The Slip Zone Exhibit Fails to tell it Straight
By Eric Shaw
On the one hand, the Dallas Museum of Art exhibition, Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia, is bold and entertaining. It thrillingly introduces viewers to some relatively unknown international art movements. On the other, the exhibit (which runs through July 10, 2022) falls embarrassingly short of its ideologically-driven thesis. It fails to offer the facts needed to support a very bold historical claim.
Framing Slip Zone’s organizing idea, the DMA’s press release states:
“Slip Zone represents the globally inclusive reconsideration of the art historical canon we work to present. . . In placing iconic artists in direct dialogue with their equally innovative but under recognized contemporaries . . . we tell a more honest . . . story of a radical era in the evolution of art.”
Nope.
That last line’s a lie.
We see statements of this kind everywhere nowadays and, as I present the facts that undercut this particular one, I need to begin by framing the following comments carefully, because, you, my dear reader, may share the political concerns of most people in the artworld.
For all of us, it’s tres cool to knock Western society down a notch, and it’s definitely gauche to sing any praises to it. This comes from a healthy appreciation of the errors of Euro-American culture. But, that point of view — a view many believe to be both cutting-edge and ethically-appropriate — is also a hammer that tries to make everything a nail — and in this case, the nail is illusory.
The history of art — as presented by Slip Zone — is not as the curators make it out to be, and, as Slip Zone’s artifacts try to make the case for a global “equality of innovation” they fail in a particularly bald-faced way, making the entire curatorial escapade look somewhat unconscious and badly-conceived.
I ask patience as I frame this criticism for you. I’ll do some breadcrumb-by-breadcrumb reasoning here — such thoroughness is necessary if I’m to unwind the slippery thought-processes of some pre-existing convictions.
Plainly put: the revisionism championed by curators Brodbeck, Li, and Crockett is not supported by any historical analysis or by the artifacts the DMA has put on display.
Keep reading, and I’ll explain.
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The press release I quote in my third paragraph suggests, a “canon” of art is such because it foregrounds the most “innovative” contributors to a discipline’s “evolution.”
So . . . thought experiment:
If I, Eric Shaw, make a fine Cubist painting tomorrow, will it make me as “innovative” as Picasso? Will it make me fodder for an “inclusive reconsideration of the art historical canon?” It won’t, of course. Far too many years have passed, and, frankly, even if I was painting just a few years after that movement’s heyday (1914), I’d still be just one more person in a train, working out my influences. I’d be an artist who’s yet to establish his own signature style — a style that may or may not end up being historical.
By the same token, if I discovered the element radium all by myself next month, I wouldn’t sidle into history next to Madame Curie.
Such is the way of “innovation” in cultural history — artistic, scientific, technological, etc.
If you walk through Slip Zone, and pay attention to the dates on the placards next to the putative “iconic artists in direct dialogue with their equally innovative but under recognized contemporaries,” you’ll note that the works of the non-Western artists consistently have creation dates that are anywhere from 4 to 40 years after those of the eminent Euro-American artists they’re bracketed with.
Those Westerners are the ones who actually authored the innovations that the featured Asians or South Americans are in thrall to.
In short, with only one exception (the early 1950s performative activity of the Japanese Gutai artists), Slip Zone’s non-Western works are definitively not “equally innovative.” They dog the footsteps of Euro-American artists who crossed these particular cultural boundaries years or decades before.
That said, there are alot of compelling artworks here. Let’s assess their aesthetic heft as we orient them in historical context.
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The Venezuelan, Alejandro Otero, has given us the gorgeous, Colorhythm No. 37, from 1959. Its method of crossing out color bars with strong blacks offers a bracing visual dynamism. As the DMA curators suggest in their nearby wall note, Otero was probably responding to the American, Ellsworth Kelly — whose painting, Sanary, made seven years before (1952), hangs closeby for historical comparison.
The 1959 Stoic Figure made by the Bolivian, Maria Luisa Pacheco, also makes good use of black while carving out the rest of its grid-buttressed, abstract imagery with tans and murky reds. Stoic Figure shows a mastery of the Abstract Expressionist idiom that was established some 15 years earlier by a number of Americans slapping around paint as part of the New York School — including Pollock, De Kooning, Franz Kline, and others. Stoic Figure stands next to a small, early-career effort by the American, Louis Nevelson, and it has a similar title: Archaic Figure. It was produced at least four years previously (1953-55). This is from Nevelson’s learning phase, when she, too, was copying the Abstract Expressionists. She went on to create cutting-edge work in her signature style of found-object sculpture beginning in 1958.
Amidst these dynamic works, Slip Zone’s Korean pieces fail to get the blood moving much (though it is nice to see work from a country rarely-highlighted in American museums). Characteristic of this blandness are Kwon Young-Woo’s P80–103, from 1980, and Park Seo-Bo’s, Ecriture, from 1973. Both are monochrome wall pieces from the Tansaekhwa school that are neither compelling in their ideation nor arresting in their physical presence.
The significant exception in the Korean work comes from an artist who falls outside the Tansaekhwa school.
Lee Kun-Yong’s, Cloth — Ultramarine, from 1974, is original in concept and execution. It gives us a trompe l’oeil representation of a blue cloth seemingly sagging on a wall, violated by a bright red-orange line that proves it’s not a hanging cloth at all.
Alongside this Korean work, Slip Zone’s other cool Asian highlights are artifacts from the highly-dynamic art movements in postwar Japan.
These styles of practice were rooted in a culture that was re-inventing itself right after World War II. The US was doing this then, too (though on very different terms). As in America, the war replaced Japan’s old identity with a new one. This freed that country’s avant-garde to produce art that leaped into the international mainstream — more immediately than any other Asian or South American group featured in the show.
The 1950s performance art pieces of the islands’ Gutai school were as novel and complex as anything happening that decade in Western contexts (by Cunningham, Rauschenberg, Yves Kline, Kaprow and others). Slip Zone’s photos of these novel performances establish dates that mark their innovations as not just equal to, but sometimes more advanced than Euro-Amerian activity in those years.
Some of the Japanese painting is also wonderful, despite falling behind on the “innnovation” timeline like the show’s other Non-Western work. The big monochrome by Kazuo Shiraga, titled Kan’u Unchō (1984), teases out one exciting line of direction for postwar Japanese painting.
Measuring 6.5’ by 9.5’, this large, thickly-impastoed, black-and-white oil piece displays that same pitch of artistic fervor found in immediate American precursors from the midcentury. Kan’u Unchō is the star of the exhibit. The 1984 composition harkens back to similar works Shiraga manifested in the mid-1950s — sometimes when hanging by a rope as he painted, working out a concurrent performance mode.
For comparison’s sake, the DMA curators give us Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist Cathedral — created 37 years before (in 1947). It hangs to one side of Shiraga’s piece in the exhibit’s northeast sub-gallery. The juxtaposition is nice, but Kan’u Unchō doesn’t call to mind Pollockian works like Cathedral so much as it does the imagery of Pollock’s contemporary, Franz Kline, whose slashing, black-and-white brushwork was profoundly evocative of Japanese calligraphy (though sourced elsewhere).
We know Shiraga was a student of Western art. Kline’s discoveries were most likely Shiraga’s template — as Shiraga began working this way in 1952. Kline had started investigating this particular mode of expression four years before, in 1948.
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Like most folks in the artworld, I’m a cheerleader for global cultural innovation (and I’m incensed by China’s censorship policies cutting against this grain). I love banging the drum for our multi-polar world — one where powerful cultural contributions come from many shores.
But that development can’t be walked back into times when it didn’t exist.
If we do this, it’s just ideological revisionism.
This is what the DMA curators are up to.
Eyes everywhere would roll if I said nuclear fission was discovered yesterday by some scientist in Azerbaijan, but, if I made an artshow saying something equally outrageous, I’d probably get away with it.
This happens partly because journalistic organs are complicit.
This essay, in its first form, was commissioned by a regional art magazine but, despite my scholarly credentials (five higher degrees) and long history of publication (over 100 articles in major journals), my editors forced me to wholly rewrite it twice — then rejected it wholesale. Re-pitching the piece to other magazines, some number of them said they wouldn’t print it because it criticized the DMA.
This is what democracy in the US looks like, folks.
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But, here’s the meat of my thesis . . .
To support the argument in those revisions, I included more historical context for my editors, and I’m guessing that detail will be useful for your understanding, too, dear reader.
Many museum-goers understand what I’ll explain here, but some don’t.
Just like science, art displays an ongoing synthesis of ideas. These ideas concern visual and spatial understanding (not mathematical, biological, or chemical understanding). 2-D and 3-D art exhibits an evolving aesthetic, just like music. Hardly anyone would mistake a tune recorded in 1932 for a tune recorded in 2022. Visual systems have their own, constantly-transforming “music,” as well, and it is particular to its era. Visual art concretizes visual ideas — ones that cannot be put in musical or linguistic form — and these ideas move forward, generation by generation, building on innovations discovered in the years (and sometimes, months) prior— just as musical ideas do.
Despite the anti-historicism of our era, today's artists still “stand on the shoulders of giants,” and the general public can name a handful of these individuals: Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Warhol, etc.
But even if you didn’t know these fellas or believe my above statements about art’s year-by-year advance, the DMA does. It’s the groundfloor recognition that provides the raison d’etre for this show.
As they deploy the words, “canon,” “era,” “evolution,” etc., it’s artistic progression they’re talking about. The “Postwar Abstraction” this show highlights has its roots in European artistic developments that began as far back as the late 1700s, as overseas influences pushed numerous aesthetic conversations forward. (Think Japonisme and Chinoiserie, think Gauguin in Tahiti, think Picasso riffing off African sculpture, etc.).
Americans aren’t strong in history or geography. The DMA’s audience may understand that European cultures initiated the first truly global phase of trade and conquest, but they probably no longer recognize that these activities led to information-rich societies that manifested complex cultural artifacts which were cutting-edge in terms of humanity’s advancement as a whole (even though such facts were broadly-acknowledged mere decades ago).
Empire cultures can pull this off because they are informed by geographically far-reaching sets of ideas. They pool diverse concepts from the areas touched by their rule, and these bring unprecedented novelty to artmaking, technology, and other progressive efforts.
Innovative artists informed by a wide net of information — usually found in major crossroad cities — formulate incipient “international styles.”
Though such stylistic works are not the only ones of artistic value, they dominate museum exhibits with complex artifacts, old and new — no matter what continent or era they come from. Empires in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas produced this broadly-informed art in pre-Columbian epochs.
Because it was mainly Westerners who initiated the more massive cross-currents that led to our contemporary globalized society (through 15th-Century trade and conquest amidst Europe’s “Great Divergence” as well as the following “Age of Discovery”), so it has been Western citizens encountering the world’s diverse cultural forms who’ve been central in synthesizing planetary traditions in this period after Columbus ( a period often identified with “modernity”).
Only in the last three to five decades has that condition changed.
As referenced above, other, smaller, empire cultures — those in China, Persia, India, and elsewhere — had taken the lead in pre-modern times (for a number of reasons, the massive Mongolian Empire, c. 1229–1368, did not create international styles — but that’s another story).
The West’s integrative activity began most earnestly during the colonial push of the mid-1800s. As a result, the most complex examples of multi-cultural art arose nearly-exclusively in Euro-American societies during the approximate 125 years that followed.
There was no internet, folks.
You had to travel to get new information or read the accounts of others who did. You had to examine the artwork that travelers brought back or see pictures of it (which were painted or hand-drawn for centuries; photography wasn’t invented until the 1840s). Only Europeans (and even then, mainly the educated classes) or privileged non-Europeans living in well-connected colonial outposts had sufficient access to wide nets of information necessary to create truly avant garde art — that is, art that was global in its purview and which added something dramatically new to an evolving transnational conversation.
Upon World War II’s conclusion (i.e., the “postwar” period, named in this show), the rest of the planet began inching toward this kind of broad cosmopolitanism in its art forms. The planet wound its way toward a set of avant garde expressions that were highly-responsive to non-local art histories. In short, the world outside the Occident began getting up to speed — but it would only hit terminal velocity after the “postwar abstraction” period that this exhibit focuses on (i.e., after 1945–1980 — at its far end).
In post-WW II times, an explosion of wild artistic innovations bloomed in America — mainly in New York. This left even most Europeans behind.
Confessing this, when we look at this unfolding midcentury artistic cosmopolitanism honestly, we’re compelled to say that the West made nearly all the world’s canon-ready “iconic work” in the postwar (and long before it, as well).
The funny thing is, Slip Zone’s placards tell this exact story, piece after piece (as detailed in the handful of quotes provided, above — and in this photographic example, below).
Another fact-check that belies the Slip Zone’s thesis is that it offers no “innovation” initiated by South American or Asian artists that outpaced the show’s Euro-American artists. No such example is provided on any wall of this show.
If, as the DMA claims, the non-Western world was “equally innovative,” the curators could show us numerous examples of Western art imitating the art of non-Western contemporaries. They do not do this. (In the pre-war, Non-Western strategies and modes were integrated into Western visions (as international styles tend to do), but those Western visions weren’t subordinated to to these non-Western strategies and modes— those influences weren’t imitated. For example, Picasso integrated African mask forms into a novel artmaking mode that subsequently had worldwide impact: Cubism.)
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Coda:
I don’t think the failures of Slip Zone are a sign of bad faith on the DMA’s part.
I simply think the curators let their values get ahead of their scholarship.
In our politically-charged present, this happens all the time now.
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Thanks for bearing with me.
This is probably the most over-explanatory piece of writing I’ve produced since my school years.
Pushed by editors and friends, I found that I had to state these truths with heaps of context because people reflexively deny them. These ideas appear inconsistent with (or threatening to?) ideologies that promote cultural diversity and mutual respect.
But they aren’t.
I happily affirm, as most writers do, that we are now living in a dynamically multi-polar art world where new styles of cosmopolitanism blast forth from the north, east, west, and south.
But that was not happening in the time period that this show highlights.
To say so is irresponsible.
Global inclusionism is a very good thing — but we don’t need to lie about the past to make it real.
The thought leaders who guide our museums must — as the DMA press release states — speak “more honestly” about history (and everything else) than those who ignorantly trade barbs on social media.
After the lies of the Trump administration, America’s public intellectuals should have at least learned this.
Culturemakers must speak truth even when those truths don’t align with cherished or hegemonic patterns of thought.
Though it is a beautiful show, the faulty thesis of Slip Zone is not worthy of the good people at the DMA. Let’s trust that their next blockbuster exhibit will do better.