What sets so-called atemporal painting apart from painting that might be less kindly characterized as derivative or regurgitative? In her catalog essay for “The Forever Now,” a 17-artist exhibition which opens at the Museum of Modern Art on December 14, curator Laura Hoptman traces the definition of atemporality to sci-fi novelist William Gibson, for whom the term captures “a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the Internet, all eras seem to exist at once.” While some might lump such a phenomena under the larger banner of postmodernism, Hoptman does not. “Unlike past periods of revivalism, such as the appropriationist eighties, this super-charged art historicism is neither critical nor ironic; it’s not even nostalgic. It is closest to a connoisseurship of boundless information, a picking and choosing of elements of the past to resolve a problem or a task at hand.”
But whether we call work like this referential, or appropriationist, or postmodern, or atemporal, it’s hard not to feel slightly deflated by the contours of “Forever Now,” which comes off seeming a bit safe overall. Outside the main exhibition space, a series of large-scale oil-on-paper works by Kerstin Bratsch are hung, with six of them framed and stacked next to the entryway as if they’ve been casually placed in a storage room. A similarly cheeky presentation is apparent in Oscar Murillo’s corner of the show, which includes a series of his signature derivative — I mean, atemporal — canvases along with a number of unstretched, finished paintings thrown on the floor, which gallery visitors are asked to rifle through, touch, Instagram, perhaps roll around in. An explanatory label notes that these unstretched works are “indistinguishable from the ones on the wall in terms of quality,” to which I have little to add.
The so-called deskilling of painting has its moment here, too, from Joe Bradley’s grease pencil scrawls of numbers, stick figures, and lines on dirty, creased canvas to Josh Smith’s willfully amateur palm trees, monochromes, and insects. Dianna Molzan represents the revived interest in a Supports/Surfaces-esque drive to peel back the picture plane to reveal what lies beneath. Laura Owens and Michael Williams both experiment with digital imagery and silkscreen or inkjet-on-canvas techniques, combined with the application of actual paint. Julie Mehretu’s 2014 paintings look like Cy Twombly works redone by Christopher Wool. Mary Weatherford’s are fairly unspectacular abstract works jazzed up with thin, colorful neon tubes. Elsewhere we have eccentric portraits from Nicole Eisenman; compositions wobbling on the abstract/figurative divide by Charline von Heyl and Amy Sillman; a trio of vibrant abstracts by Mark Grotjahn; Rashid Johnson’s Ab-Ex energy cut into black soap and wax; Richard Aldridge’s off-handed casualness, which includes wood slats jutting out of the canvas, as well as an abstract that he says is equally inspired by Kanye West and Franz Kline; Matt Connors’s “Variable Foot,” 2014, three primary-colored canvas rectangles that lean against the wall like oversized, very imperfect John McCracken planks.
I like almost all of these artists quite a bit, with various exceptions, so I’m still not quite sure why my takeaway from “Forever Now” is one of odd disengagement. Seen together, the paintings in this exhibition evince a kind of tired radicalism, and maybe that’s the point: Here we are, floating in the atemporal ether, where there’s no such thing as a truly radical gesture left. Hoptman’s essay-manifesto makes a determined effort to position atemporal painting as a unique condition: one that subverts the “great-ladder-like narrative of cultural progress that is so dependent upon the idea of the new superseding the old in a movement simultaneously forward and upward.” Atemporal artists are operating in a sea of plenty, high on the “infinite possibilities of reevaluation, remixing, and retrofitting.” It’s a rousing call to arms, but I can’t help but feel that this particular exhibition fails to live up to the level of that rhetoric.
