The exhibition Abstract Resistance explores the relationship
between politics and ethics, representation and abstraction
as embodied in a selection of works created between 1955
and the present. Rather than embracing an explicit art of
social protest, contemporary artists have often responded
to violence and upheaval with art that rejects a comforting
or familiar sense of order. Such art is resistant to
interpretation; it withholds information and evades ready
identification.

As the title suggests, the pairing of the terms “abstract”
with “resistance” proposes an alternative framework for an
inventive and defiant art. The works on view engage in a
critique of the existing world without offering an answer
or solution. Some operate in the realm of political speculation
rather than action, aesthetic repulsion rather than attraction, or moral ambiguity rather than initiative. Altering more conventional ideas about materials, surface, and space, the exhibition reveals the creative process as an exercise of both perception and reasoning that can be elusive, irreverent, and rebellious. Abstract Resistance challenges us to reconsider ways that we confront the events, systems, and ideas of our times.

In each of the three galleries, visitors will find cards that
identify the works in the exhibition. An overview of its
themes and ideas is also available. These publications are
part of the Card Catalogue, a new approach to the traditional
gallery guide.

(The Card Catalogue publications make up the last three slides of this Set.)

You see, I look at my paintings, speculate about them. They baffle me, too. That's all I'm painting for. —Philip Guston, 1978

In the mid-1960s, having established a reputation as an abstract painter, Philip Guston changed focus, incorporating a range of recognizable subjects into his works. He drew on many sources for his imagery, including Surrealism, Mexican mural painting, and underground comic books. He admits that as a painter he felt disconnected from life in the 1960s: "The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man I am, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything--and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue. I thought there must be some way I could do something about it."

Guston maintained that the visible world was "abstract and mysterious enough" as subject matter. As the number of his paintings of shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars increased, the more enigmatic these objects appeared.

The imagery in this painting seems at first to resemble a cityscape, but the artist has transformed it into a cluster of disembodied limbs and floating, mouthless heads.

This painting is in Gallery 5.

This sculpture by British artist Anthony Caro is one of the first works you'll encounter in Abstract Resistance. It's made of scrap metal that has been painted a muted red. To get a sense of the work's scale click the "More Info" button at the bottom of the screen and once the object record appears scroll down the page to the "Scale" tab.

Discussion question:

Even though Caro's sculpture is static and physically heavy, it's made of steel, one might say it's whimsical in appearance. What about this work gives it a sense of whimsy?

This sculpture is in Gallery 4.

In contemporary art, surface is an expression of anxiety, and no one is as anxious about surface as I am. —Charles Ray, 1998

Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray has been altering notions of abstract sculpture since the early 1970s, often drawing from popular culture and the most basic aspects of human experience for source material. He has said of his past work that he was trying to "make something that was so abstract it became real and so real that it became abstract," and his art tends to focus on such carefully calculated oppositions--between abstraction and representation, perceptions of the real and the ideal, sculptural form and the implication or residue of the event.

For Unpainted Sculpture, Ray began with the purchase of a Pontiac Grand Am (circa 1991) from a salvage auction--a place where one can buy automobiles that have been involved in accidents. The artist then completely dismantled the wrecked car and cast it piece by piece in fiberglass. In a typically painstaking process, he rebuilt it as one would a model hobby kit. Thought of another way, Ray made the original car disappear in order to create its aura. The sculpture took two years to complete.

Ray chose as his model a form made by pure chance, created by speed and impact, by the collision of form, material, space, and time. As with modernist sculpture, the piece has a sense of "volume" about it, in fact, it weighs more than the original car from which it is molded. The color--like the body-shop primer normally found underneath the high-gloss finish--lends the work a disinterested quality, a flatness and silence, despite the drama of the event that produced the original wreck.

(Advance to the next slide for a closer look at Ray's sculpture and discussion questions.)

This sculpture is in Gallery 4.

The following is an excerpt from "Contending with Comfort: The Possibility of an Abstract Resistance," an essay by the exhibition's curator, Yasmil Raymond.

"Spectator Standing (2005) consists of a life-size cast in beeswax of an androgynous child whose eyes have been covered with a thick coat of opaque white paint. Blinded by the heavy pigment, the spectator, as the figure is referred to in the title, is absorbed in his or her own thoughts, in a state of introspection. Hanging on the wall behind the figure is a large square canvas covered with a collage of multicolored felt pieces and found images from the artist's archive."

Discussion questions:

This is the first work of art in which we've seen a human figure (with the exception of the disembodied eyes in Guston's Bombay); however, the figure has  been altered -- no eyes, no sex, etc. Why do you think the artist has taken away some of the basic physical elements of being human?

Does the figure in Wekua's work resist identity? Why or why not?

This sculpture is in Gallery 4.

(For an image of this work, please click here. An image will eventually be uploaded to ArtsConnectEd. You can go to Art Finder and search for the piece under the artist's name or type Abstract Resistance in the keyword search.)

One of the key works of art in the exhibition is an installation piece by Thomas Hirschhorn entitled Abstract Resistance, for which the exhibition is named. In her essay "Contending with Comfort: The Possibility of an Abstract Resistance," Yasmil Raymond describes the artist's piece as follows:

"... A walk-in sculpture in the form of three platforms on which found images are displayed. These images include reproductions of images of bodies mangled and dismembered in bombings alongside reproductions of 'healing pictures' and nail sculptures."

The artist says of this work, "for me, the image of a mangled victim of a bomb attack or the image of a suicide bomber reaches a degree of abstraction way beyond what we can conceive with our imagination. I wanted to confront this degree of abstraction with the degree of abstraction of Art, of abstract Art. I wanted the different connections on the suface to confront one another."

Discussion questions:

Why do images impact us differently than language? For example, why does seeing the physical result of the bombing we hear about on the news or read about in the paper trigger different responses and reactions?

How do you feel about artistic expression as a means to confront challenges?

Do you think like Guston, Hirschhorn feels that "the visible world ... is abstract and mysterious enough" that he doesn't need "to depart from it in order to make art?"

To learn more about Thomas Hirschhorn's approach to making art advance to the next slide and view the video clip produced by Carnegie Melon for Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International.

Pay particular attention to the artist's comments regarding collage, precarity, and engaging with the more challenging and violent conditions in the world.

Thomas Hirschhorn's Abstract Resistance is on view in Gallery 5.

For the artist's description of the series ADSVMVS ABSVMVS, of which this particular image is a part, please read the "Hollis Frampton Intro Text" PDF available at the end of the presentation. The series contains fourteen photographs.

Here's a description by the artist of this particular image:

IX. GARDEN TOAD (Bufo americanus)
This specimen was donated by Mary Emmaline Bryant, then of Poolville, New York, in August, 1979. The author suspects that her gift was prompted by the creature’s imaginary tactile symmetry with certain grotesque or exotic fungi, of indeterminate identity, which he had gathered on that pleasant day, whereafter he stopped in Poolville to show them to her family and drink a bottle of beer.  Constantin Brancusi maintained that toads were more handsome than Michelangelo’s statues, but he referred to the modest French park toad. The drug bufagin, a cardiac stimulant and vasodilator, brewed from Chinese toads during the Chou and Former Han, and rediscovered in the West in the early 1950’s, has never been synthesized and may have fallen in to medical desuetude or disrepute. Its scarcity in purified form is pendant to the deserved unpopularity of toad catching as an adult vocation:  toads defend themselves in a perennially surprising way.

Discussion questions:

Do you collect anything? How do you categorize your collection(s)?

If you were to write a description of this garden toad what are some details you'd be sure to capture?

This work is in Gallery 5.

Self-exposure does not make good art. —Bruce Nauman

In 1969 Bruce Nauman began working with a high-speed industrial camera that was able to shoot up to 4,000 frames per second. (Most frame rates are 24-30 frames per second and some modern formats use 72 frames per second.)  With this equipment he documented himself performing simple activities in the studio and then changed the projection speed to extreme slow motion. These "Slo-Mo" films were usually short, black-and-white documents of Nauman manipulating parts of his body: stretching his lips with his fingers, for example, or pulling a length of gauze from his mouth.

Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear is a continuation of the Slo-Mo films. In this video work, Nauman records his face in closeup as he methodically pokes himself in the eye, nose, and ear. By enlarging the image, slowing down the pace of the video, and focusing on the feature he is manipulating, he grossly exaggerates the brutality of the activity, transforming a straightforward, almost mundane action into a prolonged essay on human vulnerability.

Discussion questions:

How does the repetition of Nauman's actions affect your experience of this work? How about the scale of the projection (this work takes up an entire gallery wall)?

Could this work serve as a metaphor for the discomfort we're perhaps supposed to grapple with when experiencing this exhibition? Is it a wake up call of sorts?