On Abstract Art.

Move up close, back away. Now you see it, now you don't: "it" being, depending on your point of view, either the material surface of a painting, or the illusions it was meant to constitute before your very eyes. This used to be the spectatorial movement solicited by illusionistic painting, as well as an important trope of criticism regarding it - most fatuously encountered in the Salons of Diderot, and his remarks about the still-lifes of Chardin, in which he oscillated between their facture and their chimerical inventories of copper and linen and gutted fish and dusty plums and so forth. It seems that this is also the spectatorial movement solicited by "abstraction": move up close and take in the clotted, cracked, frayed, buckled, tackily material surfaces of painting and collage, back away and take in a sublimated illusion, now not of objects figured in pictorial space, but of some ideality - of purity and autonomy, universality and originality, transcendental unity and logical inevitability, an optical or spiritual absolute untainted by the tactile and undisturbed by the blind impingement of the body or the psychic splittings engendered by it.

But move up close again and that ideality begins to clot, crack, fray, buckle and come unglued. The realization arises not only that the optical and all else is built upon the brutely tactile, but also that the very movement to and fro before the surfaces of abstraction, whether to take pleasure in them, to write their history or to deconstruct them, whether to constitute or take apart their transcendent illusions, is the movement of the body, and so necessarily involves the demands, desires, and drives of the bodily, and its sexing as well - precisely that which abstraction, or rather the theory and criticism of abstraction, had sought to expunge. This, overall, is the argument of Briony Fer's new book On Abstract Art. More even than its argument, this is its demonstration.

That demonstration is mounted, for instance, in the reproductions of Kasimir Malevich's Black Square on pages 8 and 9, each the negative of the other (the second is an X-ray), but both showing the factural cracks in the pure geometry of the square - as much as they show up the colored, diagonal (that is to say un-black, un-square) composition that underlies it. That same demonstration is mounted in the reproductions on pages 24 and 27, in which, first, two collages by Olga Rozanova are displayed, and then a detail from one of them: embodying the shift between the distanced and the close-up view, together they manage to convey to the eye photographically how "[t]he glue shows through the tissue paper to give the collages a rough handmade quality, a mixture of delicate material tackily stuck with clots of paste." The demonstration is performed more poignantly in Andre Kertesz's photograph of Mondrian's studio, which serves as the frontispiece to chapter 2, on "Mondrian's Excess": the "pure" geometries of rectangle and circle suggested by the doorway and the shadowed straw hat, already both reinforced and undermined by the curving stair-rail which doubles the diagonal painted on the stairwall and by the absurdly whitewashed potted flower, are photographically undercut by the homely textural "punctum" of the straw mat at the threshold. The demonstration is mounted, again and again, by the reproductions of Arp's glue-buckled Torn Drawing, rendering "the torn edges" and "the glutinous quality, the colle of collage," and the pleasure in those effects, heightened, as "Arp suggested, ... in close-up"; of Pollock's Phosphorescence, the sticky bubblegum relief of his facture more successfully evoked in black and white than in a large, slightly out-of-focus color detail of the hacked Out of the Web inaugurating chapter 5; the four differently angled overhead views, moving between the distanced and the close-up, of the "decrepit but dazzling, worm-eaten but ravishing" surfaces of Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (Floor), and so on.

On Abstract Art is structured, as a whole and in its parts, around some strange bedfellows. Moving from the "origins" of Malevich (and Lyubov Popova and Rozanova) to the endpoints of Richter and Whiteread, Fer's narrative encompasses the history of twentieth-century avant-garde art: ranging from century's beginning to century's end, from Greenbergian Modernism to that which comes after it, from Suprematism, Neo-Plasticism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Eccentric Abstraction and Minimalism, and on to our own moment, moving between Europe and the United States, painting, collage and sculpture, artists male and female, she covers the canon of abstraction from end to end, center to center, movement to movement, across media and gender: Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, Miro, Pollock, Hesse, Judd, Richter, and Whiteread. But then into this roster intrudes Bataille, and to it are added some peculiar local encounters between Mondrian's and Karl Blossfeldt's flowers, Pollock's cuts and Holbein's anamorphosis, Judd's and Klein's and Louis' work in color, Richter's and Whiteread's cancellations, among others.

But in spite of the casting of its net over all the twentieth century, On Abstract Art seems to me less a rewriting of the history of Modernism and its aftermath than a kind of treatise on what pleasure in the abstract is, pursued through cases and examples. Or that, anyway, is its main strength, in my view. Taking up the old formalist opposition between the optical and the tactile, Fer maintains the tension between the two, but treats those aesthetic polarities as inextricably intertwined, the one the alter ego and underbelly of the other, the interplay between them constitutive of all abstraction's "fantasies," which turn out to be fundamentally split rather than subject to the instantaneous unity of the transcendental augenblick. Upon that riven ground, the jouissance of the abstract is founded.

Having myself always felt the literally tactile pull of the toothpaste-and Silly-Putty surfaces of, say, Abstract Expressionism, or of the buttery pastes and thickened, hardened crusts of other kinds of painting, both abstract and otherwise, or of the scissor-nicks and fabric threads and pencil marks and differentiated paper textures of collage and Rapiers colles; having also, though I know full well the reasons for it, been puzzled at the fairly drastic suppression of such pleasures by the aesthetic discourse on abstraction, it was both refreshing and confirming to come across Fer's kind of address to abstract art, which seeks neither to discredit its subject, nor to erect a monolith upon it, nor to shape it into a historical line, nor to divide it up neatly according to avant-garde movement or theoretical stance or even politics of gender.

On Abstract Art takes part in a recent trend in the criticism of the modernist paradigm, of which the leading example is Rosalind Krauss' The Optical Unconscious. Fer's argument, however, is far less assertive than Krauss', and her investment less pronounced. Indeed, there is a curiously elusive quality to her text, which proceeds cumulatively, by means of indirection, ellipsis, and suggestion more than by the elaboration of statements. This is Fer's virtue as well as her vice: her play in the shifting, interstitial fields of "fantasy" (a word she uses often, but never defines) is part of the point of the book, but it can be very difficult to hold onto.

I like, for instance, the delicacy of her relationship to feminism, which for her is reducible neither to canonical inclusions and exclusions, nor to biographies, nor even to Freud's oedipal scenarios or Lacan's emphasis upon language, though it touches on both. But, given her several broachings of the topic of gender - her frequent sallies into the terrain of "sexual difference," her remarks about Mondrian and the "feminine," her attention to Hesse, Melanie Klein and the "blank space" of "female creativity," or her association of Whiteread's work with "underneath," "inside," a "cavity," and with the "mark of absence," and above all, her opening refusal to reduce the contributions of certain members of the early Russian avant-garde to the question of "the woman artist" - one wants to know a bit more about what she thinks about the gendering of abstraction, and about the fact of her being a "woman viewer," therefore positioned differently vis-a-vis the values of universality and transcendence. But between the Scylla of essentialist overstatement and the Charybdis of indeterminate understatement such as Fer's, I'll willingly take her drifting to the latter side.

Carol Armstrong is associate professor of art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas.