Kim Anno: Shifting Ground

by Tirza Latimer

To leave something out, to change the implied gravity of the picture plane, to allow the viewer to complete the experience of the work, to conjure the familiar while foiling narrative expectations, these are the tools of the contemporary abstract painter.
Kim Anno

Kim Anno’s recent paintings renegotiate the givens of contemporary abstraction. Symptomatically, the surface, or support, has come to the fore in Anno’s work over the last decade. First, she abandoned canvas to paint on wood panels prepared with gold or silver leaf. “I wanted to consecrate my paintings in a secular way,” Anno explains. [Figs. 1&2: Gold Stripe, 1999; Ukiyo-e, #7, 2001] For those trained in the history of Western art, the use of precious metal leaf as a background calls to mind the devotional paintings of Italian primitive masters or, perhaps, Byzantine artifacts. Gold-leaf painting, though, has an even longer history (approximately 3000 years) as a traditional handcraft in China, Japan, India, and South Asia. For years Anno has studied “the contribution of Eastern influences in abstract thinking, so under-recognized in the West.” Thus the choice to work on wood panels surfaced with metal foil throws the art of painting into deep historical perspective and, at the same time, evokes a sphere of influence that migrates around the globe. Heterogeneity is a political as well as aesthetic choice for Anno. “Homogeneity,” she observes, “denies the full spectrum of cultural identities and perpetuates cultural hierarchies.”

Anno does not disclaim the influence of path-breaking artists in the field of twentieth-century Western abstraction, yet the celebrated names of the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline…) do not make her list. “As a student, I wanted to have these heroes but many fell flat. I wanted this because I knew there was urgency in me to recreate the abstract image, the illusive idea. The slippage between illusion and the non-real seemed so compelling.” When I posed questions about her creative lineage, I was surprised to hear Anno identify more sculptors and performers than painters--Janine Antoni, Rebecca Horn, and Barbara Turner Smith, among them. Practices that transgress the bounds national school as well as traditional genre--such as those of Lucio Fontana (a native Argentine and major contributor to the Italian Arte Povera movement) and Anish Kapoor (a Bombay-born artist who has worked in London since the 1970s)--have also sparked her imagination, she divulges. With this transgressive inclination in mind, I turned again to the panel paintings. I was able to appreciate the cultural mobility of the medium and to perceive how the gilded ground, along with the solidity and asymmetries of the wooden supports, imbues these paintings with sculptural dimensions.

Paradoxically, the application of metal foil also has a flattening effect. The flatness of these picture planes, in conjunction with the panels’ emphatic materiality, relates Anno’s work (albeit critically) to a narrative of art history outlined by Clement Greenberg in his classic 1961 essay about “Modernist Painting.” Moreover, the metal leaf Anno has employed, with its 4” square format, creates a grid-like pattern on the support, evoking the dominant substructure of modern and contemporary Western art. For Anno, the underlying grid also has a personal meaning. “My father was a physicist who worked on grid paper, and my process of working on grid paper, and then scaling the work up, was a way to have a dialogue with him.” The personal dimension of Anno’s practice is significant in that it challenges the assumption of rationality and cool objectivity that the modernist grid typically generates. “I became fascinated with these visual contradictions,” she recalls. The grid’s constitutive gilding carries with it decorative associations that, within the Western art world value system, code Anno’s panel paintings in socially as well as personally meaningful ways. “The decorative,” she asserts, “has female connotations; it is therefore perceived as superficial and, like costume and theatricality, intrinsically false. The real truth must be unadorned, pure, white, and Western.” Anno’s reclamation of decorative and non-Western vernaculars has strategic implications.

The choice affirms the political commitments of a generation of painters emerging in the 1970s, when artists such as Louise Fishman and Harmony Hammond rearticulated the conceits of male modernism in gender-neutralizing ways to arrive at abstract vocabularies of their own. Anno’s brushstrokes flow upon the silver or gold grids of her panel paintings to create a new calligraphic language redolent of her own commitments to both feminism and cultural diversity. Her “pictures of the floating world” deterritorialize abstraction. The lyricism of the brushstrokes evoke Japan’s Ukiyo-e masters of the Edo period, while the rich palette captures the vibrancy of Hildegarde of Bingen's medieval illuminations and the intensity of Tantric art. “The first time I made an abstract painting was a moment of ecstasy,” Anno declares. The remark illuminates her attraction to Tantric modes of expression. The scholar Ajit Mookerjee defines Tantra as “a creative mystery which impels us to transmute our actions more and more into inner awareness, not by ceasing to act but by transforming our acts into creative evolution.” It is the transformative energy of ancient forms of abstraction that Anno aspires to tap.

At the same time (and with defiant incongruity), her work engages with Western gestural abstraction, or “action painting,” to employ the phrase coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg in the 1950s. According to Rosenberg, in his essay “The American Action Painters,” the canvas represents “an arena in which to act.” Rosenberg conceived of the paintings produced by Pollock and his contemporaries as the residue of their creative struggles. Both Rosenberg’s seminal essay and Clement Greenberg’s roughly contemporaneous piece, “American-Type Painting,” effectively establish the U.S., and more specifically New York, as the geographic epicenter of post-World-War-II artistic life, supplanting Paris. Anno, born in Los Angeles to mixed-race parents, assimilates cultural references in her work that pay tribute to California’s eastward orientation on the Pacific Rim, while also evincing conversancy with key European and American trends. In this way, Anno intervenes into the exclusionary narratives proposed by the American critical establishment, re-gendering artistic “action” (thus, artistic agency) while globalizing abstract expressionism.

Her paintings are confident, even grandiose, but do not register as “heroic.” They tend to remain in the range of human reach. Although she sometimes employs improvised tools and prosthetic devices, she uses the extensions not to work on a larger-than-life scale but to vary her spatial relation to the painting during the creative process. Whether traced by a brush, an improvised tool, or a finger, “the line is a mark of the human hand,” she insists. “Line,” she adds, “was first a thread or a stripe that could be found in a garment that a human being might wear….The threads are altered by the weaver as well as the person who wears them.” Line, then, “marks the presence of the figure without picturing the figure.” In this way, Anno’s paintings may be viewed as self-portraits, revealing aspects of both the artist’s person and her personality: her physicality, her sensuality, her multicultural allegiances. “Content is important to me, but I want to leave the viewer free to decide what the content means.” She embraces abstraction because it resists the kind of interpretive closure that figuration might solicit, but, at the same time, she does not disdain narration. “I want to make the last abstract painting I can make before it becomes narrative,” she explains.

Fearing that the grid would eventually “predict a certain way of working” and that this, in turn, would impose habits of viewing, Anno broke her working pattern in 2003 to experiment with the use of aluminum “canvases.” [Fig. 3, Wind, 2006] At the suggestion of Harmony Hammond, she began painting directly on metal. “This was initially to eliminate the omnipresent grid” she confirms, “which had become restrictive. I needed a more neutral ground plane. The metal offered an illusive quality. It’s more ambiguous. Sometimes it looks really deep in space, and other times it looks flat or unusual, distant from everyday life.” Abandoning the irregular wood panels embellished by metal leaf to opt for an industrially produced material, Anno positioned herself to make a significant intervention into to the aesthetics of canonical minimalism. Rather than vaunting the cool anonymity and machine-made perfection of the industrial material (as male minimalists such as Carl André or Donald Judd have done), Anno “messes with” the metallic surface, “roughing it up” for the paint to adhere. “This creates an image gestalt to work with or against,” she claims. Moreover, this preliminary scouring lays down the first layer of marking that transforms the aluminum itself into an expressive medium, troubling the dichotomous distinction between machine-produced and hand-crafted. The abrasions tone down (but do not cancel) the reflective quality of the metal. An underlying glow shows through the water-like patterns left by notched tools that the artist fashions out of vinyl coving. The metal ground gives Anno the flexibility to trace lines or create fields of color by removing as well as applying paint, registering every stage of the creative process.

A similar sense of fluidity characterizes Anno’s recent works on paper. [Fig. 4, Smoke, 2007] In 2007, Anno began an on-going artists' book project, Sleep, with the poet Anne Carson. Here, Carson reflects on Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). As the title Sleep suggests, both the imagery and the text explore notions of unconsciousness. For this project, Anno produced black and white photographs of pigments and objects floating in water. Page by page, the book appears to submerge. Carson’s text, printed face to face with Anno’s images, dialogs with the visual prompts while responding to Proustian passages where the narrator contemplates the dream life of the protagonist Albertine. Words (“irrefutables, irréparables, innomables, imprévisibles, imperturbables...”) flow like threads of ink slowly dissolving in water.

Lately, Anno’s painting has undergone a sea change that, in retrospect, seems to have been forecast by these works on paper. “I started pouring white grounds that are very fluid onto the metal, and working on top of that. The white paint gives me a different kind of color spectrum than working on bare metal.” These almost accidental looking white spills create “floating islands of ground on the metal” and introduce the new streams of poetic association apparent in the works exposed in Liquescent. We think of white as a “neutral” color, but the neutrality of white has been achieved through a long and culturally invested process of naturalization. Anno’s paintings stage a productive encounter between the white ground conventional in modern Western art and the less historically charged aluminum support. The resulting contrast highlights the artificiality of white’s blankness while permitting Anno to mobilize the connotations white inevitably carries (white is pure, white is sublime). [Fig 5: Rose Snow, 2008] White here functions as trope reflecting the artist’s ecological consciousness: icy landscapes melt into the sea. These are not quiet paintings. They are charged with the strange beauty of unnatural catastrophe and animated by the elemental tensions of a cycle that transforms solid to liquid, liquid to vapor. They are both more theatrical than her earlier paintings (freezing a moment in an unfolding drama) and more detached (the drama is viewed from a distant, disembodied perspective). Yet, as in her earlier wood panel paintings and first experimental works on aluminum, Anno persists in creating zones of contact between elements commonly understood as opposites. The cerebral and the sensual form inseparable bonds. The edges that separate East and West, ancient and modern, figuration and abstraction, words and images, dissolve. Here, Anno fully revels in the unruly processes of visual reorientation to create paintings that provoke passionate aesthetic emotions and, at the same time, stimulate complex thought.