Entrée de l'exposition "La peinture est presque abstraite". Le transpalette, Bourges, 2009

Almost... but Not quite...
by David Ryan
 

Nearly ten years ago I was introduced to a painter in Mexico City. He told me about his involvement with a project devoted to creating a museum of abstract art; deep in the heart of Mexico, the future museum and the home of the project was to be a disused prison. The cells were projected galleries constituting different ‘wings’ of practices and genres of abstraction. Nobody could doubt this particular painter’s enthusiasm for, or dedication to, this project – he was a modernist painter of an older generation and a participant in the development of abstraction in Mexico under the auspices of European–orientated intellectuals such as Octavio Paz who favoured cultural modernism over nationalistic imagism. As it turned out, the project itself was eventually realised in, as far as I know, another location and with a different inflection from its original conception, becoming much more personalised in its scope. But, as a purely conjectural image or idea, the possibility of this museum of abstraction housed in a prison remained intriguing in itself. On one level, however, it would seem deeply unappealing that abstraction at the beginning of a new century could be presented, or even thought of, as all but hermetically sealed in the various wings of a prison house (even in this localised context). And what, it should be asked, is the meaning of isolating abstract art? How would such a project be organised? What would be categorised as bone fide abstract and what would not? Where would it ‘start’ and ‘end’? These questions also plague how we conceive of the practice and history of abstraction today, and this proposed ‘museum of abstract art’ would imply abstraction’s completion as a project in itself; as an image, albeit unintentional, the ‘prison house of abstraction’ might sum up what so many have longed to escape ever since abstraction was projected as the core of modernism, with an infallible sense of vanguardism or historical sense of mission.
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David Ryan - Almost... but Not quite...