Discrepant Abstraction (from Annotating Art's Histories series) edited by Kobena Mercer
reviewed by Bettina Malcomess
This book of essays seeks to introduce previously excluded voices into the history of Modernism. In the story of abstraction, with its more or less North American hegemony, it makes a welcome and important post-colonial turn.
Contributors relate stories of abstraction from Hong Kong, the Islamic world, South America and the Caribbean to those of Europe and the United States. It takes as its point of departure the mid-century moment of Abstract Expressionism, with artists such as Pollock, Newman and Rothko and critics like Clement Greenberg as representatives. Against the backdrop of World War II and the Cold War, what emerged from European geometric abstraction and American vernacular painting was what Greenberg called 'Pure painting', asserting its autonomy from context and truth to form. The book's basic premise is that rather than 'purity', abstraction is based on a multi-cultural borrowing and openness. Editor, Kobena Mercer, explains, '[B]y opening our understanding of art to a multiplicity of possible interpretations, abstraction is inherently multidirectional: it de-centres� [t]he essays examine the material entanglement of "race", nationality and ethnicity in the cultural production and circulation of post 1945 abstraction'. In light of this, the book aims to do two things: while it retells the history of Abstract Expressionism, it also re-theorises abstraction as 'discrepant'.
I would say that the book is most successful in introducing previously untold narratives of artists outside of the hegemonic, Greenbergian narrative. Essays introduce us to marginalised African American artists like Norman Lewis and South American abstractionists such as Boanerges Cerrato of Nicaragua, and also demonstrates the influences of Native American art on Pollock's action painting. Iftikhar Dadi's 'Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism' acknowledges the other side of a conversation, between Islamic decoration, Arabic calligraphy and Surrealism in the work of artists from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
What I found most difficult about the book is its attempt to find a theoretical complement for the practical project of retelling of the history of abstraction. Appropriately, the contributors are both artistic practitioners and well-published in theory and criticism, the book itself having emerged from a conference. Their varied contributions centre around the concept derived from Nathaniel Mackey's 'Discrepant Engagament: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993) '. For Mackey 'discrepancy' makes reference to 'practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity'.
Abstraction, Mercer argues, is a form of 'discrepant engagement' because, in liberating the 'pure' line, colour and form, it exposes the very conditions of art as visual representation. For example, an essay by Angeline Morrison asserts the monochrome surface's refusal of figure/ground relationships as reflective of a refusal of racial signification in the 'mixed race' subject. While interesting, such arguments sometimes veer towards the eccentric, and maybe that is symptomatic. In legitimising an outsider position from within a discourse with a long history of exclusion, far from hand in glove, theory and practice can prove to be a somewhat tight fit.
Nonetheless, the book is well worth engaging, its topics relevant and contemporary to South Africa now. We too are just beginning to engage with the legacy of the Modernism in our own terms.
Publisher: InIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts), MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts (2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0-262-63337 - x
