How to write about Tomma Abts? (2018)

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Luke Elwes: How to write about Tomma Abts?

(Tomma Abts, at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, 7 June to 9 September 2018)

A good deal of speculative writing on Tomma Abts is devoted to fitting her paintings into certain established lineages, from hard edge abstraction (Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella) to Constuctivism (Archipenko) and geometric abstraction (Vasarely).

Essays published by the Tate Gallery and Parkett magazine both point to Jasper Johns, with his breaks, interruptions, and blurring of image and object; and the Tate goes further, namechecking Richter’s abstract paintings of the early 1980s, and tentatively trailing a notion of ‘transitive painting’ that places her within a postmodern culture informed by emergent technological and economic networks, before going on to problematize her work as ‘a hermetic practice with no reference to the outside world.’ (Godfrey, 2013, pp10-17)

Elsewhere, Frieze magazine posits the romantic notion of Abts as an artist creating something from nothing, employing a working process informed by ‘metaphysical concerns’ (Bedford, 2012, p.100); while ArtReview makes a connection with postmodern graphic designers of the 1980s (Charlesworth, 2012), and Adrian Searle admits to being simultaneously intrigued and mystified, displaced in much the same way as he was by the work of Raoul De Keyser.

All plausible suggestions, but where does any of this really get us?

Is the work retrogressive, or an art of the future? Does it represent a crisis for painting, or a solution?  Or perhaps – discarding binary oppositions for a moment – it is all these things. Suzanne Hudson, in Parkett, isn’t really sure either, beyond identifying ‘an obdurate materiality that remains impervious to translation (and that rushes to connect disparate objects in a great long historical continuum).’ (2009, pp.18-23)

The bulk of commentary on Abts’ work goes in search of ‘abstraction’, but doesn’t ever quite find it; indeed, the artist herself has said more than once that ‘I don’t see my work as abstract’. At the same time, however, she does her best to discourage looking for conscious allusions to anything outside the paintings: ‘I don’t really look at things while I am working. There is no reference material in my studio at all.’ (Abts, 2004)

As these lines of enquiry run into the sand, another one pursues a psychological tack, by regarding the paintings as images of mental states, or even as ‘portraits’ of a kind (the clue here being her recurring use of an intimate portrait format). Abts has pointed commentators in this direction (‘I think it relates to the size of a head space – a portrait type space’), but she immediately grounds this in technical concerns: ‘The vertical format holds the space tight. A landscape format would let the tension flow out on the sides’. (Grant, 2013, pp.24-25)

‘For me, painting is a concrete experiment that is anchored in the material I am handling’. (Bedford, 2012, p.100) Her concerns are physical, rather than metaphysical.

She paints lucid representations of a thing – which can never be the thing itself.  Just like words. Even the words she deploys as titles are untranslatable. Apparently ‘each title has a German name’ (Searle, 2005), but put them into Google translate, and they return only themselves as results. Maybe they are proper names pulled from a directory – but they seem as arbitrary as trade names for wallpaper or paint lines. Alternatively, they might be elements of an imaginary structure or private language. Either way, they are blunt syllables attached to sealed containers.

So words continue to circle and continue to miss their target. But then, how can you pin down, neatly categorize, these small geometric daydreams, these semi-conscious doodles?

As Hudson points out, ‘the paintings appear premeditated but not inevitable’. They result from unvoiced meanderings now buried within eerily crystalline forms: ‘I’m working from a somewhat indistinct and hazy notion towards a very specific and concrete image’ (2004).

Their origins are obscure, and their forms are strange: such is the lure of the uncanny.

 

Tomma Abts, at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, 7 June to 9 September 2018

 

References

Godfrey, M. (2013) ‘Tomma Abts’ in ‘Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists, 2013, Tate Publishing, London, pp.10-17

Bedford, C.  (2012) ‘Dear painter…’, Frieze, 145, pp.100-101

Charlesworth, JJ. (2012) Tomma Abts, ArtReview, 56, Jan-Feb 2012

Searle, A. (2005) ‘Is Anyone there?, The Guardian, 13 December

Hudson, S. (2009) ‘The Best-Laid Plans’, Parkett, 82, pp18-23

Abts,T. and Doig,P. (2004)  ‘Conversation between Peter Doig and Tomma Abts’, exhibition publication, The Wrong Gallery, New York, pp12-16

Grant, S. (2013) ‘Tomma Abts in conversation with Simon Grant’ in

Bordering Constable Country (2016)

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willows.jpg

Accompanying text for the exhibiton 'Luke Elwes: Floating World' at The National Trust Flatford Mill, 2 July to 30 August 2016

Following the footpath down the hill from Constable’s studio in East Bergholt and along the Stour valley to Dedham you cross not just the boundary between Suffolk and Essex but also the border between past and present.

On a spring day the view across the water meadows, the sky above and the willows on the riverbank, are much as Constable would have known and experienced them as he walked, or as he later revisited them in paint. Little about this tranquil scene, here on his home ground (and now underfoot as I walk) has changed in two hundred years - deliberately so as it’s been more or less held in timeless suspension since being entrusted to the future as ‘Constable Country’.

The place where he made his images is now made in his image. One walks it as though in a dream, a pastoral idyll through which seemingly we can return to ourselves, to a shared past ‘gathered into a homeland’.  Yet while he haunts this territory, there is also a sense in which his time and space and our own remain fundamentally unbridgeable - we can visit but cannot fully inhabit this other country. In our anxious present there is something uncanny about the desire to render this place immutable.

For we know - as we return to the car park and the A12  - that life flows on, contingent and unstable. The future is not knowable country. Close by, across the border and further east out on the Essex marshes where I work, everything changes. It becomes instead an untended wilderness of dissolving paths and silted up streams where creeks and channels endlessly mutate in the tidal salt waters. Beyond the fragmentary system of sea walls and dykes one encounters an un-tethered world, prone to flooding and now bearing silent witness to the cumulative effects on this fragile ecosystem of climate change. 

In a recent essay Robert Macfarlane uses the term ‘solastalgia’ to encompass recent art that is, ‘unsurprisingly, obsessed with loss and disappearance’. ‘Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants’. (1)

And yet, regardless of the visible gap between them, what both territories offer is common ground for contemplation, one that connects us across time to a deep and enduring sense of place.  When interviewed in 2014 about Constable’s painting Frank Auerbach said this: ‘it is not so much about the more well-known qualities – the clouds and the freshness and the light. It is more that I can’t think of another painter who has invested quite so much in every single image…Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there’. (2)  

This act of close observation, of ‘burrowing down’ (in paint), was essential to Constable’s being, just as for me it has become a way of marking my own transient presence in the flow of phenomena, of paying quiet attention to the shifting patterns on the water, the fall of light on a given day, and the incidental life that passes across one’s visual field. Beneath all this, there is also the delicate registering of material erasures, the disappearances and the brief resurgences, the momentary recollection of this place’s silent (sinking) past.

Caught between land and sea, this interzonal territory remains precarious, its existence granted with no future guarantee. Perhaps the only response (as one who paints) is to ‘gather in’ the present and recognise that if our current homeland is one of flux and uncertainty it is nevertheless still – in the earth beneath our feet, the ‘weather’ and the sky above - an essential realm of connectedness and embodied experience. ‘Everything’, as the writer Andrew Lambirth once said of this work,’ is submerged or reduced to dust eventually by the elements, but in the meantime we may enjoy the trace of their being’.

 Luke Elwes Landermere 2016

 (1) Robert Macfarlane: ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever’ (Guardian 1April 2016) (2) Frank Auerbach talks about Constable, The Observer 21.09.14

The Painter's studio (2004)

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Imagine that, instead of looking at a painting you are a painter. Morning light fills the studio, a space of paint covered floorboards measuring six by six metres, a silent container of possibilities. Some days there is nothing there, because nothing is seen.  Postcards,drawings, maps, and books lie all around in dormant heaps.  A few are bleached, torn, paint spattered, suggestive still  of momentary meaning.  They are the scattered references of a strange and familiar journey. You stand in this space, looking and waiting.  Not for something new, but rather for what is newly seen.  Somewhere in that drift of paper, with its fragments of thought and grains of suggestion, is the starting point for a painting.  The thing seen out of the corner of the eye that may be briefly held and made known. What absorbs you entirely  is the curious process by which the visible first becomes visible, before the thing seen has been given a name. It’s a silent game, this waiting for the moment when a painting comes to a painter.  Tom Stoppard  articulates this feeling in a passage from “The Coast of Utopia” :  A poem can’t be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are trying our hardest to be present a real poet goes absent.  Every work of art is the breath of a single idea breathed by God into the inner life of the artist.

What is this space,the studio, but the mind at work?  A place in which to search but not escape, a purgatory at worst, a threshold at best.  Maybe today it will be possible to look up and out through its walls, make of the space a vehicle for navigating the stars.  Or maybe not, as in the long work of dreamless sleep.  Either way, the painting will be have to be worked, sometimes rapidly, at other times with great patience, but usually to the point of exhaustion.  In its unresolved condition it will have to be left to rest, to return to darkness. In a new light and on another day you will return, and hope to be taken by surprise, like a witness to authorless action.  Gradually the studio secretes those simple means for  transformation, whereby a painting may start to breath on its own. You look quickly, without judgment, sensing the uncertainty that begins to stain your way of looking and which will then impel you to act once more.  And in acting, the odds begin to shorten, the surface loosing its vitality as it is stripped back and remade, the paint travelling down deeper and narrower passages, closing down possibilities as it goes. You may be lost once more, searching in a dark wood for the path you once knew.  This has to be accepted  because the studio is also, in Anish kapoor’s phrase,  ‘a laboratory of failure’.  The tools allow for experiment but not for its undoing.  However intractable and unyielding the material may seem, the chance always remains of finding a way through. To get lost in a painting and never know for sure what it is about is how William de Kooning described it.

If we  keep looking at paintings, it is not least because the handling of paint itself is always unique - it is after all done by hand.  Painters continue to show us how we don’t look, or at least not enough.  When they are good, they reveal the very thing we have forgotten to see.  About the Spanish painter Miguel Barcelo, John Berger  was moved to write that the process of painting is highly tactile. Yet what he is hoping to touch is not normally tangible.  This is the only real mystery. And later on, about not looking he says, what any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which, without the painting, we might be unaware. Curious indeed, but an essential part of what makes being a painter worthwhile.

Luke Elwes (from a talk given at Art First Contemporary, London, September 2004)