Amy Sillman wrote a piece, “AbEx and Disco Balls; In defense of Abstract Expressionism 2,” for the Summer 2011 issue of Art Forum (caveat: the editors at Art Forum may have chopped this thing to hell, but in any case she was solicited for her unique/individual thoughts because of her position within the art world so I can’t imagine too much was bastardized from her original manuscript). Art Forum is a magazine that typically solicits artists, curators, collectors, critics, directors, actors and a general assortment of scencesters to contribute articles for print. In this summer’s collection the topic was the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Most contributions are the typical art world polish and rub that we’ve come to expect, but Sillman’s piece caught my eye. Amy Sillman is a painter (sic.), great painter (this writer’s humble opinion), her work sits in the awkward zone between expressing a forthright joy for painting and all the manual duty that that entails as well as making a sarcastic comment about art, art history, and the art world in general. Experiencing the work amounts to either, complete submission to the paintings for their faith in color and form and her snarky little asides to the world in which they hang, or oh cool, I like blue too.
“AbEx and Disco Balls” is not a good piece of writing but it does begin to suggest a few interesting ideas. The main argument she proposes is that the underlying ideology of AbEx (expression, the primal scream, man only within himself, “…working from their innermost intuitive feelings…”) was vulgar and it took two generations, Susan Sontag with her Notes on Camp, and something she calls the “new-style dandy” who loves camp and therefore vulgarity to finally adopt AbEx. But this dandy, adopting and therefore adapting AbEx, was/is uniquely positioned to take and leave whatever parts of the historical movement he/she wants. In Sillman’s view the main things taken away from AbEx are the material qualities, where those qualities speak to the formal concerns of an artist, specifically the young artist looking for a way in which to begin a painting practice without being bogged down by the romance and dogma of AbEx. This is all quite obvious and uninteresting – what is interesting is Sillman’s marriage of this procedure with “LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, queer and questioning)” artists. Her argument almost falls flat on its face. Most of the article consists of clunky statements with MFA grade type lingo punched in, to which I can only assume is some sort self-consciousness (i.e. “Foucauldian materialist-discursive practice, connected to the “bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations and pleasures…,” “…the gender vicissitudes of AbEx..,” “AbEx was ripe for double detournement.”), leading the reader to assume she feels her position is only legitimate/defensible by implementing and randomly distributing references to theory. The problem isn’t that she using the vocab incorrectly, she’ not, but that Sillman feels the need to throw these referents out there at all.
Sillman kinda succeeds and only does so once you’ve read the article twice. She takes too much time leading up to her actual point and all the information beforehand almost seems irrelevant. In between the jargon droppings Sillman slips in some autobiographic gems, that belie her use of the upper crust lingo in the first place, (i.e. “ we knew what we liked…something to be looked at, cut up, and used as material, like punk music or underground movies or other sloppy, enthusiastic things made by a lineage of do-it-yourselfers and refuseniks with a youthful combination of awareness and naïveté.”) These, from what I assume, are mostly direct anecdotes from the artist herself and ring truer than the other statements in the piece. The topper that seals the deal, her finishing move, comes at the bitter end of the article. Sillman was giving a lecture at a university, a self-described content-driven program, and to fuck with the institution she decided to focus her talk on the more formal elements of her work;
…the people who loved my formalist rap were the guys who had gone the furthest in their own personal lives to make specific changes to their own forms. We were both committed to an idea of the inseparability of form and content, and we were working with their interactions, their malleability; if you could change one side, you could change the other.
The guys she refers to are some bearded guys who she later discovered were transgendered men. This event is the crux of her entire piece and she mentions it at the end like some kind of real world proof to back up the theory she quotes. The problem here is that Sillman is making a fairly large claim about homosexuality and procedures of making and her best proof, her most defensible position comes from her real life, but she buries that behind the claims of others and their dense language. There are moments where Sillman tips her hand when describing her own work, “performing a critique of a critique,” or “even the risk of actual delight – no undoing but redoing, if from and oblique angle.” In these moments we see her true feelings and can’t help but feel disappointed – and the disappointment is two fold. (1) The idea that the construction of the self, someone running against the status quo must mettle themselves to the world and then that personal history informs a certain formal predilection when art making happens (which is a fantastic way of beginning to look at a persons work in terms of their life and tribulations, this idea adds a very real context for the decisions and outcomes of an individuals practice – but it never gets investigated by Sillman, she just makes the proposition) and (2) Sillman’s own practice, as she would say, thrives on the “tactile and material. To touch it is to know it,” and I feel more of that hokey forthrightness is all the more convincing (yet she refuses to be direct, giving little snippets but consistently falling back on canonical white men’s words (which is the whole problem to begin with!)).
It is very uncool to stand behind/up for something by yourself, and if not uncool then down right career suicide (in any field), because how can you defend yourself with only yourself? This would be the problem that leads Sillman to try and defend her case with proofs and theories outside of her own position. But, in truth, her case is made when she speaks from her position and her experience, how could one refute that? More importantly why is that not enough? Even more importantly why is that not enough for her? (The work is the evidence.)
Amy Sillman is a damn good artist, and she has great ideas but when she feels beholding to some status quo her ideas are sequestered to the same rote art writing that’s (mostly) too easy to ignore and eventually reduced to fluff.
