2 Painters: Charles Clough and Mimi Thompson
William Olander
The New Museum, New York, N.Y. Nov ember 1987—January 1988 (by the publisher’s
permission)

(William Olander was a curator at the New Museum until his death in 1989.) Much attention has been paid in the last few years to the resurgence of abstract painting, either in its late modern form (the work of, for example, Elizabeth Murray, Sean Scully, and Gary Stephan) or its revivalist, postmodern development (the generation of artists, such as Peter Halley, Peter Schuyff, and Philip Taaffe). Too little attention, however, has been paid to yet another option: workwhich is skeptical of the first, suspending belief in the humanist tradition of modern painting, with its continuing faith; and self-consciously aware but uninterested personally in the second—sidestepping irony and appropriation in favor of something more “felt” if not more genuine. Key figures in the evolution of this curious dialectic include Jasper Johns, Joan Snyder, and Cy Twombly. More recent figures include Ross Bleckner, Carroll Dunham, and Deborah Kass. To the latter, I want to add Charles Clough and Mimi Thompson. Charles Clough is well known for the strange hybrids of painting and photography which he developed over the last decade. Indeed, if they had not been so curious and so hybrid—if one or the other of the photographic or painterly aspects had been more prominent—Clough could probably have counted on a secure place in the postmodern canon, either in the progressive arm, identified with appropriation, or the retro arm, associated with Neoexpressionism. But since the beginning, he has been unwilling to disentangle either himself or his work from the various issues, even though of late he has devoted himself almost exclusively to painting. This shift, however, has not clarified matters. On the contrary, it has only made the state of his art more complex and contradictory. For instance, when I first saw Clough’s new paintings, I was unavoidably reminded of the “lyrical abstractions” of that second generation of color field painters which emerged in the late1960s—work by Darby Bannard, Dan Christiansen, and David Diao—which was an attempt to extend the perimeters of late modern painting. That someone so sophisticated as Clough would turn to work so debased, and in the likes of LeRoy Nieman or Paul Jenkins, whose pictures currently function within the culture not as paintings but as signs of paintings. (It’s not surprising that the Hollywood version of a painter, in films like An Unmarried Woman and Legal Eagles, is now a stainpainter, like Jenkins, rather than an expressionist—a Picasso or Pollock.) From out of this amalgam, Clough has developed yet another hybrid—a painting which is simultaneously genuine and artificial, cultural and natural, full and empty, without resorting, overtly at least, to the ideological apparatuses of late modernism. Although Mimi Thompson’s work does not tread so firmly on that line which separates the artificial from the natural, as does Clough’s, on first viewing it too has a mildly off-putting atmosphere about it. The colors are too bright or garish or wildly synthetic; the way the paint has been applied lacks finesse, as if the artist did it with her eyes closed, or as if there is no interest in the way the paint is laid down; the grounds are too pretty (hot pink, lime green) or too flat (beige); the whole look is too stereotypically “feminine.” And then there are those awkward shapes which don’t resemble anything
so much as arbitrary markings, and those too-tall canvases. But given time, we begin to warm up to this eccentric vision. I start to notice that certain forms are repeated from painting to painting; that areas of paint which look so flat have a resonance of their own; that the colors are not so garish as popular. Indeed, the paintings begin to look both pop (as much as an abstract painting can be pop) and expressionist, without exactly engaging in the rhetoric of either. As Thompson says,“Ambiguity...can create a vocabulary that resembles a backward thesaurus.” In many ways, our appreciation of both of these artists’work operates in a similarly backward manner. The paintings have to be metaphorically unfolded, laid out and then put backn together—deconstructed, if you will. Once accomplished (and this is a timely and time-consuming process: these paintings do not give up their secrets easily), we can begin to experience the pleasure that is the act of looking at paintings, and we can recognize, in Thompson’s words, “the point where tension holds and there is a kind of hum,” and in Clough’s, “the indispensability of illusion, illusion and simulation, ‘not what it looks like...other than it looks.’”