A Darwinian Reading of Bill Kohn's Painting

This book skips from arguably maladaptive representational painting tens of thousands of years ago to the two-dimensional Abstract Expressionism heralded by Clement Greenberg for its ever-more-autonomous forms of painting. Though postmodernism repudiated Greenberg's metanarrative, the American art world was enthusiastic and Abstract Expressionism flourished for sixty years! Bill Kohn's Udaipur Tinsmiths presciently exemplified the anti-totalization that characterized the postmodern....
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This book skips from arguably maladaptive representational painting tens of thousands of years ago to the two-dimensional Abstract Expressionism heralded by Clement Greenberg for its ever-more-autonomous forms of painting. Though postmodernism repudiated Greenberg's metanarrative, the American art world was enthusiastic and Abstract Expressionism flourished for sixty years! Bill Kohn's Udaipur Tinsmiths presciently exemplified the anti-totalization that characterized the postmodern. Bill remained receptive to alternative aesthetic strategies, his own the incorporation of abstract details within simplified real world representations. It is regrettable that exclusionary, autonomous abstraction garnered the art world's attention at the expense of inclusive, eclectic figuration. Given those prehistoric millennia of maladaptivity and today's extreme abstraction, it may be that maladaptivity, now cultural, is art's recurring condition. Even Bill may have succumbed to Abstract Expressionism's anti-figuration when, after his India period, he pretty much stopped including humans in his paintings. This book deals with abstract expressionism, Joseph Carroll, cave paintings, Darwinism, Ellen Dissanayake, evolution, genetic talent, Grand Canyon, The Inheritors, Julian Jaynes, Jonathan Losos, maladaptivity of early art, Henry Moore, Neanderthals, Paleolithic cosmology, Jackson Pollock, postmodernism, posy painterly abstraction, Thomas Pynchon, St. Louis Art Museum, sexual selection, shaman control and E.O. Wilson.