Animating Abstraction, Reimaging Representation: Monika Bravo's Vector Paintings Put Visual Consciousness In Hi-Res Perspective Animating Abstraction, Reimaging Representation: Monika Bravo's Vector Paintings Put Visual Consciousness In Hi-Res Perspective
By G. Roger Denson, Contributor
Cultural critic published with Parkett, Art in America, Bijutsu Techo and Duke U’s Cultural Politics
Feb 9, 2017, 02:07 AM EST
|Updated Feb 7, 2018
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform.
This is the sixth installment in the series, The 3D-Materialization of Art, an ongoing survey tracing the new and growing movement of highly-reflexive 3D spectacle and narrative art and activism. Made by artists who distance themselves from the commercial uses of 3D in motion pictures, television, advertising and gaming, the new 3D artists employ the same technology that the commercial industries use. The difference is the 3D-materialization artists extend the dematerializing values and strategies of Conceptual Art to digital imaging, narratives, mythopoetics, satires and paradigms that promote progressive and sustainable political, cultural and natural lifestyles for the present and future. The preceding Huffington Post features in the series include commentaries and criticisms on the 3D art of Claudia Hart, Kurt Hentschlaeger, Matthew Weinstein, Jonathan Monaghan and the bitforms gallery exhibition, Post Pictures: A New Generation of Pictorial Structuralists A related article includes the digital art of Morehshin Allahyari in a particularly global feminist context.
Much of the work discussed in this post can be viewed at the Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, through February 26, 2017.
It is rare that an art or a medium that is self-reflexive about its structure, its operations, its effects on the viewer, and about assuming a visual strategy that is largely abstract and process oriented, is also preoccupied with its own historicity, it's own capacity for pictorial representation, it's own conciliation of fiercely defended ideological oppositions. But these are just some of the contradictions posed by Monika Bravo's vector art of abstract-representation. Yes, abstract-representation sounds like a non sequitur, but the work that Bravo has exhibited at the Johannes Vogt Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is focused on making the conciliation of such opposites a presiding philosophy of vector art.
Even the passage from the street into the Vogt Gallery imposes its own powerful epiphany about opposites in dialectical relationship, about ideas outliving their time yet resisting the new order, in this case the ongoing and likely unreconcilable conflict between an ascendant cultural relativism and the political orthodoxy set on obstructing that relativism's advance. For upon reaching the gallery's location near the intersection of Chrystie Street and Canal, my attention could not but be drawn across the street by the huge yawning portal of the Manhattan Bridge sitting like some giant sphinx of modernist American engineering guarding against a newer, likely foreign technology. As my eye traced the bridge's ascent to the American continent that Manhattan Island defiantly remains aloof from culturally and aesthetically, I became aware that Bravo, a Columbian immigrant-turned-citizen, introduced her art in a sanctuary city more attuned to global history and culture than to the static provincialism of the continental United States, especially amid Trump's anti-relativist America. But as this particular series of work by Bravo is largely apolitical, I was grateful for once to escape the dark cloud looming over the nation to partake in a meditation on what new media and ancient media together can tell us about time and consciousness.
Inside the gallery, the digitally, seemingly-abstract animated paintings of Monika Bravo, and the inspired curating of Octavio Zaya, spoke to me of the vital new direction for painting. Should we call video painting? Definitely. In the 1960s and 1970s Dan Flavin, Marian Zazeela, and James Turell presented light as an essential formal component of both painting and sculpture. We're not calling it 'paint', after all, which is the skin of traditional painting. Painting is an optical art, and thereby light's color alone merits it to be called painting. But animation is not just revitalizing painting, but abstraction. That is abstraction that is both authentic and ironic (yet another pair of opposites to reconcile) in being taken up as vital components in the structure and language derived from the negotiation of abstraction and representation as renewed by the epoch of vector imaging. By understanding that abstraction and representation are two sides of the same coin, we also come to understand that abstraction isn't just a modern or Western invention, but a universal cognitive process that enabled the evolution of linguistic, visual and material expressions of representation since the dawn of human consciousness. In this larger sense of abstraction/representation as reciprocally interchanging within all meaningful structures, we mustn't get bogged down in the stylistic geometric abstraction that Bravo visits.