Painting After Art is Dead

This little moment caught my eye during a recent trip to the Weatherspoon. it’s a detail from a Josef Albers, whose work regular readers are aware I contemplate a good bit. I imagine a lot of Art viewers, who have a bit of background on Josef, think of Albers work as having an almost cold precision to it. While the work isn’t sloppy and it’s also clearly about color (he used a “hard edge” vocabulary to highlight contrast) I think it’s easy to forget that he spent many years hanging out at Black Mountain college where human expressiveness was highly valued, and it’s likely he intentionally allowed this work to reveal it’s hand-made nature.

I initially thought I might write about imperfections and the human hand. After a bit of contemplation thought I realized that’s not the right word since “imperfection” means a blemish or undesirable trait, and I’m certainly not advocating that being human is inherently undesirable. In fact, the opposite.

The village impulse project which I recently helped organize was quite literally the opposite of striving to be perfect. Allowing space for accidents was intentional, and the maximalist creation at the center of the show was if nothing else a testament that the human hand could be shaky and wild and uncontrolled and that creative output doesn’t always need to be beautiful or sublime to draw us in. Maybe that’s a big, perhaps (the) primary reason this little moment jumped out at me from a 60 year old painting.

I’ve talked with some of you irl about what it means to allow the human hand to show through in the context of using geometric shapes- below are some examples of this direction that are recent. I like the contradiction of using uneven lines to form edges for very nearly the same reasons Albers often used squares and rectangles to highlight contrast (in particular, I like juxtaposing these hand-painted edges with areas of color which have taped edges).

Is something human made more important now than it was in the not too distant past? Maybe that’s also the wrong adjective… relevant, perhaps? Given the reactions I’ve had from many of you, it feels like we are in a moment where the answer is “yes.”