Zombies On The Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look The Same?

Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?
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A RT | JUNE 17, 2014
Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much

New Abstraction Look the Same?
By Jerry Saltz
For the past 150 years, pretty consistently, art movements moved in thrilling but unmysteriou
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For the past 150 years, pretty consistently, art movements moved in thrilling but unmysteriou
or constellations of artists, gain followings, become what we call a movement or a school, influ
taken up by more and more derivative talents. Soon younger artists would rebel against them
Impressionism, Postimpressionism, and Fauvism, and again with Abstract Expressionism afte
Now something’s gone terribly awry with that artistic morphology. An inversion has occurred
diluted art have the upper hand. A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by
collectors who prey on their wealthy friends and their friends’ wealthy friends, getting them to
The artists themselves are only part of the problem here. Many of them are acting in good fait
some of them are complicit, catering to a new breed of hungry, high-yield risk-averse buyers,
which they deal fundamentally looks the way other art looks. It’s colloquially been called Mod
Crapstraction. (The gendered variants are Chickstraction and Dickstraction.) Rhonda Lieberm
loot.” I like Dropcloth Abstraction, and especially the term coined by the artist-critic Walter R
Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less han
“dangerous”-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what “new” or “dangerous” really
also a global presence: I saw scads of it in Berlin a few weeks back, and art fairs are inundated
worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction, dep
minimalism, post-minimalism, Italian Arte Povera, Japanese Mono-ha, process art, modified
Wool, Prince, Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Sergej Jensen, and
at galleries and art fairs, and a sampling appears on these pages.
This work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels “cer

insight into anything at all. It’s all done in haggard shades of pale, deployed in uninventive arr
dilapidated. Replete with self-conscious comments on art, recycling, sustainability, appropria
similar vocabulary of smudges, stains, spray paint, flecks, spills, splotches, almost-monochrom
biomorphic composition is de rigueur, as are irregular grids, lattice and moiré patterns, ovula
bars play a part. This is supposed to tell us, “See, I know I’m a painting—and I’m not glitzy lik
product is just painters playing scales, doing finger exercises, without the wit or the rapport th
Most Zombie Formalism arrives in a vertical format, tailor-made for instant digital distributio
same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collecto
material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see
structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incon
bitcoin.
Almost everyone who paints like this has come through art school. Thus the work harks back
days of the 1960s and 1970s, when their teachers’ views were being formed. Both teachers and
art of this period; then only on certain artists. It’s art-historical clear-cutting, aesthetic monoc
semantic painterbation—what an unctuous auction catalogue, in reference to one artist’s wor
Apologists offer convoluted defenses, saying that certain practitioners differ from all the other
Colen uses M&Ms for his; Adam McEwen deploys chewing gum; Parker Ito paints fields of ha
printed but is handmade; others make it look handmade when it’s printed. We’re told that a p
outdoors or in a polluted lake or sent through the mail, or that it came from Tahrir Square. W
change, social oppression, art history. One well-known curator tried recently to justify the spl
of Oscar Murillo—the hottest of all these artists—by connecting his tarp- or tentlike surfaces
Colombia. Never mind that he was educated in England and largely grew up there. At 28, obv
out to be great. Regardless, so many buyers and sellers are already so invested in him that eve
month, three major art dealers pulled me aside to say that, although they agreed that we’re aw
what the other had said to me, and that each had named a different hot artist.
I’ll admit that I don’t hate all of this work. Frankly, I like some of it. The saddest part of this tr
the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less li
where everything looks familiar. My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art
will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one re
*This article appears in the June 16, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
Top row, from left: All You Hear Is Beads Rattling (2012), by Leo Gabin; Untitled #0904 (2009), by John Bauer; Untitled (JS0
more
Top row, from left: Plastic Sheeting (2012), by Helene Appel; F (A Thing Is a Thing in a Whole Which It’s Not) (2012), by Davi
more
Top row, from left: Pleasure Island (2009), by Mark Flood; Untitled (2013), by Israel Lund; The Agony and the Ecstasy (2012)
more
Top row, from left: Untitled (The Skin I Live In) 12 (2013), by Antonia Gurkovska; Stainless Steel (Fine) XIII (2011), by Garda
more
Top row, from left: Untitled (2010), by Ned Vena; Untitled (2011), by Hugh Scott-Douglas; Spine, Chapter 20 (Silberkuppe)
more
Top row, from left: Untitled (2010), by Markus Amm; Untitled (2013), by Stef Driesen; Roll Fades (2012), by Sam Falls. Bottom
more
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- Slideshow - Vulture 12/7/20, 8)29 AM

A RT | JUNE 17, 2014

Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much

This work is decorator-friendly, especially in a contemporary apartment or house. It feels “cer

TA G S : ART A B S T R A C T PA I N T I N G NEW YORK MAGAZINE SLIDESHOW

TV MOVIES COMEDY MUSIC W H AT T O S T R E A M

CONTAC T MEDIA KIT

WE’RE HIRING PRESS

DO NOT SELL MY INFO

VULTURE IS A VOX MEDIA NETWORK.

© 2020 VOX MEDIA, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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