Irreplaceable hue.

By the mid '70s, Color Field painting was self-evidently passe. In his classic essays on the "white cube," Brian O'Doherty hardly needed argue his assertion that the art Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried championed as the crescendoed triumph of Modernism had become a kind of latter-day salon painting Calling for big walls and big collectors, it looked "like the ultimate in capitalist art." Well, it's been so long since Color Field had that kind of reputation that it's now hard to believe it ever did. Today, it's Minimalism that seems to have sure access to elite patronage and to the attendant presumption of taste. In fact th tables have turned so decidedly that the same Minimal art that to O'Doherty seemed pointedly to shun allegiance with "wealth and power," and indeed to try to "redefine the relation of the artist to various establishments,"(1) has lately (and reasonably) been subject to critical interrogation of its "rhetoric of power."(2) Color Field painting, by contrast, has seemed so pathetic for so long that it threatens to become interesting again.

At least since Fried's essay "Art and Objecthood" and Greenberg's "Recentness o Sculpture," both 1967, the discourse on Color Field painting has been structure as an agon with Minimalism. Donald Judd asserted that "actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than ... a flat surface";(3) in fact the positioning of Minimalism as an "art of the real" famously inspired Fried t dismiss it as "merely literal."(4) In a celebrated counterintentional twist, Fried's anti-Minimalist polemic provided the very coordinates by which the movement was written into art history. Today, most accounts would say that Colo Field painting's status as the designation toward which the mainstream of artistic development flowed (Greenberg and Fried tended to designate this painting, along with the sculpture of Anthony Caro, simply as "Modernist") was long ago ceded to Minimalism. Recently, a spate of East Coast exhibitions focusing on the work of Caro, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Larry Poons provided an opportunity to take another look at this singularly maligned movement.(5)

Reconsidered today, the work of Caro, Noland, Olitski, and Poons seems to evade its assigned post in the battle against the literal at several crucial junctures. Noland's work is a striking case in point where the resistance of hi mid'60s work to the optical orthodoxy is concerned. For if the counterpoint of color as weight and color as recession/advance in the "target" paintings of the late '50s and early '60s remains striking, though in a somewhat academic way, Noland's wall-length horizontal stripe paintings, such as Via Blues, 1967, are as centrifugal as the earlier paintings were centripetal. The approach to space and to the physicality of the viewer here is still fresh. The stripes have an almost friction-free velocity that draws the eyes away from the center toward both ends of the painting at once--points that cannot be apprehended simultaneously because of the painting's length. And the color is so keyed up a to create a quasi-physical resistance to your advance, as though it were buffering you back. Push on, though, and at a certain point the color becomes tranquil and accommodating--you're inside the painting now. Clearly this experience is not "purely optical"; a painting such as Via Blues is "theatrical," in the sense of the word that Fried used in his attack on Minimalism.

Unfortunately this is not the direction of Noland's subsequent art. His future turns out to have been foretold by another, untitled work of 1967, a canvas in the shape of a flattened diamond, its form coinciding with the sum of its three diagonal lozengelike stripes. Strangely inert, the piece is more like some sort of wall medallion than a painting, yet it only hints at how Noland would fall off the edge of the earth, esthetically speaking, sometime before the early '90s, as evidenced in the naively slick, watered-down Frank Stella-isms of his recent Plexiglas wall reliefs. What could account for such a decline? While the practices of these key figures have weathered their negotiations with the alternatively enabling and crippling weight of the critical legacy with varying degrees of success, in Noland's case one suspects something like a sort of phobic reaction--the need to contain and distance the quasi-Minimalist "theatricality" broached by works like Via Blues in order to remain within the reassuring orthodoxy of the Color Field fold.

This is not the place to reconstruct Greenberg's theory of Modernist painting after Jackson Pollock, or Fried's either. It may be said, though, that for Greenberg the success of Olitski and Noland was dependent on their push toward both "pure" abstraction and "pure" visuality or opticality (a flat surface repressing allusion to the tactile). The work's link to what Leo Steinberg once called "design technology" has often been seen as undermining its abstractness, and it is just as hard to see it as purely optical.(6) Despite its flatness, a painting like Via Blues is more a tactile experience than a visual one; like music so loud you feel its vibrations in your bones, the work turns the volume of its color up to the point where it becomes physical sensation.

Olitski veers away from an experience of pure visuality in a different, more traditional, and less overt way. His color, with its interfusions and hazy indirections, allies itself with that of late-19th-century Symbolism--the work of Odilon Redon, for example, who spoke of "the shudder of the colored surface by tone over tone."(7) The idea of synesthesia is central to this esthetic; it' as though Olitski wanted to render the experience of color as some far more intimate and indefinite exchange than seeing alone affords--as flavor or scent, perhaps. His later work makes the fundamentally nonoptical nature of his interests more explicit. His most recent paintings are nothing if not physical and color is distinctly a secondary phenomenon. With Olitski, the optical/actua (or alternatively merely literal) opposition has once again been strained, if not reversed. As is also the case with Noland and Poons, when the work is seen in a continuum that includes their most recent efforts the dichotomy seems pointedly inadequate. Color Field painting might now be better called an art of the factitious or "virtual real." Its stubborn attachment to illusion, even in the absence of representation, makes what looked like the wrong turn thirty years ago feel surprisingly relevant.

Like many other painters who became otherwise identified in the '60s, in the '50s Olitski had been in the orbit of second-generation Abstract Expressionism, in an offshoot close to European "matterism," not unlike concurrent American work by Al Held and Ronald Bladen. The plastery thickness of Olitski's early work, in light of his return in the '80s to a similar impasto (though now lustrous rather than matte), shows how much of himself Olitski sacrificed in order to produce his signature '60s canvases, with their slowly modulating fields of stained acrylic quasi-framed along two or more edges by subtly contrasting or dissonant hues--paintings of a sort in which Max Kozloff once sa "the aftermath of a physical event or contact seemingly absent from the canvas itself."(8) Such Mallarmean elusiveness, it now seems, was unnatural to an artist avid for an almost Rabelaisian physicality and copiousness, despite the complication of his studied, sweet-and-sour color. Yet if Olitski's '60s work i subservient to an imposed notion of what good painting must look like, in this instance the Greenbergian diet was a healthy one. Though as thin and watery emotionally as it is in style, the '60s work doesn't glut itself to exhaustion the way the recent work tends to, but maintains a level of repressed energy tha remains palpable today.

A generation younger than Noland and Olitski, Poons was a relative latecomer to the Color Field group. His best-known works, the dot paintings of the early-to-mid '60s, occupy the same fertile zone between Minimalism and Color Field painting as some of Noland's work of this period, as well as that of Stella. It was only toward the end of the decade that Poons began pouring and pushing his paint to arrive at a facture equally distant from the manual and from the mechanical, a mode typical of Color Field. The first results of this conversion, if that's what it was, were remarkable: dense rainstorms of turbid color that still overpower the efforts of many subsequent fetishists of the drip.

Since then the careers of Poons and Olitski have often seemed to move in tandem with a push and pull of influence from one artist to the other--though Poons' apparent indifference to taste has led to more eye-opening results than Olitski's infatuation with bad taste. Like Olitski, Poons today is an energetic exponent of the ultrafunky relieflike surface. His fascination with pouring has led to canvases suggesting oceanic spills of detritus. Forcing the experience o sensation to overwhelm the understanding of sensation, this work transmutes the tragic art of Abstract Expressionism, empowered by ideas of myth and heroic sacrifice, into a disenchanted, countertranscendental immersion in the mud and debris of mundane and earthbound confusion. In a new development, Poons has taken to overlaying his broken flows of acrylic sludge with ovoid dots reminiscent of those he was using on flat surfaces three decades ago. Far from nostalgia, this shows his rare and salutary ability to joke with his own history, not to undermine it but to filter it through the change in perspective forced by time.

If the later development of the painters associated with the term "Color Field" makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of even their early work in terms of "pure opticality," this is all the more so with Caro. His early emphasis on planar and linear elements over volume was seen as diminishing the tactility and mass of sculptural forms in favor of an appeal to the eye alone, even though that eye was navigating a three-dimensional structure rather than a two-dimensional picture plane.(9) But the claim to "pure opticality" on behalf of sculpture must always have seemed somewhat tenuous. In any case, Caro's work from the late '80s on shows him moving as far toward mass and volume as Olitski and Poons have moved toward encrustation and density. Indeed his work now approximates architecture and furniture to a degree that (happily) threatens it "abstractness." He has even constructed "follies," larger in scale than his other recent work, that he refers to as "sculpitecture."(10) Much of Caro's recent work seems to speak of visual fascination as a form of physical bondage or imprisonment--the huge chain links of Marathon, 1993, the anchor ring of Delphi, from the same year, the blind or labyrinthine architecture of so many works.

One can hardly fault Greenberg or Fried for the descriptive power of their writings on Noland, Olitski, and Caro in the '60s; these artists' work of the time did emphasize the visual. It is only where description turned to prescription, as in the case of Noland's latter development, that the critics' formulations exerted an inhibiting force. Freed of the responsibilities incumbent on upholding the heroic tradition, the artists' best products reveal their visual and corporeal excess more clearly. We can see how an unappeasable hunger for strong, rare, properly unnameable sensations--the hallmark of "decadent" art--has impelled this art from one surprising extreme to another, from the pointed and "pure" effects typical of the '60s to the more copious, even chaotic mixtures it has sought in recent years.

It's easy to like the clarity and openness of early Caro or Poons, but their best recent work offers the more difficult pleasures obtainable only by submission to visual confusion and psychological ambiguity. This art has come t reflect ironically on its own development, and in contrast to that of the Minimalists, its development has outstripped its origins, for both good and bad Perhaps at this point these artists would be better off just conceding the mainstream, for quite probably over the long haul the chasm that has seemed to separate these painters from their Minimal counterparts will all but close. Far more than Minimalism, Color Field today seems theatrical, flamboyant and artificial. Strategically detached from its original critical framework, its profligate, sometimes grotesque concatenations of texture, color, and shape could be ready to retrofit to our virtually realized fin de siecle.

Barry Schwabsky is an art critic and poet who lives in New York.

1. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986, p. 26. First published in Artforum XIV no. 7, March 1976, XIV no. 8, April 1976, and XV no. 3, November 1976.

2. See Anna C. Chave, "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power," Arts Magazine, January 1990, pp. 44-63. Of Caro, Noland, and Olitski, on the other hand, Charles Harrison has suggested that "we might wish to acknowledge that their work is in certain respects free from implication in the manipulative and managerial aspects of that culture which puts them to use." Essays on Art & Language, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991, p. 260, n. 23.

3. Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," 1965, republished in Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975, p. 184.

4. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: Critical Anthology, New York: Dutton, 1968, p. 12. First published in Artforum no. 10, Summer 1967.

5. "Caro Noland Olitski," Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, Hartford, Conn., 28 April-15 June 1994; "Anthony Caro: A Major Survey of Recent Sculpture on the Occasion of the Artist's Seventieth Birthday," Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 14 April-27 May; "Larry Poons," Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York 5-30 April.

6. Leo Steinberg, "Other Criteria," Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 79.

7. Odilon Redon, To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and Artists, trans. Mira Jacob and Jeanne L. Wasserman, New York: Braziller, 1986, p. 148.

8. Max Kozloff, "The Inert and the Frenetic," Renderings, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969, p. 254. First published in Artforum IV no. 7, March 1966.

9. My account assumes that the later (1958) version of Greenberg's 1948 essay "The New Sculpture," published in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), preprogrammed the "formalist" reception of Caro's sculpture. Fried has subsequently directed attention to the notion of "syntax," also taken up by Greenberg, as more central to his understanding of Caro than that of "opticality." See "Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop: Discussion," in Ha Foster, ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture no. 1, Seattle: Bay Press, 1987, pp. 71-72. In relation to Caro, though, the term "syntax" remains more a suggestive metaphor than a substantive concept.

10. Karen Wilkin, Caro, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1991, n.p. Interestingly, Thierry de Duve reports that "sculptecture" ("sculpitecture" without the i) was a neologism coined in the '60s for what came to be known as Minimal art. See hi "The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas," in Serge Guilbaut, ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-64, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, p. 269.