I recently tried to explain the impact of Clement Greenberg’s art criticism on the Canadian prairies to a group of American art writers I had met just a few weeks earlier—that a few choice visits and critiques had tinged the prairies with a kinship toward New York Modernism, as it existed in the ’60s. I explained that when I was navigating Saskatoon’s art scene as an art student, my teachers and mentors were an unusual mix of abstract bronze sculptors who had studied at Emma Lake, feminists who railed against Modernism’s exclusionary play at universality and art historians who had adopted the thankless task of trying to reconcile the region’s Modernist history and the subsequent postmodernist backlash that, at its most dogmatic, often resulted in a refusal to even acknowledge the existence of Clem and his ilk. This was no news to me, but it left the Americans curious and sort of giggly about the fact that this iconic moment of what they saw as quintessentially American art history had seeped across our borders and that we were still wrestling with its legacy.
At the Art Gallery of Alberta, that legacy of Modernism and its contemporary entanglements are taken up in “The Double Bind: Conversations Between Modernism and Postmodernism.” The premise of the show is simple and novel: a Modernist work from the AGA’s collection is placed in dialogue with a postmodern one, for a total of seven pairings. The works commune on the level that they share something and startle each other at how strangely they manifest their similarities. They’re not quite long-lost siblings—more like new, awkward, intergenerational friends who found each other on MeetUp.com because they both share some niche hobby.
Though the show is a smart exercise in thinking through legacy and formal kinship, some of the pairings operate at a fairly literal level. The entrance to the exhibition includes Kenneth Noland’s colossal 1968 painting Via Pink, composed of thick and thin bands of pink and permutations of near beiges (off-white, yellow, subtle hints of green), juxtaposed with Arlene Stamp’s Signs of Breathing 8-16 (2002). Stamp’s plastic compositions arrange a set of colourful bands as well, but each work in the series is differentiated by a series of rectangular cutouts along the side of the works, making them look glitch- or barcode-like. Similarly, Claude Tousignant’s Gong 80 (1966) and Julian Schwarz’s Shutter (2001) share that they are both approximately the same size, circular and vaguely mandala-like. While Tousignant’s painting attests to the visual vibrations produced by modulating complementary and analogous colours in a bull’s-eye formation, Schwarz’s cut aluminum work more closely recalls a nucleus.
Other pairings are uncompromisingly brilliant: Michael Steiner’s planar welded-steel sculpture, Bambu (1975) meets Barbara Astman’s Mother’s Kitchen (#10 from the “places” series) (1982). Astman’s sculpture sits on a small wooden shelf with a plastic placard hovering just above it. The shelf is structured as a series of interlocking geometrical forms made from kitchen linoleum. Although on a formal level, the sculptures appear to mimic each other’s planar, architectural space, the pairing also unfolds an uncanny synchronicity between retro kitchen decor and Modernist aesthetics. The blobs and drops and pastels of Astman’s linoleum evoke at once the muted palette of Minimalism and the dribbles of action painting.
In a final enclosed gallery space, Barbara Hepworth’s Six Forms (2 x 3) (1968) faces Brian Jungen’s Companion (2013) head on. Hepworth’s squat bronze forms stacked atop each other are set on a plinth with the regal appearance of a marble table. She employs a signature Modernist cutaway so that each figure dances gently with the air around it, giving peeks from the foreground into the other side of the gallery, playing coyly with positive and negative space. Across the floor, Jungen’s sculpture sits on a clunky Frigidaire deep freezer. The armature for the sculpture is the hood of a German car and a hide is stretched across it, tight like a drum but unplayable, thanks to a perfectly circular cutout in its centre. Around the other side a circle of hide is stitched, directly obscuring the view through this hole. The piece is frustratingly impractical, transforming conventional objects into decorative ones, but the hide is seductively tactile. In Jungen’s work, the cutout doesn’t read simply as a formal play with space, but instead conjures a moon, a sun, an eye. Atop the deep freezer, the hide evokes sustenance hunting, and gestures clearly to its origin as a living thing.
Jungen’s cutout draws Hepworth’s sculptural cutouts beyond a formal kinship, and into a story about art’s materials and where they come from, and about commodities and how we consume them. Maybe that story was already there, alluded to in Hepworth’s support, which offers the sculpture up like an item on a dining table, ready to be eaten.
This is the beauty of these pairings: in their most successful instances, they re-world the Modernist works, which often risk appearing opaque and unanchored from the experience of the everyday. I was reminded of Jeanette Winterson’s assertion that “canonizing pictures is one way of killing them. When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history, popularity, association, all crowd in between the viewer and the picture and block it out.” I’ve felt this blockage often with Modernist works. Here at the AGA, there’s a chance to see them anew. The exhibition doesn’t make any attempts to erase Modernism’s formal innovation, but instead suggests that Modernism was always narrative, always striving to convey some experience of existence. The postmodern works operate a bit like annotations—conjuring a bit of context gone missing from the original text now that it is wrenched out of time.
There’s a sense of reciprocity in the illumination each work provides its partner. The Modernist works assume a prescient quality that’s difficult to pinpoint. More than careful, measured guidance or artistic mentorship, the Modernist works appear prophetic. While postmodernism is often positioned as a wholesale rejection of Modernism, “The Double Bind” rescues some of the camaraderie, the gentleness, the correspondence between the two.
