Page 6 - Art First: Dan Sturgis: Strict and Lax

It is an impasse a century in the making. From Malevich on, the driving force

of abstract painting was, and had to be, centrifugal. Abstraction defined itself
by what it was not—not traditional, not representational, anti-conformist;
revolutionary.

Ωis was a problem. Revolution demands radicalism, so that abstrac tion was
forced to define itself outwards, pushing its follow ers further and further
along whichever painterly road they hap pened to have taken. Once he had
adopted Neo-Plasti cism as his mode, Mondrian could only and ever be more

like Mondrian, until he arrived at the point that there was nowhere more
[2 ] Mondrian- like to go. Abstraction, which had begun with the year-zero paint -
ings of Malevich’s Black Squareand White on White, led irresistibly back to them.

Possibly the greater problem was that what lay at the end of each of these
vari ous visual culs de sacwas its own specific classicism. Revolution may breed
a new status quo, but it is a status quo none theless. Bridget Riley’s black-and-
white Move ment in Squareswas revolutionary when she painted it in 1961, but

it is now as canon ical as Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, and as recog nisable.
In a mode of painting that allowed itself the luxury of tradition, this might
not have mattered. In one that had set out to overturn it, it mattered greatly.

If, as an artist, your instinct is to paint abstractly, how do you deal with this
prob lem? That question is key to Shine on me, as to Sturgis’s work as a whole.
Ωe most obvious solution is to reach for the word ‘postmodern’ and defuse