Andrew Cerami, "White Rose", 24" x 22", 2017

MARCH 23RD, 2018
RESPONSE > PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Philadelphia-based artist Andrew Cerami’s work acts as an compelling entry point for a discussion on what the role of abstract art ought to be in the post-truth, post-abstract, post-political age. Focusing on his most recent collection titled Inner Body, I will offer two terms for discussion first the subjective a priori and second visual inertia. Through these coordinates, I suggest that there is a critical importance of rethinking the subjective a priori that highlights the consequences of one’s place in the pre-conditions of consciousness. This attends to the questions that the perception of visual inertia by which abstraction can demystify.

Currently, abstract art is widely understood  within the great philosophical community as dead and politically inert. The article Zombie Art- Not What You Think, by Anika Dačić  for WideWalls, suggests that abstraction has taken on specific conditions resulting in a fetishization by the market, the perception of the work being devoid of content, and ultimately lacking the original radical push that it once socially signified. This type of “Zombie Formalism” as defined by Dačić, through critic Walter Robinson, lacks conceptual grounding and is reliant on a type of mechanical reproduction. However, Dačić is careful to suggest that not all abstraction is falls into this category, but that abstraction must be vigilant of the derivative, and police its own criteria for success. This art historical and political-economic understanding  is limited in that is presupposes that the art community has agreed upon these criteria. Cerami’s Inner Body can activate, as a case study, a discussion surrounding access, agency, subjectivity and spontaneity., This work helps us ground the role of abstraction in broader discourse surrounding object-oriented ontologies highlighting a concern for what the materiality of his work activates. That is, unlike the critique of Zombie Formalism, Cerami’s work engages a renewed conceptual emphasis that is central to unpacking what ought to be the aesthetic criteria of abstract art.

Materially, Cerami’s Inner Body employs plaster, satin, charcoal, acrylic paint, casein paint, flash-paint, gesso, and glitter assembled in varying combinations. His broader works also utilize a fusion of multiple organic and manmade products such as chicken wire, satin, wood, straw dipped in plaster, and casein paint. As I suggested in the introduction, for his painting and sculpture, a designation that I feel almost uncomfortable making as his work resists traditional modes, the focus on the material is central to the work’s conceptual grounding. As Cerami suggested in our conversations, “A critical aspect of my active role as an artist is selecting and assimilating my materials.” Moreover, he notes, “Each material has a voice. A piece is like a choir of these voices. I like mixing traditional materials like plaster with modern materials like glitter. Materials can form juxtapositions that create energy. I like to ask myself: how can materials offset one another and create imbalance or tension?” This process of intuitive material selection, and the openness to unresolved tension, is central to the work’s success.       

Andrew Cerami, "Mother and Son", 52" x 40" x 36", 2016

Above all, Cerami’s work is constitutive of his concern and intention to attend to questions of the subjective a priori. In other words, out of Inner Body emerge, as a condition of his personal mediation, an attention to a shared pre-sensorial, pre-linguistic universal condition or, what he would call the “cosmic spark.” The subjective a priori in contrast to objective a posteriori are basic tenets of the philosophical tradition. Immanuel Kant suggests that by philosophically investigating these terms, the bedrock of the human condition emerges:through the a priori there are things we know before sensory experience that are outside of our ability to reason, things that offer transcendental apperception. Building upon Kant’s insights in Critique of Pure Reason, we can suggest that the consequences of such knowledge are radically important as it helps us better understand the role of the subjective experience in coming to understand the objective world that we live in. In other words, what are fundamental truths that emerge from the subjective experiences before he or she is ‘acted upon’ by the outside world by the agency of others? For Cerami, the consequences of this thinking helps the artist reflect not on questions of his own post-experience identity, but as I have suggested, a removal of the separation of otherness from the agency of materials and viewers. It is through this work that I see the role of abstraction building a relationship with a new politics of material’s inherent agency.

Just as Kant suggests that transcendental apperception is a place of subjective preconscious thought, Cerami’s work attends to the questions of intuition, through a fusion of a priori intuited pre-sensory metaphorical cognitions. This move invites the viewer into an abstract space activated by the centering of the material and the artist’s’ destabilized personal context. The subjective then becomes a place for the artist to seek deeper intuition. The purpose of the work then, in the context of intent, is to destabilize and leave meaning making to emerge from the spectators’ subjective speculation, out of the artists’ subjective meditation on the unconscious or limits of reason. Far from being devoid of meaning or walking dead, his work pushes and pulls. Thus asking the viewer to drift in and out of stable meaning.

Cerami’s concern for rethinking his practice outside of stable meaning and established conceptual restraints intertwines within the web of the subject/objects relationship to agency. The question however, rather than what does his subjective identity mean, is one that troubles identity in total. Should identity be seen as a type of restriction? Attending to what it means to not subscribe to a singular identity, engages in the more playful aspects of identity that are then for the artist a place of levity, limitlessness, and semantic drift. A perfect term to highlight the force of visual inertia as I propose it. By rethinking the role of abstraction in Cerami’s work, we set the stage for pronouncing the freedom to change one’s identity, through the sensitivity of the agency of the ‘Other’ that the subject can embody and combine with an attempt at resisting representation. Cerami notes, “there is reciprocal relationship between the agent and image, that, when resisted, seeks to address how and when the agent can act without getting trapped in its image.” This has led the artist to the principles of energy transformation that places his a priori subjectivity in a space that goes beyond default settings ascribed by the social-political.

What I am most drawn to is the language of the material’s desire for limitless play, in order to find the voice of the object’s own agency. By using glitter and pinks in Inner Body, the viewer is placed in a traditionally feminine chain of signification that is dependent on psychoanalytic and the question of lack and absence. The code of female and male is broken in more radical read of the works. The viewer then is placed in tension, as created with Cerami’s use of bold, dark black lines and aggressive movements activate and could signify traditional modes of masculinity. This contrast shows that if there is any sexuality in the work at all, it is surely not making a vulgar statement about what sexuality ought to be. Rather as Derrida suggests in his famous essay Structure Sign and Play that meaning drifts and is placed into freeplay. There is no singularity (monad) to be found in representation. He notes, “The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.” The attention to play thereby allows the viewer’s subjective experience to unfold not dependent on old mythologies or structures of what it is not. Moreover, although the nature of the line work penetrates spaces of reception in the color fields, I want to be careful to note they are not directly or limited to formal concerns. This is particularly true when we consider that the folding over of textures and embrace of both the line and color fields by the three dimensionality of the canvas emphasizes that there is something more adrift about meaning and representation begins suggested. Perhaps, a desire for something unrepresentative.

Cerami gives agency to material through his concern for this pre-sensory and radical spontaneity; this, in turn, empowers the viewer with an agency to deconstruct and experience the work through contradiction. In this sense, Cerami places Inner Body against deeper traditional metaphysical questions of the ether or nothingness, and a focus on what emerges out of subconscious thought when the artist places his intention as secondary to intuition. Hence, Cerami’s work recalls  post-minimalism of Eva Hesse or the Gutai artists in his focus on role of spontaneity and the decentering of form. Building upon Hesse in particular, the artist’s intention is to rethink the metaphysics of form by allowing form to be secondary to the objects place in a universal condition of spontaneity.

Inner Body as a collection also helps us to start our conversation concerning the attempt of the artist’s abstraction to represent energy no longer limited by the discourse of containment. That is to say, by addressing energy as a force that transcends representation, Cerami desires a way to question the limits of our ability to depict the true ontological nature of the force we call energy. Cerami addresses the essence of energy rather than energy as a subject of form that takes on both physical and spiritual engagements. For example, his work titled highlights the use of color, texture, line, and intuition. Although the work in general is best seen as a collection, during my studio visit I was transfixed by the ways his work “Shen” in particular represented the artist intentions and narrative this essay builds.

 Andrew Cerami, "Shen", 55" x 45", 2017 

What is clear is that through abstraction, nature as an assemblage (to hint at Spinoza) is omnipresent and revered. Here Cerami’s self-indicated influence of Giuseppe Penone is most relevant. I highlight this suggestion in that the connection to Cerami and Penone’s work both sees nature as a mythological actor in ways that that those familiar with Arte Povera movement would associate. By attempting to capture and confront the metaphysical essence of nature, Cerami’s work engages the viewer by acting against a type of misunderstanding of abstract representation as it relates to the static quality of visual representations of nature.  I see visual inertia as matter as lacking agency, assumed by a false understanding of the dynamic relationship between the viewer and the viewed. To propose this concept as a heuristic speaks to the physicality of the work, and grounds that the process of abstraction is ideally fitted to capture.

However, beyond the well-worn path of entropic investigations (where cyberbabble is as bad as psychobabble) it is critical to read the discourse surrounding abstraction as not working with energy as data/information/ Cerami’s work is an attempt to make information theory secondary to his obligations pulled from his intercessions on metaphysics. It is clear that by allowing the discourse of visual inertia to not worry itself about governors or regulators, either metaphorical, semiotic, or thermodynamic. To borrow Brian Massumi’s term, the very “force” of intuition and creative affectual sociality. This type of examination of consciousness is perhaps romantic, but I would suggest needed with walls forming around us.

I would accordingly propose that by applying visual inertia to abstraction we are able get beyond the territorial binaries of inside/outside and up/down male/female black/white. Thus, abstraction opens up to a new conversation, without binding to the historical mistakes of erasure. Particularly, the ways that recognition plays out concerning the role of abstraction in the more political aspects of agency and context. As Cerami suggests in his artist statement, “Through my work I experience myself as something beyond my self. My agency is inseparable from my context yet my agency can shape and evolve my context.” This complexity pushes back against the tired, intellectually retreaded point of view, even extending to the role of abstraction in unsettling the singular anthropomorphic horizon. Moreover, returning to the thesis of the subjective a priori, I believe that this highlights as a byproduct; that post-sensory outrage is not the zenith of artistic or philosophical insight. And, that the former ought to be constitutive of the complexities of the latter. As Kant famously suggests in Critique of Pure Reason “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Through the proposed trajectory of visual inertia, we acknowledge that there is still space for activation through a meditation on form, energy, and light beyond the gendering of outlets and plugs. Far from dead, this new abstraction is a place where theory and art can fuse and breath new life into discourses surrounding painting and material. Consequently, by addressing the subjective a priori through abstraction we can reclaim the political through artists, like Cerami, whose engagement with the subject/object dialectic uncouples art and our current self-directed and limited social projects to build upon something more playful. On a social imaginary level, this opens and builds upon new imaginative spaces that transcend the insistence on pragmatic possibilities. The question of if we can save abstraction from the derivative remains of consequence. However, by attending to visual inertia we clearly see that the project of abstraction is not the inert mindless space that others would claim. Instead a positive space through which we might approach an impossible utopia.

Andrew Cerami, "Delta", 46.5" x 15", 2017

J.A. Dowdall is a Ph.D. Candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dowdall's general intellectual work focuses on computational semiotics; cybernetics; and aesthetics. As part of his dissertation, he is currently working with RPI and IBM’s Cognitive Immersive Systems Lab. There he is examining the ways abstract art and philosophy can be utilized by engineers to create and challenge assumptions in the development of virtual reality/machine learning systems.

Andrew Cerami is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA.
andrewceramistudio.com

All images courtesy of the Artist.

RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.