GALERIE GITI NOURBAKHSCH, BERLIN AND DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY, NEW YORK) , , TOMMA ABTS, LURRO, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 18 7/s x 15" / Öl und Acryl aufLeinwand, 48 x 38 cm. (ALL IMAGES COURTESY: GREENGRASSI, LONDON; GALERIE DANIEL BUCHHOLZ, COLOGNE Tomma Abts Tomma Abts The Best-Laid Plans: SUZANNE HUDSON On Accidentally Not Reading TOMMA ABTS When I first sat down to draft this essay on Tomma ofbiomorphic abstraction; read Abts’ figure/ground Abts, I stared at my blank screen for longer than I instantiations in TABEL (1999) against those put in would like to admit. I found that I had embarrass­ play decades ago by Ellsworth Kelly; and just as easily ingly little to say about this painter whose work I held name some morphologically suggestive precedents in such high regard. Abts’ paintings seemed to be so to contextualize FEWE (2005) (Lyonel Feininger utterly concrete as to frustrate any determined jumps to mind), these paintings’ quivering presences attempt at putting them into words. Then I discov­ caution against any such attempts to ferry them off to ered that she has spoken in many instances of aiming other times and places. This is especially so as they to create art that stymies attempts at symbolism and quite eloquently insist on an obdurate materiality that “becomes congruent with itself,” a totally won­ that remains impervious to translation (and that derful equation that nonetheless goads the sadist in rushes to connect disparate objects in a great, long me into speculating about how to pry it open. historical continuum), an attention to the here and Still, I couldn’t help but think that this purposeful now that any compensatory recourse to the telos of muteness, this challenge to pat transcription, is inte­ art history would unwittingly sweep under the rug. gral to Abts’ project. Stubborn is a word that crops But the Charybdis to this Scylla of temporal suc­ up often in writing about Abts—and for good reason. cession is equally problematic. Rather than being the To be sure, although one could, for instance, slot a product of an inevitable trajectory, Abts’ work is else­ work like HEESO (2004) into some clichéd narrative where contemplated in a vacuum of sensationalist, SUZANNE HUDSON is a New York-based critic and Assis­ tant Professor of modern and contemporary art at the Univer­ sity of Illinois. She is the author of Robert Ryman: Used P aint (The TOMMA ABTS, FEHBE, 2008, oil on canvas, 18 7/s x 15" / MIT Press, 2009). Öl auf Leinwand, 48 x 38 cm. PARKETT 84 2008 18 1 9 To mm a Abts Tomma Abts demimonde production. This game-board model, primarily cranberry, cement, and baize green MEKO wherein her paintings are regarded as strategic gam­ (2006). bits in the expanded field of contemporary painting Abts’ compositions in fact emerge out of the give- does little to explain her process. Instead, such and-take that comes with the application of numer­ moves insinuate causality tied not to an internal ous successive layers of paint and through choices logic of decision-making but read through an exog­ being elaborated over many months. Interlocking enous set of circumstances where the only agency left linear elements might float across densely layered for the artist is to appeal to the amorphous thing we fields, objective aggregations of the thin strata. Deli­ call “the market.” They also suppose her trifling hip­ cate webs of faintly protruding ridges bisect most ness or cleverness in merely fulfilling appropriative of Abts’ paintings, admitting to something like em­ acts that comment on the very thing that they bodied thinking. They are exceptionally striking are ostensibly one-upping (modernist painting, dec­ as palimpsests in FOLME’s (2002) bas-relief ovoids, orative easel pictures, etc.). Thus was I fretting about MENNT’s (2002) zig-zag tracery, and ERT’s (2003) how to specify Abts’ formalism without allowing her stuttering staccato lines. So consequentially deep are practice to masquerade as an empty sign that conveys these embankments that they shore up the many “post-criticality.” tiers; they also manage to survive in reproduction, For though Abts’ paintings look premeditated, giving Abts’ paintings oddly sculptural—and hence they are not inevitable. Needless to say, they are not less than iconic (or the Greenbergian shibboleth readymades. Anything more than a cursory look at “optical”)—effects in photographs. each vertically oriented, 18 7/8 x 15 inch (48 x 38 In this respect, her pencil and colored pencil cm) panel reveals a massively labor-intensive and far drawings offer a marked contrast, since depth is from forgone development. Employing a standard always the product of an illusion in them, not the size since she abandoned large, serial paintings hard-won physical result of accumulated deposits. In based on the grid a decade ago, Abts nonetheless— UNTITLED # 12 (2006) and related works, overlaps or precisely because of her reduction of means and between shapes are implied but not drawn, meaning eschewal of preparatory sketches, research, and that there are no material seams where they cross. source material—succeeds in producing works with Contrary to her paintings—for which these are not incommensurate organizational principles. preparations—Abts’ drawings are distinctly imagis- She tucks the diminutive supports in the arc of tic; they do not engage the paper’s properties (its her arm, working freehand with her elbow propped porosity, texture, thickness, etc.) but sparely arrange on a table or on her knee, like a miniaturist. Labor­ structures across it as a neutral, receptive ground, ing at such an intimate range, she successively covers which is in turn activated by the retention of large the primed support and divides it into washy planes swathes of uncovered white. UNTITLED # 20 (2005) with brightly colored acrylic stripes.1' Then come the and UNTITLED # 3 (2006) additionally illustrate that nearly transparent pellicles of coruscating oil, many Abts’ employ of the background creates a spatial of which curl around onto the paintings’ edges in opening that extends well beyond the bounds of the thicker swathes than one might expect from viewing paper (a conceit amplified by aspects that careen off only the front surface. Colors also appear there it, as though unfettered by the strictures of size). that are long gone in the main event, like a deeply Abts’ paintings do not necessarily pressure their submerged yellow that persists on the sides of the edges, either. In spite of this they play with the notion of finitude in a very different way—indeed they are built upon the possibility of producing it. This is why they so frustrate interpretations in excess of them, even as they bait us to supply just that. The TOMMA ABTS, ERT, 2003, acrylic and oil on canvas, question becomes exactly what to do with all of this 18 1 /s x 15” / Acryl und Öl auf Leinwand, 48 x 38 cm. information that circles back, like Abts’ tautological 20 21 Tomma Abts Tomma Abts TOMMA ABTS, UNTITLED # 1, 2006, ball point pen, TOMMA ABTS, UNTITLED # 3, 2006, ball point pen, colored pencil, and pencil on paper, 33 1 /s x 23 3/s ” / colored pencil, and pencil on paper, 33 1 /s x 23 3/s ” / Kugelschreiber, Farbstift und Bleistift auf Papier, 84,1 x 59,4 cm. Kugelschreiber, Farbstift und Bleistift auf Papier, 84,1 x 59,4 cm. it accrued a number of drawings (including those a positive hallmark) owes to Abts’ paintings being detailed above) and looked totally changed, despite themselves: The crucial distinction is that neither the near-identical checklist (drawings aside). In Los abstraction nor figuration really obtains. Her interest Angeles, Abts hung the paintings at evenly appor­ in a painting existing as an image and an object at tioned intervals. This resolution, more than any other the same time cannot but recall Jasper Johns and his site-specific variable, accounted for much of the FLAG (1954-55) more explicitly, a comparison that difference between the venues. Paradoxically how­ makes this point clear. Fred Orton has written: “Flag ever, this difference reconfirmed the paintings’ self­ is m ade of two m ain messages or two utterances. As a sameness, which recalled something Scott Burton work of art it embodies a set of ideas and beliefs once wrote about Richard Tuttle (who also wanted about art and aesthetics and as the American flag it “to make something which looks like itself’) 2h embodies a set of ideas and beliefs about citizenship, “Imagine making an object which will maintain its nationalism and patriotism.’’5) In short, was—is— integrity in all circumstances yet which exerts FLAG a flag or a painting? Or like Abts’ expressed absolutely no demands on its situation.”3> wishes, was it the same thing? In the process of deciding how to reconcile this Much anxiety attended FLAG’S importation into very potent thing-ness of Abts’ making with making the Museum of Modern Art. When Alfred Barr met meaning, finally, I did what any well-intended if with the acquisitions committee in 1958 to confer thwarted procrastinator might and googled my sub­ about purchasing the work, he was at pains to reas­ ject for inspiration. There, amidst the many entries sure the deliberating body as to its positive, non anti- paintings, to the issue of their self-sufficiency: Fur­ relating to her winning the 2006 Turner Prize, I American value. Barr’s ultimate recourse was not to nothing except that very painting. There is no room ther describe facts of her paint handling? Or turn found a New Museum high school teaching guide the work but to the person of the artist; he provided between the image and the thing when talking about our attention to the subtleties of her quietly quixotic entitled “Drawing Formal Evidence in Tomma Abts.” a character reference of Johns as an “elegantly Abts’ paintings, after all.