In terms of their style, these works may be described as a hybrid, even mongrel combination of two already venerated concepts of modern art. When those close to Alexandr Rodchenko launched an attack on the idea of pictorial composition in the spring of 1921, in Soviet Russia, they were determined to get rid of artistic subjectivity and replace that concept with an idea of construction, in which the elements and forms of material could come to be seen as verifiable in relation to one another – ‘factual’ and even ‘true’ in a sense not seen before in art. Constructing material (and materialist) structures was to provide the perfect antidote to what the group saw as a redundant aesthetic of relationship, balance and (of course) legible subject-matter. It became clear that giving up painting altogether might be necessary to achieve that end; and in practice most Constructivists renounced the use of paint and brushes in favour of prosaic matter in the form of wooden spars, wire and occasionally collage, that is, the cutting-up of mostly photographic material and sticking the pieces down in a given position relative both to the ground-plane and to each other. It is a nice fact that, almost simultaneously, an international Dada movement, programmatically opposed to everything (Dada included), also found in collage a congenial method of defamiliarising the material world to the point of making its familiar coherences look absurd. Was Constructivism also absurd? In a way it was, and perhaps needed to be. My point is that veneration of the idea of construction in modern painting turns out to be consistent, at a nearly hidden level, with a practice of untidiness, experiment, and the apparently random use of paint as a viscous medium: sticky, expensive, and inherently unpredictable when allowed to melt, drip and coalesce with other types of material or to form an unstable pact with a given surface. That gives a clue to another of modern art’s venerated moments, a later one, to which Constructivism seems at first glance inevitably hostile. The poet Allen Ginsburg pointed out that the word ‘Beat’ – launched upon the public in an article in the New York Times in 1952 – came to mean not only penniless, exhausted, without a place to sleep or stay, but also wide-eyed, receptive to vision and perhaps illumination, hence ‘beat’, ‘beatific’. ‘Everything belongs to me because I am poor’ – the phrase comes from Jack Kerouac but is close enough to the working method of that exemplary Beat-Constructivist, Kurt Schwitters, who roamed the streets looking for remaindered fragments of existence, the banal and lowered objects that remain once the feast of consumption has ended and the people have gone home for a rest. For Schwitters and now for us, the eye of the Beat-Constructivist turns away from the shining surfaces of the contemporary city to find in its gutters bits and pieces of detritus that sparkle with their own life and intensity, each of them formed by desire, competition and exchange. The impulses that form this group of wood reliefs and dripped paintings are both ‘Beat’ and ‘Constructivist’ at the same time. The group includes collage-objects made (we should perhaps say ‘formed’) of paper, wood and plastic dejecta accumulated over years of noticing, marvelling and scavenging. The paintings themselves also revel in the casual and the ecstatic, while paying dutiful homage to the squared-up grid of the canvas rectangle and the properties of the viscous medium dripped, vibrated or splashed upon its flat surface. For all Constructivist-type paintings, Beat or other, are in the end obliged to respect the material properties of the canvas rectangle, including its horizontal and vertical orientations that face the viewer and appeal for attention and maintain scrutiny. That said, most of their other visual effects can be traced to the laws of diffusion and dispersal that govern the behaviour of viscous matter when it comes into contact with a surface having qualities of its own. It is in this sense that these works are made the same way other things in the world are made: through a contest of regularity and accident, planning and disorder. In medieval Japan, the word ‘sabi’ meant chill, lean or withered, while a rhyming word ‘wabi’ meant the misery of living away from society in a superficially cheerless state – at least until the 14th century when both words began to signify the spiritual richness to be derived from self-imposed poverty of means and of expression. Today, ‘wabi-sabi’ is understood to mean the imperfect and the variegated, the crude or the irregular; whatever can accommodate attrition or degradation; or can survive ambiguity and contradiction. It can mean incomplete, relative, dark, contaminated, corroded, or seasonal. It is also said to be a good thing if the creator of such things is of no distinction, invisible and anonymous; another reason why a blatant miscegenation of distinct (and distinctive) modernist traditions is worth a try.
2010