Looking at Ad Reinhardt

In the last month, I've been thinking about and studying the concept of representation in art.  In regards to my own practice as a photographer, I have been moving towards more abstraction in my work. Even at last June's residency, I was quickly labeled a "painter's photographer." One project I am currently working on is making long exposures of Oahu's shoreline at night. The images are less about what they literally represent and more about the emotions evoked. At the same time, however, I am aware that they are still representations of Hawaii in a sense. They are, after all, made on Oahu’s beaches and depict the horizon line as seen from the shore. They are OF something even if that something is not immediately deciphered visually. My hope is for the emotion evoked to be representative of the spirit (perhaps "mana") of Hawaii… for the abstract images to still have a sense of place.  I would like for the abstractions to portray a sensitivity to the elements that are embedded in daily life here - light, air, and water.

My mentor, David Ulrich, suggested I look at the work of Ad Reinhardt during our last meeting. He loaned me the book below. It was informative to review Reinhardt's work and to learn more about his ideas, especially as I explore both long exposure abstract work and more literal collages juxtaposing representations of Hawaii. I've selected a few images and quotes from the text below. 

"The paintings in my show are not pictures....The intellectual and emotional content are in what the lines, colors, and spaces do. - Ad Reinhardt 1944

Lippard, Lucy R. Ad Reinhardt. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1981. Print.

On Collage: "At the same time, expanded use of the collage medium brought Reinhardt dangerously close to fusing two aspects of art which he considered permanently opposed - the pictorial, or picturesque, and the abstract; or life and art....Yet Reinhardt was an obsessive clipper of reproductions, art and otherwise, from magazines, books, and newspapers, a collector of the most picturesque of the picturesque - humorous, evocative, grotesque images for which he later found an outlet in the PM cartoons, and still later, in his teaching methods. One of the major challenges of the abstract collages, therefore, lay in the rearrangement of highly charged representational images in order to divest them of just those effects for which they might have been chosen...In figure 22 (Collage), what shapes can be discerned are only parts of a patterned whole. The pasted papers had to be small in order to be cleansed of associative imagery; this gave them an anonymity rare in geometric art at the time, and the disintegration of both form and image paved the way for the black paintings." (34)

"The expressive and structural meaning of color space in painting is my main interest." 

- Ad Reinhardt

Another quote from Lippard's book citing the English writer David Thompson: 
“Radical extremism in art tends to be thought naïve in Europe. In America it tends to be thought necessary; hence that extraordinary ability of American painting in the last twenty years to drive through again and again to what appear to be ultimate conclusions. ‘It’s too obvious’ or ‘It can only be a cul-de-sac,’ the anti-Americans have said in turn of Pollock, Rothko, Newman, Johns, Louis, Noland, recoiling from the idea of being so uncompromising.

Extremism is both romantic indulgence and the strictest of disciplines. Perhaps that is why, being a paradox, it is not a bore, but a challenge, and why American painting can derive so much strength from it. Reinhardt is the embodiment of such a challenge, a sort of logical counterpart of Duchamp." (123)

“The separation, definition, compartmentation of all that affects how art is seen occupied Reinhardt wholly apart from the process of making art. He considered art a social responsibility and saw himself as an imperative force toward the formation of a type or class of American artist opposed to the current image. A certified liberal in regard to ‘life,’ i.e. all that is accidental and uncontrolled (including personal relationships), he was a dogmatist or a “conserver” in regard to art because art was, finally, what counted.” (130)