David Diao’s extended bout with abstraction constitutes one of the longer, stranger sagas in the annals of recent painting. In the 25 years since Diao arrived on the scene, his career has registered most of the decisive pressures that have shaped the medium in the crisis following American painting’s midcentury triumph. Diao followed an inaugural decade of reductive experiments that reflected the dominant Minimalist temper of the late ’60s with an extended hiatus. During this time he internalized all the proclamations that stated painting had run its historical course. Effectively sitting out the much-hyped neo-Expressionist return to painting, Diao bounced back in the mid ’80s with a full-throttle return to the exhibition circuit, which seemed less a last-ditch effort to pump up the bankrupt trappings of high-Modern painting than a full-fledged reinvention of his practice. By taking one giant step backward and treating abstraction as a tradition with a localizable history rather than as a repository of disabling mythologies, Diao coaxed the medium of painting to register the conundrums with which he had for so long silently wrestled.
While some found the variations on Kasimir Malevich’s “0-10” exhibition with which Diao inaugurated his new offensive to be overrefined, almost melancholic testaments to the artist’s personal sense of artistic gridlock, others hailed the mix of homage and archeological curiosity as a convincing alternative to the then-current wave of less self-conscious appropriations. At the close of a decade dominated by the “neo-ism,” the strongest argument that can be made for Diao’s current show is that he has made the “neo”—the stylistic repetition—his subject matter.
The key works in the current show juxtapose two moments in the history of abstraction. Lesson #1 and Black Noise (all works, 1989), both of which combine a schematized image from Malevich with forms from Matisse cutouts, tap into the two constituent poles of Diao’s temperament: the artist as esthete and as utopian polemicist. These positions clash, and the paintings that result are as gorgeous as any thing the most unrepentant sensualist might ask for, yet they provide a framework within which their good-old-armchair quality reads as a point of dialectical tension rather than as a final resting place.
Cardinal Rule, Watch Out For False Friends pairs a signature Franz Kline image with one by Malevich. Knowing Diao’s attachment to the utopian politics associated with Malevich, one gets the feeling there is something here of a moralizing caution against confusing Kline’s hyped-up “neoism” with the “genuine” avant-garde moment represented by Russian Constructivism. Yet a reading of the work less bound by commonplace pieties would provoke us to ask just how social transformative capabilities were ever imputed to hard-edged abstraction in the first place. Diao has always looked to Constructivism as an ideal heavy with revolutionary cachet—as a place where left-leaning praxis and painting conspired happily—but here he may have inadvertently slain his own god. The work’s title clues us into Diao’s pedagogical intent, but the painting suggests that Kline and Malevich may be more comfortable as bedfellows than Diao would care to consider. (Ditto for Matisse.) Malevich may have come to stand for art’s utopian hopes while Matisse has gone down in history as the famously unapologetic bourgeois sensualist, but the best message of Diao’s paintings is the call to consider these myths and how they figure and inform current artistic practices. In the long run, Malevich’s austere edges have proved no more resistant to colonization by upscale taste than have Matisse’s lyrical flourishes.
Alfred Barr Jr.’s famously influential graph of Modern art’s progress has become a kind of critical talisman used to demonstrate the ideologically determined nature of artistic canon formation. Constructivism, as compared to Cubism, gets relatively short shrift in Barr’s schema. It is indeed a one-sided view of Modernism that serves and sustains institutionalized museum culture, and with the Barr lineage as key (presented in white on a chalkboard green canvas), Diao sets about rooting around in the archives of abstraction with the mission of exposing the movements that Barr’s dominant model represses. The references that figure in this show are too abundant to rehearse here, but the overall effect spurs a reconsideration of the tradition of abstraction, with all the tangled ideological messages that come attached. The great boon here is that by zeroing in on the contradictory legacies of Modernist abstraction that obsess him, Diao has set a process in motion that won’t let him play the pedagogue. The fruits the works deliver challenge and exceed the artist’s own sometimes stultifying good intentions.
—Jack Bankowsky
