The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: David Diao: Front to Back

Diao

David Diao: Front to Back Curated by RIchard Klein July 13 to September 21, 2014

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

David Diao: Front to Back is the second in a series of exhibitions in The Aldrich’s 50th Anniversary year that presents the work of artists whose careers are intimately tied to the history of the Museum. Diao had a painting enter Larry Aldrich’s collection in 1968, and his work was subsequently included in group exhibitions at The Aldrich in 1987, 1992, and 1996.1 The artist’s response to this history is an exhibition that references the idea of a retrospective, 2 but casts it in the unique light of the body of work Diao has done that focuses on his own career as well as the nature of the art world in which he finds himself embedded.

The title Front to Back implies a chronological read, and the exhibition does indeed include works from the beginning of the artist’s career as well as from the recent past; but the reference goes deeper, speaking of Diao’s ongoing interpretation of Modernism and, since 1984, the extensive use of text in his paintings.

Diao came of age in the period immediately following Abstract Expressionism and was part of the generation of painters that struggled with the evolution of the medium in the shadow of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Process Art that categorized New York in the 1960s.

The tilt during this period was away from the expressive (i.e. emotional and/or psychological) towards the formal, and Diao’s initial response to this climate was what the Modernist art critic and historian Michael Fried has called “deductive structure,”3 which, in the case of painting, argued for the explicit recognition of a work’s composition to echo the painting’s support or outward form. This led Diao to begin to make paintings where the “mark” (the gesture of the artist’s hand) was the same size as the canvas. To accomplish this, Diao needed to reinvent the brush, and he turned to objects that were readily available on the streets of SoHo: large cardboard tubes discarded by the fabric industry that still existed in the neighborhood at that time. Fitting the tubes with handles made from found electrical conduit, Diao would pour paint at the edge of a canvas and then “squeegee” it across the surface with the tube, forming a mark whose beginning, journey, and end were recorded within the confines of the painting’s rectangle. Diao’s practice has consistently been seduced by art that is about thought and thinking, and it is no coincidence that these early paintings echo aspects of the work of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, two artists who were also writers and theoreticians and whom Diao has mentioned as influences.4

Résumé (detail), 1991 Courtesy of the artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York

Diao’s squeegee paintings, such as 1971-A (1971), exhibit a great respect for Abstract Expressionism, while at the same time undermining it through rendering the expressive mark as a mechanical gesture. Diao, like many other painters, felt trapped by the dead end that they literally painted themselves into: a position where either painterly expression or the “what you see is what you get” attitude of Minimalism had become opposing clichés that offered little in the way of future evolution. Diao briefly strayed into hard-edged geometric abstraction

Résumé, 1991 Courtesy of the artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York

David Diao: Front to Back

in the mid-1970s, but this move precipitated another crisis that led to the artist giving up painting altogether for several years.

The cultural ferment in New York in the early 1980s included the growing use of appropriation by artists, the recognition of identity as potent subject matter, and a renewed interest in painting through trends, including “New Image Abstraction,” “Bad Painting,”5 and the retrostyle of Neo Expressionism. It was at this point that Diao found the true direction that his work would take, a situation that was made possible by both the changing art-world climate and the artist’s critical and trenchant attitude towards art making and art history. Diao’s move was to take on the history of Modernism (in art, design, and architecture) and use it as subject matter to forge a new and rigorous path that would use Modernist tropes, such as monochrome painting and revolutionary typography, for both critical and aesthetic ends.

Using Modernist painting in all of its discursive richness as subject, Diao has subsequently created a singular body of work that is both outward looking and at times intensely personal.

Included in this exhibition are Triptych (1972), an early abstract work, and Double Rejection (2012), a painting that references Triptych both visually and autobiographically. Although Triptych was painted in 1972 it has never been exhibited publically. In 1972 it was brought to The Museum of Modern Art for review by the acquisitions committee, but was not purchased by the museum. The left-hand panel of Double Rejection pictures Triptych hanging on the wall of what was then MoMA’s boardroom, which was designed in 1951 by architect Philip Johnson and subsequently destroyed during MoMa’s 1979 expansion project. Double Rejection obviously references MoMA’s rejection of Diao’s painting, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it clearly reminds us that Philip Johnson’s physical contributions to The Museum of Modern Art have been systematically eliminated by its rapacious institutional expansion.

Double Rejection can be looked at as a comment on power and who gets to write (and erase) art history, and how that story shapes what we perceive as truth. It is worth noting that at

Synecdoche (detail, sheet B of sheets A-E), 1993 Courtesy of the artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York

present MoMA doesn’t have a painting by Diao in its collection. Double Rejection stubbornly memorializes Triptych and its specific history, while aestheticizing the usually unseen forces that shape visual culture.

It is certainly unusual for an artist to use aspects of his own career as subject matter and Diao’s position is risky in that it might be read as bitterness about his own failure to achieve the recognition he thinks he deserves. But if one of the major roles of art is transgression, then Diao’s oppositional position by its very self-reflective (and public) nature escapes mere selfaggrandizement and becomes something larger: a harsh critique of the ecology of visual culture as played in one artist’s life. As he has stated, “I don’t know of too many artists that beat themselves up the way I do,”6 a comment that reflects Diao’s insistence on not separating the reality of his life as an artist from his art. In this light, much of Diao’s work is an act of resistance, echoing—although in an idiosyncratic form—the revolutionary fervor of early Modernists, particularly movements that were categorized by pointed ideology, including Suprematism and Russian Constructivism.

This brings us to Synecdoche, perhaps Diao’s most provocative work, in which he takes an oppositional stance against the prevailing narrative. Synecdoche is a print consisting of five panels that uses a 1985 essay on German painter Gerhardt Richter by art historian Benjamin Buchloh as its basis. Diao came across the essay (it was included in a catalogue of a Richter exhibition7) and realized that if he changed certain facts (such as names and dates) and inserted images of his own early abstract works, the essay was clearly about what he was doing five years before Richter started to make his own “squeegeed” abstract paintings.

Diao’s rewriting of Buchloh’s scholarship is not just based on the essay, however. In 1973 both

Diao and Richter were included in the exhibition Prospect 73: Maler, Painters, Peintres, which was presented at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. The exhibition included Diao’s work Untitled, Columbe d’Or (1972), which the artist has incorporated in the opening panel of Synecdoche, pointedly overlaid on an image of a painting from 1984 by Richter.

In Synecdoche, Diao is suggesting something more basic than criticism: correction—a simple correction of the facts. Richter was exposed to Diao’s abstract painting in the Düsseldorf exhibition at a time when he was experimenting with monochrome painting (he was primarily known at the time for his photo-based realism), and in the ensuing years Richter moved towards a conceptual form of gestural abstraction in which the mark, while superficially “emotive,” was really about the mark standing in for all marks; in other words, a synecdoche of painterly expression. This position had been arrived at in the early 1970s by Diao, a situation that led to his abandoning all allusions to the gestural mark in his work and clearing the way for his monochrome, text-based paintings of the 1980s.

Here something must be said about Diao’s approach to painting, post 1989, when the artist began to use materials and techniques such as vinyl and screenprinting that related more to Pop art than the classic high Modernism of Newman and Reinhardt.

Diao’s paintings during this period became more diagrammatic, reflecting a skew towards typographic and graphic design, but also, more importantly, reflecting the artist’s interest in the diagram as a tool for visually conveying complex information. Diao made paintings in 1989 and 1990 based on Alfred Barr’s famous 1936 flow chart that delineates the historical cross-influences that formed Modernism, highlighting how the visual language of the diagram could be used as a potent critical tool. It is interesting to note that Ad Reinhardt used diagrammatic drawing in his famous “art cartoons” done between 1942 and 1947, which, like Barr’s diagram of a generation earlier, was a way of conveying theory other than purely via the written word. It’s ironic that Reinhardt used cartoons to advocate for abstraction, but the form allowed him to express humor and sarcasm, things that reductive painting certainly could not incorporate. In a way, Diao’s painting since the early 1990s combines the critical aspect of Reinhardt’s diagrammatic drawings with this late monochrome painting style by layering graphic information (vinyl text and screenprinted images derived from photographs) on top of a monochrome field.

The grounds of Diao’s paintings, which are made of acrylic paint that has been painstaking laid down and burnished with a palette knife, clearly show the artist’s hand, reflecting his love for the craft of painting, despite his conceptually-based approach. As content laden as Diao’s paintings are, they are always beautiful, resulting from the curious combination of mechanical process and hand-made facture.

Front to Back includes the artist’s three-panel painting Résumé (1991), which as the title implies is a work that summarizes Diao’s exhibition history up to that point.

Besides listing individual exhibitions, Résumé lists the individual works that were included in each show. Blown up to this scale and presented in this format, the work resembles a memorial wall (Washington’s Vietnam Memorial comes to mind).

This association brings up an underlying emotional current that runs through much of Diao’s work but is frequently overlooked: tragedy. The work that Diao has done that includes self-references focuses on the conflict between the artist (the protagonist) and the erratic and uncontrollable forces of destiny, and how that drama is played out throughout a career. “We assert that the subject is crucial and that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless,” Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb wrote in 1943, during the period they were making the transition from Surrealism to Abstraction.8 Diao, with his roots in Modernism, has taken the pathos that informed much of Abstract Expressionism to rebuild the endeavor of serious painting in an age when either empty formalism or the most superficial aspects of irony are the pervasive subject matter.

Diao’s deadpan composure when portraying the vagaries of the art world casts him as a Buster Keaton-like figure, perhaps downtrodden, but never pitied.

As simple as Mean Things seems on first glance, the more scrutiny one gives it the more questions it raises. The mind doesn’t like a horror vaccui, and the two monochrome surfaces with their suggestive statements are empty vessels to be filled by the viewer’s imagination.

Each section, resembling respectively the blackest night and the most blinding snowstorm, we think is filled with the nasty and malicious. Typically a monochrome surface inches us towards transcendence by its pregnant, open-ended suggestiveness, and Diao’s painting does exhibit this quality to a certain degree. But the text, in its confessional tone, brings to mind the Biblical injunction of “judge not lest ye be judged.” The art world, like every other area of human endeavor, has a moral component, and its usual and highly publicized excesses focus on a mixture of greed and celebrity that eclipse less sexy attributes, such as generosity and respect.

Mean Things is ultimately a moral work, and although it is physically black and white, its content expresses all of the shades of gray that categorize the darker side of social behavior.

The early works in this exhibition point to the grounding of Diao’s art in the formal, abstract aspects of Modernism, while the later works are categorized by the use of the highly flexible and articulate language of Modernism for deliberate and meditative social ends. Usually, art that is based in either the social or the political is ineffectual as the finger pointing is directed out towards the morally obvious. Diao, through his recent work, has held a mirror up to himself and the community he inhabits and the results are complex, nuanced, and often uncomfortably self-conscious—just like the truth.

Richard Klein, exhibitions director David Diao was born in 1943 in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, and lives and works in New York City.

1

Post-Abstract Abstraction (1987), Quotations: The Second History of Art (1992), and Landscape Reclaimed (1996).

2

Diao’s work is the subject of a major retrospective opening in September 2015 at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

3

Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” from Art and Objecthood: Essay and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 233-234. First published as an introduction to the exhibition of the same title at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 21 to May 30, 1965.

4

From conversations between the artist and the author on November 13, 2013, and May 15, 2014.

5

“Bad Painting” was an ironic name coined by critic and curator Marsha Tucker in 1978 to describe a trend in figurative painting that reflected a deliberate disrespect for recent styles, particularly Minimalism and Photorealism, through the use of parody and faux-naive technique. The trend was related to the concurrent style “New Image Abstraction,” which was categorized by an intersection of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art. Artists whose work received the New Image Abstraction label included Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney, and Robert Moskowitz.

6

From a conversation between the artist and the author on May 15, 2014.

7

Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: March 1985, exhibition catalogue with essay by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (New York; Marian Goodman/Sperone Westwater, 1985).

8

Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with the assistance of Barnett Newman), Letter to the Editor, included in Edward Alden Jewell’s article “The Realm of Art: A New Platform and Other Matters: ‘Globalism’ Pop into View,” The New York Times, June 13, 1943, p. 9.

Double Rejection, 2012 Collection of Frank F. Yang, Hong Kong

Monochrome and Color Field painting, with their self-referential and rather hermitic natures, are an odd arena for the performance of morality plays, but Diao has used the literal blank canvas of the forms to surprising ends in the painting Mean Things. Superficially recalling works by artists such as Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, or Brice Marden, it is a vertical rectangle divided horizontally into a black monochrome rectangle on the top, and a white monochrome rectangle on the bottom. Closer inspection reveals a line of text on each of the sections where they meet: Mean Things I Said About Other Artists in black vinyl on the black section, and Mean Things Other Artists Said About Me in white vinyl on the white section.

The text, almost invisible, is rendered sotto voce, giving the impression that the utterance of each statement is either forbidden or somehow embarrassing.

Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches 1971-A, 1971 Acrylic on canvas 90 1/2 x 140 Collection of the artist; ex-collection Frank Porter, Chagrin Falls, Ohio From the Wings, 1972 Acrylic on canvas 84 x 66 Triptych, 1972 Acrylic on canvas 84 x 198 Mean Things, 1991 Acrylic and vinyl on canvas 56 x 35 Private collection Résumé, 1991 Acrylic and vinyl on canvas 3 panels: 66 x 84, 66 x 96, 66 x 84 66 x 264 overall Synecdoche, 1993 Color Xerox, marker, silkscreen on paper 5 sheets (A-E); 22 1/2 x 38 each 84 x 84 overall Edition 1/3 Slanted MoMA, 1995 Acrylic and vinyl on canvas 46 x 70 Double Rejection, 2012 Acrylic and collage on canvas 36 x 78 Collection of Frank F. Yang, Hong Kong All works courtesy of the artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York, except where noted

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/Secretary; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

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1971-A, 1971 Collection of the artist, ex-collection Frank Porter, Chagrin Falls, Ohio

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