The National Gallery comes highly recommended by one of my fellow visitors to the Saatchi Gallery’s Abstract America Today show. So does the Courtauld Institute. I’d never met the source of this information before – in fact I still haven’t – but I know her views as she chose the second gallery in the show for a long, volumatic recommendation of other galleries in London. Maybe she wasn’t enjoying the work on display, but it leads me to the first of the new rules on How to behave in Art Galleries…
1. Don’t talk loudly. If you must talk, only discuss the art.
But back to the Saatchi. Abstract America Today stretches the meaning of Today – there’s work on show from 2011. The title implies an overview of current American art, but includes only nine artists. In a country of over 300 million that’s not a representative sample, especially when one of them lives and works in Berlin. To complete the title’s inappropriateness I might as well add that not everything on display is abstract.
Brent Wadden, Alignment (21), 2013 Hand woven fibers, wool, cotton and acrylic on canvas
If a nation is to be judged by this exhibition it would seem that sewing and knitting are favourite media of American artists. Lisa Anne Auerbach starts the show with an embroidered black image of words and images – a kind of over-sized sampler as created by 18th century girls with time on their hands. No longer demonstrating excellence in needlework it is full of what appears to be useful written advice. Don’t worry so much. Find time to read. But it becomes less educational with sourer notes such as Try drinking in the middle of the day. Its message is clearly don’t take anyone’s advice too seriously – especially nothing you learn in an art gallery.
We’ll never know what Bridget Riley’s knitting looked like but Berlin-dweller Brent Wadden’s work might give a clue. It’s harder to be precise in wool than paint, as Wadden’s Alignments – where nothing is in alignment – demonstrate. Triangles of subtly different colours and thread-patterns hang on the walls like rejected rugs or computer designs demonstrating the Garbage in Garbage out dictum. Their cartoons won’t end up in the V and A.
Cullen Washington Jr creates large multimedia – no, I mean mixed media – collages with impressive names like Infinity. In his artist statement he claims to be trying ‘to capture a snapshot of things before they are formed.’ A tricky aim that is hard to see achieved in his debris compiled images. Mainly black and white, some include shots of colour amongst the dirty paper, chopped canvas and old drawings that are his building blocks. A ripped cover from an art magazine hangs at the edge of one piece, corners bent over showing the red of the inner page. Getting the historical references in early and trying to claim an artistic link, its title is still visible – Black artists and abstraction 1964-1980. His works are stuck directly on the wall, his whole creative method, using sections and left over bits of canvas saves on stretchers, makes work from the dregs that get left behind. No expensive rolls of canvas or tubes of oil are needed. It’s make do and mend, applied to fine art.
Paul Bloodgood has the best name in the show. A work called Thing language beats all the Untitleds around. His thick scrubbled surfaces and muted colours are attractive but the work is expressionist abstraction of the type seen too many times before.
Working abstractly in the 21st century often forces artists to seek out unusual media in an attempt to appear interesting and contemporary. Sometimes this works. Often it doesn’t.
Abstract America Today also features work by Trudy Benson, Keltie Ferris, Wyatt Kahn, Ivan Morley and Jackie Saccoccio.
Abstract America Today is on until the 28th September. Entry is free.
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