In Defense of Zombie Formalism.

When there's no more room in Chelsea, the dead will walk the earth.

It’s twenty-eight years later in Danny Boyle’s zombie-ravaged world, but only twenty-three have passed since the first film in the series dropped in ours, and this is going to shock you—only eleven years since Walter Robinson coined the term zombie formalism. The original material has aged well in my memory, but a few indelibly-etched remarks have taken an ironical cast with the passage of time:

“There’s always a government.”¹ (Is there?)

“Mary Boone had the magic formula in the ‘80s.”²

“It’s silly to be upset at Donald Trump.”³

I know it’s in my skull somewhere, but I struggle to recall a time when the Donald was merely silly—when zombies were slow, when Mary Boone was magical⁴—a time before we had a word for boring abstract art.

And to the latter—a word, if you please. Zombie formalism snagged deeply in our collective curatorializing consciousness, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone full pandemic. At coffee with a successful abstract painter recently, the term was used casually to deride half of the artists showing in New York today. A critic coughed it out to describe the shows he wishes he didn’t have to review. A group of collectors doing a gallery crawl parsed their morning into “zombie formalists” and “real art.” It catches on something—but what?

Robinson, the term’s coiner, struggled to put it down with certainty. An “important element of Zombie Formalism,” he wrote,

“is what I like to think of as a simulacrum of originality. Looking back at art history, aesthetic importance is measured by novelty, by the artist doing something that had never been done before.”

There’s also something about the exhumation of Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic philosophy, but that bit of obscurantism has been largely discarded in modern use.⁵ The real problem, to Robinson, is that that Zombie Formals are skin-deep. They manifest a novelty, but it’s not an important novelty.

Which raises the question—what’s the right kind of novelty?

II. Which’s brew?

Hunter Biden’s art is better than Adrien Brody’s—hear me out!

Miles Davis was a relentless innovator, but he too has been called a zombie formalist—just not for his music.⁶ Davis, I learned too late, was also a painter. When the jazz composer and trumpet-player was trying to clean up his life in the early 1980s, he sought creative outlets that allowed some distance from the jazz-fusion scene that was so awash in drugs. He painted: he splattered, dashed, and drizzled—strange chromatic intervals are vaulted on widely varied strokes. Some of it’s better than others, but I think the best of it is challenging and satisfying—and more, functions as an insightful delightful adjunct to his musical composition. “I had always written in a circular way,” he recalled, but through the influence of the German electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen,⁷

“I could see that I didn't want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because I never end songs: they just keep going on. Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition.”⁸