THE CIRCULARITY OF HISTORY / Daniel Sturgis on Ross Bleckner at Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Ross Bleckner demanded as a young painter that art objects had to connect to a “larger psychological, social, and political reality.”#A1 In “Transcendent Anti-Fetishism” he argued that painting needed to address emotional as well as aesthetic demands. Written when he was 30, this text can be characterized as a call for a return of content after the supposedly arid feeling of much of the minimalist and post-minimalist works being made at the time. The essay was published in 1979, the year that Bleckner had his first solo exhibition at Mary Boone, and when his work also had its first international outing in London, at the Hayward Gallery. This exhibition – “New Painting – New York” – curated by Catherine Lampert following advice from the painter John Walker, pitted Bleckner’s paintings not against work by his close colleagues, such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle, whom Bleckner had featured in his article, but rather against “stubborn painters” whom Lampert felt “had assiduously and knowledgably […] drawn guidance from masterpieces of the past.”#A2 These artists included Jerry Zeniuk, Joe Zucker, and Elizabeth Murray, all older than Bleckner and more upbeat in their work. Bleckner exhibited Kristallnacht (1978), a painting that responds allegorically to the horrors of the Holocaust. In doing so, the work draws from the artist’s own Jewish heritage, as many of Bleckner’s works have done, and seems a far cry from the pick-and-mix appropriation that “divorced form from content” in the works of Salle, Schnabel and other artists associated with neo-expressionism. Bleckner’s attachment to content – both historical and allegorical – is one of the things that differentiated his work, then as it does now, from that of his peers.