Text by Aage Langhelle

On Concrete Art in a Post-postmodern Era

In 1920, when Kasimir Malevich painted Black Square on White, he invented a new artistic practice in which art would no longer be referential. In 1930 the term ”concrete art” is first used in connection with the art of the Dutch de Stijl movement, which doesn’t reproduce concrete objects directly from reality. The artwork’s primary aesthetical means are line, colour and geometrical form that produce rhythm and balance, dimension and space.

Some might certainly argue that no art can be found that is not concrete. Others, such as the American artist Joseph Kosuth, insist that even a thought can be art. I won’t follow up this topic - I only mention it to demonstrate a point: how relative definition of terms can be. But the definition of terms aside, it is first of all necessary to define one’s position in the art-world deliberately before creating art objects or taking part in this discursive artistic area.
Mader’s position refers to Constructivism, Concretism and Minimalism. The overriding goal of artists who worked in this tradition was to create immanent art. They took on God’s position and created objects that were meant to be as natural as nature itself. And any form of representation was categorically rejected.

The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in a way a landscape - not its picture is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals
Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitch, Partisan Review, 1939.

For me, Mader’s pictures are like sounds or sound ensembles, or like forms in a geometrical ”nature”. They don’t impart a symbolic or psychological content; they seek ways of communication with me directly as viewer. A personal encounter with colours in a spatially dynamic interaction. Additionally, I think of Mader’s artistic practice as being an examination of the existence of colour and its effect in space.

The ideological concept on which this artistic tradition is based was largely developed during the modernistic era. To a great extent, a modernistic/concrete piece of art became an evocation of modernity. A work of ”concrete art” created today could be regarded as a re-presentation of modernism. This, of course, dishonours the original intention of creating immanent art, because the very idea of an immanent art no longer has the same validity as it did during its early stages, after passing through the deconstruction of the authentic throughout the post-modern era.
Certainly, Mader’s art can be regarded as a meta-modernistic commentary – and whether this was her intention or not. For me, however, this aspect is not the most interesting – not after viewing countless ”post-modern” works in the art-scene at the end of the last century. Instead, the question araises as to whether or not we should now remove this theoretical corset and allow Mader’s work to speak its own language, and I ask this while modestly hoping that the authentic, immanent work hasn’t totally dissolved in the acid bath of post-modernism.

Aage Langhelle