Spirals Upon Spirals: The Wright’s
Architecture and African American Abstract Expressionists.
I recall the premier view I had of the original structure of the Guggenheim Museum by the precocious architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Seeing as his main thesis for art was natural settings with natural building and furnishing materials, this is now a beloved oddity of the New York art and design world. The rounded ramps reaching high, was like one long, slithering balcony. It isn’t until one reaches the top of the spiraled ramp and look down does one see the magnificent vision which had to have been Wright’s provocative reason for the entire structure. Looking down, the bottom floor has (had?) a small oval shaped pool, which is the focus of the view, as the magnificent conception is completely experienced. My experience looking down initially was a bit of light headedness, then an experience of innate grasp of the sensation that multiple floors of spiraling ramps have when looking down bringing your attention spot onto the pond. The space is a miniature canyon, which provides a natural form which would keep his effort close to his basic interpretation of architecture.
We didn’t move up so fast that we missed another person’s work I was infatuated with: Caldor’s mobiles and stabiles. What a delicate balancing of usually metal rounded pieces attached to various thickness of wire, one hoped for a breeze to come buy and stir them, seeing them rotate, plunge downward precariously until they would with some contradictory effort reach the desired balance.
Someone I was with on another occasion asked why I was so drawn to these devices which were most notably hung in toy form on a baby’s bassinet or crib. They are delighted we see by the shapes, with some parents creating some bonding by attaching their pictures onto the “bottom” of the balancers. Yet, here is an adult, seemingly as delighted as he once was in whirling toys places them in the world as “works of art.” First that the shapes are geometric forms, the element that usually applies to classic geometry to the present. Calculate from there how much each piece needs to weigh to balance the entire sculpture. The mobiles to be rightly understood need a source of wind to have them move about slowly. Then the sculptures move, which contrasts with the view of most
sculptures which are stationary. The movement interrupts the Zen like stillness of the mobiles balanced at rest. In a well-lit studio one can see the shadows of the mobiles on a wall, which provide a mirror image that reflect this as a grey view. Often, the part of the mobile which attaches to the ceiling does not show up in the shadow. The geometric pieces appear hanging with no support, floating in the shadow play on the walls. The stabiles compare more definitively with traditional interpretations of sculpture. In those the movement is reflected in the shape of them rather than the actual movement.
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Sensibility. One needs a certain sensibility to appreciate all art, but especially abstract forms. What keeps the painting contained within a frame or even without one on the canvass? If the artist paints a representational tree, it is not as if it is a Platonic form. Rather, it is so individualized as to tolerate no exactly similar plant. Take instead a abstract depiction of a tree, well it just isn’t a tree. It is tree-ness, trees that are compared with that rendition share the shape, color and dimensions of the dark morphed shape that abstract versions would produce of tree. It is not representational tree, but has more in common with all the trees one might compare it to. These intangible, non-existent (outside the walls of the canvas) trees are conceptualized. One sees one tree and multiple trees within a form that presents like an object, in this case a tree.
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While I was satisfying my thirst for and discovery of other artists in the Guggenheim, there was something absent from the building that I didn’t notice. In fact, so absent was it that the absence of the absent was not even comprehended.
What was absent was any defined selection of the African-American art movement eponymously named African American Abstract Impressionists, whose number reaches nearly sixty artists of different media. When I was first in NYC, at these museums, the concept that the artists were white, black or any minority was simply not a part of what I looked at. If Alexander Caldor had been pictured as a black person, I surely wouldn’t think it would have mattered to me, but I am sure in that I was a minority. I just hadn’t a thought at all about the race or past of any of the people who had one or several pieces of creations in the Temples of Art. This could be the unexperienced innate thought that of course the artists were all white, as I knew by seeing their pictures that some were in fact white. The African American artists were sitting on the balcony walls or beside the Caldor sculptures invisible ghosts, not by their own doing. Even in the very liberal art world on the post-WW2 generation, they were once again a fiction fully hidden. And we of the discerning art students were the poorer for it.
Follow this link to a list of over 50 names of Artists who are or were African American. Discovering them is/was an edifying experience. Like someone looking through a large warehouse of objects of art, and looking inside the large drawers of some cabinets, there one would find them. For this essay I want to concentrate on two who I find very intriguing. The one a man Al Loving and the other a woman by the name of Howardina Pindell and some very transforming work.
Al Loving was born in the northern Midwest and knew that his destiny was to be an artist. He
obtained both an BFA and MFA before he left his home state to head for the art mecca of the Western world, New York City in 1953. He began his art concentrating on geometric forms in a visual interpretation of the chaotic world. When he heard of people who were hurting physically and emotionally from the burgeoning civil rights movement, AL Loving took a turn to the more serious involvement in his work, applying more mature elements of color, differential media and out-of-the frame perception. Having had early popularity and critical acclaim of his work, his desire to integrate more African elements moved him away from canvas alone. His first effort was to use ripped canvas pieces and “keep the good part” and sew them together with thread, This gave the painting the appearance of textiles. His efforts reached outside the frame, in his words to escape the jail cell of the box geometric form he had focused on in his earlier work.
The next artist is Howardina Pindell, an African-American woman whose gift for artwork was discovered early by teachers who urged her parents to send her to Saturday classes in art. She studied art through high school, taking classes at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, then to Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts with a BFA followed by a MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. I will link the rest of her biographical information here. Pindell's biogaphical data.
I want to bring to your attention two of her works I find most interesting and enlightening of her
style and conception. Let’s start with Free White and Plastic a combination collage and Jackson Pollock effort using multiple media, as artist catalogues like to say. In this case included are cut, pasted and painted circles from painted paper, punched paper, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, ink, thread, nails, mat board, spray adhesive and plastic on cardboard. First, it is not chaotic as over decorated as at a party or festival. Everything is adhering in conflicting and harmonious but unconstrained ways. This effort is in line with many pictures where small discs are numbered like if you were using a valet key board or hat check person. In this case order is not even a consideration. The title gives reference to her video effort entitled Free, White and 21 in which she contrasts film of herself and herself with white face make-up informing the audience of the reality of racism of white women being different than white men. Shaming is a specific tactic that she illustrates white women use to condescend to black women who are not deemed as capable, stylish, coiffed and glamorous. The class difference is based on race but exacerbated by the 2nd stage feminist movement which was white and middle class. The explosion of form and color from this work may be ignited by anger, but instead the style and vision of this black women over rides even the frame of the work. The message I think: “I may not be free of you, but I am free from you.”
In a second painting, the title of which is Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family
Ghosts a figure is very evident as the women with multiple arms reaching upwards and sideways. Whether deliberate or not, the depiction could be a translation, a black woman’s version of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man interestingly moving this version to a less geometrical depiction. It is also a reminiscence of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, with her multiple arms pouring out riches, jewels and riches of happiness. It is not clear to me that these images are those that Pindell is referencing, although she is in the spirit world dealing with family ghosts and ancestors. The appearance of the women provides a inscrutable face of herself, almost in a trance realizing the extent her ancestry impacts her art and her life as an African American woman.