org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net Haber's Art Reviews: Sean Scully and Brice Marden Sean Scully and Brice Marden Should one see painting as an object or as the purely visual art? Formalism took that puzzle as the meaning of art—and as a directive for artists. Since the first Minimalist and Postmodern cracks in that fabulous two-dimensional façade, however, that directive has seemed dated. Abstraction, one used to hear, has died. Remarkably, abstraction has survived by taking those cracks for its subject matter. Walls of light For over twenty years, Sean Scully has been building walls of light, and he attributes it all to an experience in Mexico. A point of origins may sound suspect, but it tells a story, one of self-discovery. Besides, the Irish-born artist has entered his sixties, and his education in London, at Harvard, and in New York had long inclined him to monochrome abstraction. Each term can itself pull in more than one direction, and in each case the ambiguity links Scully further to Henri Matisse or to late Modernism. The cover-up A postscript: neo-formalism
Barbara Kruger: Signs of Postmodernity Barbara Kruger re-makes signs. Unlike the bulk of signage we see every day, Kruger's work tries not to deceive us into believing we have a need to fulfill, but to allow us to discover the deception of signs. As far as a classification of her medium, Kruger is considered a montage artist. But, as Kate Linker, who wrote the text for Love for Sale: The Art and Words of Barbara Kruger, puts it, her pieces "resist the smooth coherence associated with that genre (Love, 12)." Kruger makes visible the breakdown of metanarrative structures, the decentered nature of contemporary culture, the struggle between sign and signifier, the hyper-consumerism of the late 20th century, the commodification of the sign, and involves her viewers in the universal flow of power. She reapportions the power of cultural iconography and commercial images, robbing the slick conveyances of societal assimilation of their strength and giving it to her audience in the form of knowledge. Simulacra Corner BIbliography