Cheetham’s Abstract Art Against Autonomy is a compelling if ultimately somewhat disappointing account of some trends in recent abstract art based on the premise that abstraction functions as a virus that infects other forms of art and ways of viewing. Instead of presenting the turn toward abstraction as the result of artistic discourse revolving around autonomy, Cheetham proposes a discourse on abstraction that argues in favor of the heteronymous, infectious effect of abstract art. This infectious dynamic of abstract art seems to be grounded in two arguments. A first argument is historical and goes back to Malevich, whose turn toward abstraction and theory of the additional element functions as the starting point for Cheetham’s book. He writes: ‘Because the additional element was explicitly modeled on the behavior of the tubercular bacillus, abstraction was construed by Malevich as a “disease” and put to work as both poison and cure in the Platonic and Derridean senses of the “pharmakon”.’ (8) The second argument has to do with the interaction between viewer and artwork and suggests that the artwork hs an infectious effect upon the viewer.
The use of infection as a concept that can open up our stagnated view on abstract art has certain potential, provided that the concept is able to move beyond the merely metaphorical. But more often than not Cheetham’s use of the words infectious and infection fails to have the conceptually enlightening function it aspires to. In many instances the ‘infectious’ qualities of abstraction are really not that clear and the use of this concept seems rather empty, if not ad hoc. One example: in criticizing Fried’s distinction between absorption and theatricality, Cheetham introduces the infectious as a third paradigm for engaging with a work of art. As opposed to the absorptive in Fried’s account, ‘in which the viewer and the work are held apart’, the infectious ‘model is indeed more literal in the sense that it acknowledges as a positive element the participation of the audience in the work.’ (46) One still wonders what the difference is, since the qualification that the viewer and the artwork are engage in a mutual relation that we could call infectious does not yet say anything about nature of that relation in certain historical periods (which was Fried’s aim in making a distinction between absorption and theatricality). Cheetham himself may have realized this too, since a few lines further down, when discussing Klein’s ‘sponge’ sculptures, he suggests that the infectious is not so much a separate category as it is a way of highlighting the literalness that comes with absorption: ‘[Klein’s] memorable sponge sculptures … were anthropomorphic bearers of “absorption” in a physical sense. The literalness of absorption was to be encouraged if art was to have a social force: theatricality of absorption defined the desired infection and transformation of the viewer through art.’ (45)
About Klein Cheetham argues: ‘Because Klein systematically took the monochrome beyond the frame of painting, our assessment of his legacy is a touchstone for how we construe abstraction since the 1960s.’ (56) This only makes sense if you accept the premise that the monochrome and the destruction of the frame are the two singular decisive breakthroughs in recent abstract painting. (The second premise is presumably influenced by Derrida’s account of painting and the frame.) But this just does not seem very convincing to me. At least not at first sight. It seems as if these premises, or at least the one about going beyond the frame, again indicate how much Cheetham’s definition of abstraction is overdetermined by the turn toward the conceptual in art.
As far as the premise on the monochrome is concerned, I am reminded of the following remark by Danto in After the End of Art: ‘Monochrome painting has its pleasure and victories, within the materialist aesthetic of the modernist narrative, but refining on the monochrome would correspond to a kind of wiping up operation in science, when, for example, one might fiddle with new data to get the orbit of the moon right.’ (141)
