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Lot Essay
Study For Forward Retreat, 1986 is a classic example of Mark Tansey's questioning of Modernist orthodoxy. Employing sly wit and stunning technique, Tansey depicts a scene in which four horses gallop in one direction while their riders, seated backwards, focus their binoculars and intently gaze in the opposite direction. Reflected in a pool of water at the edge of a landscape littered with fractured cultural artifacts from eastern and western civilization, the image is inverted, creating a paradox of topsy-turvy dualities. Tansey invokes the original connotation of the "avant-garde," depicting the forward thinkers of Modernism in military attire, looking backwards as their horses propel them forward, and upon further examination we notice one of the riders is a polo player, suggesting that this game of Modernism should not take itself too seriously. The shards of history, including a fragment of a nineteenth century frame, a fallen totem pole, and several apples, (fallen from a still life? and devoured to the core) underscore the action of the avant-garde upon art history.
A study in name only, Study For Forward Retreat is the penultimate of several studies which put on full display the artist's tantalizing ingenuity in developing a painting. Mining a trove of "found images" the artist has culled and collected over the years from every imaginable source but primarily magazines, newspapers and art history, Tansey creates a collage by combining and recombining found images, distorting and enlarging, eliding and adding, until the composition reveals itself. Ranging from Edward Curtis' 19th century photographs of the West to Robert Smithson's exploration of land, Study For Forward Retreat showcases Tansey's ability to create images that "are the cover of a book not yet written" (in conversation with Mark Tansey). By denying a variable palette in his compositions, the artist's monochrome paintings emphasize analysis and reading. The art critic David Joselit notes that "Like the space of the mass media in which bits and pieces of information are broken loose from their historical grounding and freely recombined into novel configurations, the landscape Tansey describes is one in which radically dissimilar events and places can gracefully coexist. Although his use of grisaille reads most immediately as a reference to old photographs, it also recalls the space of film and television. And yet in spite of their metaphorical reflection on the mass media, the paintings refer to another era of art-historical pastiche: academic art of the 19th century. Through the historical displacement which this similarity suggests, Tansey is able to reflect on the present in images clothed by the conventions of the past. As the title of one recent painting Forward Retreat implies, he is approaching modernism from both sides at once, subjecting his paintings to a kind of temporal bending" (D. Joselit, "Wrinkles in Time; Mark Tansey," Art in America, June 1987, p. 109).
The "avant-garde" of the 1980s art world struggled with the notion of "The Death of Painting," as the denial of the art object in the 1970s Conceptual Art movement challenged the relevance of any art object, let alone the traditional medium of painting. Mark Tansey's art in turn challenges the theories and context of this new philosophy of text based deconstruction espoused by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and others. Tansey has explained that "Included in the art discourse of the early 1980s was a critique of representation that, in part, proposed a general opposition between representational painting and postmodern textuality...The underlying questions were: How does representation transform into text? Where does the pictorial rhetoric begin and where does the rhetorical text end?" (M. Tansey, quoted in J. Freeman, Mark Tansey, Los Angeles, 1993, p. 30).
Study For Forward Retreat serves as an investigation of a theme developed first in his masterful work title Triumph of the New York School from 1984 and now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. French and American soldiers convene in a manner reminiscent of Diego Velazquez's The Surrender of Breda, but upon examination, the pictorial metaphor becomes clear: the shift in the 20th century from Paris to New York as the center of the art world and the avant-garde. Andre Breton surrenders to Clement Greenberg, the momentous occasion captured on film by a kneeling photographer at the center of the composition as Rothko, Motherwell and Gorky stand opposite to Duchamp, Bonnard and Derain. Utilizing military terminology in this work as well as in Study For Forward Retreat, Tansey is explicitly questioning the battle of modernism: the reduction of art to no content and critical theory over the art object. Ultimately, Tansey confronts the existence of the avant-garde and its revolutionary fervor. The four horsemen in FORWARD RETREAT may be seen as apocalyptic figures, the avant garde trampling on civilization, but as they search for the elusive truth, are the riders going forward or backward, advancing or retreating?
A study in name only, Study For Forward Retreat is the penultimate of several studies which put on full display the artist's tantalizing ingenuity in developing a painting. Mining a trove of "found images" the artist has culled and collected over the years from every imaginable source but primarily magazines, newspapers and art history, Tansey creates a collage by combining and recombining found images, distorting and enlarging, eliding and adding, until the composition reveals itself. Ranging from Edward Curtis' 19th century photographs of the West to Robert Smithson's exploration of land, Study For Forward Retreat showcases Tansey's ability to create images that "are the cover of a book not yet written" (in conversation with Mark Tansey). By denying a variable palette in his compositions, the artist's monochrome paintings emphasize analysis and reading. The art critic David Joselit notes that "Like the space of the mass media in which bits and pieces of information are broken loose from their historical grounding and freely recombined into novel configurations, the landscape Tansey describes is one in which radically dissimilar events and places can gracefully coexist. Although his use of grisaille reads most immediately as a reference to old photographs, it also recalls the space of film and television. And yet in spite of their metaphorical reflection on the mass media, the paintings refer to another era of art-historical pastiche: academic art of the 19th century. Through the historical displacement which this similarity suggests, Tansey is able to reflect on the present in images clothed by the conventions of the past. As the title of one recent painting Forward Retreat implies, he is approaching modernism from both sides at once, subjecting his paintings to a kind of temporal bending" (D. Joselit, "Wrinkles in Time; Mark Tansey," Art in America, June 1987, p. 109).
The "avant-garde" of the 1980s art world struggled with the notion of "The Death of Painting," as the denial of the art object in the 1970s Conceptual Art movement challenged the relevance of any art object, let alone the traditional medium of painting. Mark Tansey's art in turn challenges the theories and context of this new philosophy of text based deconstruction espoused by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and others. Tansey has explained that "Included in the art discourse of the early 1980s was a critique of representation that, in part, proposed a general opposition between representational painting and postmodern textuality...The underlying questions were: How does representation transform into text? Where does the pictorial rhetoric begin and where does the rhetorical text end?" (M. Tansey, quoted in J. Freeman, Mark Tansey, Los Angeles, 1993, p. 30).
Study For Forward Retreat serves as an investigation of a theme developed first in his masterful work title Triumph of the New York School from 1984 and now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. French and American soldiers convene in a manner reminiscent of Diego Velazquez's The Surrender of Breda, but upon examination, the pictorial metaphor becomes clear: the shift in the 20th century from Paris to New York as the center of the art world and the avant-garde. Andre Breton surrenders to Clement Greenberg, the momentous occasion captured on film by a kneeling photographer at the center of the composition as Rothko, Motherwell and Gorky stand opposite to Duchamp, Bonnard and Derain. Utilizing military terminology in this work as well as in Study For Forward Retreat, Tansey is explicitly questioning the battle of modernism: the reduction of art to no content and critical theory over the art object. Ultimately, Tansey confronts the existence of the avant-garde and its revolutionary fervor. The four horsemen in FORWARD RETREAT may be seen as apocalyptic figures, the avant garde trampling on civilization, but as they search for the elusive truth, are the riders going forward or backward, advancing or retreating?