the end of the Nineteenth Century. This mental eye was built out of clear notion of a strong subject, that shaped via a scientific understanding of perceptual processes, the world that surrounded the artist. The imposition of the gaze of the individual on what surrounded him seemed to parallel the thymotic excesses of Western Civilization as it objectified via science and capitalism the whole world. The image of the conquistador Lope de Aguirre in Werner Herzog’s classic film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) descending the Amazon river and con- quering solely with his imperious gaze all that he surveyed is probably the most emblematic image for me of this attitude. A rather powerful bit of information to support this notion of Western consciousness is that the perspectival system of the Versailles gardens radiated from the bed of Louis XIV. Sartre has a lot to say about the withering gaze of his grandfather, who was an old-world authoritarian type. The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in the Twentieth century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s essay Downcast Eyes (1993). To make his point about the domination of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating insight and mirroring. “Even a rapid glance at the language we commonly use will demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors. If we actively focus our attention on them, vigilantly keeping an eye out for these deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight int the complex mirroring of perception and language”. Zabala goes on to say: “If the old philosophy only referred to what could be seen clearly, the new philosophy refers only to what can be clearly communicated”.3 Richard Rorty, as well as Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Jay, call this transformation Linguistic Turn. Science required that objects be placed under the scrutiny of the researcher and submit to the scientific method. A strange amalgam of suspicion and arrogance worked together in a mighty cabal to turn the world inside out. A naive acceptance of the world as it is presented on a day-to-day basis was replaced by a vision that the world must be founded on a more solid basis through the power of logos. The world became transformed into a series of topics: geology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, grammatology, and so on and so forth.4

The first crack in that stranglehold on the Real appeared in the phe- nomenological studies of Edmund Husserl. Martin Heidegger has a phrase that always carried a lot of significance for me: “immer schon” (always already). If we act on the world in a certain way, we are always already in it as a participant with other people using a language that we did not create. The pure cogito was immediately problematized. Our relation to things is not one of subject to object, but a more shared engaged reality of being in the world. His word for that reality was

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Dasein, which roughly translates as “being there”.

This became the start of a hundred years of philosophers trying to decenter the scientific gaze by deconstructing the language of met- aphysics, with each new generation of philosophers accusing the previous one of still being subject to it. Wittgenstein added to this deconstruction by moving our focus away from the metaphysical to an analysis of how we use language in the real world. During the most recent era of french deconstruction one adjective that you didn’t want attached to your ideas was “logo-centric”. Initially, the problem was that behind the strong ego was the belief in God as the origin of everything in a well-ordered universe, which still supported Descartes’ rationality. After that, everything logical was perceived to be just a trace of that divine belief system, which had to be expunged from wherever in our language it was still hiding. And, of course, it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.

I got off on this tangent after reading John Yau’s article in Hyperallergic about what he called the latest “look” in Abstraction.5 The work of its practitioners, Sarah Morris, Wade Guyton and Jacob Kassay looks very much like the abstraction of Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly, which is decidedly logo-centric. Greenbergian ideas about reduc- ing forms to basic elements and constructing abstract realities went hand and hand with the positivists who believed in the superiority of mathematical language over the language of poets and mystics. “What you see is what you get” Stella is purported to have said. The early spirituality of Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian is gone. These artists are laconic macho painters. They give you the least amount of what might be construed to be a painting and then pull up the ladder behind them. I suspect that this paring down of painting to simple terms embodies in some manner the analytic analysis of language, which reduces language to its grammatical elements and then submits it to validity tests. They want to see how painting functions as shapes on a wall. Or as they loved to say in grad school: does it work.
Already Yau, who is not a fan of these artists, does accept the prem- ise that we should not go back to the days of the gigantomachia of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. And there may be some truth that this generation of artists is too imbued with the culture of deconstruction to attempt to overcome Kelly, Stella and Reinhardt or in the case of Jacob Kassay, Robert Ryman, at least on their own terms. Something else is going on here: there seems to be a need to push painting toward something totally inert, that could be simply part of a common language, no longer power-laden as the last word of something irreducible, which was the goal of Kelly, Reinhardt, and the early Stella. The work of these artists becomes as common as money, just a token of exchange, like baseball cards.6 By shifting the terms of painting away from any lingering notion of being an object and pushing it into the realm of language and in the case of Guyton producing the painting mechanically with an inkjet printer, sets the painting free from its roots in science and objectification.

If the influence of Tugendhat and analytic philosophy is as pervasive as I think it is, the primacy of language theory would give permission to this generation to take painting further down the road to just words and sentences. Rorty, who had his role in this winding down of the metaphysical, critiques Heidegger because “he treats language as a brooding presence rather than as a string of marks and noise emitted by organisms and used by them to coordinate their behavior.” Heidegger placed importance on the ignored verbal copula is that we use without acknowledging its role in grounding our day-to-day use of language in something more numinous. It backgrounds it and in poetry approaches the foreground. In the case of our contempo- rary practitioners of abstraction it has been excised. These works of art look like paintings, act like painting but on closer inspection are as bloodless and lifeless as zombies. Simone Weil said that culture moves in grand arcs either ascending or descending. Assuming the movement is down, could it be we have reached the bottom?

2. The nihilist condition and Provisional Painting

Flannery O’Connor stated that you could not understand the modern world without understanding nihilism’s central role in moving and shap- ing modernity. She said it was the air we breathed. As a Catholic I assume she felt that we cannot base the way we live on either the positivism of science or superficial societal strictures of what is good and bad. I am not very knowledgeable about Catholic doctrine, but I know unlike the Protestants they believe in original sin and from what I recall of Saint Augustine’s Confessiones you can only overcome it through the grace of God. To say that we are all nihilists is tantamount to saying we start out our lives as fallen from grace.

That a devout Catholic living in the conservative 1950’s South should find herself as Andy Warhol’s intellectual bedfellow only proves the pervasiveness of the nihilistic strains that permeate our world. These nihilistic experiences seem to hit us from different directions but gene- alogically have the same origin. Warhol’s fame as an artist was due to his understanding of the role that mass media played in our perception of self; that we are no longer individuals relating to a small community but have been abducted by alien forces as it were into the universe of the electronic media. If O’Connor can acknowledge the nihilism of society and express its fallenness, then could it be said that Warhol shares with her the same sense of our fallen condition and sees our mediated condition as a false transcendence?
So how to connect the dots that place O’Connor and Warhol in the same nihilistic world? Warhol picked up that mass media provides a sort of transcendence to the ordinary. On the one hand to be lifted up out of one’s existence and forced into the media is like being reborn in the human condition, a double dose of nihilism and fallenness. The fifteen minutes of fame implies transcendence of our mortal coils but only for a moment before we fall back into the banal. Is Warhol a theologian of banality?

When, in the past years, I wrote about Wade Guyton and Jacob Kassay, who produce ice-cold replicas of High Modernist art, I detected that the only way to get a grasp on these artist’s success was to see the correspondence between the nihilist air we breathe and their total lack of anxiety about being a simulacrum of another person’s style. I threw in some gratuitous rhetorical flourishes, that painted these artists as being a sort of cultural dead end. But if you are a nihilist then dead ends are where you want to be. Especially when you take Stella’s work, which is part of the scientifically based positivist strain of Modernism that looks for building blocks, sine qua non’s and relation of parts to the whole, and then bleed it dry so that the copy is a pale memory of the original. What is intriguing is that there are contemporary artists who paint images similar to Guyton, but who are descendants of the positivist line of Held, Stella and de Kooning. David Row and Craig Stockwell are two artists who come to mind. In the case of Row his work has its origins in Al Held and de Kooning. In Stockwell I see Brice Marden. I think they want the viewer to visually and intellectually expe- rience an event, a movement of rhythms in time and space, painting that still captures the energy, like the events that are caught on an x-ray in a scientific experience. It is very Aristotelian. Concepts like energy, time and movement are crucial to their self-understanding. But the art scene moves quickly and although these descendants of High Modernism are successful, they are not always at the center of the cultural radar. The name of Raphael Rubinstein comes up often as an apologist for the movement he calls “Provisional Painting”. Around the end of the last decade, he noticed a distinct artistic style, when he made the rounds of galleries and artist’s studios in New York. It was abstract (Mary Heilmann, Richard Aldrich), mildly ironic (Christopher Wool) and unabashedly derivative (Stanley Whitney) and in no way wanted to surpass its influences. He curated the group show Reinventing Abstraction. New York Painting in the 1980s (2013) at Cheim and Read to convey that this movement was more than just a recent phenomenon, but had its antecedent in the work of Joan Snyder and Jonathan Lasker, although some such as Snyder are incredibly earnest and only look provisional. I suspect, that like Greenberg’s ideas on abstraction in the Fifties, it got codified and became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the artists outside of the movement (if you can call it that) start to think that this is the new wave to emulate and its ideas begin to infect the academy.

It seems that the metaphysical past will always haunt us as some- thing that is still embedded in our language and institutions. Is not this what is happening with Provisional Painting? The edict, that was handed down from on high that painting is dead, meant that painting as embodying metaphysical absolutes was past. But can we stop paint- ing? Can we stop interpreting the past? Is the will to say something about one’s experience of the world at an end and is not abstraction in its manifestations in the Twentieth century full of bits and pieces of language that we can “bricole” with. You don’t have to espouse the absolutism of Held or Stella to borrow from their playbook. In a Brooklyn Rail interview Rubinstein sees the provisional movement as a reaction to the slickness of work by John Currin, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami.7 I have observed this sort of reactive event in the New York scene from the late Sixties. Chuck Close comes to New York looking to stand out from the minimalist crowd, and, according to an urban legend, espouses photorealism as a means to this goal. Neo-Expressionists react to minimalism and some of them like Julian Schnabel survive to be part of the provisionalist reaction to worldwide corporate slickness. So it goes the agonic battle between generations. To know that it all functions under the umbrella of nihilism would be a good critical tool that would help critics understand the different strains of nihilism and maybe put the fire in the belly of the next gen- eration to overcome the shadow it casts on all we do. Has Simone Weil’s cyclical trope of history hit the nadir of meaninglessness and instead of bouncing in another direction became an intensification of itself? This aesthetic nothing is not totally nothing as the market gives it significant monetary value. The dialectic of history provided no zigzag, no way out just more zombification ad infinitum. As said before, this state of affairs was foretold in the early work of Frank Stella. His work was not built out of the cosmic gestures of the Jungian Pollock or the labor of the working class of de Kooning but out of color aid packs and bad geometry. Whereas Stella felt some remorse over putting painting into such a straight jacket and has spent the rest of his career paying homage to the Italian Baroque, the Zombie Formalists, a label created by Walter Robinson – just to name a few:Wade Guyton, Mark Grotjahn et alia – look like early Stella. They saw the scission his palette provided from flesh, blood and the inner life as a good ground upon which to build their bloodless zombie edifice. It did not refer back to a lived world but to the artifice of graphic design. Modernism was the last breath of authoritative self-consciousness grounded in Science, the individual as capable of solid perceptions of the Real. When one reads that Husserl’s eidetic reduction seizes reality as it is captured by the senses, one understands that this is what Rothko did. I was reminded of his spiritual intensity in Paul Rodgers The Modern Aesthetic (2017) which sees Modernism as an ever-revivified battle against the Prussian state and its reincarnations.8 For sure the scientific community achieved its goals with a group effort but judging from the mid-century portraits of greatness by the Canadian-Armenian photographer Yousuf Karsh, the consciousness of the truth was a private affair. So here is a definition you can take home: Zombie Modernism is Modernism without the authoritative stance of self-consciousness. There is no one home.

Martin Mugar graduated from Yale with a BA cum laude in 1971 and with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1974. Yale also granted him a travelling fellowship to travel in Europe from 1971 to 1972. In 1970 he received a fellowship to study at Yale Norfolk with Philip Guston among several visiting artists. Mugar has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Dartmouth College, The University of New Hampshire, and the Art Institute of Boston. His work can be found in the several public collections such as The Boston Public Library, (Boston), The Danforth Museum, (Massachusetts),The Museum of Modern Art (Yerevan, Armenia), The MIT Museum (Massachusetts), Tufts University Museum (Massachusetts). Mugar has recently writ- ten the book “Drawing and Painting: perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw” (2019).

Note

1 S. Zabala, Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, pp. 1-11.

2 I am mainly thinking about Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the so-called “school of suspicion”. See P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation (translated from French by D. Savage), Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, pp. 32-35.

3 Infra.

4 S. Zabala, op. cit., p. 12.

5 J.Yau,“WhatHappensWhenWeRunoutofStyles”,Hyperallergic,December 3th, 2013: hyperllaergic.com/96934/what-happens-when-we-run-out-of-styles.

6 Asknown,theword“zombie”,andofcourseitsvividimagery,comesupmanytimesin regard to economics and finance. See J. Rushing Daniel, “Art and Capital Have Become Nearly Indistinguishable”, Jacobin, November 15th, 2021: https://jacobin.com/2021/11/ art-market-financialization-commodify-currency-museums-assets-capital.

7 J. Waltemath, “Raphael Rubinstein”, Brooklyn Rail, July 2013: brooklynrail. org/2013/07/art/raphael-rubinstein-with-joan-waltemath.

8 P. Rodgers, The Modern Aesthetic, 9W, New York, 2017, p. 160.