Amy Sillman, who describes abstract painters as “doomed to work in between hoping and groping,” has provided the premier example of how far a painting can be pushed and brought back; her canvases teem with stop-and-start traces, film-still swipes of action, and veils of limbs bending time like metastatic clock faces. The stakes of abstraction, of “lumpen form,” as Sillman has written, can have to do with “body politics” and “care and repair,” or with “merely try[ing] to beam out an electrifyingly personal and strange signal that wakes up the receiver for a moment—one weird moment that could shift the sense of things.” Strange and weird point to the unknown, and to the simple paradox that a painting is something you make because you’ve never seen it before. So what happens in finishing is a fastening of the mind’s kernel to the pulp of this world.
UNIVERSALIZING HISTORIANS have given the newspaper comic strip a distinguished pedigree as the twentieth-century descendant of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphics. True or not, no classic strip was better suited to embellish the inner sanctum of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb than Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running tot saga Nancy.