Terminal Papers

Pousette-Dart’s insistence on the fundamentally spiritual nature of his own practice — and of artistic practice in general — helped marginalize him from mainstream art-world culture, but equally endeared him to acidheads and closet Jungians. On the other hand, the flat opticality and compositional virtuosity of his geometric abstractions kept him in the conversation — Manhattan-wise — well beyond the expiration dates of many of his AbEx comrades. Riding a rising tide of interest in pictorial semiotics and early-20th-century spiritualist abstraction, Pousette-Dart experienced a renewal of currency in the mid-’80s, and subsequently realized some of his most vigorous work.

As gifted visual linguists emerging in contradictory periods of critical context, Pousette-Dart and Hesse share more than they (or rather, their champions) would like to admit. Maybe the oddest correspondence between the two is the formal similarity of their work, supposedly created out of such critically divergent worldviews. In spite of the polar-opposite rationalizations they’ve been used to illustrate, and the essential difference that purists insist they perceive, their pictures raise the question: When Martians discover the ruins of our civilization in 50 years, will they be able to tell the concentric rings of Hesse’s Post-Minimal Systems from the concentric rings of Pousette-Dart’s AbEx Psychedelia? If not, why not?

Richard Pousette-Dart, Chromatic Dreams (1940s)

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