A little over twenty-five years ago, Kobena Mercer published “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” an essay urging participants in the critical discourse around black artists’ work to check their discursivizing practices against the artistic and formal contents of art practices as such. Of course the project of Mercer’s essay is far vaster than an aestheticist reduction like “returning to the object” can suggest. Its target, rather, was a then-emergent multiculturalist movement lost in thrall to visibility discourse, and its simplest point was also its most valuable. Even visibility campaigns, Mercer warned, entail specific matters and problems of form. The implicit admonition carried serious implications for business-as-usual in so-called African American art history, where compensatory representation frequently produces a slighting of visual concerns. Even the internal components of culture, Mercer argued (amplifying the insights of the work of Stuart Hall and, to a lesser degree, Paul Gilroy), are complexly ramified fields of contestation, their representations requiring patient working-through. His implementation of art-historical procedures in cultural-political practice further suggested that the responsible investigation of a given “difference” couldn’t occur apart from studied consideration of the mainstream from which it is seen to differ, as well as specific mechanics of divergence. For many, Mercer’s refusal either to marginalize formal problems or suppress the fact of antagonism within the politics of difference marked a critical watershed. His ambitious and optimistic thesis made it possible for me to imagine pursuing an art-historical advocacy of the work of black artists who decline the normative comforts of cultural and aesthetic particularism and attempt instead to locate their production in the world to which it responds.

Although much time and many citations have passed since the essay’s publication, a field-wide embrace of such possibilities remains incomplete. By now the most salient form Mercer’s art history takes is a series of impressive books co-published by MIT Press and the International Institute of Visual Arts (inIVA), a London-based organization, where in 2002 Mercer held a residency that involved a substantial programming component. Each of the four installments in the series (modestly titled Annotating Art’s Histories) gathers essays originally delivered as talks at inIVA conferences convened by Mercer. The events were unified by a generative scheme in which participants were invited to revaluate a canonical framework in the historiography of late art—e.g., modernism, Pop, or abstraction—from the standpoint of cultural difference. Discrepant Abstraction, the series’ second volume and the subject of the present review, seeks to displace an understanding of abstract art as both a signifier of modernity and modernism. It spotlights principally the diversity of conceptual means by which critics and historians have taken up reductive art practices, and, only secondarily, particular deployments of abstraction by artists from a global range of cultural and political minorities.

For this second emphasis—by way of which readers are introduced, for instance, to the purchase of modernist abstraction on non-Western art systems—the book may contain some surprises for those unaccustomed to tracking abstraction beyond its mainstream peregrinations. Mercer’s framing conceit is an extrapolation of the concept of “discrepant engagement” introduced in 1993 as a paradigm for cross-cultural literary studies by Nathaniel Mackey, to whom Mercer graciously extends the last word of the collection (Mackey contributes “Quantum Ghosts,” an interview with Guyanese writer Wilson Harris). In Mercer’s reformulation, discrepant abstraction is “hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange. It includes almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for artistic purity” (7).

This distillation foreshadows a chief characteristic of this collection: most of the material presented in its eight essays and one interview seeks distinction from modernist practice in a range of fundamental differences from it—some of them natural, others ideological, all of them basic—or else in an avowal of expansiveness, a trait that several of the authors invest with the power to loosen modernist abstraction’s preternatural constraints. Its sympathetic, if cryptic, orientation to representation makes discrepant abstraction an interesting choice of foils to that discourse on abstract art famous for the pains it took to empty the domain of abstraction of anything that might distract the work of art from itself—mainly by pushing it so far beyond the realm of figuration as to obscure the fact that such emptying operations were themselves inescapably caught up with problems of representation. It’s now acknowledged that these operations are not only what give distinct abstract practices their particular shapes and dynamics (what sort of space had you “emptied” and how had you done it?), but also, and more broadly, make it possible for abstraction, despite its putative effacement of representation, to mean (in the way an event means) without meaning something particular (as does a signifier). Clearly, then, in order to function as a viable critical formation, discrepant abstraction has to mimic the spurious incorporative activity of the lapsed modernism it claims to reassess.

The signal contribution of Discrepant Abstraction is its commendable repopulation of the historiography of abstraction. In this regard the collection is a resounding success: an ingenious, polyvocal extension of the project Meyer Schapiro set in motion with his 1937 essay, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” which remains the most substantial redaction of Alfred Barr’s notoriously un-self-conscious modeling of abstract art along predictably Anglo-centric lines of culturo-economic patronage. Yet while Discrepant Abstraction aptly conceives of “modernist practice” as a loose formation of art practices and a distinct critical-historical-institutional practice, its contributors also share a habit of constellating modernism around an extremely limited cohort of antagonists (Barr, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock et al.). Indeed Discrepant Abstraction’s chief complaint concerns the implicit monoculturalism of mid-century modernism, but in a way makes matters worse by proceeding as though no significant alternative framework preceded the discrepancy thesis. In this way at times the collection feels less like a response to inadequate arguments marshaled in specific circumstances or a seizure of rich interpretive opportunities than yet another resigned demonstration of that modernism’s finally imperturbable hegemony. It might be said that its supposed permanence even serves the collection’s conceptual ambition. For in order to stand for “almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art” (7), what choice does discrepant abstraction have but to construe its other in the severest possible terms? But in fact such simplifying denigrations of high modernist discourse exert as much drag on the historiography of postwar art as do gross apologies for it. What’s more, the discrepancy narrative reduces almost to nothingness the long history of thinking about abstraction that resists the closures of arch-modernist thinking. Schapiro, therefore, signifies little more than his mid-century antinationalism, and the insistently materialist accounts of abstraction his early writing engendered all but fall away. Many other seriously consequential ideas emerging at various intervals from counter-modernist (and modernist counter-) positions—at the hands, say, of Briony Fer, Michael Leja, Agnes Martin, Harold Rosenberg, Robert Ryman, Raymond Saunders, or Miriam Schapiro—are diminished in the process. By this reader’s lights, the discrepancy thesis simply isn’t worth the dilution or loss of this rich historiography, so utterly indispensable to the complicated history of modernism.

Who, then, is this book for? Collectively, the essays seem to postulate a discrepant subject, one whose cultural position is at once established and validated in the nonfigurative representation that is a work of discrepant abstraction. Although the discrepant subject is supposedly constituted in the flow of difference, she is made visible through her abstractions: abstraction worlds her; it is, paraphrasing Mercer, how she makes her mark. What, then, becomes of her discrepancy? After all, it’s a determining, not a provisional, condition. And what of abstraction? Would not the very theorization of this subject as materialize-able agency undercut the de-specifying tendencies of abstraction? Discrepant Abstraction neither poses nor responds to these questions. But it would seem that whatever abstractness may obtain to the condition of such a subject vanishes when it becomes so many marks for a reading. And how should any of this matter to modernism, except as pure difference? Too few of the contributions to Discrepant Abstraction offer means of complicating this gloomy deduction. By and large, they understand discrepant practice to figure nothing more than its externality, or its knowing insolence in relation to high modernist protocols. A discrepant abstraction is, finally, didactic (inasmuch as it reminds us that purity is a fiction) and different (inasmuch as it sullies the prevailing formation not to transform it but in order to sit more contentedly on its constitutive outside). In this way it matters to modernism as an annotation matters to the main body of a text—as a supplement.

These shortcomings can be mined for productive insight concerning art-historical considerations of abstraction. For as Discrepant Abstraction unwittingly shows, a certain rigor is sacrificed in the effort simply to yield a “different” kind of positive content from abstraction. The results thrown up by particular essays in the volume are correspondingly underwhelming: in one instance, abstraction becomes “an open-ended site of contestation wherein various cultural practices from different classes and ethnic groups are temporarily combined” (David Craven, 33); in another, a “partial commitment” to abstraction by Chinese artists of the eighties and nineties expresses a “cultural aversion to extremity of any kind, a turning away from the . . . absolutist or purist attitude that often informed Western abstraction” (David Clarke, 91); in a more historical vein, we are told that abstract “artistic endeavors during the era of decolonization [in the Middle East] have retained critical differences from metropolitan modernisms, differences which pose a ‘threat of opacity’ to the western-universal norm” (Iftikhar Dadi, 11); and an essay treating the activities of black American abstractionists in the 1970s puzzlingly finds in their work an opportunity to widen the scope of black art: their abstractions, we are told, showed that black art “could be about color and form in the way that jazz . . . signaled something distinctly American and aesthetically enveloped in Black culture” (Kellie Jones, 165). It’s difficult to imagine how specific visual matters could count for less to these conclusions.

A preponderance of such readings produced in this reviewer a sense that Discrepant Abstraction was moving inexorably back to the very ground away from which Mercer’s unsolicited advocacy of aesthetic specificity had once delivered us. Perhaps it shouldn’t matter that the project of Discrepant Abstraction appears deeply out of synch with the priorities Mercer set forth in his seminal criticism. Surely it won’t for many readers. But those priorities seem most pertinent to studies of abstraction. Especially the matter of care—the care we take, in our efforts to understand the constitution and effects of artworks produced in exigent conditions, to think forms themselves as charily as we do human circumstances. And abstraction reminds us more naggingly than any other mode that some art wants to be seen in a specific and concentrated context of its own—not a context disconnected from others that inform what it is and how it is seen, but a context that nevertheless has something to do other than to facilitate meaning-making operations. However dubious we may find abstraction’s aspiration to singularity, it’s too easy to greet this with an opportunism that compels it to symbolize. Abstraction’s desire (yes, its desire) to stand down or apart from meaning—even, perhaps especially, a meaning as apparently ineradicable as identity—poses us an acute challenge. Michel Foucault once noticed how “the demand [exigence] for an identity and the injunction to break that identity, both feel, in the same way, abusive.”¹ There is room in our work for such complexities.