FUTURA2000 | FUTURA2020
Eric Firestone Press 2020
Essay by Carter Ratcli
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all the individuals who have made this long overdue exhibition for FUTURA2000 come to fruition. The team at ICNCLST, including Sky Gellatly, Nikle Guzijan, and Peter Brockman. My incredible sta : Alex DiJulio, Kara Winters, Jennifer Samet, Anne Habecker, Davis Brown and Dylan Varner, who have put in tireless hours to put this show together and open our new space at, 40 Great Jones Street, New York. ShiLei Wang for her thorough documentation and constant support of Lenny. And most importantly, to Lenny, thank you for your ultimate trust in my voice and curatorial vision. Those who are closest to you love and adore you. You are a true original and it’s an honor and a pleasure to call you my friend.
Eric Firestone
by ShiLei Wang
Photo
Seven feet high, five feet wide, FUTURA2000’s MOON, 2020, is a big, abstract painting of the kind that has been subject to detailed formal analysis since the late 1940s. With its high charge of sheer, pictorial energy, you could say that it is ripe for precisely that approach. Yet neither this work nor any other by this artist has received much formal scrutiny, even though he began to make abstract images in the late 1970s. That he began as a gra iti “writer” makes it easy to find the reason for this neglect.
In 1981, the critic Suzi Gablik included FUTURA2000, by then a renowned spray-paint virtuoso, in a survey of “the gra iti question.” “To many people,” she wrote, “the presence of gra iti in the environment has come to symbolize violation, social anarchy, and moral breakdown.” Intent on fairness, Gablik quotes Diego Cortez’s declaration that “gra iti should be looked at as a highly sophisticated art form which is the image of New York and is definitely the soul of the underground scene at the moment.” 1 When the topic is gra iti, the issues addressed have nearly always been moral and social, not pictorial.
In the 2006 catalog of The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974–1984, Carlo McCormick includes FUTURA2000 in a list ranging from Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson to Peter Schuy and Rhys Chatham—a wildly disparate array of gra iti “writers,”
INSPIRATION ON THE FLY
by Carter Ratcli
painters, composers, musicians, and performers. “In its phantasmagoria of subjectivities,” says McCormick, this milling population of downtown denizens “was like a cargo cult washed up on the shores of a most amazing island of cultural detritus—where the invention of self, art, culture, and space was concurrent with the re-imagining of place.” 2 Seen as agents of social-cultural-political turmoil, the gra iti “writers,” have been exempt—or excluded—from the formal analysis that the critic Clement Greenberg brought to bear, for example, on paintings by Hans Hofmann. Focusing on a single work, Greenberg critic would ask if Hofmann brings all his slabs of color into alignment with the picture plane. Is the space in the painting su iciently “optical” to count as purely pictorial? 3 As far I know, FUTURA’s paintings have never been subjected to an interrogation even vaguely resembling the Greenbergian kind. 4 Yet they should be, for they are more than ready to stand up to a fine-grained formal analysis.
Hovering in the upper right-hand corner of MOON is a brushy patch of white. Equal and opposite to this luminous form is the large blob of dark blue residing in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. Between the two forms an invisible line reaches from left to right and upward, thereby tracing the general drift of the gaze as it scans MOON and just about every other painting. Visual incidents may catch the eye along the way, yet this is vision’s overall trajectory when faced with a well-wrought work on canvas. Granted, most
FUTURA2000, MOON, detail, 2020. Spray paint, acrylic, varnish, oil and ink on canvas, 84 X 60 inches
Hans Hofmann, The Prey 1956. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley. © The estate of Hans Hofmann
FUTURA2000, THE OBSERVATION, 1983
Spray paint on canvas, 53½ x 70 inches. Collection of Henk Pijenburg
paintings do not take us all the way from lowerleft to upper-right. By doing so in MOON , FUTURA emphasizes—he celebrates—something we share: a habit or, better yet, a style of looking. Our gazes are dynamic and yet their energies are structured, though you could argue that pictorial structure comes first and shapes our seeing.
However that may be, FUTURA is unflaggingly alive to the formal possibilities built into the four-cornered universe of the canvas. Look at his ways of gesturing toward the virtual line in MOON . First there is the large spatter of bright blue curving down from upper left, its tendrils reaching nearly to the right-hand edge of the canvas. This form doesn’t challenge the rule of left-right-and-upward so much as acknowledge and flamboyantly revise it. The same feat is performed in a di erent manner by the broken arc, a form that in isolation would be no more than a graphic mark. In conjunction with the blue splatter, this sweeping, pulsing line becomes pictorial, as the two forms merge their energies and take possession of the surface.
It is impossible to say precisely how this works. Language is far from entirely adequate to works of
visual art and so formal analysis runs up against its own limits very quickly. One can note, nonetheless, that MOON succeeds as a painting because its elements—not only the spatter and the arc but also its cloudier forms and the floating, implicitly spinning atoms—all stand in elegantly taut relation to one another and to the rectangular form of the canvas. When a painting is resolved, every detail of form and placement matters. No doubt, but exactly how do they matter? Greenberg and a line of formalists reaching back to the eighteenth century have a simple but circular answer to this question: to understand how pictorial details matter, experience them in a purely pictorial mode and their significance will be self-evident. Yet that purity is empty. Happily, there are other ways to look at paintings.
Greenberg emerged in the late 1940s as a champion of Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, and others in the small band of painters who came to be known as Abstract Expressionists. While Greenberg zeroed in on form, his chief rival, Harold Rosenberg, looked for content. What, he asked, does the work of these artists mean? By 1952 Rosenberg was ready to explain
that an Abstract Expressionist did not simply make pictures. Driven by an urgent purpose, he “gesticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art to be.” 5 This is the key statement in Rosenberg’s “The American Action Painters,” an essay that continues to guide our responses to Abstract Expressionism.
Rosenberg’s theory of art as self-definition borrows a moralizing tone from the existentialist philosophy then in vogue. This idea renews itself every generation, as it has done ever since the 1820s, when the critic Thomas Carlyle surveyed Romanticism, still a new development in those days, and concluded that criticism now poses “a question mainly of a psychological sort, to be answered by discovering and delineating the peculiar nature of the poet from his poetry.” 6 The point of writing ambitious verse is to express oneself. As in poetry, so in painting: to create is to make oneself manifest to the world—an axiom
that shines a bright light on the gra iti “writers” whose work made such a stir in the New York of the 1970s.
Less expressive than declarative, a gra iti “tag” is a name writ large—Zephyr, Dondi, Fab 5 Freddy. As the “writer” Wasp put it, “You never stop writing your name, everybody does it, everybody wants to let the world know he’s alive.” 7 Then, in the early 1980s, FUTURA did something di erent. Rather than inscribe urban surfaces with a stylized signature, he let his name dissolve into a high-keyed field of streaks, geometric shapes, and bursts of sprayed-on color. Treating entire subway cars as canvases, he made the gra iti movement’s first abstract paintings. Observers saw a resemblance between these works and Wassily Kandinsky’s abstractions—a comparison that points to a quirk of nomenclature.
FUTURA2000 ’s “Break” train passing through the South Bronx, 1980.
© Martha Cooper
Writing the catalog notes to Cubism and Abstract Art, his 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr coined a new label: “Abstract Expressionism,” which he applied to the non-figurative paintings Kandinsky first made in 1911. 8 Echoing almost inaudibly for a decade, Barr’s phrase was heard at full volume in a review by Robert M. Coates, the art critic of The New Yorker. Writing about a Hans Hofmann show, in 1946, Coates called the painter a particularly impressive member of “what some people call the spatterand-daub school of painting and I, more politely, have christened Abstract Expressionism.” 9 Catching the art world’s ear this time, “Abstract Expressionism” became the label routinely applied to the generation of gestural painters led by Hofmann, Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and friends.
MOON doesn’t look like a Pollock drip painting or any of de Kooning’s impacted compositions, yet it has
the same large scale and improvisatory verve. Rosenberg said, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act.” 10 FUTURA’s painterly gestures are the traces of powerful actions, yet his imagery feels more exuberant than gladiatorial. With a confidence he has always been able to count on, he turns the daunting blankness of the canvas into an occasion for an unexpected response. So it can’t be said that FUTURA follows Rosenberg’s “action painter” into grim battle with the existential void. And the Abstract Expressionists resembled the mythical hero of the “action painter” essay chiefly in their willingness to jettison precedent and set out for new pictorial territory. FUTURA shares this willingness and if he fights anything it is bland predictability, the opponent that lies in wait every artist. Moreover, he wins.
The elements of MOON appear throughout this exhibition, endlessly reimagined and deployed in startling configurations. We know his pictorial repertory but we never know what he is going to do with it That any painting in the show could be seen as the origin of all the others is a sign of the immense coherence of FUTURA’s oeuvre. Within that larger unity are more localized ones—see CONCAVE and CONVEX , a pair of atom-filled paintings from 2020, which the artist’s unflagging inventiveness rescues from the mirror-relationship suggested by their titles. INSPIRATION , INDECISION , and INTUITION are the names of the paintings in another set of canvases, also from 2020. All three are rich with signs of inspiration
MOON in the studio. Photo by ShiLei Wang
working on the fly. INDECISION is no less inspired than INSPIRATION . If we insist on finding a message in these titles it would be that inspiration, indecision, and intuition are di erent designations of the same creative force—even indecision, which FUTURA2000 turns into the generative factor that makes his art open to an inexhaustible range of interpretations. Thus, to take an ironic cue from DIRECTION , the title of the fourth canvas in this series, there is not one but any number of directions to take through the multipart world opened up by these images.
We could, of course, narrow our reading down to the conclusion that FUTURA’s art, like that of the “action painter,” is about the artist. For Rosenberg, to paint is to create an up-to-the moment fragment of an autobiography. FUTURA’s art is less autobiographical than evidence of a self-possessed yet mercurial quality of being. His paintings convey the presence of an individual alert to the world’s myriad possibilities and
unfailingly graceful in addressing them. These qualities of grace and awareness give every canvas a liveliness tinged with a utopian spirit of reciprocity—everything is hyper-responsive to everything else, despite drastic di erences of hue, line, scale, and even style. Persuading di erences to cooperate in the construction of visual unities, he gives each image a relaxed but decisive rapport the four enclosing edges of the frame—and in a tondo like SPHERES IN SPACE THREE, 2020, it almost seems as if the compelling sweep of his gestures has turned the rectangular shape of the canvas into a circle. Whatever the format, FUTURA is a brilliant pictorial composer. And he is more.
The balance and counterbalance of composition has been with us for centuries. Having grasped—and mastered—this age-old way of organizing a painting, FUTURA made the transition from gra iti “writer” to
FUTURA2020 working in the studio. Photo by ShiLei Wang
artist. Not stopping there, he experimented with the “allover image,” a kind of pictorial structure seen first in paintings made during the mid-1940s by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. 11 Dispensing with composition’s hierarchical balance of disparate parts, alloverness puts in its place a field of pictorial incidents that sprawl over the canvas with no regard for its edges. The abstractions FUTURA unfurled across the exteriors of subway cars were allover images and he has made them ever since. See, for example, POLL WATCHERS, 2020, in this exhibition.
Just under five feet high and eighteen feet wide, POLL WATCHERS arranges verticals—lattice-like forms as well as streaks of orange and red—in a complex tempo that could easily continue beyond the right- and left-hand edges of the canvas. The painter
stopped when he ran out of canvas to fill, not because the internal structural of his image demanded it. This is the hallmark of alloverness: an incipiently infinite expansion, which we feel not only here but in the Minimalist grid, in Barnett Newman’s nearly empty fields of color, and in dripped paintings of Jackson Pollock. FUTURA makes the allover image his own with grand clouds of color and jagged bursts of drawing that sometimes resolve themselves into variations on Pointman, the personage the artist invented in 1988 for the cover of an album by UNKLE. Guided by the title of this painting and the prevailing political situation, we could see these figures as members of a numberless band of citizens—embodiments, perhaps. of the infinite watchfulness that the survival of democracy requires.
Left: FUTURA2020 working in the studio. Photo by 13thWitness
Opposite: FUTURA2020 working in the studio. Photo by ShiLei Wang
Notes
1. Suzi Gablik, “Report from New York: The Gra iti Question,” Art in America, October 1982, p. 36
2. Carlo McCormick, “A Crack in Time,” The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, ed. Marvin J. Taylor. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press; New York: Grey Art Gallery, 2006, pp. 71, 86
3. For Greenberg’s summary of his formalist principles, see Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 1960. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 4 vols., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, vol. 4 pp. 85-93
4. When Leonard Hilton McGurr took the name FUTURA2000, the millennium was decades in the future. After it arrived, he dropped “2000” often but not always. Now he uses the two names interchangeably.
5. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 1952. Reprinted in The Tradition of the New, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 31
6. Thomas Carlyle, “the State of German Literature,” 1827. Quoted in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1958, p. 226
7. Wasp, quoted in Suzi Gablik, “Report from New York: The Gra iti Question,” Art in America, p. 36
8. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Painting, exhibition catalog, 1936, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 64
9. Robert M. Coates, “The Art Galleries,” The New Yorker, March 30, 1946, p. 83.
10. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” The Tradition of the New, p. 26
11. Carter Ratcli , The Unacknowledged Equal, New York: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, 2020. Available for download at the Foundation’s website, pkf.org. Forthcoming in printed form later 2021.
DIRECTION 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS 90 X 120 INCHES
2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
FOLLOWING SPREAD
2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
PLUTO
MOON
SATURN
EARTH 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
FOLLOWING SPREAD
MERCURY 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
URANUS 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
VENUS 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
FOLLOWING SPREAD
JUPITER 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
MARS 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
84 X 60 INCHES
NEPTUNE
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, VARNISH, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
X 60 INCHES
INSPIRATION 2020
SPRAY PAINT, INK AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
96 X 72 INCHES
FOLLOWING SPREAD
INDECISION 2020
SPRAY PAINT, INK AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
96 X 72 INCHES
INTUITION 2020
SPRAY PAINT, INK AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
96 X 72 INCHES
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS 90 X 120 INCHES
INCEPTION 2020
90 X 120 INCHES
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, INK, OIL AND VARNISH ON CANVAS
FOLLOWING SPREAD
CONCAVE 2020
SPRAY PAINT, INK AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
96 X 72 INCHES
CONVEX 2020
SPRAY PAINT, INK AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
96 X 72 INCHES
SPHERES IN SPACE ONE 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC AND OIL ON CANVAS
48 X 48 INCHES
SPHERES IN SPACE TWO 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC AND OIL ON CANVAS
48 X 48 INCHES
SPHERES IN SPACE THREE 2020
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC, OIL AND INK ON CANVAS
40 X 40 INCHES
POLL WATCHERS 2020
56 X 216 INCHES
SIGNED LOWER CENTER: FUTURA
SPRAY PAINT, ACRYLIC AND INK ON CANVAS
