Martha Diamond: Sensation Rising
By Bill Berkson
Diamond is a New York visionary. Her pictorial embodiments of the stuns and implosions of urbanity are best understood in the company of those painters of Manhattan across whose surfaces the arguments between representation and abstract form are deflected by the urge to nail down the forces that contend at just about any intersection. One thinks of the vector-ridden outcroppings of John Marin’s “downtown” pictures, Georgia O’Keeffe’s night-blooming monoliths, and the hectic avenues looming up in pictures by Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The energetic realist wing of the New York School belongs here, too: Jane Freilicher’s ever-deepening skylines, John Button’s reveries upon cornices and clouds, Yvonne Jacquette’s contemplative particularist overviews, and the recent “black” paintings of Lower Manhattan at night by Alex Katz.
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It’s as if Diamond has put the paint back in front of the picture where de Kooning had it, and from where Katz eventually (and other ’60s reductivists, generally) smoothed it away. But, like Katz’s, Diamond’s art is distinguished from that of the exemplars of action painting by a heightened intentionality apropos image and appearance, including a pragmatic approach to the mediating messages of style. “On the surface,” she told me,
my work resembles expressionist paintings, but I’m more concerned with a vision than expressionism and I try to paint that vision realistically—I try to paint my perceptions rather than paint through emotion. A familiar subject in a radically generalized or edited treatment is a formalist device I use, so that recognizability or familiarity leads the viewer to look for expected detail. For the most part the details are not there so you look harder at the paint and the painting. You begin to distinguish between paint, performance, image, idea, expectation, and you.
The normally rigid components of the urban grid—of what James Schuyler calls “the continuous right-angled skin of the city”—yield to the eliding fluency of Diamond’s brushstrokes. [...] In the overall image a precise look of combined architecture, light, and air may be reflected, but the reflection is without objects; it veers instead to fasten on sensations analogous to those high-pitched, random instants of vision when our associations of contour and particular objects merely percolate in the effect.
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Diamond’s vision may be subjective—sensation, finally, can be nothing else—but her painting’s expressivity derives from a feeling for live fact. Joan Mitchell has spoken of “a feeling that comes . . . from the outside, from landscape.” And it may be that Diamond is doing for the cityscape what Mitchell does for the great(er) outdoors. Where Mitchell layers her canvases with the irregular swatches of nature perceived as chaotic sense impressions, Diamond builds edifices that bring citified chaos into focus as character, condensing the rush and stabilizing it as an emblem.
