“Its detractors would have it that the whole kit and caboodle is nothing but bad politics steel-welded around a chassis of machismo,” she writes. In “AbEx and Disco Balls,” an essay that has acquired cult status since it was published in Artforum in 2011, she performs a “detournement” of Abstract Expressionism, a “phenomenology of making” to which she was drawn as a student in New York in the 1970s, after the movement had fallen from grace. Rather than throwing Art History under the bus, Sillman is alive to the transformation of ideas and techniques as they pass through different hands. The book asks, and often answers by example: How to talk about painting today? How to reckon with its politically unfashionable past-its entanglement with the market, the canon, the cult of male genius? Why paint at all?ĭuring a time when anti-intellectual sentiment is rife, it’s refreshing to experience a smart and formally ambitious thinker operating at full stretch. Included are a letter in which Sillman explains that she has broken up with abstraction, which she characterizes as an uptight ex catalogue essays on peers and influences, Laura Owens, Eugene Delacroix, and Philip Guston among them and idiosyncratic theories of shape, color, and the diagram, in the form of essays and cartoons. Published by After 8 Books, with an introduction by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas comprises seventeen texts written for journals, zines, and lectures between 20. Amy Sillman’s selected writings are a welcome reminder that how you paint, as well as what you paint, is intimately associated with the experiences of the body, and that the affective and intellectual significance of process should not be underestimated.Īn influential American painter working in what might be called the afterlife of Abstract Expressionism, Sillman is also an inventive and charismatic writer. Not only has it been usurped by figurative painting, the genre du jour of a time defined by identity politics and visual representation, it has also been tarnished by its association with Zombie Formalism, gaining a reputation (often deservedly) for apathy and commercial cynicism. Abstract painting has spent much of the past decade in the doghouse.
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