Exhibition Review: Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake on view at Nubuke Foundation, Accra from December 18, 2021 to March 12, 2022
“My aim is to make a painting for audiences to possibly walk through— not only to walk around or to merely see […] but something that creates or organises spaces.” Al Hassan Issah (Issah 2021, 60)
Can painting transcend the symbolic task of respresentation? Is a painting always greater than the surface of its support and the boundaries of its shape? How can painting accede to its spatialness in terms of form? What happens to the experience of a painting when it is augmented with olfaction, touch, and sound? How can an essence of painting be sustained without repressing such excesses? These are a few of the questions that animate Ghanaian artist Al Hassan Issah’s works staged within the elevated one-room rectangular concrete extension of Nubuke Foundation (Figure 1) and its exterior surroundings in Accra for his debut solo exhibition Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake.[i] Issah’s practice begins with the medium of painting as a site of contestation and as the void (or space) within which to reflect on the possibilities of emergence regarding this art form. In recent years, the artist has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the limits of flatness, and the possible ways this essence in painting could be immanently affirmed and expanded.
The thesis of the exhibition could be summarized as a rethinking of the surface, structure and experience of painting— in other words, rethinking the form of painting. The funky visual texture created by the sporadic layering of paint on Issah’s surfaces in the exhibition is inspired by the ageing paint and/or posters on walls (commercial/domestic), kiosks, cars, and other non-habitable structures within and outside Kumasi. The irregular films of paint blotching the broad and narrow surfaces of his materials occur as a result of the tension caused by the separation between acrylic and vegetable oil. The wood, metal, and unstretched canvases on which these pigments are overlaid sometimes have visible brushstrokes and reveal drawings made in charcoal. These fabrications are generally made from steel pipe, cast aluminum, iron rod, plywood, glass, and treated with acrylic paint, acid, emulsion paint, vegetable oil, scuba fabric (floral cut-outs), autobase paint (automotive coating medium), gold leaf, charcoal sticks and charcoal powder. Prior to staging this exhibition at the Nubuke Foundation, some of the works had already been displayed in open parks, auto repair shops, and elsewhere in Kumasi, exposing them in such a way that people could break the distance between themselves and the art objects so as to touch or feel them.
The range of works in the show depicts traces of influences from Sam Gilliam’s mid-century lyrical abstractionistic and unhinged materiality to the contemporary site-responsive and immersive paintings of Katharina Grosse[ii] (Issah 2021, 2-15). In addition to these is the influence of local metalsmiths and collaborators like Dotsey Atsagli who specializes in bending iron. Atsagli’s work involves fashioning designs out of iron rods to be used for architectural ornamentation and fenestration (i.e. in the production of windows, doors, gates, burglarproofs, balustrades, etc.). Designs such as Atsagli’s embellish mainstream and vernacular architecture, as well as temporary structures in the urban and inner city areas of Kumasi.
The motifs used in Issah’s repertoire are generally appropriated from Akan Adinkra symbolism and the floral/ornate designs in the lineage of Arabesque, Baroque, and Victorian (Arts and Crafts Movement) decorative traditions and their indigenous adaptations in Islamic manuscripts, architecture (e.g. Tropical Modernism), furniture, interior, textile, and graphic design.
The artist indifferently inserts these conventional art, as well as crafts-based, kitsch and quotidian, references into his oeuvre. He has connected the concerns raised in the exhibition, about the inadequacies of orthodox painting, to the retroactive [re]turn to three-dimensionality akin to postwar neo-avant-garde passions (e.g. Neo-Concrétismo, Minimalist, Conceptual, and Pop artists) to transgress the structural crises within modernist painting and sculpture while challenging both to ultimately upend their given parameters[iii]. In formalist critic Clement Greenberg’s classic text titled “Modernist Painting,” he theorizes the limitations that constitute the medium of painting to be “the flat surface, the shape of the support, [and] the properties of the pigment” (Greenberg 1960, 3). The logic of self-definition, or purity, that he uses to justify this perspective attributes flatness as the “unique and exclusive” quality of pictorial art (Greenberg 1960, 3). But, for much of modernist painting the rectangular shape of the canvas acts as a “boundary, the end of the picture,” says Donald Judd (Judd 1965, 1). Indeed, Judd seemed to allude to the third question remarked in the opening paragraph when he contends against Greenbergian idealism that all paintings are, in one way or another, spatial. “Anything on a surface,” Judd avows, “has space behind it” (Judd 1965, 2). He takes this idea further by stating that “[t]wo colors on the same surface almost always lie on different depths. An even color, especially in oil paint, covering all or much of a painting is almost always both flat and infinitely spatial” (Judd 1965, 2). And staying with his immanentist counter-logic implies that depth, the third dimension, is always present but nonetheless suppressed to keep the myth of two-dimensionality alive and exclusive to modernist painting.
The consequent profanation of these established boundaries embarked upon by artists of this persuasion— whether by turning to deskilled production processes or to dematerialization qua art (via Conceptual art)—was also a turn towards the multiplicity of art, with consequences for postmodernism in the decades that followed the 1960s and beyond.[iv] In fact, this was the touch paper for proto-minimalist artist and architect Tony Smith when he was reflecting on the open-endedness of art by way of his quotidian ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the 1950s, in terms of the pictorial canons of modernism. He came to the conclusion that “[t]here is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it” (Smith as quoted in Foster 1996, 51). Incensed by this heresy, the poet and high modernist critic Michael Fried proceeded to denounce this attitude as antithetical to art; for it apparently was not enough that a third dimension was being introduced into modernist art to undermine flatness and to blur the distinction between painting and other forms of visual art. It was more, as duration—the relative and secular dimension of time—had also been invoked to further unsettle the transcendent and siteless temporality of the modernist artwork, potentially rendering it contingent to phenomenological and socio-political conditions (Fried 1998, 148-172). While Fried regards this expansion (to include depth and time) as signaling the “negation of art” (because it conflates fine art with theatre, and for Fried theatre is the concrete antithesis of modernist art),[v] Hal Foster, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, positively considers Smith’s epiphany to be “the crux of minimalism” (Foster 1996, 35-70) which opens up new horizons for art and curating in the 1960s and in anticipating later practices such as site-specific, performance, institution-critical, land art, among others.[vi]
Issah’s concerns at this historical moment may recall these antecedent polemics in its desire to connect art and mass culture—to observe painting in everyday life and vice versa. The artist insists that he is making paintings, but paintings that reinterpret the essence of traditional painting[vii]. His position is also analogous to early twenty-first century artistic attitudes which attempted to “rethink the modern;” more specifically, to introduce an altermodernity facilitated by a radicant[viii] indifference—to use the terms by curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud. These concepts jettison the linear, centrist and nostalgic interpretations of history and politics, in the quest to fashion out a new modernity, an egalitarian one that emanates from the contradictions of late capitalist globalization in relation to contemporary art (Bourriaud 2009).[ix] The synchronic thesis underlying Bourriaud’s extrapolation of the botanic concept observes that radicant aesthetics situate “one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, [while] denying them the power to completely define one’s identity” (Bourriaud 2009, 22). Radicant art also inheres in “translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, [and] exchanging rather than imposing” (Bourriaud 2009, 22). Read in this light, Issah’s formalism could be said to be one that practices an altermodern[x] criticism of painting— for it is by such logic, as I see it, that a consistent defense of approaching a polymorphic essence of painting can be made—an approach that, in Issah’s case, embraces a conjunctive synthesis of painting in structural (i.e. formalist), plastic, spatial, temporal, and aural dimensions[xi].
Issah’s radicant posture deploys strategies that do not a priori bracket out these surpluses always already present within painting. This is perhaps most evident in the ways by which he ‘builds’ paintings—accumulating layers of pigment and fabric cut-outs on the surfaces of canvas, metal, and wood via hand-painting, collage, spraying and transfer methods; manipulating unstretched paint-stained canvases on architectural facades and landscapes (figure 2); and by using extra-painterly operations such as bending, forging, welding and punching to construct forms. In this sense it would seem that Issah, like Gilliam before him, “can’t help but be concerned with (the abolition of) the metaphysics of painting, bending it toward sculpture, folding it into music [and] letting it hang with performance so that […] painting is beside itself” (Moten 2020). But what, for example, would situating painting beside itself mean if not to say in another way that painting as we know it takes a distance from itself and, as such, becomes overwhelmed with new destinies?
Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake[xii] countenances this commitment to experimentation in its constellation of assemblages sited in interior and exterior spaces: on the walls, floors, and ceiling. Before entering the Nubuke Foundation premises, the visitor at the main gate encounters “Alidu and His Goat”—partially-buried and serially-mounted compositions of double-sided canvases hanging on metal fabrications in the idiom of advertising banners and street lights (Figure 2). The gardens in the compound display “Eloquence of the Wind,” clustered installations of paint-stained canvases held with c-clips to steel pipes and wooden poles tilted at various angles and buried in the ground (with one shooting out of the roof) to mimic flags (Figure 1). A cursory inspection of the eastern and western facades of the flat horizontal concrete building reveal the treated canvases which have been folded, wrapped and hanged, namely “Salam” (Figure 1). Sited on the mezzanine are “Biem Kekabom” and “Kuran Gawayi”—two sets of free-standing foldable units, each with four vertically placed rectangular metal fabrications girded together at their corners.
The main floor of the high-ceilinged gallery space displays a distribution of objects leaned against the wall (“A Dream of Toffees and Spikes,” “A.I.B,” “Agudie ne npiaaw,” “Dangerous Kidney,” “Otonous” and “Sankofa”); free-standing objects (“Nana Yaa’s Flowers,” “Two loves and Kotodwe” and “Poma ne Pills”); two display cases fabricated with metal and glass showing the artist’s sketches, tools and accessories used in the production process (“Dream State” and “Golden Genesis”); and “The Creation of Allos,” which are spear-esque fabrications with melodically wrought iron rods near their tips, designed to stand on their own but paradoxically displayed to achieve the rhythmic tension of upward- and downward-facing elements nearly converging but never quite (Figure 3). Permeating every area of this hall are acoustic images staged in the form of sounds composed into a musical sequence. The four-and-a-half-minute montage softly loops post-produced grinding, sanding, cutting, welding, and hammering sounds in every section of the gallery space. Collages printed on sticker paper of varying sizes were also mounted at random locations in the city of Accra on planar, cylindrical, and folded surfaces.
One element that is common to the ensemble of spatial objects in the exhibition is paint. In this sense, the artist’s obsessive coating of surfaces could be interpreted as a doublebind; firstly as a contrivance which unconsciously desires to ‘cure’ the literal or “non-art” condition of the objects with a medley of colours, successfully securing them into the conventional parlance of painting. But by the same token, this theatricality of surface treatment facilitates the singleness of identity unique to Issah’s spatial paintings and establishes their dissent to qualities such as part-by-partness, flatness and [optical] weightlessness enshrined in modernist sculpture as such. Yet, it is as if each individual element—the colours, the collages, the protruding ornamental spikes, the linear and curvilinear details—is demanding the spectator’s attention at the same time (Figure 3). The internal dynamic between the expressionistic use of pigments and the flattening of surface (achieved in gilding the ornate parts of the constructions) is another effect of this tension.
The dissidence at play in Issah’s formalism, exemplified in Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake, short circuits the absolute limits associated with traditional painting. Perhaps the real issue at stake here has to do with the interpretation one brings to the question “What is a limit”? Rather than consider a limit in terms of its finality, the artist seems to situate it in the immanent and molecular context of a network of operations either at the beginning or in the middle of a process[xiii], and not necessarily at its end. By so doing Issah deterritorialises the space for his paintings to freely exist in the vitality of their ex-centered condition.
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Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana. He is a lecturer at the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and actively publishes essays on his blog: www.iubeezy.wordpress.com.
Author’s note: A version of this text has been published as “Reading Al Hassan Issah’s Radicant Formalism” in volume 25 of the Ghana Studies journal. See citation below:
Ohene-Ayeh, K. (2022). Reading Al Hassan Issah’s Radicant Formalism: Exhibition Review: Seduced by the Charms of a Mistake on View at Nubuke Foundation, Accra (December 18, 2021 to March 12, 2022). Ghana Studies 25, 215-222. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/879887.
List of References:
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2009. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foster, Hal. 1996. “The Crux of Minimalism.” In The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 35-70. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fried, Michael. 1998. “Art and Objecthood.” In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 148-172. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published 1967.
Greenberg, Clement. 1960. “Modernist Painting.” York University website. Accessed [November 14, 2021]. https://www.yorku.ca/yamlau/readings/greenberg_modernistPainting.pdf
Issah, Alhassan. 2021. Eloquence of the Wind, A Dream of Toffees and Spikes. Unpublished M.F.A Thesis, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
Judd, Donald. 1965. “Specific Objects.” The Berkeley Center for New Media website. Accessed [January 09, 2022]. http://atc.berkeley.edu/201/readings/judd-so.pdf
Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Moten, Fred. 2020. “The Circle With a Whole in the Middle.” Pace Gallery website, November 13. Accessed [December 20, 2021]. https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/circle-with-whole-in-middle-fred-moten-on-sam-gilliam/
Smith, Terry. 2011. Contemporary Art: World Currents. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Endnotes
[i] The exhibition title is adapted from the electronic song “Seduced by the Charm of a Mistake,” released by Late Night Jazz in 2019. The song was released on the album titled “1,000 Choices Can’t Be Wrong” under the imprint of Merlin Circle Records.
[ii] Issah writes about the influence these artists have had on his experimental approach to painting in his MFA dissertation.
[iii] Issah explicitly engages these histories and polemics in his unpublished MFA dissertation (Issah 2021).
[iv] In Donald Judd’s words, “[b]ecause the nature of three dimensions isn’t set, given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost anything.” (Judd 1965, 4).
[v] Fried contends that “what lies between the arts is theater” (Fried 1998, 164), and “theater has an audience— it exists for one— in a way the other arts do not; in fact, this more than anything else is what modernist sensibility finds intolerable in theater generally” (Fried 1998, 163). But further on in Fried’s exposition he distinguishes theatricality (which he equates to what he terms “objecthood”) as the quality distinct from theater that is opposed to modernist art as such.
[vi] Miwon Kwon loosely traces the genealogy of site-specifity as evolving from medium-specificity to the experiential (phenomenological), to the social/institutional, to the ethnographic turn in art in the 1990s which opened up the space for discursive and community-oriented practices. See Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
[vii] Issah has stated that “[b]y appropriating these materials and object-creation strategies into my artistic practice (which begins from painting), painting is exported into the everyday and the everyday object is also imported into painting. This mode of production, expands the limit of painting from its traditional two-dimensional orientation into a three-dimensional mode (which engages the public physically)” (Issah 2021, 99-100).
[viii] “[C]ontemporary creators are already laying the foundations for a radicant art—radicant being a term designating an organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances” (Bourriaud 2009, 22).
[ix] For Bourriaud, “If twentieth century modernism was a purely Western cultural phenomenon, later picked up and inflected by artists the world over, today there remains the task of envisaging its global equivalent, that is, the task of inventing innovative modes of thought and artistic practices that would this time be directly informed by Africa, Latin America, or Asia and would integrate ways of thinking and acting current in, say, Nunavut, Lagos, or Bulgaria” (Bourriaud 2009, 17).
[x] I use “altermodern” here to further distinguish such later attitudes in contemporary art from, for example, the revisionist practices in the 1980s described by Terry Smith as “Remodernism”. While both tendencies express a desire to make art after modernism, artists with remodernist tendencies operated within postmodernist boundaries, However, Bourriaud’s altermodernism aspires to “take a step beyond postmodern borderlines” (Bourriaud 2009, 9). For Terry Smith’s description of remodernism see Smith, Terry. 2011. Contemporary Art: World Currents. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
[xi] I use plastic to capture the quality of fluidity and radical transformation.
[xii] The exhibition, curated by Kwabena Agyare Yeboah, opened at Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana, on 18th December, 2021 and will run through 12th March 2022. To view more of Al Hassan Issah’s works the reader may visit his Instagram account @ssanisa1.
[xiii] I borrow this thought from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as they write that “”limit” has many different meanings, since it can be at the beginning as an inaugural event, in the role of a matrix; or in the middle as a structural function ensuring the mediation of personages and the ground of their relations; or at the end as an eschatological determination” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 175).
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