If you’re an artist, and your good friend is a monk, what does it say about your work, or what it means to be an artist, if that friend finds a use for your paintings as a meditative guide, or an aid for prayer? And how can something so rigorously derived from a process of total negation produce an outcome that is so fulfilling? Beyond the overwhelmingly quiet sensorial experience on offer, these were the questions I found myself returning to after I left the exquisite exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s masterful black paintings on view at David Zwirner.
This exhibition provides the first opportunity to experience a room of what Reinhardt described as his “ultimate” black paintings since a 1991 retrospective. All works are on loan either from public or private collections and are installed in such a way as to allow for the most complete visual exploration of the surfaces as possible–totally even lighting and plenty of space–although proximity is unfortunately, though understandably, limited by stanchions that ring the entire gallery.
There is not much I can add to what has already been well documented about what it is to experience these works and the fantastic depth which emerges from extended, patient, and open viewing. Nor would it be productive to delve into Reinhardt’s notoriously reductive process, which is also well documented through the artist’s own journals, whereby he undertook to eliminate nearly every crutch available to the contemporary artist in search of a total negation of all things pictorial.
What I find interesting, beyond the transcendent visual experience, is how effectively these works continue to function as a form of protest even today, roughly 50 years after their production. By crafting images that require time and patience to fully reveal themselves, Reinhardt refuses to placate the passive viewer. Laziness will get you nowhere here, a particularly refreshing position in a culture that continually rewards increasing vulgarity across all things. The fact that it took one of the most, to be blunt, monied galleries on the planet to produce this exhibition, all while Macklemore is popping tags, adds to the complexity of the experience.
But what of my lingering questions? Thomas Merton described the black painting he commissioned from Reinhardt as a “holy” picture, and Reinhardt’s own writings often struggle with contradictory ideas where he approaches a full intuiting of something divine via his continual push toward total negation. In my own experience, the black paintings provide, when I am at my best as a viewer, not only an experience of surprisingly boundless depth, but an opportunity to transcend the perpetual distractions that characterize nearly every aspect of the current moment. The deep sense of self healing and abstract, emotive meaning that can be derived from such an experience is completely indescribable, in ways similar to those elusive yet powerful moments of self understanding offered by a psychedelic experience. In this sense, the black paintings are not dark at all, but instead become radiant, illuminating not only the soulless limitations inherent in current cultural obsessions, but the absolute freedom that can be found through a commitment to reduction.