Medium | Eric Shaw
2022.07.02
The Slip Zone Exhibit Fails to tell it Straight
Kazuo Shiraga, Kan’u Unchō, 1984
On the one hand, the Dallas Museum of Art exhibition, Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia is bold and entertaining. It thrillingly introduces viewers to some relatively unknown international art movements. On the other, the exhibit (which runs through July 10, 2022) falls embarrassingly short of its ideologically-driven thesis. It fails to offer the facts needed to support a very bold historical claim.
Framing Slip Zone’s organizing idea, the DMA’s press release states:
“Slip Zone represents the globally inclusive reconsideration of the art historical canon we work to present. . . In placing iconic artists in direct dialogue with their equally innovative but under recognized contemporaries . . . we tell a more honest . . . story of a radical era in the evolution of art.”
Nope.
That last line’s a lie.
We see statements of this kind everywhere nowadays and, as I present the facts that undercut this particular one, I need to begin by framing the following comments carefully, because, you, my dear reader, may share the political concerns of most people in the artworld.
For all of us, it’s tres cool to knock Western culture down a notch, and it is definitely gauche to sing any praises to it. This comes from a healthy appreciation of the errors of Euro-American culture. But, that point of view — one that many believe to be both cutting edge and ethically-appropriate — is also a hammer that tries to make everything a nail — and in this case, the nail is more illusory than ever.
The history of art — as presented by Slip Zone — is not as the curators make it out to be, and, as Slip Zone’s artifacts try to make the case for a global “equality of innovation” they fail in a particularly bald-faced way, making the entire curatorial escapade look somewhat unconscious and badly-conceived.
I ask patience as I frame this criticism for you. I’ll do some breadcrumb-by-breadcrumb reasoning here — such thoroughness is necessary if I’m to unwind the slippery thought-processes of some pre-existing convictions.
Plainly put: the revisionism championed by curators Brodbeck, Li, and Crockett is not supported by any art historical analysis or by the artifacts the DMA has put on display. Keep reading, and I’ll explain.
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The press release I quote in my third paragraph suggests, a “canon” of art is such because it foregrounds the most “innovative” contributors to a discipline’s “evolution.”
Pablo Picasso, Instruments de Musique Et Tête de Mort, 1914
If I, Eric Shaw, make a fine Cubist painting tomorrow, it won’t make me as “innovative” as Picasso. It should not make me fodder for an “inclusive reconsideration of the art historical canon.” Far too many years have passed, and, frankly, even if I was painting just few years after the close of that movement’s heyday (1914), I’d still be just an imitator.
By the same token, if I discovered the element radium all by myself next month, I wouldn’t sidle into history next to Madame Curie.
Such is the way of “innovation” in cultural history — artistic, scientific, technological, etc.
If you walk through Slip Zone, and pay attention to the dates on the placards next to the putative “iconic artists in direct dialogue with their equally innovative but under recognized contemporaries,” you’ll note that the works of the non-Western artists consistently have creation dates that are anywhere from 4 to 40 years after those of the eminent Euro-American artists they’re bracketed with.
Those Westerners are the ones who actually authored the innovations that the featured Asians or South Americans are in thrall to.
In short, with only one exception (in the early 1950s performative activity of the Japanese Gutai artists), Slip Zone’s non-Western works are definitively not “equally innovative.” They dog the footsteps of Euro-American artists who crossed these particular cultural boundaries years or decades before.
But — if we can avoid the elephant in the room for a few paragraphs here (before I begin pointing to it again) — Slip Zone does showcase some remarkable works of art.
Alejandro Otero, Colorhythm №37, 1959
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The Venezuelan, Alejandro Otero, has given us the gorgeous, Colorhythm №37, from 1959. Its method of crossing out color bars with strong blacks offers a bracing visual dynamism. As the DMA curators suggest in their nearby wall note, Otero was probably responding to the American, Ellsworth Kelly — whose painting, Sanary, made seven years before (1952), hangs on a nearby wall for historical comparison.
The 1959 Stoic Figure made by the Bolivian, Maria Luisa Pacheco, also makes good use of black while carving out the rest of its grid-buttressed, abstract imagery with tans and murky reds. Stoic Figure shows a mastery of the Abstract Expressionist idiom that was established some 15 years earlier by a number of Americans slapping around paint as part of the New York School — including Pollock, De Kooning, Franz Kline, and many others. Stoic Figure stands next to the small, early-career effort by the American, Louis Nevelson, and it has a similar title: Archaic Figure. It was produced 4 years previously (1955). This is from Nevelson’s learning phase, when she, too, was copying the Abstract Expressionists. She went on to create cutting-edge work in her signature style of found-object sculpture beginning in 1958.
Maria Luisa Pacheco, Stoic Figure, 1959
Amidst these dynamic works, Slip Zone’s Korean pieces fail to get the blood moving much (though it is nice to see work from a country rarely-highlighted in American museums). Characteristic of this blandness are Kwon Young-Woo’s P80–103, from 1980, and Park Seo-Bo’s, Ecriture, from 1973. Both are monochrome wall pieces from the Tansaekhwa school that are neither compelling in their ideation nor arresting in their physical presence.
The significant exception in the Korean work comes from an artist who falls outside the Tansaekhwa school.
Lee Kun-Yong’s, Cloth — Ultramarine, from 1974, is original in concept and execution. It gives us a trompe l’oeil representation of a blue cloth seemingly sagging on a wall, violated by a bright red-orange line that proves it’s not a hanging cloth at all.
Lee Kun-Yong, Cloth — Ultramarine, 1974
Outside such gems in the exhibit, the coolest part about this show is that it honors the radical dynamism of some rarely-celebrated art movements in postwar Japan.
These styles of practice were rooted in a culture that was re-inventing itself immediately after World War II — much as America was doing at the time (though on very different terms). As in the United States, the war replaced Japan’s old identity with a new one. This freed the Japanese avant garde to produce art that leaped into the international mainstream — more immediately than any other group of artists highlighted by Slip Zone.
The one big work by Kazuo Shiraga, Kan’u Unchō (1984), teases out the significance of this line of Japanese invention.
Measuring six-and-half by nine-and-a-half feet, this large, thickly-impastoed, black-and-white oil painting displays the same pitch of artistic fervor found in the best American action painting from midcentury. It’s the star of the exhibit, and this 1984 composition harkens back to similar work Shiraga manifested in the mid-1950s
For comparison’s sake, the DMA curators have given us Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist work, Cathedral — created 37 years before (in 1947). It hangs to one side of Shiraga’s piece in the exhibit’s northeast sub-gallery. The juxtaposition is nice, but Kan’u Unchō doesn’t call to mind Pollockian works like Cathedral so much as it does the imagery of Pollock’s contemporary, Franz Kline, whose slashing, black-and-white brushwork was profoundly evocative of Japanese calligraphy (though sourced elsewhere).
We know Shiraga was a student of Western art. Kline’s discoveries were most likely Shiraga’s template — as Shiraga began working this way in 1952. Kline had started investigating this particular expressive language four years before.
Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1957
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Like most folks in the artworld, I’m a cheerleader for global cultural innovation (and I’m incensed by China’s censorship policies cutting against this grain). I love banging the drum for our multi-polar world — one where powerful cultural contributions come from every corner.
But that development can’t be walked back into times when it did not exist.
If we do this, it’s just ideological revisionism.
This is what the DMA curators are up to.
Eyes everywhere would roll if I said nuclear fission was discovered yesterday by a scientist in Azerbaijan, but, if I made a museum show saying something equally outrageous, I’d probably get away with it.
This happens partly because journalistic organs are complicit.
This essay, in its first form, was commissioned by a regional art magazine but, despite my scholarly credentials and long history of publication (over 100 articles in major journals), my editors forced me to wholly rewrite it twice — then rejected it wholesale. Re-pitching the piece to other magazines, a number of them said they would not print it because it criticized the DMA.
This is what democracy in the USA looks like, folks.
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But, here’s the meat of my thesis . . .
To support my argument in those revisions, I included more historical context for my editors, and I’m guessing that detail will be useful for your understanding, too, dear reader.
Many museum-goers understand what I explain here, but some don’t.
Just like science, art displays an ongoing synthesis of ideas. These ideas concern visual and spatial understanding (not mathematical, biological, or chemical understanding). 2-D and 3-D art exhibits an evolving aesthetic, just like music. Hardly anyone would mistake a tune recorded in 1932 for a tune recorded in 2022. Visual systems have their own, constantly-transforming “music,” as well, and it is particular to its era. Visual art concretizes visual ideas — ones that cannot be put in musical or linguistic form — and these ideas move forward, generation by generation, building on innovations discovered in the years (and sometimes, months) prior— just as musical ideas do.
Today's artists “stand on the shoulders of artistic giants,” and the general public can name a handful of these individuals: Michelangelo, Pollock, Picasso, etc.
But even if you didn’t know these fellas, or believe my above statements about art’s year-by-year advance, the DMA does. It’s the groundfloor recognition that provides the raison d’etre for this show.
As they deploy the words, “canon,” “era,” “evolution,” etc., it’s artistic progression they’re talking about. The “Postwar Abstraction” this show highlights has its roots in European artistic developments that began in the mid-1800s, as overseas influences pushed numerous aesthetic conversations forward. (Think Japonisme, and the flattening of space and use of silhouette inspired by Japanese prints, think Gauguin in Tahiti, think Picasso riffing off African sculpture, etc.).
Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Women, 1891
Americans aren’t strong in history or geography. The DMA’s audience may know that European cultures initiated the first truly global phase of trade and conquest, but they probably no longer recognize that these activities led to information-rich societies that created complex cultural artifacts which were cutting-edge in terms of humanity’s advancement (even though such a fact was broadly acknowledged mere decades ago).
Empire cultures can pull this off because they are informed by geographically far-reaching sets of ideas. They pool diverse concepts from the areas their rule has touched, and these bring unprecedented novelty to artmaking, technology, and other progressive efforts.
Innovative artists informed by a wide net of information — usually found in major crossroad cities — formulate incipient “international styles.” Though their works are not the only ones of artistic value, they dominate museum exhibits with complex artifacts, old and new.
Because it was mainly Westerners who initiated the more massive cross-currents that led to our contemporary globalized society (through trade and conquest beginning in the early-1400s during the “Great Divergence” as well as the following “Age of Discovery”), so it has been Western citizens encountering the world’s diverse cultural forms who’ve been at the vanguard of synthesizing planetary traditions up until the last three to five decades.
The West’s integrative activity began most earnestly during the colonial push of the mid-1800s — and this integrative activity remained almost exclusively-focused within Euro-American cultures for the next 125 years.
There was no internet, folks.
You had to travel to get new information or read the accounts of others who did. You had to examine the artwork that travelers brought back or see pictures of it (which were painted or hand-drawn for centuries; photography wasn’t invented until the 1840s). Only Europeans (and even then, mainly the educated classes) or privileged non-Europeans living in colonial outposts had access to sufficiently-wide nets of information to create truly avant garde art that was global in its purview.
Upon World War II’s conclusion, the rest of the planet began inching toward this kind of broad cosmopolitanism in its art forms. The planet wound its way toward a set of avant garde expressions that were highly-responsive to non-local art histories. In short, the world outside the Occident began getting up to speed — but it would not arrive there until some decades after the period of “postwar abstraction” that this exhibit focuses on (i.e., from 1945 onward).
In the postwar, an explosion of wild artistic innovations bloomed in America — mainly in New York — leaving even most of Europe behind.
Confessing this, when we look at the unfolding midcentury artistic cosmopolitanism honestly, we’re compelled to say that the West made nearly all the world’s canon-ready “iconic work” in the postwar.
The funny thing is, the placards in the show — piece by piece — tell this exact story (as detailed in the handful of examples I’ve provided, above).
Another fact-check that belies the assertion of Slip Zone’s thesis is that the show produces no “innovation” initiated by non-Western artists that set the pace for Euro-American artists. No such example is provided on the DMA’s walls.
If, as they claim, the non-Western world was “equally innovative,” the curators should be able to show us numerous examples of Western art which imitated that from outside the West.
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I don’t think the failures of Slip Zone are a sign of bad faith on the DMA’s part.
I simply think the curators simply let their values get ahead of their scholarship.
In our politically-charged present, this happens all the time now.
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Thanks for bearing with me.
This is probably the most over-explanatory piece of writing I’ve produced since my school years.
Pushed by editors and friends, I found that I had to state these truths with heaps of context because people reflexively deny them. These ideas appear inconsistent with (or threatening to?) ideologies that promote cultural diversity.
But they aren’t.
I happily affirm, as most writers do, that we are now living in a dynamically multi-polar art world where new styles of cosmopolitanism blast forth from the north, east, west, and south.
But that was not happening in the time period highlighted by this show.
To say so is irresponsible.
Global inclusionism is a very good thing — but we don’t need to lie to make it real.
The thought leaders who guide our museums must — as the DMA press release states — speak “more honestly” about history (and everything else) than those who ignorantly trade barbs on social media.
After the lies of the Trump administration, America’s public intellectuals should have at least learned this.
Culturemakers must speak truth even when it doesn’t align with cherished or hegemonic patterns of thought.
Though it is a beautiful show, the faulty thesis of Slip Zone is not worthy of the good people at the DMA. Let’s trust that their next blockbuster exhibit will do better.
https://ericjohnshaw.medium.com/tall-tales-at-the-dallas-museum-of-art-4a91a6107b9d
