She Comes in Colours

There's a strong urge that builds within you the moment you step out of the final gallery in a blockbuster exhibition at a major museum and into that well-placed giftshop that blocks the exit, so well-placed that it's forehead-slappingly obvious that it's there, so first-year marketing, vulgar, insulting, and yet the urge surges within you to document this moment (which moment? seeing the show? entering the giftshop?), to get some sort of reminder that you were there, and you value that well-earned cynicism that allows you to read through the strategies of any advertising campaign no matter how lithe and dewy-eyed the models who gaze at you (yes, you) through the tv screen and into your world, yet you stand there gazing at Rothko nightlights and you check the price, like somehow, in some strange alternate universe you are going to take that wretchedly-produced post-Pop tchotchky and plug it into your wall so the soft glow of the cheap bulb can flicker near your baseboards and distract your cat for a while.

Remind yourself: what city are you in? Are you a tourist? Are you damp from the Maid of the Mist, standing in line behind Herb and Shirl from Topeka, with a small, soft, polarbear Mountie gripped in your hands? The main question you need to ask yourself is this: can you buy this in New York or London or Paris? If yes, and you're standing in the makeshift satellite giftshop at the TRANS-FORMATION AGO, put down the Frankenthaler keychain, ignore the Morris Louis coasters, and pick up the Jack Bush fridge magnet of Dazzle Red (1965) and feel good that you won't find this at MoMA or Tate Modern or the Pompidou.

The Shape of Colour at the Art Gallery of Ontario closes August 7 and it's a decent way to see some samples of a number of modern and latemodern treatments of colour. Worth seeing is a Robert Motherwell, a massive canvas of powder-blue and thin, jittery, black lines. Clifford Still's roughly painted work stands out as a particularly tactile piece, harsh, not pretty. Ellsworth Kelly's blue and white graphic work is cool and quiet while Barnett Newman and Guido Molinari represent two generations of explorations of large surfaces of colour, solid in every sense of the word, although the younger Molinari moves away from Newman's rigid formalism with a shimmering surface treatment, saturating rather than layering the surface. The intermediary generation are the oft-called second generation abstract expressionists, who awkwardly hold a position in the shadow of the minimalists while waiting for the colour field painters championed by Clement Greenberg (Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella) to mature. These second-wave abstract expressionists, represented here by Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, work with the raw canvas directly, staining the unprimed surface with pigment and oil and the subsequent years see the seepage of the linseed out from the colour and extending the shapes further. Louis and Frankenthaler tend to be rather minor figures, overshadowed by Noland and Stella in the 1960s, while the third generation abstract expressionists resolved the hesitancy of the second-gens, and learned to reconcile the shared language of the colour field artists and minimalists, famously pitted against each other by Greenberg and Michael Fried (think of it as something like the media-invented rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones). It's curious that one of the best examples of the third generation abstract expressionists, Brice Marden, is absent. Marden's extended body of work documents the genealogy of formalist painterly abstraction, from the Classical period of Pollock, Motherwell and Rothko through the half-step of the canvas stainers and finally into the endgame of the colour field painters and minimalism.

Like an afterthought, tucked away in a corner, is a sad little Sir Anthony Caro sculpture, red and deflated. This is what formalist painting did to sculpture. David Smith, Caro's immediate predecessor, created small works to be viewed on pedestals, to extend into the third dimension what the painters were doing on canvas. Of course, to Greenberg, the painters were making paintings that referred to their materiality, their existence as paintings, as paint on canvas, in the real world. That made the position of sculpture rather tenuous. It was a minor art in this particular world, and neither Smith nor Caro seemed to challenge this. Caro's innovation was to flatten the plane of the object. To view an Anthony Caro, one looked straight on, like a painting. It was a flat surface, as if not three dimensional. His more famous works were larger than Smith's and were usually placed on the floor but they were still within the grasp of the viewer as a flat object. Think of it as four views of lines and shapes on four flat picture planes. The Caro piece in The Shapes of Colour on the other hand, sits on the floor as if discarded, the only way to view it is to look down.

Sol LeWitt's monumental string-art installation is a wonder. Red and blue threads trace out large rectangular forms off the walls of one room, quivering. It's both overwhelming and delicate, Richard Serra as interpreted by a group of children.

3 to 1 Groovy Green, part of a series of collaborations between artist Charles Long and the Franco-Anglo band Stereolab, is the stand-out among the contemporary works. A green pod rests on a coffee table with a couch. The surface of the pod is shiny plastic. Listeners can sit on the couch and listen through one of three headsets that plays a loop of a Stereolab song written for the piece. Stereolab makes music that evokes an era of space-age optimism, retro lounge rock sung in mostly French, with la-la-las straight from A Man and a Woman. The pod, the table and the couch would look good in Wallpaper. The tangle of cords from the headsets disturb the polish, the fabricated gleam of a world-weary take on latemodern progressive design, what Long calls "bachelor pad formalism."

Me, I'm looking forward to Catherine the Great: Arts for the Empire: Masterpieces from the State Hermitage Museum, Russia, opening October 1, 2005 at the AGO. Bestial relations with horses never looked so good.*