David Burrows
Art Monthly

An exhibition should never be held to ransom over its press release, but sometimes the claims made on behalf of an exhibition are worth chewing over: the press release for 'Abstract Art' begun by claiming that the six artists all favour 'visual effect over ideology'. This statement evoked a strong taste of the past, of Clement Greenberg talking from the height of his years, allowing a self-mocking smile to spread across his sensuous lips, chastising the young ones who always want to think too much. Check in your brain with your umbrella at the lobby before entering the exhibition. That would be Clement Greenberg's advice. So I switched off the thinking part of my brain so as to absorb the visual effects of 'Abstract Art' and, it has to be said, this drifting through the exhibition was not an unrewarding experience.
 
Ian Dawson's Blue 196, a marauding mess of melted plastic, stood frozen to the spot like a lava flow arrested by a drop in temperature. DJ Simpson's impressive drawing, routed across a 40 x 10 ft metallic expanse, rested on the reflection of the exhibition caught in the smoky mirror surface of the work. Keith Farquhar's soft palette of green, ochre and purple made for an awkward lyricism, as awkward as Simon Bill's ovals, produced mostly in brown and eccentric materials and absurd motifs. Gary Webb's Come to Me, a large sculpture that looked like it belonged to the family Oldenberg – a distant, mixed-up crazy cousin – was constructed from a number of elements which may or may not have evolved from two straws and a pink upturned air freshener. A heady cocktail that played with scale and …
 
But this drifting through visual and spatial effects was difficult to sustain. The trouble was that the artworks had a tendency to switch the thinking part of the brain back on. It is true that the exhibition was not infused with the 'idealism of Modernism', as the press release pointed out – Clement Greenberg's belief in modern specialisation was notably absent from the exhibition. Nor was the exhibition playing out endgame strategies or dabbling much in the informe. As well as an interest in plasticity, what all the artists shared (except perhaps Dawson who may have been the exhibition's sole single-minded formalist) was a concern for the language of abstraction and its place in culture and history – we are probably too far down the path of postmodernity for it to be otherwise.
 
Take, for example, Farquhar's ensemble of paintings, text pieces – one of which tells of smuggling marijuana in a Skoda – and a lone record sleeve entitled Re-education through Labour; design for a spoken word LP cover. These works all evoked discarded and seldom celebrated objects, projects and aspects of 20th -century culture. Farquhar's dangling circular canvas with a small cross attached makes a not-too-confident attempt at masquerading as a Suprematist painting. The painting's title Woman, I can hardly express… is borrowed from the opening line of a John Lennon song and alludes to the fact that the canvas resembles the biological symbol for woman, appropriated by Feminism. Another canvas employs the logo of the John Lewis Partnership retail business. Farquhar's nostalgia stops short of sentimentality though, as a degree of irony and humour is mixed up with, one suspects, a sympathy for past utopian and collective ventures in equal measure. This was perhaps less true of Eric Bainbridge's inelegant constructivist works made from stained chipboard and dental floss. Bainbridge's constructions rely too heavily on referencing Modernism's attempt at a hygenic world revolution, something many artists got out of their system over a decade ago. And Farquhar avoids this modernist melancholia through the surprising heterogeneity of his sources.
 
 If Modernism was being referenced in one part of the exhibition then, in another part, Simon Bill's oval paintings seemed like they came from another planet. And this was Bill's accomplishment, as his series of works seemed to recede from any referential framing or aesthetic criteria. In this way the spots, patterns and the well-known reversible icon that is both a rabbit's and a ducks head, achieved a level of abstraction through signification, or rather the lack of it, rather than just through formal or visual effect.
 
DJ Simpson's work, Diamond Hubcap – Star Halo, played a similarly elusive game, though the artist's means were more seductive. Simpson's all over drawing is achieved by using a routing machine that cuts into a laminated surface to reveal layers of wood below. What could be mistaken for a scaled-up copy of a Pollock drawing is actually a drawing produced free hand using a heavy industrial tool. What is more, the lines that appear as positive marks are actually negative furrows produced by the drawing process, creating an illusion that makes the drawing both a physical event and a virtual image. What prevents Simpson's work from being a quotation of a modernist drawing style is the unexpected process of his mark-making. This play on illusion and physicality, coupled with a title that knows it is full of promise and optimism, makes Simpson's work a teasing proposition, one that suggests that maybe, just maybe, something new might still be possible.
 
The new, of course, means something different these days. It was Adorno who fretted that it might be impossible to tell the difference between fashion and something historically significant. Nowadays, any artist wanting to take part in the British art scene often has to live with the fortunes of fashion. What is curious about 'Abstract Art', and what in the end makes the show an interesting piece of curation, is that it feels like an exhibition that is aware of fashion but which also recognizes a desire for autonomy amongst the selected artists, most of whom will have developed their practices during the height of postmodern discourse. Within the exhibition, however, the term 'new' is still something being thought over. Will this concern for abstraction or plasticity grow into something significant or is it just a phase we are going through? It is difficult to say but the best work I the exhibition will be difficult to ignore. There is an Ad Reinhardt cartoon in which a woman, who represent art, is helpless before an oncoming train. A man, who represents abstraction, looks like he will save the day and rescue art. Obviously he failed in his mission and the woman was very badly injured while the man was killed outright. Years later some artists have returned to the scene of the collision to see what can be made from what is left, without getting morbid or moral about it all. Most people know that abstraction cannot be resurrected to live its former life, or at least that it can't save the day. But some artists continue to value the negative and utopian impulses of abstract art as they might still prove important.
 
I would have liked to finish the review here but there is one more ting I feel has to be said about the exhibition: it was an all-male show. After all, there are plenty of women artists who would not have looked out of place in the exhibition. It is true that this fact does not take anything away from the exhibited work, so does it matter? Is it an issue? Well it has been, at least since people started to see through the heroic male figure of abstraction that raced to the rescue in Reinhardt's cartoon. And look what happened to him.