A Thousand Rivers
by Lucio Pozzi
“A Thousand Rivers” was published in American Abstract Artists International, brochure, American Abstract Artists and BAU Institute, New York, NY, 2010.
The American Abstract Artists (AAA) association was founded in New York in 1936, a few months after I was born. Those were stormy times. Nazi Germany was at its point of high power, Italian and Spanish Fascism was triumphant, Soviet power was rampant. In the art world there was controversy about whether abstraction could be legitimately accepted in the realm of art. In Europe it had begun to make inroads but in the US there was, in the Thirties, the kind of prejudice that some in the European culture had overcome. A typical chauvinistic reaction was that abstraction is too European.
We are now living light years after those storms. Art is no longer exclusively European or American, but there are still those who debate about the supremacy of representation over abstraction and vice-versa. Even art itself is being questioned, not to mention the innumerable rivulets of controversy that feed the insular culture of the art world. It is my feeling that we are enmeshed in an aged Gordian knot which has to be cut.
A first step could be to acknowledge that many critical and creative minds have left behind the culture of “either/or” thinking in order to nurture a “and/also” culture in its stead. The tendency to seek reassurance in rigid categories is an inheritance of the Positivist philosophy, that way of thinking that is devoted to finding proof and verification of intentions, processes and results. Consumerism has embraced a vulgar version of it because by dividing the turf it can make a quicker buck. By repeating tired formulas, consumerism has slowed down for a while the wonderful outburst of energy now available in the arts.
The truth is that once any consensus about the ultimate purpose of art has been lost in modern society, whatever rigid criteria art has inherited from the times when such consensus existed has now become moot and artificial. It is in this flexible and revisable scenario that we witness the complete turnabout of American Abstract Artists.
What are its members doing? The field of abstraction witnesses a range of options almost as ample as the field of art at large. These artists explore a great many ways of making art, but what characterizes their production is the utmost importance they lend to sensibility and feeling, pushing often even towards the edge of meaninglessness, which is one of the most precious assets we can cultivate in a culture that tends to package any and all activities into sensational or publicizeable instant explanations.
It is miraculous, for instance, to see the infinite number of variations that are sprouting from just simply painting rectangles and lines on a surface, from constructing a surface onto which to paint, from placing a hand-painted something in a specific place it sensibly interacts with. The “and/also” culture gets rid of ridiculous notions of progress and ecologically fosters respect for the density of individual attention.
AAA has become the field where personal sensibility and intellectual discourse are freely cultivated with no end in sight. This is its new wonderful charter: as an alternative to the rushed ephemeral hysteria of novelty, of constantly raised and constantly dismissed apparent conclusions, the sheer persistence of these artists, each in his or her concentration, is now the beacon of the creative present.