Art Basel, Miami Beach - Lévy Gorvy

Art Basel, Miami Beach

Miami Beach Convention Center
December 3 - 6, 2015

Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried
me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would
surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence
you don’t know.

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

—Samuel Beckett

From December 3 through 6, 2015, Dominique Lévy will present You Must Go On. I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On. at Art Basel Miami Beach (Booth K11). Featuring works by David Hammons, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Senga Nengudi, Thomas Schütte, Frank Stella, Rudolf Stingel, Günther Uecker, and Christopher Wool, this exhibition explores how, with Minimalist painting in the 1960s, the medium reached an endgame, a breaking point. After critics and curators alike decried painting as dead, however, artists continued to create, to go on, pushing past the previously conceived limits of the medium.

The exhibition takes its title from the closing lines of Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Here, the anonymous narrator’s interior monologue reaches an impasse: how, he asks himself, can he find a way to proceed at the cusp between narratives? His central concern is that he may be constructed by the very language that he speaks, his identity folding back on itself, made by the means of his own thinking. Thus, he realizes, he cannot exist outside the formal parameters of the medium by which he is formed. These lines reveal the dilemma inherent in such a construction: how might one continue to create, to exist, after the medium’s breaking point has been reached?

Written in 1953, Beckett’s novel stands as a literary corollary to postwar American painting. Intentionally and hermetically sealed off from social, historical, and expressive modes, the paintings of such artists as Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Robert Mangold represent the moment at which formal concerns turned in upon themselves. At this time, when the medium served only to represent itself, art became one and the same as the structures and supports that comprised it. You Must Go On. I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On. presents works by Martin, Stella, and Mangold next in proximity to several artists who responded to the call of Minimalism with Beckett’s staunch declaration: I’ll go on.

One such response—embodied by Post-Conceptual painters on view, Christopher Wool and Rudolf Stingel—was to self-reflexively reintegrate the history of painting onto the act of painting, thus opening the Minimalist gesture onto its own modes of production. Another response, taken up by David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, involved making use of the formal modalities of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism and applying them to larger social issues.

Such means of proceeding forward point directly back to the painting of the 1960s as the precipice, the decisive moment. Those who, by necessity, took up the provocation of going on after painting had closed in on itself could not merely continue: these artists repeatedly reckoned with their predecessors, reexamined the medium, and turned to the tropes of the past, often employing them to ironic or subversive ends. I’ll go on, they insisted, I’ll go on—by upending that which they were leaving behind, by referencing and re-appropriating their point of departure: formalist painting.

Image: Robert Motherwell, In Black and White, 1959. Oil on masonite. 9 x 12 inches (22.9 x 30.5 cm). Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

READ MORE

Selected Press

The New York Times | Frank Stella’s Favorite Cities for Art

November 1, 2017

The American artist Frank Stella, 81, best known for his Minimalist and abstract styles, will tell you …

More Information

Font Resize