ABSTRACT:
This exhibition review analyzes Al Hassan Issah’s debut solo exhibition in terms of the artist’s spatial approach to painting, which transgresses the traditional limits of the medium. One could suggest that the exhibition presents an altermodern criticism of the formalist ethos of modern art that is influenced by academic, mainstream art, and quotidian sources. The article argues that Issah’s formalism considers painting as a synthesis of structural, plastic, spatial, temporal, and aural forms.
“My aim is to make a painting for audiences to possibly walk through—not only to walk around or to merely see […] but something that creates or organises spaces.”
Al Hassan Issah (Issah 2021, 60)
Can painting transcend the symbolic task of representation? Is a painting always greater than the surface of its support and the boundaries of its shape? How can painting accede to its spatialness in terms of form? What happens to the experience of a painting when it is augmented with olfaction, touch, and sound? How can an essence of painting be sustained without repressing such excesses? These are a few of the questions that animate Ghanaian artist Al Hassan Issah’s works staged within the elevated one-room rectangular concrete extension of Nubuke Foundation and its exterior surroundings in Accra for his debut solo exhibition Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake.1 Issah’s practice begins with the medium of painting as a site of contestation and as the void within which to reflect on the possibilities of emergence regarding this art form. In recent years, the artist has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the limits of flatness, and the possible ways this essence in painting could be immanently affirmed and expanded.
The thesis of the exhibition could be summarized as a rethinking of the surface, structure, and experience of painting; in other words, rethinking the form of painting. The funky visual texture created by the sporadic layering of paint on Issah’s surfaces in the exhibition is inspired by the aging paint and/or posters on walls, kiosks, cars, and other non-habitable structures within and outside Kumasi. The range of works in the show depicts traces of influences from Sam Gilliam’s midcentury lyrical abstractionistic and unhinged materiality to the contemporary site-responsive and immersive paintings of Katharina Grosse (Issah 2021, 2–15).2 In addition to these is the influence of local metalsmiths and collaborators like Dotsey Atsagli, who specializes in bending iron. Atsagli’s work involves fashioning designs out of iron rods to be used for architectural ornamentation and fenestration (i.e., in the production of windows, doors, gates, burglarproof bars, balustrades, etc.). Designs such as Atsagli’s embellish mainstream and vernacular architecture, as well as temporary structures in the urban and inner-city areas of Kumasi. The motifs used in Issah’s repertoire are generally appropriated from Akan adinkra symbolism as well as from the floral/ornate designs associated with Arabesque, Baroque, and Victorian (Arts and Crafts Movement) decorative traditions and their indigenous adaptations in Islamic manuscripts, architecture (e.g., Tropical Modernism), furniture, interior, textile, and graphic design. The works in the show are generally made from steel pipe, cast aluminum, iron rod, and glass, and treated with acrylic paint, acid, emulsion paint, vegetable oil, scuba fabric (floral cut-outs), auto base paint, gold leaf, charcoal sticks, and charcoal powder.
The artist has connected the concerns raised in the exhibition, about the inadequacies of orthodox painting, to the retroactive [re]turn to three-dimensionality akin to postwar neo-avant-garde passions in terms of transgressing the structural crises within modernist painting and sculpture.3 In formalist critic Clement Greenberg’s (1960, 3) classic text titled “Modernist Painting,” he theorizes the limitations that constitute the medium of painting to be “the flat surface, the shape of the support, [and] the properties of the pigment.” The logic of self-definition, or purity, that he uses to justify this perspective attributes flatness as the “unique and exclusive” quality of pictorial art (Greenberg 1960, 3). For much of modernist painting the rectangular shape of the canvas acts as a “boundary, the end of the picture,” says Donald Judd (1965, 1). Indeed, Judd seemed to be alluding to the third question presented in the opening paragraph when he argues against Greenbergian idealism that all paintings are, in one way or another, spatial. “Anything on a surface,” Judd (1965, 2) avows, “has space behind it.” And staying with his counter-logic implies that depth—the third dimension—is always present, albeit aggressively suppressed, to keep the myth of two-dimensionality alive and exclusive to painting.
The consequent profanation of these established boundaries embarked upon by artists of this persuasion—whether by turning to deskilled production processes or dematerialization qua art (via conceptual art)—was also a turn toward the indeterminacy of art, with consequences for postmodernism in the decades that followed the 1960s and beyond.4 Issah’s concerns may recall these antecedent polemics in its desire to connect art and mass culture—to observe painting in everyday life and vice versa. The artist insists that he is making paintings, but paintings that reinterpret the essence of traditional painting.5 His position is also analogous to early twenty-first century artistic attitudes which attempted to “rethink the modern;” more specifically, to introduce an altermodernity facilitated by a radicant indifference.6 These concepts jettison the linear, centrist, and nostalgic interpretations of history and politics, in the quest to fashion a new modernity, an egalitarian one that emanates from the contradictions of late capitalist globalization in relation to contemporary art (Bourriaud 2009).7 The synchronic thesis underlying Bourriaud’s (2009, 22) extrapolation of the botanic concept observes that radicant aesthetics situate “one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, [while] denying them the power to completely define one’s identity.” Radicant art also inheres in “translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, [and] exchanging rather than imposing” (Bourriaud 2009, 22). Read in this light, Issah’s formalism could be said to practice an altermodern criticism of painting—an approach that embraces a synthesis of painting in structural (i.e., formalist), plastic, spatial, temporal, and aural dimensions.8
Issah’s radicant posture deploys strategies that do not a priori bracket out the surpluses always already present within a painting. This is perhaps most evident in the ways by which he “builds” paintings—accumulating layers of pigment and fabric cut-outs via hand-painting, collage, and spraying methods on the surfaces of canvas, metal, wood, and paper; manipulating unstretched paint-stained canvases on architectural facades and landscapes; and by using extra-painterly operations such as bending, forging, welding, and punching to construct forms. In this sense, it would seem that Issah, like Gilliam before him, “can’t help but be concerned with (the abolition of) the metaphysics of painting, bending it toward sculpture, folding it into music [and] letting it hang with performance so that […] painting is beside itself” (Moten 2020).
Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake9 countenances this commitment to experimentation in its constellation of assemblages sited in interior and exterior spaces: on the walls, floors, and ceiling. Before entering the grounds of the Nubuke Foundation, the visitor at the main gate encounters “Alidu and His Goat” (Figure 1). The gardens in the compound display “Eloquence of the Wind,” clustered installations of paint-stained canvases held with c-clips to steel pipes and wooden poles tilted at various angles and buried in the ground to mimic flags (Figure 2). A cursory inspection of the eastern and western facades of the flat horizontal concrete building reveals the treated canvases which have been folded, wrapped, and hung, namely “Salam” (Figure 2). Sited on the mezzanine are free-standing foldable “Biem Kekabom” and “Kuran Gawayi.”
Installation view of Alidu and His Goat from the car park (main gate) of Nubuke Foundation. Photo © Al Hassan Issah, 2021.
Installation views displaying Salam on the façade of Nubuke Extended and Eloquence of the Wind in the garden. Photo © Al Hassan Issah, 2021.
The main floor of the high-ceilinged gallery space displays objects leaned against the wall (“A Dream of Toffees and Spikes,” “A. I. B,” “Agudie ne npiaaw,” “Dangerous Kidney,” “Otonous” and “Sankofa”); free-standing objects (“Nana Yaa’s Flowers,” “Two loves and Kotodwe” and “Poma ne Pills”); two display cases fabricated from metal and glass showing the artist’s sketches, tools, and accessories used in the production process (“Dream State” and “Golden Genesis”); and “The Creation of Allos,” which are spear-esque compositions with melodically wrought iron rods near their tips (Figure 3).10 Permeating every part of this hall are acoustic images staged in the form of sounds montaged into a musical sequence. The four-and-a-half-minute composition softly loops post-produced grinding, sanding, cutting, welding, and hammering sounds in every section of the gallery space. Collages printed on sticker paper of varying sizes were also mounted at random locations in the city of Accra on planar, cylindrical, and folded surfaces.
Installation view of Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake in the main gallery. Photo © Al Hassan Issah, 2021.
The dissidence at play in Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake short circuits the absolute limits associated with traditional painting.11 Rather than consider a limit in terms of its finality, Issah seems to situate it in the molecular context of a conjunctive network of operations either at the beginning or in the middle of a process, but not necessarily at its end.12 By so doing he deterritorializes the space for his paintings to freely exist in the vitality of their ex-centered condition.
Footnotes
↵1. The exhibition title is adapted from the electronic song “Seduced by the Charm of a Mistake,” released by Late Night Jazz in 2019. The song was released on the album titled “1,000 Choices Can’t Be Wrong” under the imprint of Merlin Circle Records.
↵2. Issah writes about the influence these artists have had on his experimental approach to painting in his MFA dissertation.
↵3. For example, Neo-Concrétismo, Minimalist, Conceptual, and Pop artists. Issah explicitly engages these histories and polemics in his MFA dissertation (Issah 2021).
↵4. In Donald Judd’s (1965, 4) words, “[b]ecause the nature of three dimensions isn’t set, given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost anything.” This was the touch paper for proto-minimalist artist and architect Tony Smith when he was reflecting on the open-endedness of art by way of his quotidian ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the 1950s. Smith concluded that “[t]here is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it” (Smith as quoted in Foster 1996, 51). Michael Fried (1998, 148–172) then denounced this attitude as antithetical to art; for it apparently was not enough that a third dimension was being introduced into modernist art to undermine flatness and blur the distinction between painting and other forms of visual art. It was more, as duration—i.e., the relative and secular dimension of time—had also been invoked to further unsettle the transcendent and siteless temporality of the modernist artwork. While Fried regards this expansion (to include depth and time) as signaling the “negation of art,” Hal Foster (1996, 35–70), albeit with the benefit of hindsight, positively considers Smith’s epiphany to be “the crux of minimalism” which opens up new horizons for art and curating in the 1960s and in anticipating later practices such as site-specific, performance, institution-critical, land art, among others. Miwon Kwon (2002) loosely traces the genealogy of site-specificity as evolving from medium-specificity to the experiential (phenomenological), to the social/institutional, to the ethnographic turn in art in the 1990s which opened the space for discursive and community-oriented practices.
↵5. Issah has stated that “[b]y appropriating these materials and object-creation strategies into my artistic practice (which begins from painting), painting is exported into the everyday and the everyday object is also imported into painting. This mode of production, expands the limit of painting from its traditional two-dimensional orientation into a three-dimensional mode (which engages the public physically)” (Issah 2021, 99–100).
↵6. Nicolas Bourriaud (2009, 22) states that “contemporary creators are already laying the foundations for a radicant art—radicant being a term designating an organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances.”
↵7. For Bourriaud (2009, 17), “If twentieth century modernism was a purely Western cultural phenomenon, later picked up and inflected by artists the world over, today there remains the task of envisaging its global equivalent, that is, the task of inventing innovative modes of thought and artistic practices that would this time be directly informed by Africa, Latin America, or Asia and would integrate ways of thinking and acting current in, say, Nunavut, Lagos, or Bulgaria.”
↵8. I use “altermodern” here to further distinguish such later attitudes in contemporary art from, for example, the revisionist practices in the 1980s described by Terry Smith (2011) as “Remodernism.” While both tendencies express a desire to make art after modernism, artists with remodernist tendencies operated within postmodernist boundaries. However, Bourriaud’s (2009, 9) altermodernism aspires to “take a step beyond postmodern borderlines.” I use the term plastic to capture the quality of fluidity and radical transformation.
↵9. The exhibition, curated by Kwabena Agyare Yeboah, opened at Nubuke Foundation on December 18, 2021 and ran through March 12, 2022. To view more of Al Hassan Issah’s works, the reader may visit his Instagram account @ssanisa1.
↵10. They have been designed to stand on their own but are paradoxically displayed to achieve the rhythmic tension of upward- and downward-facing elements never quite converging.
↵11. One element that is common to the ensemble of spatial objects in the exhibition is paint. The artist’s obsessive coating of surfaces could be interpreted as a double bind: firstly, as a contrivance that “cures” the literal or “non-art” condition of the objects with a medley of colors, thereby securing them into the conventional parlance of painting. By the same token, this theatricality of surface treatment facilitates the singleness of identity unique to Issah’s spatial paintings and establishes their dissent to qualities such as part-by-partness, flatness, and [optical] weightlessness enshrined in modernist sculpture as such. Yet, it is as if every individual element—the colors, the protruding ornamental spikes, the curvilinear extensions—demands the spectator’s attention at the same time. Another effect of this tension is the internal dynamic between the expressionistic use of pigments and the flattening of surfaces achieved in gilding the ornate parts of the constructions.
↵12. I borrow this thought from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983, 175) as they write that “ ‘limit’ has many different meanings, since it can be at the beginning as an inaugural event, in the role of a matrix; or in the middle as a structural function ensuring the mediation of personages and the ground of their relations; or at the end as an eschatological determination.”
In this issue
Related Articles
Cited By...
- No citing articles found.