DONALD KUSPIT Karen Gunderson's Black Paintings
Modern painters are divided about the meaning and use of black. On the one hand, there’s Kandinsky, who accepts its traditional association with death--black for him is always something burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse--and on the other hand there’s Matisse, for whom black is simply another color, indeed, an important part in color orchestration. Their ideas were strangely complementary: for Matisse, black was essential to so-called musical painting, adding to its richness of effect, while for Kandinsky black was a silence with no possibility that is, the pause within the music--the silence separating the living notes of color. Without the silence of
death there was no possibility of living music.
But then there’s Ad Reinhardt, who repudiates both views, arguing instead that black, however much it signals negativeness, is entirely an aesthetic-intellectual matter involving non-color. Reinhardt turned to black because he didn’t like color—it’s always trapped in some kind of physical activity or assertiveness of its own, which has to do with life, and thus involves vulgarity. It’s an odd series of associations: non-color to physical assertion to life to vulgarity, but Reinhardt’s point is that color is the expression of life, which is always imperfect, while art is involved in a certain kind of perfection, and as such tends towards the absence of color. For Reinhardt black was the path to artistic perfection --a perfection that however lifeless it seemed transcended the imperfection of life. He thought he had reached this perfection in his all-black paintings: they showed that the idea of negativity is not a bad idea any more, and, more crucially, their reductive,... inexpressive, endgame, zero aesthetics signalled the vanishing of [the] mighty ego of [the] romantics, [the] neutralization of self. |
