Target Practice: Painting Under (Global) Attack: 1949-1978

Giorgio Mordandi was not easily distracted. When fascism wreaked havoc in his country and for decades after, he painted the same cluster of bottles, plates and tins in his studio. For each small painting he found a rhythm, as if each were a universe that could hum.

The artists in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 tend to be tone-deaf to that hum. They see what it leaves out, the world brutally making and unmaking itself in a chaos of repression, beauty, murder and freedom. Nor were they persuaded by the paint-driven ambitions of the New York School, those who rode into history after World War II as abstract expressionists. The giants of ApEx looked inward and advanced the idea of timeless aesthetic values.

By 1949, time was up on timeless values. Curated by Michael Darling, Target Practice at the Seattle Art Museum is a survey of the means, motives and results of a global generation questioning the lofty aspirations of painting as well as painting itself.

Scorched-earth gardeners, they hoped to make way for a bloom. Darling picked not only key work from key figures, he included a host of artists who are less familiar but hold up well in the context of the famous, such as Gunter Brus, using his body as canvas on the left, below.

Sharing space in the galleries, art from disparate sources clicks in place to generate the passion of a critical moment, dispensing with the usual thing - scholarly dissection and imposition of hierarchy.

As a survey, it's  wide but deep, and nobody in it comes up empty. The artists are as they saw themselves, or, as Alan Ginsberg wrote about William Carlos Williams, what "he tried to be among the bastards out there."

Darling opens with Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale from 1949.  Fontana punched holes in the canvas as a means of marking it. Aside from the novelty of his approach, his effect fits comfortably inside the all-over realm familiar from ApEx. He tore into the canvas, but nicely chewed what had already been chewed by others.

In the work of Shuzo Shimamoto, however, the innovative makes an appearance. In his Work (Holes) from 1950, tears in whitewashed layers of newsprint approach their own kind of tragic, and his scribbles in pencil on what is left of the ground anticipate Cy Twombly.

Still, Shimamoto is firmly within ApEX, with new means to old results.

Back to Fontana, whose Concetto Spaziale from 1952 evokes Arthur Dove's Fog Horns from 1929. Fontana's single echoing circle stands in place of Dove's three, but with the same reverberating lightness.

Who will look at Niki de Saint Phalle's ripe and juicy Tir neuf trous from 1964 (left) and not think of Joan Synder, who came later?

Unlike de Saint Phalle, Synder needs no guns in her studio. Her holes dripping paint are made of paint, but both de Saint Phalle's small canvas and Synder's many larger ones are not about their means of production. They are about female sexuality, and a ripeness that is past its peak.

Art comes from art, even when it doesn't come from painting. Jasper Johns' iconic Targets from 1958 is rooted in early 20th-century ideas, especially Duchamp's. I'm rarely moved by Johns, the ice man of contemporary art, but in this exhibit, the brilliant humor intrinsic to his endeavor is in high relief.

Fontano and to a lesser extent Alberto Burri made careers out of tearing up canvas, and Johns put the capstone on it and similar efforts in 1964, with a small pencil on paper demonstration, Untitled (Cut, Tear, Scrap, Erase.) In vertical columns, it does all those things, foreclosing on the option of doing them again outside the repeat mode. How concise Johns is, and how powerfully his work unfolds in the company of those who also tried to make it new in the mid-20th century.

Sam Gilliam's Bow Form Construction, from his best period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, hangs near Lynda Benglis's Chi from 1973. His painting-on-canvas sagging against the wall functions as a giant shawl, and hers as a tumorous type of jewelry.

With his modesty, Richard Tuttle engaged the abject with an elegance few equal, but who isn't sick of Arman? Unlike Mordandi, who traversed a tiny amount of ground without repeating himself, Arman's mounds of similar objects wear out their welcome quickly. Not the one in this show, which is a one-piece Arman rehabilitation project: Ochre from 1967.

More than 200 tubes of paint vomit their color, both tubes and paint squiggles trapped in clear resin. Each squiggle is a gesture, and a gesture is, in Roland Barthes' phrase (quoted in the catalog), "something like the surplus of an action."

The Japanese are a strong presence in this show, especially Ushio Shinohara, whose performances (seen in large photos) with paint are the equal of anything happening in Europe and America at the time.

Shinohara:

Not content just to use brushes, we came up with ways that would shock, aiming to evoke an effect on those who would appreciate it.

Those who would appreciate it. He wasn't trying to unnerve outsiders but to delight those who are capable of being delighted by him.

Johns' Cut, Tear, Scape Erase is the cool end of Target Practice. Otto Muehl's Untitled from 1963 (below, left) is one of the sensations on its hot end. Made of sand, plaster, stockings and emulsion on sackcloth, with gaping holes bound by dark, ropey knots, its golds and blacks gleam like old jewels.

A word (or two) about the aesthetics of violence, celebrated in Target Practice. Walter Benjamin dealt with the subject in his much-celebrated 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, here. Benjamin wasn't impressed by the manifestos of the Italian Futurists, fascist to their cores. He must have thought that quoting from Futurist fascist poet Marinetti was sufficient to discredit him.

Apparently not, but in light of this exhibit, Marinetti's point of view is the elephant in the gallery. Isn't it more interesting to acknowledge it as a kind of disgraced roots music? I like a machine-gunned canvas as much as the next person, but what was the back story from the artists' point of view?

Marinetti:

War is beautiful because it enriches a flowery meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns...War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease fire, the scents and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.

More on this exhibit to follow. It's the single best survey of contemporary art ever mounted by the Seattle Art Museum.