David Ryan opens his introduction to Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters with the inquiry, “How do we connect the contemporary condition of abstract painting with its history?” (Ryan 1). He sees the question as necessarily posing two further ones: What do we mean by abstraction? And how do we construct history? Talking Painting sets out to explore these issues by juxtaposing Ryan’s interviews of twelve abstract painters with each artist’s choice of a critical text about his or her own work. The essays are primarily reprinted from journals and catalogues, and the interviews took place mainly between 1996 and 1998.

The contributors and artists in Ryan’s volume include Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, who offers a further introductory essay, and texts by Andrew Wilson on Ian Davenport, David Moos on Lydia Dona, Max Wechsler on Günther Förg, Guy Tosatto on Bernard Frize, David Joselit on Mary Heilmann, Andrew Benjamin on Shirley Kaneda, Joseph Masheck on Jonathan Lasker, Carlos Basualdo on Fabian Marcaccio, Peter Schjeldahl on Thomas Nozkowski, Arthur C. Danto on David Reed, Robert Pincus-Witten on Gary Stephan, and Jennifer Higgie on Jessica Stockholder. All of the artists came to prominence in the mid- to late-1980s. As an abstract painter himself, Ryan offers with his conversations many insights into the processes and techniques that inform each artist’s work, and the book is a valuable resource for this reason alone. Combined with questions concerning theoretical and philosophical issues relating to contemporary painting, Ryan’s interviews are both insightful and provocative, and, for the most part, his questions solicit a wide array of critical responses.

Ryan’s introduction sets up the context for the essays and conversations with some useful summaries of the issues that he claims are relevant as background to abstract painting today: the notion of modernist autonomy framed as reductive; relationships of parts to whole; and the importance of language to the practice of painting. Ryan’s reading of each of these concerns is informed by the writings of Gilles Deleuze, so autonomy becomes a case of addition (“ands”) as opposed to negation (“nots”); wholeness is transformed into a matter of fragments and multiples folded into another kind of unity; and linguistic analogies are productive to abstract painting so long as they do not deplete the visual potency of painting, something Gilbert-Rolfe’s own introductory essay to the volume also warns against. Unfortunately, the argument outlined in Ryan’s introduction is seldom explored in his interviews or in the essays chosen by each of the artists, even if the selections do begin to elaborate critical contexts that help situate each painter’s work. The essays construct a rather tight circle around each artist’s practice and our subsequent perception of it, which is not surprising given that we know the artists have selected the texts themselves. Since the interviews rarely challenge the assumptions behind the essays or pursue further the critical matters that are explored in them, little sustained critical purchase is gained in relation either to these issues or the terms that frame the volume as a whole. In addition, there are not enough reproductions of artworks included in the book to support specific references in the essays and interviews.

In many ways, Frances Colpitt’s edited volume, Abstract Painting in the Late Twentieth Century, provides some of the critical and historical contexts for approaching Ryan’s collection of interviews and essays. Colpitt suggests that the history of abstraction can be divided into three phases: “historical,” “late-modern,” and “postmodern.” As demonstration of these three periods, or of the latter two, she collects together a series of essays, again, mostly reprinted from journals and catalogues published between 1959 and 1998. The first context, “historical” abstraction, is characterized by this approach’s opposition to representation, and the opening text, Jules Langsner’s “Four Abstract Classicists” from 1959, represents an early attempt to discuss abstraction outside or after this familiar opposition.

Colpitt’s claim for “late-modern” abstraction is that its evolution comes to a halt or completion and enters a different kind of developmental phase in the postwar years, with specific emphasis placed on the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella. In this light, Philip Leider’s “Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella’s Retrospective at the Modern” takes us back to the crucial debate between abstraction and literalism as it was mounted from the reception of Jackson Pollock through to Stella’s Protractor series from 1967. This section also includes Lucy Lippard’s essay, “The Silent Art,” and Grégoire Müller’s text, “After the Ultimate,” both of which investigate monochrome painting as a particular form of abstraction, raising the question of an endpoint or closure that then demands other possibilities for thinking how abstraction continues. Beginning with Claude Monet and running up through Josef Albers, Kenneth Noland, and Ellsworth Kelly, John Coplan’s “Serial Imagery” offers a historical and critical example of the promise a serial approach to painting provides, and takes the seriality of Albers and Yves Klein as a challenge to an American fixation on autonomy. Concluding this section, Sheldon Nodelman’s essay, “Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality,” opposes the experience of paintings as illusion or “virtual” space to paintings in the “actual” space of installation.

The third section of Colpitt’s book, on “postmodern” abstraction, foregrounds developments that are primarily informed by theory. Douglas Crimp’s “The End of Painting” from 1983 interrogates the relevance of all painting, not simply abstraction, to society; Hal Foster’s ”Signs Taken for Wonders” raises the question of the relationship between financial capital and abstract painting; Gilbert-Rolfe’s “The Current State of Nonrepresentation” insists on the potential of abstract painting to continue as a viable practice when understood as “nonrepresentation,” opening a counterhistorical form of painting that is concerned with the objectness of the artwork, understood in terms of a Derridean discourse of deferral; Donald Kuspit’s “The Abstract Self-Object” investigates abstract painting in terms of its psychological implications; and David Pagel’s “Once Removed from What?” takes up questions of the definition and contemporary situation of abstraction in relation to feminism and formalism. Colpitt, who has long been one of the important voices concerning abstract art, notably from outside of East Coast contexts, concludes the volume with a long essay, “Systems of Opinion: Abstract Painting since 1959.”

In Colpitt’s anthology, there are some instances in which the questions raised within abstraction turn strongly toward a more direct concern with painting as such. A pertinent example is Crimp’s often-cited essay, “The End of Painting.” Commenting on the resurgence of various “returns” to abstract painting in the 1980s, which were centered on the assumed resilience of the medium and a certain faith in painting’s ability to continue as a viable practice, Crimp asks, “Why Painting? To what end painting, now at the threshold of the 1980s?” (Colpitt 94). What seems particularly significant here is Crimp’s own response to the question. Turning to Daniel Buren’s in situ practices as a way to emphasize the concerns that are central to painting, he asks: “What makes it possible to see a painting? What makes it possible to see a painting as a painting? And, under such conditions of its presentation, to what end painting?” (Colpitt 93). Looking back at these same queries twenty years later, what seems most notable is that, while the question of painting remains open, Crimp does not phrase his discussion in terms of abstraction. Indeed, his inquiries reopen how painting as such responded to the “crisis” that different artistic practices (primarily Minimalism and Conceptualism in the U.S.) posed for the continuation of painting. And in the case of Buren, what also seems particularly significant is that his practices cannot be reduced to questions of abstraction, but instead demand an entirely different vocabulary of terms and issues. Even as this artist’s work claims a reference to painting, it becomes a way of exploring the critical limits of painting’s condition, rather than continuing to contribute to a legacy understood in terms of abstraction. While Colpitt and Ryan seem to want to hold onto abstraction as the key term for painting, we are reminded by Crimp’s essay of the impact of questions posed about the medium that cannot necessarily be reduced to claims of abstraction.

Like Crimp’s, Nodelman’s essay from 1978 recognizes the challenges posed to painting by different practices explored during the 1960s by works that use “actual” space: sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. Nodelman notes that a question emerged “as to whether the fundamental mode of experience upon which painting depends remains a viable one in the late twentieth century” (Colpitt 75). In his turn toward this issue of how we experience painting, Nodelman’s contention resonates strongly with our own contemporary situation, with the dominance of installation, photography, and interactive art. In another context, Lippard suggests that what she terms monotonal painting “demands that the viewer be entirely involved in the work of art, and in a period where easy culture, instant culture, has become so accessible, such a difficult proposition is likely to be construed as nihilist” (Colpitt 59). One is grateful to Colpitt’s anthology for allowing us to hear again the urgency about our evolving ability and potential inability to experience painting in our changing society.

Colpitt’s own fifty-page essay, “Systems of Opinion,” pulls together the threads and lays out the foundation for the collected essays. Its focus is centered on two main issues: the evolution of the term “abstraction,” and the debate between abstraction and literalism. In relation to the first, Colpitt’s essay reminds us of other terms for the abstract, such as nonfigurative, nonobjective, rejective instead of reductive (Lippard), color realism (Kasmir Malevich and Piet Mondrian), and nonrepresentation, to name a few. Various attempts at a definition of abstraction are revealed as not simply a matter of semantics, and this provides one of the most valuable aspects of this anthology. Though it may be hard for us to imagine excising abstraction from our vocabulary, it is important to see that in addition to Colpitt’s list, other terms have been employed to describe the practices of painting, particularly outside English-speaking contexts, where painting, situated within discussions and debates that are not so clearly centered around abstraction in the same way, has often developed in refreshingly different directions. The ramifications of using and developing alternate terms and a different history or histories are but distant implications of Colpitt’s choice of essays.

The abstraction vs. literalism debate fundamental to the reception of the work of Stella occupies a good portion of Colpitt’s own essay, as well as various other texts included in the book. To Colpitt’s credit, and through much of her other work (which includes her book Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993] as well as several exhibitions on both contemporary sculpture and abstract painting), the argument over whether artists read Stella’s “black” paintings of 1959 as object or abstraction still feels urgent. The interpretation of the works as literal objects led both to the three-dimensional art of Donald Judd and Carl Andre and to other work “outside” painting, such as photography and installation. In this context, Leider’s “Literalism and Abstraction” from 1970 is reprinted as a counterpoint to Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” cited extensively in Colpitt’s own essay. As opposed to Fried, Leider understands Stella’s black paintings as, in fact, objects. The relevance of the literalism debate is underscored by Colpitt’s inclusion of a text by Gilbert-Rolfe, who argues that a concept of nonrepresentation still depends in part upon making a decision about the stakes of the “objectness” of an artwork. Colpitt’s argument suggests the fundamental role essays such as “Art and Objecthood” still play for anyone working seriously within the field, and her heavily footnoted essay opens to a wide number of other historical, philosophical, and critical references that still seem highly relevant to thinking through the question of painting today.

If the opposition between literalism and abstraction is, as Colpitt’s book suggests, a defining factor in the crisis that represents the “late-modern” phase of abstract painting and informs the “postmodern” period, “complexity” rather than “reduction” is the “prominent thematic” in Talking Painting. According to Ryan, this “complexity” is what helps us avoid the pitfalls of Fried’s concept of “presentness,” as well as the conventions of wholeness and unity. Unfortunately, the opposition of “complexity” to “reduction” feels false on two counts. First, with the exceptions of Förg, Davenport, and Frize, the majority of the artists included in his interviews all seem to have the same kinds of complexity in their work, similar combinations of layered and multiplied fragments, and the same impulse to quote abstract styles that build upon the same spaces and temporalities. The cumulative effect of the work included here adds up to images that can be broadly categorized as representations or illustrations of complexity. Paradoxically, the “newness” of this complexity presupposes and reiterates an American modernist legacy that renders it dependent on the very reduction that it seeks to negate. The presence and popularity of many of these artists in national and international exhibitions devoted to recent painting only underscore the seamlessness with which abstraction is being read as contingent on this modernist legacy, however skeptical of this legacy it might be, rather than as a practice whose real critical possibilities and viability depend on moving outside of oppositions of reduction and complexity. Arguably, the exhibition L’Informe: Mode d’Emploi, held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and organized by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss in 1996, was one attempt to find a different vocabulary for the reassessment of a modernism not confined to a discourse of abstraction, arguing neither for nor against painting.

The need for other vocabularies with which to reread modernism becomes particularly conspicuous in light of one of Ryan’s summary statements in Talking Painting: “The present condition of abstract painting is like an inversion of its valorization within American modernist formalist thinking. Fragmented, multiple, heterogeneous, without any unified or centralized core of theory or history: this is the topography of what might be referred to as post-formal” (Ryan 2). Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s “complexity” is promoted by Ryan to replace the centralized core of theory and history belonging to modernism. In the unexamined overstatement of his philosophical sources, the “complexity” that Ryan highlights produces yet another reactionary style, “post-formalism,” which simply continues to build upon or make assumptions about twentieth-century art, rather than radically rethink its modernist legacy.

If Ryan overstates the relationship between painting and philosophical positions, leading to artwork that misconceives its philosophical source, Colpitt seems to understate the gravity of the “philosophical paradigms” that “inform each period’s critical trajectory” (Colpitt 193) by naming her essay “Systems of Opinion.” To understand these influential philosophical and critical debates as “opinions” seems to diminish the impact that such historical discussions surrounding abstraction have had as critical arguments, positions, and ideological commitments.

Most important, then, both Ryan and Colpitt acknowledge structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction as influencing the current concern for abstraction. This poses the further question as to what kind of relationship has existed between these disciplines in their original context in France and the visual culture that accompanied them. One consequence of this question is Colpitt’s passing mention of the French group Supports/Surfaces, whose work “bids to emphasize the planar (that is, abstract and nonillusionistic) rather than literalist potential of subsequent abstract painting” (Colpitt 171). Looking back at their work, one might argue that not only did the group consider itself to be exploring the practice of painting through exhibiting both paintings and objects, but it also took the material aspect of the medium, as well as a certain ideology of that engagement, to be central to its position regarding painting as a practice. Indeed, if one looks further into the circumstances in which much French theory was written, one might find that these essays, reduced in an American milieu to issues of abstraction, actually provoked a real complexity of practices animated by a very different vocabulary and engagement of issues. Despite the fact that Colpitt acknowledges Kuspit’s exhibition and catalogue essay for Abstract Painting of America and Europe, held in Vienna in 1988, as one of the “important but rare attempts to examine abstract painting from an international perspective” (Colpitt 189), very little is offered of the relationship between American abstraction and any larger perspective. Similarly, for all of the claims to heterogeneity and complexity, nine of the twelve artists featured in Talking Painting are American or work in the United States.

While aspiring toward abstraction as “a vital component of visual culture” (Colpitt xviii), or opening more discussion “as to the future of abstract art in an ever-changing context” (Ryan viii), some of the assumptions and generalized histories of abstraction that both books aspire to address would be enriched by a regard for developments in painting that are not centered on or reduced to a vocabulary of abstract painting. In addition, if attention were to be paid to other vocabularies, histories, and traditions, we might see emerge a dialogue and engagement with painting that keeps it from simple “reactionary” stances, as Foster argues, or positions that valorize an “insistent superficiality,” according to Pagel. Reactionary or superficial conditions represent some of the more desperate corners we have painted ourselves into in recent years, and will perhaps continue to do so if we remain determined to claim abstraction as a lineage that belongs only to America. Though Colpitt and Ryan both give us much useful historical, critical, and philosophical background for understanding the current state of abstraction, the question that still remains is this: What could happen to painting if we were to stop imagining abstraction as the great modernist tradition and instead open the circle of discussion to include works and readings whose problematics, strategies, and discussions do not operate so fully within a purely “American legacy” and its now all-too-familiar vocabulary?