Abstract In 2013, the artist now known as American Artist changed their legal name to a generic singular, making themselves impermeable to author-reference and identification. Manifesting both their official entry in the art world and a withdrawal from it, American Artist describes this name change as the “basis for an ambivalent practice—one of declaration . . . and erasure.” This performative act was only the first in a series exploring recognizable form and identification as technologies of power. In 2016, the online performance A Refusal replaced all images on Artist's social media profile with blue rectangles, and in 2020, Looted, commissioned by the Whitney Museum for its website, covered all of the Whitney's thumbnails of artworks with images of plywood sheeting. Following surfaces as formal elements invested with experimental potential in those three performances, this essay's argument is twofold. First, if refusal is a guiding gesture across these works, its objects are forms of identification (blue obfuscates social media identity; plywood blocks recognizable artworks; generic name prevents traditional author-form). Second, abstraction is not a void to be filled with concepts or affects, but a surface for formal experimentation. Surfaces and surfacing are a mode of abstraction in Artist's work that relates to what Tina Post has coined “deadpan aesthetics.” The deadpan as a surface aesthetic allows us to visualize what a refusal of form may mean and how it operates across the spheres of art and the social. In other words, how does American Artist's work illuminate abstraction as a refusal of form?
Lou Silhol-Macher (Fri,) studied this question.