Mary Fitzgerald

Irish Arts Review

Mary FitzgeraldAuthor(s): John HutchinsonSource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 45-49Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491988 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

MARY FITZGERALD

M ary FitzGerald's artistic career has been marked by a well-defined

sense of purpose. When she graduated from Dublin's National College of Art and Design in 1977, she felt the need to refine her work, to reduce the elements of her style to their barest and purest essentials. Convinced that the most effective way to achieve this goal was to live in an environment where, as she once put it, "sloppiness was not tolerated", Mary FitzGerald applied for, and was awarded, scholarships at the University of Foreign Languages at Osaka and the Tama University of Fine Art in Tokyo. There she studied for two years, also visiting art galleries and paper-making villages in the mount ains, in order to observe at first hand the perfectionism of Japanese crafts

manship. But it was the nation's general pursuit of excellence that most im pressed her. "Everything is well thought out in Japan", she said shortly after her return to Ireland, "Perfection is taken for granted".

It was to be expected that Mary FitzGerald's enthusiasm for Japanese aesthetics would be reflected in her first one-person exhibition at the Oliver Dowling Gallery. And indeed it was; the calligraphic quality of many of the

motifs in the 'Painting-Drawings' bore an Oriental influence, as did the black and gold 'lacquer' that enlivened the surfaces of some of the works. The in fuence still remains, although her work has taken a different direction since then - paper has been replaced by can vas, and she now works on a much larger scale. In the meantime, her career continues to gather momentum. In 1983, for instance, she received a Guinness Peat Aviation Award; in 1985 she was one of four Irish representatives at the Sao Paulo Biennale, and last year she was awarded the prize for painting at EVA in Limerick.

Mary FitzGerald's paintings have always been resolutely abstract - an un fashionable characteristic in recent years, and one that is comparatively un common in such a young artist. Like. most such pictures, they are readily describable in formal terms, and they fit neatly into a conventional formal con text. FitzGerald's compositions, cur sorily viewed, seem to be the epitome of Clement Greenberg's 'modernist' art: they look like self-referential art objects, concerned only with pure form, flatness of surface, and gestural mark-making.

Art critic, John Hutchinson, analyses the painterly abstraction

of Mary FitzGerald's compositions and traces her pursuit of

excellence.

Hno2196Acyi,

Hanko 2, 1986. Acrylic, graphite on canvas, 230 x 70 cms.

But is this context the only appropriate one? Is Mary FitzGerald's work access ible to any other kind of analysis, and is it capable of expressing anything other than surface beauty?

These questions, of course, apply not only to Mary FitzGerald, but to all non objective art. As a generalization, most radical critics now tend to argue that abstract painting has had its day: the in fluential Victor Burgin, for example, believes that the majority of abstract paintings are virtually meaningless. " (Abstract art) does not transgress codes of representation", he has ob served; "it leaves them alone, thus ab andoning itself to ideological approp riation"." His is not a solitary position.

Other writers have accused important abstract painters of colluding with, or falling prey to, capitalist economics, thus rendering them artistically im potent.2 So, whether they like it or not, abstract painters currently have to face serious debate about the relevance of their work. Donald Kuspit summed up the issue in a recent article in Artforum:3 "Does it make sense to create abstract art today?" he asks. Several prominent abstract artists have themselves spoken of the bankruptcy of the mode. Most abstract art has now become either cor porate or academic design, and thus ne cessarily emptied of challenging mean ing. It is often only an arch breaking of the Modernist rules which fails to fund amentally change what a long time ago became a formalist game".

But further on in the same article, Kuspit acknowledged that this was not always so. Early abstraction, he wrote, was the expression of "dynamically in tegrated selfhood - selfhood conscious of its primitive instincts and balancing them"; in his view, artists like Mondrian and Malevich found themselves "de fending and preserving an archaic sense of "eternal" self in the face of a Modern world". Kuspit, however, didn't go the whole way with the artists themselves, who buttressed their work with refer ences to idealist metaphysics, and he was careful not to allow their paintings anything other than psychological auth enticity and emblematic meaning. "In non-objective art", he added, "the in stinctive feeling is incarnated in an irreducible form to match its own irred ucibility. These forms are then 'inter personalized' in a symbolic image, an image that for a tantalizing moment in

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

MARY FITZGERALD

the early century was taken as a kind of beacon of eternity, having significant - almost talismanic - effect in the world". Today, Kuspit wrote, the crux of the problems facing abstraction is "whether it can be responsive to new conditions, especially the post-Modern situation of critically looking back at the Modern experience".

But there is no conclusive reason why painterly abstraction cannot remain a meaningful, if understated, form of visual communication. Its ability to shock and its erstwhile avant-garde status have long since disappeared, but it is too soon to suppose that abstract ion, as a visual language, has exhausted its usefulness. Nor is abstraction in itself any more susceptible to 'ideological ap propriation' than any other form of painting, insofar as it has proved to be perfectly compatible with the dec orative tastes of affluent members of society. At worst, as T.W. Adorno once gloomily remarked, abstract art might mark "the ascendance of a future society free of fear and terror, or, more likely ... the harmony of abstract art is as de

ceptive as the society-wide euphoria in the first few decades after the European catastrophe".

It is against this background of scepti cism and disillusion with abstraction that

Mary FitzGerald must set her work if it is to take its place in a non-formalist context. But what is in no doubt is her growing mastery of the syntax of ab straction, which is amply demonstrated in two recent works, 'Axis II, Light to

Dark', and 'Axis III, Dark to Light'. Their main structure is conventional: both 'Axes' are based on grids, which from a formalist point of view, are quintessentially 'Modern'. For, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out,4 the grid reflects modern art's 'will to silence', and its resistance to narrative and discourse. The grid holds visual art in a realm of exclusive visuality and affirms the autonomy of art; it flattens, orders, and articulates only with refer ence to itself. It excludes the 'real' or 'natural', stressing instead the uniform space of a single surface. Thus whatever formal relationships take place within the grid are located in a world of their own, and define themselves against the grid, which has absolute stasis, no hier archy, no centre, no inflection, and complete purposelessness. In that respect the grid opposes development and leads to repetition.

But the paradox of the grid is that it can suggest relationships and being beyond itself. This is because there are two kinds of grid, which Krauss refers to as 'centrifugal' and 'centripetal'. The latter can be read as a metaphoric repre sentation of the boundaries of the world, and the eye is directed to the interior of the work in question, while the 'centrifugal' grid, on the other hand, can be seen as extending to infinity, and its pictorial parameters can be taken as arbitrary. Consequently, any work of art based on a 'centrifugal' grid can be read as a fragment of an unspecified whole; it begs acknowledgment of a world beyond the frame, and thus 'dematerializes' the picture surface.

Mary FitzGerald's 'Axes' are structur ed in this way. Both works are composed of a number of square canvases (measur ing approximately 2 feet x 2 feet), all of them individual units that could, theo retically, be viewed independently of the others. In 'Axis 11' the twenty squares form a rectangle, loosely focus sed on one almost white image, two units up and two from the left. Towards the extremities of the composition the canvases become darker, suggesting that if the series were to be extended, the additional units would continue to darken until they became completely black. The twenty canvases, therefore, create a 'centrifugal' grid, which can be read as an extract from a much larger composition or a central portion of an unspecified whole. There is, however, an alternative way of viewing 'Axis IF', and that is to take the wall on which the twenty units are hung as a positive space, 'gridded', as it were, by the super imposition of the paintings. This is hint ed at by the cruciform shapes within several of the units, which echo the interstices between the canvases. And it is, perhaps, the most appropriate approach to 'Axis 111', which is made up of only eight squares, for when seen in conjunction with 'Axis I1', the eye fills in the 'remainder' of the implied rect angle with blank wall-space. Neither way of viewing these works excludes the other: the eye and mind fluctuate between the two.

The same process takes place, in microcosm, in most of the individual canvases. While FitzGerald's composit ions create grids or partial grids in or on the surrounding space, the smaller grids, individual marks, brushstrokes, and planes of colour energize the squares.

As in the compositions as a whole, there is a flowing interchange between stillness and motion, the individual and the universal; and there are flowing curves across both works that can be seen as gestures of fractured continuity. These arcs, so muted that they seem almost imaginary, are codified signs of spontaneity and movement. Although carefully calculated, they suggest speed of execution and unconscious movement, which contrast vividly with the cool rationality of the grid.

FitzGerald's 'Axes', like Mondrian's abstract paintings, could be said to be founded on a Hegelian process of dia lectical oppositions, which implies a transcendent totality that will eventually reconcile the dualities. But her strategy is equally analagous to Oriental concepts of dynamic universality, which hold that every extreme contains within it the seeds of its opposite, and this is particu larly relevant in relation to the white/ black polarity that characterizes the 'Axis' paintings. And there are other points of contact between FitzGerald's work and eastern thought. It is now widely accepted that there are similari ties in the development of abstract art and that of psychoanalysis, in that they both had as their aim the discovery of repressed feelings and the formation of a stable identity, and from that point of view, the units in the two 'Axes' can be read as momentary acts of the self, juxtaposed against a timeless universal principle. A Buddhist might see the world in a similar way, because accord ing to their teachings, the 'self' is con

ceived as a concentration of forces that are brought into being and pass away in an instant - it has no permanence.

This analogy has precedents in Mary FitzGerald's earlier work. Rosalind Krauss has observed5 that the modern ist grid has its origins in nineteenth century Symbolist art, where it appears in the shape of windows. In images such as Redon's 'Day', she argues, the win dow is presented as simultaneously transparent and opaque: it reflects as

well as admits light, which first flows in and then is frozen into a world of auto referentiality, as if it were being locked into a space of its own undifferentiated being. This sense of 'frozen being' was evident in the 'Painting-Drawings' at FitzGerald's first exhibition at the Oliver Dowling Gallery in 1982. The works were made of sheets of colourless

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

MARY FITZGERALD

acrylic with pigmented lines etched on their undersides, which were then plac ed on top of drawings. Painterly marks were then applied to the upper surface of the acrylic sheets, and the total effect was one of layered perception: the 'Painting-Drawings' were the residue of actions captured at different moments of time, and viewed simultaneously.

Despite the large scale of 'Axis II' and 'Axis III', their effectiveness in vitaliz ing the space around them was com paratively limited; this aspect of their function was to some extent neutralized by the surrounding environment. As many modern painters have discover ed, one way of resisting this is to attempt to reappropriate the space by dominating it by sheer size of the work, or by force of numbers. Alternatively, the work can be correlated specifically

with the room or gallery at hand. This is what Mary FitzGerald attempted to achieve with 'The Drawing Room', her recent exhibition at the Oliver Dowling

Gallery, where her goal was, in effect, the use of the room as a site for con templative and dynamic visual experi ences, based on the interaction between the material nature of the paintings and their immaterial relationship with the space in which they were located.

Because of its various connotations - withdrawal, comfort, and so forth - the very notion of a 'Drawing Room' is tinged with aestheticism, suggesting that the room was designed to encourage a

way of seeing that is in some sense more refined than usual - perhaps in the

manner of a Japanese 'Tea Room', and it could be argued that a selection of abstract paintings created to fill a particular room comes dangerously close to a form of interior decoration. There would be some truth to this, and as the shifts in perception that 'The Drawing Room' stimulated were not 'critical' - in the sense, say, of Daniel

Buren's 'stripe' installations - the work

left itself very vulnerable to what Victor Burgin would call 'ideological appro priation'. But given a willingness to accept the 'immaterial' either as part of reality or at least as a concept that has psychological authenticity, 'The Drawing Room' offered a great deal more than aesthetic elegance.

The installation was circular, in that each of the six compositions led to its neighbour, whether the viewer walked round the room in a clockwise or anti clockwise direction. White led to yel low, cerulean blue, blue/black, black/ grey, and black/grey/white - or vice versa. The painting field was really the room and its white walls, and on it was set a series of formal relationships that seemed to be poised precariously on the very brink of discontinuity. It was a strategy that is perhaps best illustrated

with reference to the composition entitl ed 'Black to Graphite Grey', which was focussed on two tall, upright canvases that hung in the recessed spaces on either side of the mantelpiece in the gallery. Above the mantelpiece, on the left, were two smaller paintings of the same size, the higher one set slightly above the top edge of the vertical canvas beside it. Both the small can vases continued motifs that originated on the matrix picture, thus 'activating' the space between them. On the right side of the mantelpiece, another small painting, the same size as the two on the left, hung opposite the space between the latter; below it a horizontal canvas was placed almost centrally between the large canvas on the left and the top of the mantelpiece. The other vertical painting was hung in the right-hand recess. Thus, because of the predomin ance of white wall, the space itself came into play as a positive force - as signif icant, in its way, as the paintings them selves.

It has to be said that none of the other pieces in the exhibition had quite

the same drama as 'Black to Graphite Grey', for they seemed to inhabit their areas of wall-space rather than energize or redefine them; the totality of the installation was suggested by the consis tent and correlated colour relation ships of the individual works. And it

would be false to claim that Mary Fitz Gerald's abstraction reaches for the 'eternal' or 'transcendent' in the manner

of Malevich or Mondrian, although it is arguable that her paintings reflect a striving for absolute equilibrium that is, in some respects, spiritual. But in any case, Mary FitzGerald makes no such claims for her work. What is certain, though, is that she continues to broad en the parameters of her vision, and that her compositions, carefully analyz ed, reveal more than pleasant mark making and clever design. These accom plishments might not put her at the cutting edge of current artistic discourse, but, after all, we don't all suffer to the same degree from Post-Modern exist entialist doubts. Beyond critical self awareness and the knowledge that every

work of art is, to some extent, a contra dictory fiction, there is still a place for the art of harmonious reflection. And as Susan Sontag once remarked, "In reflect ive art, the form of the work of art is present in an emphatic way".6

John Hutchinson

NOTES

1. Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, Macmillan, 1986, p. 23.

2. See, for instance, Jean Fisher, "Modernist

Fables", Essay accompanying catalogue of 'Frank Stella, Works and New Graphics', ICA,

London, 1985. 3. Donald Kuspit, "Back to the Future", Artforum,

September, 1985.

4. Rosalind Krauss , "Grids", in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,

MIT Press, 1985, p. 16.

5. Rosalind Krauss, op. cit., p. 16.

6. Susan Sontag, "Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson", in A Susan Sontag Reader, Penguin, 1983, p. 123.

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Mary Fitzgerald

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