Looking Critically: 21 Years of Artforum Magazine 0835715361

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Cover Design: Roger Gorman Design Coordination: Mary Beath

Copyright © 1984 Artforum All rights reserved Produced and distributed by UMI Research Press an Imprint of University Microfilms International Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

LC 83-24345 ISBN 0-8357-1536-1 hardcover ISBN 0-8357-1549-3 softcover

Preface

ARTICLES

ix

FANTASTIC ARCHITECTURE, by Kate Trauman Steinitz (1/3 August 1962).2 SAM FRANCIS: FOUR DRAWINGS [MALICE IN BLUE (fragments for Sam), by Yoshiaki Tono] (116 November 1962).6 NOTES ON THE NATURE OF JOSEPH CORNELL, by John Coplans (i/a February 1963).8 KANDINSKY, by Hilton Kramer (tm May 1963). 10 ANTI-SENSIBILITY PAINTING, by Ivan C. Karp (il/3 October 1963). 14 OPEN LETTER TO AN ART CRITIC, by Clyfford Still (1116 December 1963). 16 ON CRITICISM, by Harold Rosenberg (ilia February 1964). 18 AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE SEGAL, by Henry Geldzahler (11112 November 1964)..20 JOHN CAGE IN LOS ANGELES, by John Cage (11115 February 1965).22 AN INTERVIEW WITH JASPER JOHNS, by Walter Hopps (IIII6 March 1965).25 DISCUSSION, by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Andy Warhol (ivie February 1966).29 THE HAPPENINGS ARE DEAD. . .LONG LIVE THE HAPPENINGS!, by Allan Kaprow ((IV/7 March 1966) . . .33 SURREALISM [cover], by Ed Ruscha (vn September 1966).37 THIS IS NOT RENE MAGRITTE, by Roger Shattuck (Vli September 1966).38 PICASSO AS SURREALIST, by Robert Rosenblum (vn September 1966).41 SOME REMARKS, by Dan Flavin (V/4 December 1966).45 TALKING WITH TONY SMITH, by Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. (v/4 December 1966).48 THEATER AND ENGINEERING: AN EXPERIMENT, by Billy Kluver (VI6 February 1967). 53 SOL LEWITT: NON-VISUAL STRUCTURES, by Lucy Lippard (Via April 1967).56 ART AND OBJECTHOOD, by Michael Fried (VlioJune 1967).61 PROBLEMS OF CRITICISM, I, by Robert Goldwater (vin September 1967).69 CHRONOLOGY, by Ad Reinhardt (Vin September 1967). 71 THE SERIAL ATTITUDE, by Mel Bochner (Vi/4 December 1967). 73 PROBLEMS OF CRITICISM IV: POLITICS OF ART, PART 1, by Barbara Rose (vile February 1968).78 FILMS OF JEAN-LUC GODARD, by Manny Farber (vil/2 October 1968).80 A VARIETY OF REALISMS, by Sidney Tillim (VimoJune 1969).83 SOME NOTES ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MAKING: THE SEARCH FOR THE MOTIVATED, by Robert Morris (Vlll/8 April 1970).88 AN INTERVIEW WITH EVA HESSE, by Cindy Nemser (vmi9 May 1970).93 HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION OR ART AND POLITICS IN NEVADA, BERKELEY, SAN FRANCISCO AND UTAH, by Philip Leider (ix/1 September 1970).98 HANS HAACKE'S CANCELLED SHOW AT THE GUGGENHEIM, by Jack Burnham (ix/iOJune 1971).105 "PAUL REVERE,” by Joan Jonas and Richard Serra (X/i September 1971).110 MEDITATIONS AROUND PAUL STRAND, by Hollis Frampton (X/6 February 1972).1 12 MARK Dl SUVERO, by Carter Ratcliff (Xil3 November 1972).116 A NOTE ON BERNHARD AND HILLA BECHER, by Carl Andre [and Marianne Scharn] (XI14 December 1972).122 A PORTFOLIO, by Lucinda Childs (Xii6 February 1973).124 FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED AND THE DIALECTICAL LANDSCAPE, by Robert Smithson (XI16 February 1973).130 AGNES MARTIN, by Lawrence Alloway (xi/8 April 1973).137 REFLECTIONS, Agnes Martin (Xi/8 April 1973).141 FUNCTION OF THE MUSEUM, by Daniel Buren (xim September 1973).142 "ANEMIC CINEMA” REFLECTIONS ON AN EMBLEMATIC WORK [Marcel Duchamp], by Annette Michelson (XI112 October 1973).143 SENSE AND SENSIBILITY-REFLECTION ON POST '60S SCULPTURE, by Rosalind Krauss (XIII3 November 1973).149 A HUMANIST GEOMETRY [Robert Mangold], by Joseph Masheck (Xii/7 March 1974).157

THE ART COMICS OF AD REINHARDT, by Tom Hess (xn/8 April 1974).

160

TALKING WITH WILLIAM RUBIN; “THE MUSEUM CONCEPT IS NOT INFINITELY EXPANDABLE,” interview by John Coplans and Lawrence Alloway (xmi2 October 1974).

.166

THE ART MARKET: AFFLUENCE AND DEGRADATION, by Ian Burn (XIIII8 April 1975).

,173

PAINTING AND ANTI-PAINTING: A FAMILY QUARREL, by Max Kozloff (Xivn September 1975).... ALTMAN IN MUSIC CITY, by Stephen Farber (xiv/3 November 1975).

.177 .183

INSIDE THE WHITE CUBE [1 ]: NOTES ON THE GALLERY SPACE, by Brian O'Doherty (xiv/6 March 1976).

.188

RHODA IN POTATOLAND [Richard Foreman], by Steven Simmons (xivie March 1976)

.194

MARCEL BROODTHAERS’ THROW OF THE DICE, by Nicholas Calas (Xivi9 May 1976). MINIMALISM AND CRITICAL RESPONSE, by Phyllis Tuchman '(xv/9 May 1977).

.196

.200

ALFRED JENSEN: SYSTEMS MYSTAGOGUE, by Donald B, Kuspit (XVi/8 April 1978).

.204

ART IN RELATION TO ARCHITECTURE, ARCHITECTURE IN RELATION TO ART, by Dan Graham (XVII/6 February 1979). ARTRACE™, AN HERETICAL BORED GAME, by Heresies Collective (XVM/6 February 1980). THE BARREN FLOWERS OF EVIL, by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid (xviii/7March 1980) THE LIGHTNING FIELD, by Walter DeMaria (Xvin/8 April 1980). A CHAMELEON IN A STATE OF GRACE [Francesco Clemente], by Edit deAk (Xix/6 February 1981) THE END OF THE AVANT-GARDE? AND SO, THE END OF TRADITION., by Bazon Brock (X/X/10 June 1981).

PROJECT, by Anselm Kiefer (xixno June 1981). VIOLENCE OF ARCHITECTURE, by Bernard Tschumi (xxn September 1981).

.208 .215 .219 .224 .226 .230 .235 .238

PORTRAITS. . . NECROPHILIA, MON AMOUR, by Joseph Kosuth, SECTION 2 by Lawrence Weiner, IMPASSIONED WITH SOME SONG WE, by Kathy Acker, PORTRAITS, by Robert Mapplethorpe (XXI9 May 1982). GRIM FAIRY TALES, by Kate Linker (xxm September 1982).

.242 .254

HEADS IT'S FORM, TAILS IT'S NOT CONTENT, by Thomas McEvilley \xxil3 November 1982). CHILD ABUSE, by Louise Bourgeois (xxii4 December 1982). EDITORIAL, by Ingrid Sischy, Germano Celant (xxi/9 May 1983). AT THIS QUICK AND WEIGHTLESS MOMENT, by Lisa Liebmann (xxi/9 May 1983).

.256 .264 .272 .273

IE1ATS Volume 1

EDWARD KIENHOLZ, by Arthur Secunda (June 1962).

JOSEF ALBERS, by Henry T. Hopkins . .274

BRUCE CONNER, by Constance Perkins

(November 1962)

FRANK STELLA, by Donald Factor (May 1963)... . .274 JOHN CHAMBERLAIN, by John Coplans

(August 1962).

LOUISE NEVELSON, by Arthur Secunda

(March 1963) . . .

(August 1962).

ANDY WARHOL, by Henry T. Hopkins (September 1962) ....

Volume II

AD REINHARDT, by Donald Factor (January 1964) ..275 DON JUDD, by Lucy Lippard (March 1964) . .275 ROBERT MANGOLD, by Lucy Lippard

WERNER BISCHOF, by Margery Mann (September 1963) . . .

(March 1964).

Volume III

MILTON AVERY, by Fidel A. Danieli (November 1964). ELLSWORTH KELLY, by Irving B. Petlin (May 1965).

Volume IV

ELIOT PORTER, by Margery Mann (June 1965) .. . .276 JAMES ROSENQUIST, by William Wilson (December 1964)

ELLSWORTH KELLY, by Fidel A. Danieli (May 1966).

JASPER JOHNS, by Robert Pincus-Witten (March 1966)

CLAES OLDENBURG, by Dennis Adrian (May 1966).

LARRY BELL, by Donald Factor (January 1966). H.C. WESTERMANN, by Dennis Adrian (January 1966) ....

AGNES MARTIN, by Susan R. Snyder MARK Dl SUVERO, by Nancy Marmer (December 1965).

Volume V

HANS HOFFMANN, by Rosalind Krauss (April 1966). .278

ROBERT IRWIN, by Max Kozloff (January 1967)

. . .

. .

.276

ROBERT SMITHSON, by Robert Pincus-Witten .281

RED GROOMS, by Dennis Adrian (March 1967)... .281

. .279

SAUL STEINBERG, by Whitney Halstead (April 1967).

Volume VI

282

INGMAR BERGMAN, “Hour of the Wolf,” by Manny Farber (May 1968).282 MARTIAL RAYSSE, by Jane Livingston (September 1967).282

“The Sweet Flypaper of Life," text by LANGSTON HUGHES, photographs by ROY DE CARAVA,

RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER, by Robert Pincus-Witten (March 1968).283 ALICE NEEL, by Jane Harrison Cone (March 1968) .283

by Margery Mann (April 1968).286 CARL ANDRE, by Philip Leider (February 1968) ... .286

WALTER DE MARIA, MARK Dl SUVERO,

TONY SMITH, by Emily Wasserman (April 1968) . . .286 RICHARD TUTTLE, by Emily Wasserman

RICHARD SERRA, by Robert Pincus-Witten (April 1968).284

Volume VII

Museum of Modern Art, the Fort Knox of film footage, by Manny Farber (April 1968).284 JIM DINE, by Emily Wasserman (October 1967) ... .285

(March 1968).287

WHITNEY ANNUAL, by Max Kozloff

LUCAS SAMARAS, by Robert Pincus-Witten “HAIRY WHO,” by Whitney Halstead

(February 1969).290 FRANCIS BACON, by Robert Pincus-Witten

(October 1968).288 JACK BEAL, by Robert Pincus-Witten

(January 1969).291 MICHAEL SNOW, by Manny Farber

December 1968)..288 RALPH HUMPHREY, by Robert Pincus-Witten (April 1969).289

(January 1969).292 ROBERT MOTHERWELL, by Emily

ANTHONY CARO, by Rosalind Krauss

JOSEPH KOSUTH, JOHN BALDESSARI

(December 1968).287

(January 1969).289

Wasserman (December 1968).293 by Jane Livingston (December 1968).293

ALAN SHIELDS, by Emily Wasserman (December 1968).289

Volume VIII

ART IN PROCESS, IV, by Philip Leider (February 1970).294 RICHARD SERRA, by Philip Leider (February 1970).294 HELEN FRANKENTHALER, by Jean-Louis

Bourgeois (January 1970).295 VIJA CELMINS, by Peter Plagens (March 1970) .. . .295 RICHARD DIEBENKORN, by Terry Fenton

Volume IX

JAMES BYARS, by Thomas H. Garver (January 1970).296 EDWARD RUSCHA, by Emily Wasserman (March 1970).297

PAINTING IN NEW YORK, 1944-69 and WEST COAST, 1945-69, by Peter Plagens

(January 1970).296

(February 1970).297

NANCY GRAVES, by Kasha Linville (March 1971), .298

DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE, by Robert Pincus-Witten (February 1971).300

ROBERT SMITHSON, by Joseph Masheck (January 1971).298 KEITH SONNIER, by Peter Plagens ('October 1970). .299

R.B. KITAJ, by Jerome Tarshis (Summer 1971).299

Volume X

WILLIAM WILEY, by Peter Plagens (February 1970).296

JOHN De ANDREA, by Lizzie Borden (January 1972).301

MEL BOCHNER, by Lizzie Borden (April 1972) ... .301 CY TWOMBLY, by Ken Baker (April 1972).302 KENNETH SNELSON, by Ken Baker (April 1972) .. .302

LANGUAGE, by Robert Pincus-Witten (September 1970).300 KEN PRICE, by Kasha Linville (March 1971).300

GROUP DRAWING SHOW, by Robert Pincus-Witten (February 1972).303 MASTERS OF EARLY CONSTRUCTIVIST ABSTRACT ART, by Joseph Masheck (December 1971).304

GILBERT & GEORGE by Robert Pincus-Witten (December 1971).302

Volume XI

JOSEPH BEUYS, by Lizzie Borden (April 1973) . . . .304

LAURA DEAN, by Lizzie Borden

SYLVIA MANGOLD, by April Kingsley

(February 1973).306 LYNDA BENGLIS, by Bruce Boice (May 1973).307

(December 1972).305

HARRY CALLAHAN, by Lizzie Borden

WILLIAM WEGMAN, by Bruce Boice (January 1973).305

(February 1973).307

JANNIS KOUNELLIS, by April Kingsley (January 1973).306

Volume XII

LUCIO FONTANA, by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

JACKIE FERRARA, by Laurie Anderson (January 1974).308

ARTISTS’ BOOKS, by James Collins (December 1973).308 BRICE MARDEN, by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe VII

(May 1974).

309

(May 1974).309 PHIIP PEARLSTEIN, DUANE HANSEN, by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (April 1974).310 MARIO MERZ, by Roberta Smith (February 1974) .. .310

< •

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ARTICLES

Fantastic Architecture

Kate Trauman Steinitz There have been at all times and in all countries builders who saved their souls from drowning in the ocean of conformity by living a life of their own on the Island of Fantasy. Most of them were lone men, some highly trained professional architects, some selftaught craftsmen only. The ideas of the professionals who knew how to draw frequently remained utopic plans on papers; but the untrained men, such as Post¬ man Cheval and Sam Rodia had no means of premedi¬ tating on paper. They had no other way of expressing themselves than to set forth with their own hands what their imaginations dictated to them. “It is all in my head” answered Sam Rodia, when asked for his blue¬ prints. SIMON RODIA'S TOWERS OF WATTS, CALIFORNIA On the southeastern outskirts of the City of Los An¬ geles, diametrically opposed in any respect to the glamour of the city of Hollywood, in a drab neighbor¬ hood without glamor, one would expect anything else but a colorful garden with three giant towers. Soaring to the height of 96 feet in the midst of Mexican and colored folks who struggle hard for the necessities of life, Sam Rodia’s towers stand as a purposeless tribute to beauty. They are a phenomenon both of construc¬ tion and of human energy. The Italian craftsman Simon, or Sam, Rodia, a tile setter, built this greatest structure ever made by one man, single handed, using simple tools without the use of machines. He im¬ pressed his tools into the concrete of his construc¬ tion. He could not afford a helper, he said, moreover he would not have been able to tell him what to do. Once Sam had conceived the idea of “doing some¬ thing big” he remained obsessed by it for 30 years. James Johnson Sweeney called Sam a born construc¬ tion genius. Sam bent his iron rods in the most prim¬ itive way, without measuring instruments, under a

railroad track. His innate feeling for equilibrium made the Towers rise straight and firm. However, the of¬ ficials of the Los Angeles Building and Safety De¬ partment stated “the Towers are built of scrap, Seven-up bottles and sea shells.” They ignored the sound construction and the fact that the colorful mosaic was also protection for the reinforced con¬ crete. A 10,000 pound load test had to be applied to the highest Tower. It stood firm and proud during this rigorous test and thus escaped demolition. Sam was an inventive artist. Each tower has its own form and rhythm. One has rings bulking in measured proportion, while the inner forms are straight and angular. Another tower rises straight, but through the open transparent structure one can see the round forms of the inner structure. There are buttresses, pavilions, labyrinths and fountains and a passage-way roofed with broken mirrors. Seven-Up bottles make good finials; broken, they make patterns of odd forms with highlights on their curvatures; pulverized they cover stalagmites near the fountain like wet moss in a virgin forest. Jules Langsner, who was one of the first to write about the Towers, told me a human in¬ terest story: One Sunday he met Sam, washed and scrubbed clean, wearing a sleeveless shirt. The brown arms shimmered with splinters of pulverized glass which had settled deep in his leather-hard skin. Sam had become a part of his mosaic. In spite of his devotion to the Towers Sam Rodia abandoned them at the age of 75, feeling his strength declining. The Towers were neglected, his house burnt down by vandals. After the Building and Safety authorities condemned the Towers, two courageous artists, William Cartwright and Nicholas King, ac¬ quired them in order to save them. They were assisted by other artists and intellectuals who formed the “Committee for Sam Rodia’s Towers in Watts.” The Towers now belong to the Committee.

Watts Towers. William Cartwright, photographer. It has taken over the responsibility of maintaining them and making the grounds a cultural center for the community. The circle of friends, even abroad, is growing with the fame of the towers. Sam Rodia, now living as a recluse in Northern California, and who had refused to take any interest in the Towers, is starting to enjoy the recognition of the “big thing” he ac¬ complished. THE PALATIAL GROTTO of POSTMAN FERDINAND CHEVAL in HAUTERIVES (Drome) France, built 18781912. A mail carrier used to pace patiently thirty kilo¬ meters a day through the countryside. He liked to pick up pebbles of odd shapes from the tuff which he found at the roadside. They had forms, as bizarre as never a man could invent, resembling animals or gruesome caricatured faces. These whitish stones reminded him of a dream: "I built in my dream a castle, a palatial grotto.” At the age of thirty he began to make his dream reality. He taught himself masonry. Nature gave him cornices, figures of giants, phallic symbols, Buddhas and Pharaohs. He improved on nature’s sculpture by adding weird forms upon weird forms. It took him 30 years to build and deco¬ rate the “Grotto,” the “Cascade,” the “Grave of the Druid,” and the “Pharaonic Grave.” Then he built his own tomb in the village churchyard. He tried to para¬ phrase historical styles according to his rather vague concepts. Although one may be reminded of exuberant Indian Baroque sculpture, the result was Postman Cheval’s own style. He left no inch of space empty. A decora¬ tive overall pattern of sculpture overgrows the long facade like parasitic plant life. Various large columns and giant figures give points of rest to the eye in the

house: the house of “Onituan,” i.e. Antonio Fiiarete. Filarete’s ideal city was crowned by a building in the shape of a mountain. A court surrounds two con¬ centric cylindrical towers, one within the other. They were adorned both on the inside and outside with pillared terraces and collonades. A steep staircase leads to the top of the tower of “Virtue,” hard but rewarding to climb, while another entrance leads down to the halls and caves of “Vice.” In front of these caves are mud holes with pigs burrowing in the dirt' The door leading into the “Hall of Vice” carries the inscription “Enter to indulge in pleasure, which afterwards you will regret.”

Kurt

Schwitters’

Cathedral

of

Erotic Misery,

maze of small forms. Cheval incised verses and captions at various places of the Grotto. Proudly he incised his work calender: “1872-1912 10,000 days, 93,000 hours. 33 years.” “Plus opiniatre que moi se mette a I’oeuvre.” “He who is more obstinate a man than I (may) go to work.” BRUNO TAUT (1880-1938) “Hail to transparent, the clear, the pure! Hail to the crystal! Higher and higher shall rise the floating form, the graceful, the sparkling, the flashing, the light! Hail to building eternal!” Bruno Taut, City Architect of Magdeburg, Ger¬ many, an official, a practical builder, wrote these dithyrambic words after World War I, in a defeated country. In the midst of a chaotic revolution and eco¬ nomic disaster, his architectural fantasy envisaged ideal buildings in a new and better world to come: dream architecture, domes of crystal to top mountain tops and houses with no other purpose than to be beautiful and to uplift the soul of the visitor. He de¬ signed an ideal city, with a star-shaped house of Friendship, shining like a star in the night, a salute to the stars in the sky. It would sound as the chime of a bell, it would be built of coloured prisms. There would be columns of prayer and columns of sorrow, austere black at the base, but changing into radiant gold in the height. Taut planned a house rotating on a sort of turntable according to the light of the sun. One of his dream houses was actually built, a house of glass, simple

and convincing in its construction. It was the high¬ light of the last architectural exhibit in Cologne be¬ fore World War I. He experimented with color in architecture, converting the drab and gray city of Magdeburg into a multicoloured maze. In Berlin he built 12,000 flats, not according to fantasy but according to the needs of middleclass people. He was a pioneer of modern functional hous¬ ing. He accepted a teaching position in Istambul, but death came before he reached his new field of action. THE IDEAL CITY NAMED SFORZINDA by ANTONIO AVERLINO FILARETE (1400-1470) Between 1460 and 1464, the Milanese architect, An¬ tonio Averlino, mainly known by his self-given hu¬ manistic name Fiiarete, wrote a treatise on archi¬ tecture, which reads in part like a didactical novel. He presents challenging ideas for an ideal city of tremendous dimensions to be built rapidly according to a working schedule. He plans the working hours of a manpower of 12,000 masters, seven assistants, 90,000 workmen, altogether 102,000 men, working under military supervision. The ideal city would be star¬ shaped. It would be a functional city, each building designed for its purpose: palaces for princes and bishops; living quarters for the burghers; schools ac¬ cording to new educational systems; animal parks; a tremendous hospital with hygienic devices. There would be water reservoirs, aquaducts and sewers. The entire city would easily be flooded for cleaning pur¬ poses. There would also be a Hall of Fame for out¬ standing artists, connected with the architect’s own

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECT, ETIENNE LOUIS BOULLEE (1726-1799) and CLAUDENICHOLAS LEDOUX (1736-1806) It can be questioned whether architects trained in the rigorous discipline of Francois Blondel, even though considered revolutionary, would be able to swing themselves high enough into the clouds of imagination to fit into our pattern of fantastic archi¬ tecture. It is typical that in the Post-Baroque period in France, the most elementary solid forms appeared revolutionary. Boullee’s spiral tower, a truncated cone on a square base and his Newton Memorial, a perfect sphere had to remain projects on paper. However, Ledoux’s ideal city was built, at least partly. The story of these buildings has to be told as a “parallel in reverse” — if this expression is allowed, to the condemnation of the Watts Towers. Ledoux’s ideal city was planned and partly built around the Salt Works of Chaux between the villages of Arc and Senans in the French Conte. The French Government, conscious of its cultural heritage, main¬ tains a department for the preservation of monuments. Though Ledoux’s name at that time was fairly un¬ known, the owner of the Salt Works anticipated a “preservation order.” To forestall the governmental interference, he committed vandalism. He had Le¬ doux’s buildings dynamited in 1926. Only a few ruins are left. Ledoux’s theatre in Besancon (still existing) is rational. At that time it was new iri arrangement. Fantastic is only the way in which he rendered his impressive solution of a great building problem in an engraving. The interior of the theatre with its Palladian row of columns in the top rank and the semi¬ circle of the audience in the parquet is mirrored in a big eyeball. The eyelids and eyebrows, as if drawn from an ancient sculpture, give an almost surrealistic frame, emphasizing the purpose of the theatre: seeing. His house of the surveyors of the river is a symbol of man’s rule over the elements of nature. "It consists of a low prismatic block with open stairs on each side, and a superimposed horizontal semi-cylinder. Ledoux makes the river pass through the building so that the mighty vaulting is set astride the rushing water. Familiar with the architect’s inclination to dramatize form, we understand that the floods are to produce an uproar which stone alone cannot bring about.” Ledoux is considered the most imaginative of the architects of the Post-Baroque period, but his imagi¬ nation is interspersed with humanistic erudition and literary meaning. They are romantic allegories or “speaking architecture,” (architecture parlante). THE TATLIN TOWER A project designed by the constructivist painter Vladimir Tatlin in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Tatlin tower was designed to house a

4

radio station. The project was in the spotlight of at¬ tention in the years of political revolution after World War I. Artists and architects of many nations thought this was the time to find new shapes for a new world. Tatiin found a form both functional and symbolic for his construction: the spiral, a curve generating from one point, moving in a straight line around a fixed center, at the same time rising continuously upwards; motion expressed in architecture. The spiral expressed best the spirit of Tatlin's day, when new ideas arose from the fields of war-ruins and the debris of broken ideals. Remarkable in Tatlin's tower is the interpene¬ tration of inner and outer space. ANTONIO GAUDI (1852-1926) A cluster of four characteristic open work spires dominates the city of Barcelona. They soar to the sky from the facade of the Church of the Sagrada Familia, Gothic in spirit but hardly comparable to any style, a phenomenon in the age of functionalism. The open work spires above the facade of “Sagrada Familia” “break out into elaborate plastic finials whose multiplanar surfaces are covered with a music of broken tiling in brilliant colors . . . their note of free fantasy is raised in monumental scale . . . His “collages” of broken tiles have passages that remind one, when these are seen in isolation, of the work of such paint¬ ers as Klee or Ernst or even Leger . . . his whole ap¬ proach to the assembly of bits of broken crockery, often including fragments of the most vulgar and tasteless origin, parallels Dada and Surrealist prac¬ tices and most specifically the “Merzbilder of Schwitters.” The splendor of Gaudi’s surfaces leaves the spectator spellbound, and frequently detracts from the archi¬ tectural planning and significance of his buildings. Gaudi’s buildings move freely into space, often ignor¬ ing the borderline between sculpture and archi¬ tecture. The strength of Gaudi’s inner vision and emotion breaks forth disregarding rules and limita¬ tions of style. Gaudi is self-willed and inimitable, a unique apparition in the history of architecture.

5

THE MERZBAU OF KURT SCHWITTERS (1887-1947) Kurt Schwitters’ “Column” or “MERZbau,” also called “Cathedral of Erotic Misery” by its maker, has been destroyed by bombs during World War II. The house, in Hannover, Germany, Waldhausenstrasse 5, was en¬ tirely demolished, the debris swept away, and a new house built over the bomb crater. The column was the mast of Kurt Schwitters’ ship of imagination. Through twelve years I had watched it growing and breaking through the ceiling. Schwitters’ studio had to be converted into a duplex. The column was a three dimensional structure of wood, card¬ board, iron scraps, broken furniture and picture frames. The most heterogeneous materials were trans¬ formed into structural elements of an indoor tower, a sculptural architecture or architectural sculpture. When I saw it for the last time, it appeared more architectural, simplified in form and color to what today would, perhaps, be called “classic abstrac¬ tionism.” Kurt Schwitters believed firmly in abstract art, in functional architecture and construction. He called the expressionists “men who emptied their sour souls on canvas.” However, the column had not only formal but also expressive significance through literary and symbolic allusions. It was a depository of Schwitters’ own problems, a Cathedral built not only around his erotic misery, but around all joy and misery of his

life and time. There were cave-like openings hidden in the abstract structure, with secret doors of colored blocks. These secret doors were opened only to in¬ itiated friends. There was a “murderer’s cave," with a broken plaster cast of a female nude, stained bloody with lipstick or paint; there was a caricature abode of the Nibelungen; in one of the caves a small bottle of urine was solemnly displayed. This 3 dimensional document of Schwitters’ world appeared humorous in its details to many, but Schwitters’ world was austere, sad and even tragic, though it also was constructive, striving and gay. Kurt Schwitters had an indestructible sense of humor which covered his crevasses of misery. As Schwitters and his art matured the caves of the column were covered by architectural elements. It became a more formal architectural labyrinth or an ideal palace for imaginative thought to hide. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, 1896 Two decades - ago Buckminster Fuller’s projects were considered designs for a mathematical Utopia. Fuller was called a visionary crackpot. He got in trouble with the building code. His designs for houses were omnidirectional, translucent and light. This

sounds similar to Bruno Taut’s dithyrambic outbursts, however, Buckminster Fuller was a man of down to earth reality. If Sam Rodia built Instinctively and intuitively, creating a purposeless work of art by hand, which cannot be repeated, Buckminster Fuller constructs scientifically for industrial production in enormous quantities. He has a definite purpose: nothing less than rehousing an overpopulated world. Fuller’s constructions are translucent like Sam Rodia’s, but they are strictly geometrical, a multipli¬ cation of tetrahedrons, an orgy of tetrahedrons! The multiplication and combination of mathematical forms gives both uniformity and variety to his con¬ structions, a new beauty for a brave new world. Fuller uses standardized aircraft materials for all parts of his constructions, materials which combine rigidity with utmost lightness and economy. Fuller’s Utopic dreams of yesterday are in use today all over the earth. His geodesic domes are car¬ ried by air to sites in distant places, wherever air¬ craft hangars and shelters are needed. His domes appear in Afghanistan and near the poles. A pinned map. of the world shows their distribution, a worldvictory of the translucent, the light, the tensile strength.

References Postman Cheval: Pierre Gueguen. Architecture et Sculnture Naive. Le Palais de Facteur Cheval a Haute Rives. "Aujourd’hui, Art et Architecture” 2: 8:38-41 June 1936. Bruno Taut: Josef Ponten, Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde, Stugeart, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1923. dp. 136 ff 37Qf. Sforzinda: Antonio Averlino Filaretes Traktat ueber die Baukunst, herausgegeben von Dr. Wolfgang von Oettingen, Wien. Graes^er, 1890. Josef Ponten, Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde, Berlin,

Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. 1923. Boullee, and Ledoux: Emil Kaufmann. Three Revolutionary Archi¬ tects, Boullee, Ledoux and Lequeu, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 42, part 3, 1932. Philadelphia, The American Philosophical Society, October 1932. Tatlin: Gideon, S. Space, Time, Architecture. Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 1914. Gaudi: Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Gaudi, New York, Museum of Modern Art (1957). Quotations derived from this booklet.

Buckminster Fuller

MALICE IN BLUE (Fragments for Sam) By Yoshiaki Tono blue, stripped off from the cruel Mediterranean blue, a drowned bird's retina peeled off the Catalan sky blue, fevered with B-type influenza in Tokyo blue, cut off by the silhouettes of the shabby buildings on Tenth Street blue, Hokusai imprisoned among the swelling waves blue, shot and frozen into crystal by a gaze of the rain-god Chac in Mayan ruins blue, glimpsed by SAS JET scattered among the glaciers of the North Pole blue, a beautiful negro boy conceals behind the iris blue bloody brain brimming over with the transparent malice blue bursting laughter of Cheshire cat swallowed Alice blue hates blue loves blue curses blue sighs blue hymns blue hangs blue goes blue balls blue poles blue microbes blue balloons blue kidneys blue nothing bloody recognition evokes a dialogue in blue leaves invisible flower-petals fallen from blue un deux trois quatre cinq six sept et blue evaporated cathedral crashed up to the firmament blue

Sam Francis: four drawings Ink Drawing," 1961.

"Ink Drawing." 1961.

"Ink Drawing," 1961.

Notes on the Nature of Joseph Cornell

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Joseph Cornell, "Lunar Level £3 courtesy Ferus Gallery.

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JOHN COPLANS Cornell* lives in Flushing, New York. He was born at Nyack, New York, in December, 1903. Little is known of the artist's early life, though a schoolboy interest in the theatre, history, and symbolist poetry is re¬ vealed. There is no record of college education or formal art training. There is little doubt that there was a special cul¬ tural climate in New York during his early years. The Armory show of 1913, which in turn produced the Steiglitz Gallery, the first avant-grade gallery in America, featured photography as much as painting. The climate of opinion at that time considered that photography, and the movie, would open a new ave¬ nue of illusionistic and fantastic art. In New Jersey, in about 1916, Mack Sennett formed the Vita-Graph Film Company. Also, during these early years, the first visit to America of Cornell’s favorite artist, Marcel Du: An exhibition of his work was given at the Ferus Gallery Los Angeles, during December, 1962.

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At the very inception of the film media replacing the theatre, Cornell sees that this is the new avenue to follow as an artist — fantasy and illusion not achiev¬ able on the live stage. Believing that it could be a tool of the highest art he becomes by choice a film artist. He collects one of the most complete libraries of films and still photographs of Chaplin, Sennett, etc. But the commercialism of this world soon cuts him off: nor, it should be noted, were any of the early film writers great artists. What he thought would open the doors to the furthest reaches of fantasy instead ruthlessly shaped the stereotyped movie star. (He has never met a movie star, yet reads about them avidly and has written about them. He published an essay in “View” in 1942 on Hedy Lamarr entitled “Enchanted Wan¬ derer.”) The only way he had been able to make movies himself was to re-edit and collage existing material, occasionally shooting a sequence. (Bruce

The earliest known work of Cornell outside of film is a work of about 1929, called “A Watchcase for Marcel Duchamp,” but there may have been earlier ones. We do not know exactly what he was doing before this time, but we do know that he had begun his incredible collection of documents, primarily 19th century, but ranging widely over other periods. These documents led to the most personal and visionary reconstruction of the history of art. Cornell's art appears to be based upon the notion that the most basic data on the nature of things is recorded in all manner of ephemera, that is, things short-lived and soon to be destroyed. Decayed and peeling plaster, postage stamps, theatre stubs, a fading photo, the movements of a hand of a clock, yellowing newsprint, emblems of nations and insignia of noble and powerful families that no longer exist,

Two broad categories of work: I. On the Nature of Things (in the Lucretian sense). A. Soap-Bubble Sets II. The oblique, symbolic Memorials and Portraits. A. The Taglioni Jewel Casket of 1942 The Casket, in the possession of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is labeled with the following anecdote: “On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie Taglioni was halted by a Rus¬ sian highwayman and that enchanting creature com¬ manded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther's skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, Tag¬ lioni formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melt¬ ing among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlight heavens over the ice-covered landscape.” B. The Nearest Star (M.M.), of 1962. From the farthest star and physical reality to the most intensified personal identity — the Nearest Star: Marilyn Monroe.

A pillbox covered in shiny black and white lacquered paper. On the inside bottom of the pillbox is a drawn emblematic image of snail-shells, two chromed springs, a chromed ball-bearing and an actual snailshell. The combined image is another complex visual metaphor on phyllotaxis: the Golden Mean and Divine Proportion. Roll the ball through the springs into the snailshell; it’s also a game. This piece reminds us that Cornell, when asked the nature of his art, replied “They are games for mathematicians.’’ II. The First of the Soap-Bubble Sets (from the mid-'30’s). Evolving around the Galilean concept of the uni¬ verse, combined with a child’s sense of wonder. We are reminded that Einstein completed his Theory of Relativity in the year of Cornell's birth. III. The Memoriams (1930’s, 1940's). A. On individuals like Taglioni and Judy Tyler. B. On lovers and travelers and journeys in¬ volved with love, night and the stars. C. Those .that involve dancers. In this series of works, women are dancers, men are scientists, men and women are lovers, but dancers are also doves. Cornell has an encyclopedic knowledge of known and unknown ballet dancers of the last two hundred years. Other categories: The Forties, Fifties and Sixties. It is from the late thirties to the present that Cornell has really flowered, though the war seemed to inter¬ rupt his investigations. I. The Miniature Palaces. II. The Natural History Museums A. The Pharmacies. B. The Habitat Settings: aquariums, butter¬ flies, bees, rabbits, birds. a. Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (1939-43). Usually Cornell would ignore evil or violence. Here, however, is a bullet hole through the glass. On one level, each different exotic bird might represent one of the great powers at war. Behind the birds, who are wounded, are splashes of colors (various bloods). The birds are still alive, they bleed, yet Cornell has a desperate hope for their survival. The bundle of news¬ papers and shot-off feathers is the droppings at the bottom of the box. III. Back to the Nature of Things A. Sand Fountains. B. Sand Map Games. C. Map Toys. IV. The Hotel and Night Skies. A. Hotel (Night Sky), 1952. Through the window, its panes divided like a gunsight, the Most Distant Star.

Other categories: The Thirties and Forties: I. Time and Space (from 1929 to the mid-’30’s). A. A Watch-Case for Marcel Duchamp. The watch-case contains a little stack of layer upon layer of pictures. Time and movement revealed through a matrix of images. B. Four Wooden Cylindrical Chemical Con¬ tainers. When opened, a similar compass is revealed in each container, and, as usual when compasses are placed close to each other, each points to a dissimilar North. This piece is a complicated visual metaphor: four containers of matter, Air, Earth, Fire and Water, opened, define space. C. Untitled Object (1933).

V. The Space Object Boxes A. Smiling Sun. B. Lunar Level. C. Other Planets. D. A return to Cosmic Systems. a. The Sailing Ship (1961). The cordial glass holds the earth in place. An astronomer’s explanation of the universe is as rude and elementary a conceit as Cornell's cordial glass: one stands for the other. The ball on the tracks is a planet in orbit. The face has tide tables, charts, the blue front has wavy patterns like the sea. The traveler’s hand reaches out for water. b. Lunar Level #3 (1960). The loose balls at the bottom of the box are satellites as yet unreleased. This work, like many others, is a still-life arrangement that corresponds to the Dutch 17th-century painters’

soap bubbles (ephemeral planetary spheres that last a few seconds). A Theatre of Things, doomed to vanish, change or be destroyed. The last movie that he did was when the Third Avenue El was torn down in the forties. It had been a dramatic means of transport for the populace of the city. What was originally a shining, new, and clean marvel of engineering shifted from a romantic land¬ mark of New York City life into depressing squalor. Youthful beauty to old age, decay, and eventual disso¬ lution. Cornell arranged to have a documentary made before it perished. In understanding the importance of ephemera to Cornell it should be noted that he has steadfastly refused the ordinary avenues of publication, such as catalogs and books, in preference to the throw-away leaflet or the magazine. Cornell sees man in a theatre of formal design and elegance, like ballet. He loves the formality of the imaginative theatre as much as the formality of sci¬ ence, all of which he sees as poetic revelation where the most banal and trivial facts often carry the reality of the matter, in contrast to the historians, who are most terribly destructive. In their attempt to strip away the trivia they are left with hollow truths.

use of navigation instruments and charts on walls. The window to the sky becomes a meteorologist’s chart of the different types of clouds at various levels in the sky, the flags on the driftwood show which way the wind is blowing. c. To the Nearest Star, M.M. (1962). The symbol of the rings is that one might start at any point to follow the pathway and continuously come back to, and re¬ pass, any chosen beginning. It is Cornell’s most recur¬ rent symbol, and corresponds exactly with the Einsteinian sense of infinity (space curves and returns, retracing itself, giving a sense of ultimate totality and self-containment, as revealed not in Oriental mys¬ ticism but in Western physics and astronomy). Cor¬ nell’s drive to establish notebooks and journals of data have overtones of the Complete Renaissance Man. He signs his boxes like Leonardo da Vinci, in mirror-writing, and, like da Vinci, is struck with curiosity. But he is not a rationalist, designs no war machines, having a totally gentle sensibility. Nor is there room for evil in Cornell’s world. He wants to observe, document and record, but change nothing. Each box and each thing within is put together in the most simple and direct way, with screws, nails and glue. Everything looks innocent and true. The peeling decayed plaster walls carry the history of generations — they come from old buildings. He is a key assembler, a true assemblage artist, earlier and purer than Dubuffet. The glass front divides Cornell’s world from ours, yet at the same time we can enter into it without difficulty. Our eyes, which peer into the boxes, are the basic scientific instrument, the hand holding the boxes is the basic tool. The mind binds and links the two together. Cornell constantly re¬ echoes universals, his boxes highlight the continuity of life, awareness and knowledge of how the drama of decay makes it bitter-sweet. The pathways of move¬ ment and change through the flow of time, stars in the firmament doomed to burn out, and earthly ones, like Marilyn Monroe, fall too, and in falling are extinguished. Cornell would love to keep everything he makes, it is important for him to have them: a. They are part of a total universe he doesn’t like to disturb. b. He continuously re-works in order to improve and perfect. c. When he does release them, he wants them to go to people who would cherish them — he hates the idea of them being in indifferent hands. He is heartstricken at the present commerciality of the art world. He does not regard his work as products, but datum. ■ From newspaper clippings dated 1871 and printed as curiosa we learn of an American child becoming so attached to an abandoned chinoiserie while visiting France that her parents arranged for its removal and establishment in her native New Eng¬ land meadows. In the glistening sphere the little proprietress, reared in a severe atmosphere of scientific research, became enamoured of the rarified realms of constellations, balloons, and distant panoramas bathed in light, and drew upon her background to perform her own experiments, mir¬ acles of ingenuity and poetry. by Joseph Cornell. (View, Jan., 1943)

KANDINSKY The Guggenheim retrospective raises questions concerning Kandinsky’s contribution as artist and as theoretician. HILTON KRAMER Everything would now seem to favor a high estimate of the art of Kandinsky. From the historical point of view, he was an innovator of great importance. He was, after all, one of the two or three key figures in the creation of modern non-figurative painting. This in itself is enough to guarantee his oeuvre a permanent place in the modernist canon, for the whole tendency of contemporary criticism and art-historical scholar¬ ship has been to identify artistic achievement with stylistic innovation. But in Kandinsky's case, our in¬ terest is not only —or exclusively — historical. It extends to his influence on the recent, and perhaps even the present, course of art. His innovations, how¬ ever one may now want to judge the esthetic quality of the individual works in which they appeared, have remained consequential. He is, if not the father, then at least the grandfather of two styles that still occupy dominant positions in current art. He was the first of the abstract expressionists, and he was also an early — though not the earliest or most distinguished — ex¬ ponent of that tight, so-called “geometrical” abstrac¬ tion that has lately been revived with some success. His art thus enjoys a claim that is both historical and, as the French say, “actuel.” Kandinsky’s career, moreover, was of a kind that makes his name nearly ubiquitous in the annals of modern painting. Born in Russia, he played an active part in the development of modern art in his native country during the brief but intense period immedi¬ ately following the Revolution when, for a few bright years, modernism in the arts was welcomed by the Bolsheviks as an instrument and companion to politi¬ cal revolution. (This relatively brief phase of Kandin¬ sky’s career was more interesting for what the artist contributed to the Soviet cultural scene in the first stage of its revolutionary ferment than for what it contributed to his art, but even this phase has lately assumed a new interest and importance in the light of recent attempts to revive abstract art —and mod¬ ernism generally—in the Soviet Union, for in any such revival Kandinsky inevitably figures as a mentor and exemplar.) More important from the point of view of Kandinsky’s creative development, however, were the two quite separate and distinct careers he enjoyed in Germany before and after the Russian Revolution. The first of these, beginning with his years as an art student in Munich at the turn of the century (when he first met Klee) and deeply marked by his associa¬ tion with Gabriele Munter, the German painter who was his mistress in this period, and his fellow Russian artists, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, culminated in “Der Blaue Reiter’’ exhibitions of 1911-12. The second, dating from 1922 when he joined the Bauhaus at Weimar, ended in 1933 when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and Kandinsky settled in Paris. These two German periods constitute the real locus of Kandinsky's creative achievement, but his influ¬ ence extended beyond them, of course. He remained in Paris until his death in 1944, and had his disciples there. And owing to the large collection of his works

assembled by the Baroness Rebay for the late Solo¬ mon R. Guggenheim, a collection that formed the nucleus and raison d’etre for the original Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York (now the S. R. Guggenheim Museum), Kandinsky's art had begun to affect the course of American painting even before his death. By turn a Russian, a German, and a French citizen, and the only modern artist to have a museum more or less consecrated to his work and his the¬ ories in the United States, Kandinsky bestrides the international art scene in this century as only a very few other painters have done. In view of such impressive credentials, it may seem churlish to raise questions about the character and quality of Kandinsky's achievement. Yet the very enormity of Kandinsky’s career and influence and the exalted status his works now enjoy among the official custodians of modern painting make such questions imperative —and indeed, overdue. Was Kandinsky a great painter? Was he even a good painter? Was there perhaps a basic discrepancy between his ideas and his ability to realize them on canvas? Was he at his best as an abstractionist, as we have been led to suppose, or are his purest works, to be found, para¬ doxically, among his representational paintings? These are not the questions we are in the habit of asking about modern painters. It is enough, usually, to define an artist’s contribution to the modern movement, and to explicate the morphology of that contribution. If, as in Kandinsky’s case, the artistic contribution de¬ rived from, or was at least accompanied by, an inter¬ esting and original body of ideas, then the lines of definition and explication will follow the contours of the artist’s thought, and pictures that most fully ex¬ emplify—one might almost say illustrate — basic doctrine will be judged the most successful and char¬ acteristic. This, at any rate, has been the prevailing critical practice, and Kandinsky has been one of its chief beneficiaries. The view of Kandinsky that Mr. Thomas M. Messer, the director of the Guggenheim Museum, has now given us in two mammoth exhibitions* conforms to this practice of turning the artist's oeuvre into a kind of pedagogical allegory of his ideas and their place in art history. Now it may be that any really ambitious survey of Kandinsky’s painting on the scale Mr. Messer has undertaken would have to follow this course. The bulk of Kandinsky’s art is painting of a kind that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to defend on purely pictorial grounds, and I know of no serious critic who has even attempted to defend it on such grounds. The defense is made for the most part on points of general esthetics and art history — which is to say, in those areas where Kandinsky really does shine as a brilliant and original figure; and it is usually assumed — erro¬

*The larger of these exhibitions will travel to Paris t Hague, and Basel after its showing at the Guggen’he Museum in New York. The smaller, after initial showin at Pasadena, San Francisco, and Portland, will be seen seven other museums across the country. Both exhibitio were selected by Mr. Messer.

neously, I believe —that the force and originality of the artist's mind will somehow explain away the defi¬ ciencies that mark his performance as a painter. This approach to Kandinsky has sometimes resulted in interesting and even eloquent writing on his accom¬ plishments, but it places the organizer of a Kandinsky exhibition in the difficult position of having to pro¬ duce a body of work that will live up to the extrava¬ gant expectations aroused by the official literature. By and large, Kandinsky comes off better as an artist written about than as one seen, and this is undoubt¬ edly one of the reasons — there are others — why Mr. Messer has taken his lead from the literature (and the view of art implicit in it) rather than from the art itself. As everyone who has read "Concerning the Spiritual in Art” knows, Kandinsky was immensely knowledgable about pictorial problems. Yet unlike Mondrian, an artist whose development was in so many other respects similar to Kandinsky’s, Kandinsky never for¬ mulated a viable pictorial principle as the basis for his non-figurative painting. He explicitly held back from such a formulation in writing his famous and influential treatise, and the intellectual diffidence reflected in that document is also clearly visible in the way he painted his early non-figurative pictures. In his treatise Kandinsky wrote: “One of the first steps away from representation and toward abstraction was, in the pictorial sense, the exclusion of the third di¬ mension, i.e., the tendency to keep the picture on a single plane. Modeling was abandoned. In this way the concrete object was made more abstract, and an important step forward was achieved—this step for¬ ward has, however, had the effect of limiting the pos¬ sibilities of painting to the actual surface of the can¬ vas: and thus painting acquired another material limit.” Reading this, one is reminded of Braque’s maxim: “Any acquisition is accompanied by an equiv¬ alent loss; that is the law of compensation.” But this “law of compensation” was not one that Kandinsky could accept. He thus differed from later exponents of abstraction in his deep desire to carry over into non-figurative art all the depth (for Kandinsky, it was not only spatial but spiritual) and pictorial complexity he admired in the great representational painting of the past. It was not a further “material limit” he sought, but an expansion of painting’s spiritual and pictorial resources. If one feels a certain irony and pathos in reading “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” today, a half-century after its publication, it is be¬ cause one now sees with what eloquent and prophetic reluctance its author did indeed usher in a new era in pictorial values. For Kandinsky was emphatic in rejecting the idea of "a single plane.” “Any attempt to free painting from this material limitation, together with the striv¬ ing after a new form of composition,” he wrote, “must concern itself first of all with the destruction of the theory of one single surface...” And yet he was equally unwilling to submit his art, and painting gen¬ erally, to the only new mode of pictorial syntax that

10

Composition VII, ^186, 783/4xll8l/a", 1913.

11

promised to keep painting both abstract and threedimensional: which is to say, he was equally set against the practice of cubism. “Out of composition in flat triangles has developed a composition with plastic three-dimensional triangles, that is to say, with pyramids; and this is cubism. But here a ten¬ dency has arisen towards inertia, towards a concen¬ tration on form for its own sake, and consequently once more a reduction of potential values.” Eventu¬ ally, of course, Kandinsky did submit his art both to the tenets of cubism and to what he described (accurately) as “pure patterning.” Eventually he did accept, to a degree, the very “reductions” he had set his mind against in writing “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” but he did so with diffidence and without consistent success. This diffidence had two causes, I believe. The larg¬ er, or at least the more “spiritual,” cause (and Kan¬ dinsky himself would have considered this the larger, at least in his “Blaue Reiter” period) was his unwill¬ ingness to concede the possibility that in abandoning “external nature” as a source of visual form, he might be imposing a radical limitation on the painter’s for¬ mal and expressive repertory. Everything in the realm of intellect and the arts that absorbed Kandinsky’s interest in the first decade of the century led him to

believe otherwise. The theosophist belief in the su¬ premacy of spiritual values over the material world; the new scientific theories that swept away conven¬ tional notions of matter and energy; and the whole tendency of 19th-century symbolist poetry and music to eschew naturalism in favor of a more transcen¬ dental concept of reality: these developments in phil¬ osophy, science, and the arts, abetted by Kandinsky’s own mystical turn of mind, were more than enough to convince him that a similar abandonment of mate¬ rialism (that is, “external nature”) in the art of paint¬ ing would inevitably• bring greater expressive possi¬ bilities in its wake. “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” is, in fact, a meditation on these possibilities, just‘as his early "Improvisations” and “Compositions” are attempts to explore ways of realizing them. But “Con¬ cerning the Spiritual in Art" is also a dialectical exer¬ cise in which this meditation is combined with an analysis of the new pictorial practices that were then emerging in the works of Matisse and Picasso — prac¬ tices that Kandinsky both admired and feared. His keen pictorial intelligence responded to the strength and originality with which the Parisian masters were developing styles that effectively challenged the very naturalism that had at all costs to be rejected, and yet his "spiritual” ideology — the conviction that the

turn toward abstraction should not involve the jet¬ tisoning of painting’s traditional resources but instead transform them into an even larger and more powerful artistic instrument —resulted in a vigorous warning against the two directions (on the one hand, “a con¬ centration on form for its own sake,” and on the other, “pure patterning”) in which he correctly saw cubism and fauvism respectively moving. The radical in Kan¬ dinsky was thus held at bay by the traditionalist. The second cause of Kandinsky’s diffidence in the face of these cubist and fauvist innovations was di¬ rectly connected with this ideological reluctance to accept the “reductions” they seemed to make impera¬ tive: he lacked any syntactical principle of his own that might have preserved painting against this feared reduction of means. He might resist for a while the new syntactical procedures of the Parisian school, but he had no radically new alternative to offer in their place. Conceptually, his art remained an amal¬ gam of received ideas. What he did effect in his own painting was a synthesis of the new forms that were emerging from cubist and fauvist painting (and from the expressionist painting that more or less merged with fauvism outside France and that Kandinsky him¬ self practiced for a time with great success) with the traditional syntax of 19th-century painting, and as

Levels, #452, 22Y4xl6", 1929.

it happened, this conjunction of the new and the old gave the appearance of being more radical than it actually was. Kandinsky nowhere admits this compro¬ mise explicitly in his writings, but he hints at it, and it is in any case clearly evident in his painting. In attempting to define the kind of pictorial construc¬ tion he aspired to as an alternative to Parisian prac¬ tice, he wrote: “It is not obvious geometrical con¬ figurations that will be the richest in possibilities, but hidden ones, emerging unnoticed from the canvas and meant for the soul rather than the eye.” The notion that a painting’s syntactical principle might pass ‘unnoticed” sounds rather bizarre, if not indeed nos¬ talgic, from our present vantage-point in the history of abstract painting. Bizarre or not, however, the no¬ tion is a significant measure of Kandinsky’s basic equivocation as an abstract artist. One can certainly admire —as I do — Kandinsky’s refusal to reduce painting to its barest syntactical components, for it was fundamentally the refusal of a man of exquisite culture and intelligence to betray his artistic inheritance with facile notions (now so widely accepted) of “less” being “more.” One can sym¬ pathize with this yearning for a high cultural ideal, but all the sympathy in the world cannot improve the quality of the pictures Kandinsky painted under its influence. In effect, Kandinsky repopulated the ro¬ mantic, impressionist, and post-impressionist land¬ scape space of 19th-century painting with at first symbolic and then totally abstract —and often illdefined— forms. This was what his abstract expres¬ sionism came to; his “hidden construction” consisted of putting some new wine, as it were, in a familiar

bottle. The question arises, then, as to exactly how this curious synthesis of old and new ideas became as fateful for modern painting as, ultimately, it did. A clue to the answer to this question can be found per¬ haps in Kandinsky’s suggestion that his style was intended for “the soul rather than the eye.” Kandin¬ sky’s concept of “soul” was indeed too disembodied, too vague and immaterial, to be pictorially useful, and so in practice its visual habitat nearly always resem¬ bled some variety of 19th-century landscape space, but a more imaginative painter, namely Miro, working out of the psychoanalytic topography of surrealism, turned this territory of the “soul” into the dreamlike landscape of the subconscious. It was by way of Miro’s highly individual use of surrealism, with its erotic fantasy and symbolic drama, that Kandinsky’s “spiri¬ tual” universe was re-materialized, so to speak, and thus at last able to assume a radically new structure for pictorial purposes, and the way then led from Miro to Gorky and Pollock and many others. As an innovator, then, Kandinsky was a more equiv¬ ocal figure than has generally been assumed. (Only Clement Greenberg, in an essay reprinted in “Art and Culture,” has really confronted the issue.) And his failures as a painter are to a large degree — though not wholly — based on this equivocation. But, of course, his works were not all failures. The best of Kandinsky’s abstract paintings are, I think, the four panels on the “Seasons,” painted in 1914 and shown as a group in the Guggenheim show. (Two of these paintings, “Spring” and “Summer,” are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the other

two, “Autumn” and “Winter” being part of the Gug¬ genheim’s permanent collection.) This series is still dominated by the imagery and “feel” of post-impres¬ sionist landscape art, but the imagery is now far more compressed and summarized than is usual with Kan¬ dinsky; this is particularly so in the “Autumn” and “Winter” panels. The paint itself forms a more unified and continuous “skin” without degenerating into the feared "patterning,” and the use of color is more consistent and lyrical, more sensuous and confident. There is, too, less of that graphic scaffolding which is so painfully evident in most of Kandinsky's abstract expressionist paintings — fewer of those disfiguring black lines that measure the exact distance between the artist’s elevated painterly intention and his usu¬ ally mundane ability to realize it on canvas. The only other oil painting that approached the success of this series was the huge "Composition VII” (1913), one of the seven paintings borrowed from the Soviet Union for the New York exhibition and, like the four “Sea¬ sons” panels, an obvious attempt to sum up and consolidate the earlier “Improvisations” and “Com¬ positions” into a definitive statement. Perhaps there was something about the vertical format of the “Seasons” series that liberated Kandinsky from a certain pictorial banality that still plagues even this “Composition VII." Whatever the reason, they stand out as Kandinsky’s highest achievement in abstract painting. The only other abstract work in the Guggenheim exhibition that could be favorably compared with this series was to be found among the watercolors and graphics. As a general rule, Kandinsky was more

12

Street in Murnau (Street in Murnau with Women). 28x38 ya", 1908.

13

at ease —and more successful — with the decorative potentialities of abstraction in manipulating the color transparencies characteristic of the watercolor me¬ dium and in the explicitly graphic character of the woodcut. The flat white page of the paper provided him at the start, perhaps, with a kind of space, at once shallow and “infinite,” that he could not bring himself to accept, or create, in approaching the can¬ vas. In particular, the “Untitled Watercolor” dated “1910” on its face but now generally believed to have been painted in 1913, is one of Kandinsky’s supreme artistic successes as an abstractionist, and it has a more immediate, up-to-the-minute relevance to cur¬ rent abstract painting than any single oil in the New York exhibition. The painters who now “stain" their unprepared canvases with thinned, irregular washes of oil pigment in an all-over design, using oil as if it were watercolor, all follow in the wake of this extraordinary little work. But Kandinsky himself never really followed through on the principle of composi¬ tion inherent in the work. When we turn from the work of Kandinsky’s first German period, which ended with the outbreak of World War I, and examine the work of his second which commenced with his return from Russia in 1922, we are again reminded of what consequences followed from the artist’s basic failure to commit his art to a structural principle that would unite its form and content into a single coherent statement. In the work of the twenties, it is a case of everything chang¬ ing and everything remaining the same. The shape of the forms in the paintings of this period are greatly simplified and clarified, but they are basically the same forms as before, only now purified into graphic and geometrical essences and left to drift in the same indeterminate space. As an exponent of tight, geo¬ metrical abstraction, Kandinsky was always a mud¬ dler, earnestly filling naturalistic space with abstract motifs, and then jamming these disparate materials into some precarious coherence by sheer will. These

pictures are pretty dismal for the most part, but they too have had a widespread influence, as one can see from looking through the old catalogs of the Amer¬ ican Abstract Artists and from those surveys of minor Parisian abstract artists that Michel Seuphor has assembled from time to time. There remains a kind of academic abstraction in Germany even today — all “cosmos” and no art —that takes its cue directly from this phase of Kandinsky's oeuvre. For myself, the main interest of the later works in the New York exhibition (from the late twenties and the thirties) was the sense I had of the influence some of the more diagrammatic abstractions must have had not only on painting but, more importantly, on the constructivist and surrealist sculpture that began to take shape in New York in the thirties. Works like “Levels, No. 452” (1929) and “Development Upwards, No. 596” (1934), both in the Guggenheim collection, lead directly to a kind of sculpture that has occupied David Smith, for example, since the thirties. Both of these paintings are, in fact, graphic illustrations of abstract objects that could never become wholly realized, plastically, until an artist like Smith had found a way to translate them into the technology of open-space sculpture. All in all, the view of Kandinsky that Mr. Messer has given us is of this international master — if mas¬ ter he is — of the modern movement, the prophet of abstract art for whom so persuasive a case can be made so long as we do not look too closely at the indi¬ vidual works. And this is pretty much the Kandinsky that everyone seems to want just now — a benevolent grandfather who can at one stroke be made both to support current esthetic dogma and yet leave us with the heady satisfaction of knowing that we can do this sort of thing much better nowadays. (I think we can, and do.) But there is, alas, another Kandinsky who barely makes an appearance in the Guggenheim exhi¬ bition, and who remains, by and large, an unknown painter to everyone who has not seen the fine collec¬

tion of paintings that Gabriele Munter donated only a few years ago to the Stadtische Galerie in Munich. That Kandinsky does not figure as an eminence in our art histories, but he was an uncommonly good painter. In the years 1904-1909, especially, he produced works of a quality that are exceptional in his entire oeuvre. They are mainly small landscapes painted from nature, post-impressionist in format and expres¬ sionist in feeling, and executed with a verve and con¬ fidence nowhere else to be seen in Kandinsky’s long development. Historically, they are interesting be¬ cause they form the basis of the abstract expres¬ sionist landscapes that grew directly out of them, but artistically they remain superior to all but a few of the abstract works. (Only the "Seasons” series equals them in quality.) In the Guggenheim show, only one painting — "Beach Baskets in Holland" (1904) — represented Kan¬ dinsky at his best in this period. Another, “Street in Murnau” (1908), was a good example of his method at the time, but not itself a first-rate picture; Kandinsky had difficulty with figures. The virtual omission of this important body of work cannot be attributed altogether to a narrow conception of Kandinsky’s real gifts as a painter, though such a conception undoubt¬ edly played its part. The delicate matter of Kandin¬ sky's involvement with Gabriele Munter must cer¬ tainly have been an obstacle to the organizer of an exhibition that required the generous cooperation of Kandinsky's widow, Mme Nina Kandinsky, the Russian woman Kandinsky married after his break with Munter and his return to Russia during the Revolution. My own view, after seeing the Kandinskys in Munich last year and also the large group of Munter’s own paintings that are shown in the same museum, is that Kandinsky's life and work cannot be fully under¬ stood without a more detailed understanding of this so-called “Murnau period" than we have been given. This was the period when Kandinsky lived with Mun¬ ter in the house at Murnau where they often had as guests, for extended periods, Jawlensky and von Werefkin. The paintings that these four artists did at that time, and especially those of Kandinsky and Munter, are often as close in subject, method, and feeling as the pictures Picasso and Braque painted in the first phase of cubism. This was, moreover, the only time in Kandinsky’s adult life when, as a man, he was rela¬ tively free of respectability and worldly cares and, as an artist, he was an earthy and robust painter of the natural world. Fortunately, the omission of this work from the Guggenheim show was to some degree corrected by the ambitious survey of the “Blaue Reiter" group that the Leonard Hutton Galleries staged to coincide with the Kandinsky exhibition. A good deal of the exhibition had only an historical interest (twenty-two painters were represented, including Schoenberg, the composer, who was much interested in Kandinsky’s ideas but who was not much of a painter), but it did include four good works of Kandinsky’s Murnau period together with a fine selection of Munter’s paintings done at the same time. These few works, seen in the context of their own period and subject-matter, gave one a more intimate glimpse of Kandinsky’s sensi¬ bility than was possible in the selection of early pic¬ tures in the Guggenheim survey. And they left one with a nagging sense of how little we have yet under¬ stood about the inner life of the artist whose “spiri¬ tual” achievement has been set before us in such exhausting detail. ■

Anti-Sensibility Painting An early exhibitor of the controversial “Pop Art” presents his case.

Tom Wesselman, “Still Life,” 4'x5V2', 1962. Green Gallery, New York. (Collection Mr. and Mrs. Charles Buckwalter.)

Roy Lichtenstein, “NoNox,” pencil on paper, 25V2X19", 1862. Leo Castelli Gallery.

ITALIAN

IVAN C. KARP The American urban landscape is fantastically ugly. Detroit is a fine example. The packaged horror of the super shopping center inspires at its worst (or best) a degree of revulsion instructive to the open eye. All others flee to Venice. The Common Image Artist observes the landscape with its accoutrements and provokes a consummately generous view of a generally monstrous spectacle. His philosophy is that all things are beautiful, but some things are more beautiful than others. What is “more” beautiful is imbued with the glorious nimbus of reve¬ lation. This is his subject. At its best Common Image Art violates various established sentiments of the ar¬ tist. By rendering visible the despicable without sen¬ sibility, it sets aside the precept that the means may justify the subject. The poetry is invisible. It is the fact of the picture itself which is the poetry. There is no startling pictorial apparatus employed to seduce the eye. The forms are locked into place and the col¬ ors are bright. The design is simple, almost simple minded. But the simple mindedness is vicious. It grates against the nerves.

The greatest art is unfriendly to begin with. Com¬ mon Image Art is downright hostile. Its characters and objects are unabashedly egotistical and self-re¬ liant. They do not invite contemplation. The style is happily retrograde and thrillingly insensitive (a curi¬ ous advance). Red, Yellow, and Blue have been seen before for all they are worth. In Common Image Art they are seen once again. It is too much to endure, like a steel fist pressing in the face. The formulations of the commercial artist are deeply antagonistic to the fine arts. In his manipula¬ tions of significant form the tricky, commercial con¬ ventions accrue. These conventions are a despoilation of inspired invention. But they are, in the dis¬ tillations of profound observations, a fecund fund for insight into the style that represents an epoch. In Common Image Painting a particular and certainly peculiar moment in time is perfectly revealed in a strangely timeless mode by encompassing the con¬ ventions of commercial and cartoon imagery. Thus it engages the total panorama of visible evidence. The worthy subject is struck down once and for all. Nothing that is seen is too base to look at, as every

form and space is suddenly interconnected. The mer¬ ciless matchbook is lying in a vernal meadow, beside a brook near a frozen custard stand and funny papers on the chair in a house full of paintings by Inness. Why Common Image Painting is remarkable at this time is because it proceeds from the artist's ecstasy of vision. The best of recent abstract painting, the works of Louis, Noland, Kelly, result from a total in¬ ward turning, a blindness to the spectacle, and in that they are excessively effete, refined, and genteel. No¬ land’s recent show in New York was elegant and lean; the grandeur was missing. The vortex and target are, like the suspension bridge, infallible as form. But Noland's targets have crossed all their rivers. The paintings of Louis are not a civilization. For all the exquisite tonalites, expansiveness, and scale, the works are timorous and kindly. Art without fierceness is only restful. It never agitates or beckons. Even Claude is fierce. When the painter eschews the expe¬ rience of wonderment at the spectacle he becomes a nervous pattern maker. Kelly’s paintings are a gran¬ diose rearrangement of small, neat discoveries which derive from the inward turning against the pain and

Andy Warhol, “Silver Disaster #6,” 42x56", 1963. Stable Gallery, New York.

James Rosenquist, “Two 59 People,” ca. 5'x7'. Collection Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

pleasure of the spectacle. Abstract Art at the moment is onanistic, an art of special effects. The artist uses his vision after the picture is made. The paintings of Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning begin with astonish¬ ment at something outside the self; they are of the phenomena and the energy of the environment. Euro¬ pean art is tired because the landscape and spectacle are depleted of interest for the painter. Common Image painting, in extracting, amplifying, and re-poising the conventions of the commercial arts, reveals the psychological and stylistic temperament of an age before it is visible. Nostalgia becomes in¬ stantaneous. Lichtenstein paints popular subjects of the forties and fifties which is, as an age, still invisi¬ ble without Lichtenstein. The “Yellow Girl” is timeless in her horror. In her conceit and vacuity she is hateful forever. In “No Nox,” the Gas Station Attendant is a symbol of himself, vile in his uninvolved stupidity. He is created of hard, cold lines that do not derive from abstraction; a severe classicism, no sensitivity, no poetics, no mush. Rosenquist depicts the Gothic of the Thirties in vomity tones and brilliant, cruel com¬ positions. The toast is stale and the smile is not for us. Although he manifests a certain artfulness that is akin to surrealism, the distance of his subjects from the viewer sustains the nice, cold, signboard clarity. Wesselman’s subjects are the present moment in com¬ mercial art. At his best he is bright and brutal, like the aluminum jackets of cheap skyscrapers. The jux¬ tapositions are crucial. He has proven with a subtle maneuver that the immense vulgarity of advertising color and form, separated from their natural habitat, is sufficient to reveal its hidden charms. The giant economy size can of Del Monte asparagus is a glory unto itself. The plastic corn with butter induces nau¬ sea and trembling. These objects are ghastly and won¬ derful at once, too horrible for words, a fearful joy. Warhol’s art is that of innocent wonderment. When he avoids lyricism his repetitions achieve a grave sim¬ plicity. The “Electric Chair” painting in silver is an apogee of violence. It has no literary content. (The “Silence" sign insists.) The vertical zone on the right is numb and reflective, an abstraction of the image on the left. Sensitivity is a bore. Common Image painting is an art of calm, profound observation and humorous won¬ derment without sensibility. It does not criticize. It only records. The attitude of the Common Image paint¬ er is whimsical and slightly ironical. The environment is overwhelming, and thus he observes it. He must maintain the sense of the monumentally bizarre with¬ out surrealism or else he will defeat his art, just as Abstract Expressionism was winded by lyricism. The Abstract painters are obliged to locate the timeless symbols from their environment before they can con¬ ceive a revolutionary vitality akin to Common Image Art. The purging of poetic sensations in painting for an aggressive classicism marks the end of Impres¬ sionist oozings. For all the perversities, horrors, and doomist regalia in the excellent private works of Lind¬ ner, Samaras, Bontecou, and Conner, the American ar¬ tists are inclined to bold affirmations. Rauschenberg’s art is the ideal symptom of these high spirits. He is a prince of imagination, that critical ingredient, and bountiful source of inspiration. Common Image paint¬ ing is an affirmation of the pleasure of seeing, and although it was supposed to have expired at five o’clock on a Friday a long time ago, it will surely con¬ tinue until a petty academy vetoes its puissance. Al¬ ready it is a monument and possibly a bridge to a splendid new Romanticism. ■

An Open Letter to an Art Critic "It has always been my hope to create a free place or area of life where an idea can transcend politics, ambition and commerce.”

Clyfford Still

Dear K: Riffling through some old magazines a few days ago, an article by you in a 1959 Evergreen Review stopped me abruptly. For, as you must remember, it dealt with the art dealers and galleries in New York, with special emphasis on the importance of th’eir walls to the artists during the 1940’s and 1950’s, and the alleged role they played for the artist and public then and now. The issues involved are strangely up to date in view of the quickly shifting relationships among dealers and their stables of painters today, and the numerous articles, and several books about to appear, purporting to be a history of those years and institutions. That they are mainly a record of fantasy rather than fact, and shameless hypocrisy wrapped in saccharine words of dedication has be¬ come obvious to all who know the record. It is un¬ fortunately to your discredit that yours was one of the first articles to initiate this sordid parade of falsification and apology. When I first saw your article, K, I was so outraged by it that I went to my typewriter and wrote you a letter. When I had finished it, I realized that it was too late; what you had done was not born of ignor¬ ance, but of positive motive and in full awareness of the facts. So I put the letter away in my files and wrote the short statement of disappointment which you received. But as events have turned and locked into one another, I think that now is not too late. This time, however, I am sending what I wrote to you, as an open letter. It is a rebuke and reminder, however small, to those whose commercial ambitions and indifference obscured all that was worthy of atten¬ tion in those critical years, and reduced the artist to his present level of competitor with political double-talk, the Broadway flea market, and the col¬ lectivist castration ward. That I speak in the first person qualifies no points I mention. The few whom I had invited to walk with me in those first years in New York quickly abdicated in favor of fear or ambition or, in two conspicuous cases, proved themselves to have been already dedi¬ cated to the machine of exploitation, only posing as men of integrity until their goals of success had been achieved. This, then, is the letter I wrote to you on June 11, 1959 but did not send: Dear K: Yesterday my attention was drawn to a small maga¬ zine called Evergreen Review and in particular to an article in it written by you.” I read it very carefully because most of the people, their actions, and the consequences thereof, have for many years been familiar and of deep concern to me. Now there is a body of interesting fact indirectly

related to those gas-chamber white walls you extol so generously. It is one of the great stories of all time, far more meaningful and infinitely more intense and enduring than the wars of the bull-ring, or the battlefield—or of diplomats, laboratories, or com¬ merce. For it was in two of those arenas some thir¬ teen years ago that was shown one of the few truly liberating concepts man has ever known. There I had made it clear that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for sub¬ jugation. It was instantly hailed, and recognized by two or three men that it threatened the power ethic of this culture, and challenged its validity. The threat was vaguely felt and opposed by others who presented an almost united front in defense of their institutions. Remember, I was invited, -even begged by many dealers to show my work on their walls. I was told I must not fail friends of delicate conviction, nor “believers in painting" who needed my company, nor the “lovers of art” who would welcome blows for the new world to come. That I accepted briefly their urgings as being in good faith is one of the mistakes I can never permit myself to forget. But in those years I learned beyond all doubt that it was a time of testing, a time for rigor without compromise. The details are too numerous and vicious to recount here. Certainly the characters who ran those sordid giftshoppes knew every nerve and how to press it. Un¬ willingness to join the herd invited malicious inter¬ pretations of one’s work and acts. Glib praise to the right people denied one the right to speak the truth; museum — politicians and hucksters determined all values, and those who sold out ranged themselves in the ranks of authority—for the price of a flunky’s handout. Thus in those dead rooms the way was pre¬ pared for self-contempt, for clowns, for the obscenity that degrades the discipline of true freedom and per¬ verts the idea that marks the moment of elevation. The little men were numbered and took their place in file. Oh, some alibied their abdication with inso¬ lence, some with syntheses of fashionable devices, some with simulated protest, and some with gestures of futility. Others were indifferent because they had always been thus. The ambitious, the shrewd, the frustrated, each found his niche in the activity that satisfied his desires. These above all, the public understood and any quarrel they provoked was spe¬ cious, a mere barroom debate, a lovers’ wrangle. Be assured, few truths were ever really seen on the sterile walls of those who now beg for remem¬ brance and honor. The professionals? They admit they would not or could not look at my work. For those walls and their owners abetted—demanded, the empty, the socio-literary, the blatant effect that ar¬

rested the jaded and insensitive for a moment in their boring rounds. The painters? One group of them begged one of the most eminent dealers you mention with approba¬ tion, for any terms when he threw them out after collecting the paintings demanded in their prepos¬ terous contract. I saw their confusion and weakness and offered to speak out in their behalf. They crawled back like whipped dogs to him when he was ready to re-admit them. For, as the affluent one among them expressed it, “Fie might be useful to us some day.” Another dealer, rated as a queen among queens in the hierarchy of galleries, demanded with a cool¬ ness that would make Shylock blush, 33 1/3% of the value of a painting from one of the impecunious in her stable who had given it to a dentist for his dental bill. Each gallery impresario performed his or her dutifully promoted role and the men they exploited were each in time brought to heel. It is a tale repeated only with slight variation in nearly every gallery, without honor, or courage, or evidence of shame. I mention the above incidents only to confirm the issue in general. The men and their work and their agents became as one, and no borrowed images, polit¬ ical illustration, Bauhaus sterilities, symbols of po¬ tency, pseudo-religious titles, nor any concealment behind that most faceless of apologies “Art,” should hide the puerility and meanness of their purpose and games. And they all are amply worthy of the contempt and hatred they secretly exchange with one another even unto their death. It has always been my hope to create a free place or area of life where an idea can transcend politics, ambition and commerce. It will perhaps always re¬ main a hope. But I must believe that somewhere there may be an exception. Meanwhile, I must charge you not to give life to those, who, whimpering from their morbid cribs, would be remembered as they were not, and given an honor they schemed to shame when one defended his name and his purpose. The truth is usually hard and sometimes bitter, but if man is to live it must live. What transpired and became clear to some in the last three decades is known by a very few, and those few would hide for expediency what they know; only its influence and parodies are commonly evident. It remains a tremen¬ dous untold story, a testing of men and minds in the shadows. The memory of it still haunts those who worked to use and betray the spirit from which it was born. Dig out the truth and one man is a match for all of them. Accept their premises and you will walk on your knees the rest of your life.* *The article to which Mr. Still has reference is “The Impor¬ tance of a Wall: Galleries," by Kenneth Sawyer, Evergreen Review, Spring, 1959.

1960-F, 112x1451/2".

Harold Rosenberg Criticism begin to think, “What am I doing, just looking? Maybe I ought to have a thesis too.” In the end, the close visual study of paintings destroys their visual reality — a reality much more involved with contemporary culture than with mere retinal data.

The following comments were made by the dis¬ tinguished American art critic, Mr. Harold Rosen¬ berg, at the time of his December 1963 visit to Los Angeles. These ad lib responses to questions from members of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Contemporary Art Council have been re¬ stricted to the vocation and techniques of con¬ temporary criticism.

Question: I detect an unwillingness on the part of art critics today to commit themselves to a work of art or a movement. Do you agree?

HAROLD ROSENBERG

To evaluate a modern painting one needs to carry it back to its creator. Taken by itself no single work can be adequately appraised. The connoisseurship which the public expects in its critics cannot be achieved in respect to contemporary works unless the artist is present in a continuum of ideas and practice. Of course it is embarrassing for a man who occupies a professional position when someone asks him a reasonable question, to say “Let me tell you why that is so complicated that I can’t answer it.” Often answers are given not because the man who gives the answers really expects anyone to benefit from them but simply because he has no other way out under the conditions in which the public expects him to practice his vocation. But we may as well know that such opinions are conjectural at best. The more hypothetical the answer to a serious question about art, the more likely it is to have a certain amount of sense. I don’t mean that there aren’t many definite things that can be said about modern art but they usually aren’t the things that people are likely to ask about. The ordinary person wants to know, “Is this a good painting or a bad painting?” “How much is it worth?” “Will it be more valuable 25 years from now or less valuable?" Very few questions of this type can be answered. Question: How does art criticism relate to the de¬ velopment of literary criticism in the last 25 years? The evolution of the critical professions since the war has taken place under the pressure of the growth of the science departments in the universities. A tre¬ mendous amount of money has been poured into the universities to carry on scientific research. This brought pressure to do the same for the social sci¬ ences. What was left out were the so-called humani¬

ties, including literature and art. There, too, arose an internal pressure to develop techniques that were as specialized, and you might say as mysterious, as those of science and mathematics. In literature the “new criticism” conceived an approach to reading novels, poetry and plays that became steadily more engrossed in its own techniques and its own termi¬ nology. This critical methodology conquered the uni¬ versity English departments. I see the evolution of a similar approach to painting taking place in the uni¬ versities. Once it has reached its full flowering it will no longer be possible to look at a painting without having studied the critical literature in which it has been analyzed in terms of space, color and line rela¬ tions. The work of each artist will be broken down into visual qualities which no one can see who is not a specialist. In “Art International” we are be¬ ginning to get a criticism that is like the “new criti¬ cism” in literature. One looks at the painting over and over again and is unable to see what the writer is writing about — perhaps it isn’t there. The critic sees it because it is part of his thesis, and others

I don’t think that is the problem of art criticism today. There are plenty of people who are ready to make the most self-assured, even ferocious judg¬ ments. Apparently, they are too unsure of themselves to qualify their observations. Perhaps the problem is exactly the opposite of what you suggest — that art criticism today tends to merge too often into promo¬ tion. Literary criticism has the advantage of a vast literature and with it in mind a critic tends to be cautious. There is no art criticism, strictly speaking, until the 19th century. Even now, there are few' critics, no literature. It does not deal with a verbal medium, and it is not capable of the degree of subtlety in ana¬ lyzing a particular work that can be achieved in re¬ spect to a poem or novel. In the absence of a body of sound opinion, there is a great temptation on the part of people who pose as experts to say, "This is a masterpiece.” How many critics have said of a work of modern literature that it is a masterpiece and that its creation cancels all previous masterpieces? I cannot think of a reputable literary critic who makes the kind of arrogant remarks that are often found in writings on art. The problem of art criticism is to get more reflection and more discussion of basic principles into its literature rather than expressions of so-called "commitment.” There is not much in¬ tellectual value in saying, "I like this painting” or "I don’t like that one,” and things are not improved by substituting, “This fills me with doubt.” We need more discussion of what painting itself is about in these times and more ideas that help everybody make up his own mind. A painter should commit himself to whatever hypo¬ thesis he is attempting to develop in his painting. The critic should commit himself to criticism rather than to a painter or a painting. If he commits him¬ self to a painter he becomes a promoter and no dif¬ ferent from a dealer. A dealer or a collector commits

himself. The collector has historically been the main critic. He commits himself by acquiring a painting, in a decisive way. I mean the collector in the largest sense. When Pope Ignatius commissioned Painter X to do his portrait, that was criticism of the most con¬ vinced sort. He chose this painter among all of the painters of Europe — that is the extremist form of commitment. The same is true today when a collec¬ tor, having the whole world art market before him, decides to buy the work of a particular artist. A critic doesn't have to make such choices. He can devote himself to talking about what’s behind all of it: what experience is represented in this or that painting, what ideas, what motives, how it relates to contem¬ porary culture. There isn't much you can say in words about the painting itself, though you can talk for hours provided the painting is there to look at.

a modern painter (particularly an action painter) ap¬ proaches his canvas and puts a stroke or a dot on it, the whole thing begins to change and he does not have control. He must struggle with it for his result. So a new concept of creation appears, and that be¬ gins to make sense of the idea of eliminating perspec¬ tive. We have an idea of some kind of continuous creation in which the artist is involved as a total individual, and it would not do for him just to place forms symmetrically in deep space. We think that maybe the modern idea is creatively richer and freer. That is why Hans Hofmann said that we have a much better idea than the Renaissance. That’s a very proud statement. Whether you believe it or not, it is an inspiring thought. Question: Do you have a set of ethics or ground rules for the critic in the plastic arts, or for yourself?

The weakness in art criticism has been in the level of its discussion of the meaning of contemporary art. There is sufficient talk about how the work is made and what its characteristics are in terms of some technological concept of evolution, some concept of a constant purification of the idea of space in painting, for example. Some critics like to compare that de Kooning with that Clyfford Still. De Kooning, they find, is involved with three-dimensional space. There is depth in a de Kooning; though his shapes are not modeled, they suggest the density of the human body. In the Still you are dealing entirely with planes —no figures, just planes laid one upon another as if they were sheets of paper. We are then presented with a theory of evolution from Renaissance deep space, a movement toward flat space, which is carried to a further degree in the Still than in the de Kooning. Why is it better to have planes than thicknesses? Only Hofmann has tried to answer this question. He has tried to erect over the many years of his teaching a principled criticism of Renaissance space, that it created, as he put it, a hole in the wall. He said that this aperture, with its foreground, middle ground and background did not act back on the painter. He tried to give meaning to the idea of fidelity to the “pic¬ ture plane” by connecting it with the problems of creation in painting. And it's perfectly true that if you look at a Renaissance painting (most Renaissance paintings) you find that the painter had complete control over that illusionary box and that he puts the figures inside it, one set behind the other. Now when

I have no ground rules because I’m not devoted to the idea of methodology. I like to talk to artists. I’ve spent most of my life talking to artists. My criticism is not really criticism very often, it is simply a con¬ tinuing dialog with artists. All of these painters (in¬ dicating the walls hung with works by Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Piet Mon¬ drian) are critics. There is no painting in this room that is not a criticism of painting. Every one of these paintings is produced as the result of a conclusion as to what painting is. That’s Still's idea about paint¬ ing today. That's Picasso’s idea about primitive art and the whole history of painting in the West. That's Jackson’s idea about the subjective relation to painting. An art critic is a critic who deals with art. You have to start with a critic —there is such an animal — the interest in art comes later. A critic is a peculiar beast who goes around repeating, “I want to find out how it works. What’s the matter with it? When is it good? When is it bad? What is it saying?” A peculiar kind of beast. Then he applies his peculiarity to some field of endeavor, say, art. Usually this animal will criti¬ cize anything: give him a plate of french fried pota¬ toes and he won't necessarily find something wrong with them. But he is likely to remark, “I once had some that were a little better.” Question: Then what the critic does is to amplify the environment?

Amplify and correct, but mostly investigate. His work involves making a judgment regarding the ten¬ dency of our culture as a whole. You start to make choices on this basis. I believe every good critic is basically a critic of society. He is for one kind of art rather than another for the sake of society. The work of art creates value. It doesn't only submit itself to value; it creates it. Question: How do you decide what to write about? That’s not really very difficult, because it has to do with one’s idea of what meaning is. Something arouses your total experience of meaning, and you say, "This seems to be related to that.” You appre¬ ciate it and then you begin to relate it to your con¬ figuration of meanings. You don't decide on any ob¬ jective basis — you’re involved with comparison, with fitting in and filling out. If you’re confronted with a painting you immediately connect it with other paint¬ ings — you can’t admire it any other way. The big event in contemporary American art is that a continuity has been established since the early '40s, so that today even when one is against an idea he is against it in terms of that idea. The artists of the generation of the abstract expressionists were con¬ cerned with the problem of creation and being cre¬ ative. Recently, Andy Warhol made the cute remark that everything and everybody are so creative that he would like everyone to think the same way. That's a very fine joke. And it results in a kind of art that is— all the same. That's lovely. You start with an idea, you get an antithesis and then somebody else says “I get the point" and goes on to do sofnething new. There we have the critical connection. This is the be¬ ginning of a culture. It is a tremendous thing. Art has become a family matter. As far as America is con¬ cerned the post-war period did not bring art to an end, it brought art to a beginning. An American artist goes to Rome and finds that Romans want to know what he is doing. Just think of that! Thirty years ago he would have looked for a third cousin to introduce him to some Italian who would have given him the inside story on European art. The world is absolutely turned upside down by this transformation of culture. We have a continuity: because Hofmann and Warhol are part of the same discussion. They used to talk about things that way only in foreign countries. ■

George Segal, “Woman Shaving her Legs,” 1963. (Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mayer;.

AN INTERVIEW WITH

GEORGE SEGAL HENRY GELDZAHLER What caused sculpture?

you

to

move

from

painting

into

My dissatisfaction with all the modes of painting that I had been taught that couldn’t express the quality of my own experience. Had you done or thought of sculpture previously? In 1958 I had a combined sculpture and painting show. I had a history of painting life-size figures. I simply made three life-size figures out of wire, plas¬ ter and burlap, one sitting, one standing and one lying. They looked to me as if they had stepped out of my paintings.

crate. They were white. To me they seemed an im¬ portant part of the show. The most important reac¬ tion was my own. I went on painting. I don't think I fully realized then the implications of the sculpture as formal solutions to what I wanted to express.

Do you see any connection between Allen Kaprow’s, Jim Dine’s, Claes Oldenburg’s and Bob Whitman’s happenings and your ideas about sculpture?

Yes, very much. Kaprow and I have a ten year history of friendship and a history of great detailed, involved, analytical, esthetic discussion. They were passionate, we used to rant and rave.

Is there much visual connection between those three pieces and your present work?

How about a visual connection?

Yes. One of the figures was sitting on a real bro¬ ken chair, on a pedestal made from an old chicken

I left a path of my own dissatisfaction in my painting, alternately accepting and rejecting expres¬ sionism, geometric structure, figuration, transforma¬

tion—and the decision to enter literal space was determined by strong urges for total experience. I could never quite paint abstractly because I felt I was too young, too sensual to deal with what I thought was a splinter of the human experience, no matter how high the level of its metaphysics. Much talk preceded the first appearance of happenings, talk about the urge to put contemporary experience into it—the litter of the streets—domesticity in your own household—the actual look of the landscape. None of these were accepted or legitimate concerns of art in the New York atmosphere. Once these con¬ cerns became clear the huge problem was how to give them form. Many solutions are possible—among them happenings. I suppose the nature of the solu¬ tion is dictated by the individual temperament of the artist, none really right or wrong but necessary to each one. Do you feel that there was a cohesiveness about the Hansa Gallery group and its relationship to the

20

Does the whiteness of the plaster disturb or intrigue you? Have you considered color, paint in the figure itself? The whiteness intrigues me; for all its special con¬ notations of disembodied spirit, inseparable from the fleshy corporeal details of the figure. Color itself interests me a great deal. In the total compositions I use the built in color of the real objects and in¬ creasingly I'm concerned with color as light rather than color as paint.

Did your trip to Europe or seeing your work in Paris give you any insight or ideas?

Yes. Mostly my experience as a tourist encounter¬ ing a few staggeringly great things I knew about but had never seen before. I was working on my Gas Station before I went to Europe and had the piece saturated with dazzlingly colored advertising signs. After encountering the space in Chartres and being staggered by the austerity of the late Titian in Venice, I came home restless and ended by tearing all the signs from the Gas Station, replacing them with ele¬ ments that are absolutely necessary and intensely expressive—there was a ruthless quality of pruning away the inessential.

Did your European experience give you an idea about being an American artist?

George Segal, "Man at a Table," (Green Gallery), ( photo: Nancy Astor).

Hofmann School?

differently.

For me the Hansa represented an embryo that hinted at most of the major directions in New York contemporary art. It’s probably a great tribute to Hofmann that he spawned a group of individuals so willing to work passionately in so many different directions.

Therefore, as with traditional sculpture, your work is impossible to photograph adequately.

Do you feel the environmental nature of your sculp¬ ture is misunderstood?

21

Possibly. Yes. Many people seem so shocked by seeing a realistic white plaster figure that they tend psychologically to focus only on the figures. What interests me is a series of shocks and encounters that a person can have moving through space around several objects placed in careful relationship. I just finished working on a Gas Station piece. The man who posed really runs the Gas Station on the highway near my house. He’s taking one step for¬ ward with an oil can in his hand. My private irony is if I took away the oil can and turned his fingers up he could be St. John the Baptist in coveralls. He's behind a huge glass window and you see him through glass and a pyramid of red oil cans. As you move around the glass you encounter him from the rear and see a black rack of seven black tires sus¬ pended several inches above his head. This sudden catching of fright doesn’t happen until you move into the right position and then you know him

Not impossible. I think it requires a different ap¬ proach. Since there is no definitive view, the photo¬ grapher can enter the work and, more than usual, trust his emotional reactions to fragments or aspects of the work. If I set up a situation well enough there can be many emotional encounters on many levels. And this offers the choice to the traveller of extract¬ ing as much or as little as he wishes.

You talk of realistic white plaster figures? The look of these figures is both accidental and planned. I usually know generally what emotional stance I’d like to have in the finished figure and I ask the model to stand or sit in a certain way. That model though is a human being with a great deal of mystery and totality locked up in the figure. In spite of my technique certain truths of bone structure are revealed and so are long time basic attitudes of re¬ sponse on the part of the model. If you have to sit still for an hour you fall into yourself and it is im¬ possible to hide, no matter the stance. I just finished casting three people seated calmly on bus seats with only slightly different poses and they come out three different, readable personalities.

It was after my first trip to Europe this summer that I made a certain peace with myself about being an American artist. I made a sculpture in Paris and had incredible difficulties getting the simplest hand tools and materials that are cheap and common here. Parisian landscape is so different in the human sense that American responses become almost im¬ possible. I discovered that many of the emotional attitudes that provoke my work are encased in the ugly expanses of glass, chrome, brick of home (of America). Are there compositional considerations that underly your work? The rules of composition are pretty fluid and ar¬ bitrary until they’re linked with a quality of how you understand the world. I read an article in Life Maga¬ zine describing the DNA molecule. It seems you have to cut through a slimy visceral mess, the kind that delighted Soutine, to get to a small bloody fragment that you put under an electron micro¬ scope. Amazingly a pure geometric helix is revealed. The ooze is undeniable—so is the geometry. Weav¬ ing together aspects, organic and geometric, keeps occuring to me because I suspect a natural truth that contains many seeming contradictions. Once you begin to deal with the everchanging aspects of three-dimensional encounters the number of formal solutions is countless. The largest problem lies in the emotional choice of the most moving or the most revelatory series of experiences. The peculiar shape and qualities of the actual empty air sur¬ rounding the volumes becomes an important part of the expressiveness of the whole piece. The dis¬ tance between two figures or between a figure and another object becomes crucial. My pieces often don’t end at their physical boundaries. ■

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n JOHN CAGE IN LOS ANGELES kind of text one doesn’t make himself clear. What I said was this; that I noticed two things he was doing and three things or something like that es¬ caped my notice. What I meant, and then I repeat later, is that he was not working on one painting at a time but was seriously engaged in about five different projects at the same time, and that struck my attention because I don’t work that way. If I am writing a piece of music I’m writing that one all the way through even if it takes me nine months. And so I’m finished with it. I don’t do something else while I'm doing that. My attention is focused on that, whereas Johns is a different character, different person I should say, who is able to give his full attention in a multiplicity of directions and I think something of this complexity enters into every single work of his—that is my point.

The following comments were made by the distinguished American composer, Mr. John Cage, at the time of his January 1965 visit to Los An¬ geles. The remarks are ad lib responses to ques¬ tions from an audience at the Los Angeles County Museum, following a reading by Mr. Cage from his texts on Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Du¬ champ, and Jasper Johns.

Question: In speaking of Jasper Johns’ working method, you spoke of the alternative of taking moves back, as in chess. But in chess you cannot take moves back. Cage: Some people you play with, when they see that you have made a bad move, they say, “Take it back and try over again.” And there is a way of working, for instance of seeing that the whole thing you have got involved in is no good, and throwing it away. There are various ways to make things easier for oneself but what I was trying to indicate is that when Johns sees he is in a bad situation, he goes right along, no matter where. It is a high sense of responsibility, courage; it is all kinds of good qualities.

Question: Did you do some editing of the texts for the reading tonight? Cage: This evening? Question: Yes. Cage: Well, do you mean how did I write the texts?

Question: At one point you said you saw three things Johns was doing (rest of question inaudible.) Cage: That is what I said. I realize that in this

Question: Yes.

John Cage

Cage: The Rauschenberg text was written rather quickly, and followed a musical score of mine. It

22

has been my habit for some years to write texts in a way analogous to the way that I write music. Say I have four subjects that I am willing to discuss. Then I take a sheet of paper with four shapes on it. Over that I place a circle which in the case of music refers to time and in the case of a text, such as these, refers to lines on a page. I have the lines, I have another sheet with points on it (these sheets are transparent) and as the points fall over the one that has shapes, some of the points are within the shape, some are outside. Now the circle with the numbers and other circles— another page not with points but with O's (circles) also is laid over this complex, then a dotted line which is wiggly—(meandering) is laid over this so that it intersects at least one of the points which is within one of the shapes and intersects also the first circle. It will possibly, very more likely than not, intersect with other points which are either within or outside of this shape, and the circles. In the case of the Johns’ text if it intersects with the circles then I am obliged to tell a story. If it intersects with the points I am obliged to present an idea. If these points and circles are within the shapes, the stories and ideas are relevant to his work, if outside, rele¬ vant to his life. And all of that within the number of lines that is given by the intersection of the dotted lines with the first circle. Now I searched and searched and searched for a way to write about Johns which would not only fulfill my musical obligation but would somehow suggest his work, or something that I felt about it. And one of the things I feel about it that I don’t feel about, say, Rauschenberg, or some other paint¬ ers, is that the whole surface of the painting has been worked on. There is no emptiness in it. There is no place that something hasn’t been done. There are a few exceptions to that, but few. So I made a text, fulfilling this obligation that I mentioned that produces jobs like this. And then I filled in the gaps, so that I too would have filled up the time, whereas in the Rauschenberg one, and I tried to give some reflection of that by the spaces that I left in time, there were spaces between these vari¬ ous obligations that I had to write. To write the Johns text, the actual writing took me, I think, about three weeks, but the coming to how to write it, this way of writing, took me five months of constant application to this problem of writing about it, and I gave you this evening, all the moves that I made (Laughter.) Interruption: But you can’t take back your moves. Cage: I did take back my moves. I admit that what you say is finally true, but in terms of what I gave you this evening, all the moves that I made with respect to this problem of writing about Johns are not given to you. You see what I mean. I had several interesting ideas which I found I could not carry out. And it may be that I will one day carry them out. I don't know that it is worth discussing. The Duchamp text was written in a simple way. You know the I Ching business of tossing three coins six times to get a number from one to sixty-four, and I got the number twenty-six which meant that I had only to write twenty-six statements. Then I tossed coins for each one of the statements to see how many words were to be used in each one. That is why there are sometimes single words, because

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I got the number one. Question: Are your texts numbered? Cage: No they are not numbered and I am not able to count them any longer because I used an¬ other process which was to connect them, so that some are connected and I don't any longer know where they began. (A question concerning Mr. Cage’s activity as a painter was asked.) Cage: I will tell you the story. I went for two years to Pomona College where they didn’t teach me what I was going to do. And they make you think, if you have an inclination to make things, that you are going to be a writer. So that one tends to think of himself as a poet or an author. But he goes to school, and after two years at Pomona I decided to leave the whole thing and I went to Europe where I was impressed by architecture and decided to be¬

come an architect. Not to become an architect but to study Gothic architecture, but a teacher of mine said that I should have a more creative involvement. But an architect told me, “In order to be an architect you must devote your life to architecture,’’ and I still felt very possessive about my life and I didn’t feel like giving it away to architecture. And so then I came in contact with both modern music and with modern painting and I decided that if that was the way things were that I could do it as well as anybody else. And so I began composing and painting, and I continued doing both of these things for three years and that brought me back from Europe to Los Angeles, to Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica, and I came in contact with Richard Buhlig, the pianist (who is no longer living), and with the Arensbergs and with Galka Schier and the Arensbergs and Galka Schier didn’t give me as much encouragement about my painting as Buhlig and others gave me about my music. I had not yet studied music, so, at the suggestion of Henry Cowell, I prepared to study with Schoenberg

and after studying with Cowell and with Adolph Weiss I presented myself to Schoenberg and he said, “Well you will probably not be able to afford my price for studying,’’ and I said, “Well, you don’t even need to mention it because I can’t pay you anything,” and he said, “Will you devote your life to music?” and I said “Yes.” And I stopped painting and I devoted my life to music. Now I wrote a great deal of music and gave concerts and what not and it looked for many years as though this music was not going to be published. In fact people always wanted more to hear about it than to hear it and so I took to writing lectures and articles and, if you please, those articles and lectures were published, or they contracted to publish them, before any of my music was published. But almost immediately all of the music was published too. Now some of that music, particularly around 1958, my “Concert for Piano and Orchestra,” used graphic notations and those notations were exhibited in the Stable Gallery. So have I or haven’t I devoted my life to music? ■

24

WALTER HOPPS Q. Jasper, from what point in your life would you date the beginnings of your career, your sense that you were an artist, or going to be an artist? A. Going to be an artist since childhood. Until about 1953 when it occurred to me that there was a difference between going to be and being, and I decided I shouldn’t always be "going to be” an artist. Q. And in 1953 were you then working in New York or were you still in the South? A. I was in New York. Q. Some of the earlier works such as the small green piece that's in the showing at the museum, did you do that when you were in New York or out¬ side of New York? A. New York. Q. Were you at Black Mountain? This has never been clear to me. A. No. Q. Do you recall the year you did the first flag? A. '54, but I’m not certain. Q. Does it exist? It hasn't been in any of the shows. A. It was in the show at the Jewish Museum. It's a large painting; it belongs to Philip Johnson. It's in sort of bad shape; it tends to fall to pieces. Q. Does it have bits of the collage paper or little photographs . . . does it have other materials com¬ ing through, such as the small one of 1955 that’s in the present show? A. Nothing so obvious as that series of photo¬ graphs. I suppose some of the type is visible. In a few places there are a few embossed papers which probably come through. Q. Was there any iconographic significance in the material that showed through or were your thoughts essentially formal? A. I think only in the instance say, where there are those photographs—that's a very deliberate kind of thing clearly left to be shown, not automatically used, but used quite consciously. But generally, whatever printing shows has no significance to me. Sometimes I looked at the paper for different kinds of color, different sizes of type, of course, and per¬ haps some of the words went into my mind; I was not conscious of it. Q. This is certainly the case with the book, the little painted book construction which you said was merely a book you weren't about to read, but was exactly the shape you wanted, and had nothing to do with it being a specific book. A. Right. Q. But then we get to a little target such as Michael Blankfort's small one of 1958 and it has always struck me as a marvelous bit of gratuitous¬ ness that the one looming bit of newspaper type that comes through near the center of it says "A very farsighted man.” A. ... I was not aware of that. (Laughing) That’s the first I heaid of it. Q. Were there historical artists whose ideas or work were involved in your thinking? A. I think not. I think I had never organized any thinking, any of my own thinking, so that I don’t think other people's thought was very interesting to me. Q. What about the case with your own peers and contemporaries? The working relationship that you had with Bob Rauschenberg is spoken of quite a bit, and I assume there was a mutual working re¬ gard for one another's activities at the time. Who

An Interview with Jasper Johns 'Flag Above White, with Collage,'’ 22 V? x 19Vi". 1955. (Collection of the artist).

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beyond Rauschenberg, if anyone? A. Personally, no one, I think, because I didn’t meet any people at that time, any artists, and so my contact was only public contact with work. I saw Rauschenberg’s work, and I saw Twombley's work, perhaps a bit of Jack Tworkov’s work at that time in a studio situation, but most of the painting I saw was in galleries. Q. You mentioned once that you admired Tworkov’s painting; was there some particular aspect of it? A. I have admired his painting. I saw a good deal of his work and it was meaningful for me to see it and this work, of course, changes a great deal from piece to piece even within a very short time. One painting may be quite different from another. Q. I would say this is true in your own work. It was very fascinating to me to see the three different paintings you had in progress in your studio in South Carolina. There they all were, being worked on close to the same moment, and yet some years from now, superficially we could place them at different moments of your career. A. Yes. Q. When did this sort of thing begin to happen, and do you feel that it’s an important part of your working way to go back and pick up images that began perhaps five, six or more years before? Is this something you would expect to be the case? A. Well, sometimes it happens unconsciously that we return to something, some aspect of something which is done returns in another painting uncon¬ sciously. There’s another thing. In working, if you

attempt to work in a way that changes, which I try to do, it can be exhausting at times and you may go back to something more familiar just as a rest. And then sometimes there is some deliberate reason for perhaps doing something that you had always meant to do and had never done. Q. Your first show in New York was in 1958. I’ve often wondered if you chose the occasion for that to be your first show there or did circumstances choose it. A. Circumstances. I guess around 1957, I had a good deal of work and I decided that I would like to show it; and there was no place that I wanted to show it because most of the galleries were involved in particular kinds of painting that I didn’t think I’d be happy to enter. I didn’t think I’d be happy to enter this kind of situation, the gallery situation. Then the only place I wanted to show was Betty Parsons who seemed to have no kind of . . . nothing that they were promoting, so I felt kind of free in that situation. Then I contacted Betty and she said she was on her way to Mexico and wouldn’t be back for six months. She said she had more artists in the gallery than she could take care of . . . she did this all very nicely, but . . . Q. Had she not gone to Mexico, things might have been different for all of us. A. Maybe, I don’t know. At any rate, she didn’t come down to see the paintings. There was no one else I wanted to see them. Then a painting of mine in some way got into a show at the Jewish Museum. Leo Castelli saw it and Leo, I guess, had just opened

a gallery, and I had never been there, and he came to see the paintings and wanted to show them. Q. Yes, that was the large green target that the Museum of Modern Art has. What sort of ideas led you from the flag to the target and some of the other images you then began working on? Did you see a kind of strain of a single idea? A. Yes, I think so. The target seemed to me to oc¬ cupy a certain kind of relationship to seeing the way we see and to things in the world which we see, and this is the same kind of relationship that the flag had. We say it comes automatically. Auto¬ matically you tend to do this, but you see that there are relationships which can be made and those seem to me the relationships that could be made between two images. They’re both things which are. seen and not looked at, not examined, and they both have clearly defined areas which could be measured and transferred to canvas. Q. They both exist on a flat surface. A. Yes. Q. Was this also the case when you began with a number painting as well? A. I believe so, if I’m right, that the first number paintings were just single figures. And that seemed to me very much the same. Then I saw a chart. You know the grey alphabet painting? I saw a chart in a book that had that arrangement of the alphabet. Then I of course realized I could do the numbers that way too. But earlier than that, with the first numbers, I didn’t do every number and I didn't work on them in any order and I deliberately didn't

26

do them all, so that there wouldn't be implied that relationship of moving through things. Q. Duchamp emphasizes the idea that his art works are idea-carrying. He’s often very unconcerned with how they look. To what extent has your painting at some particular point assumed idea-carrying qualities that weigh to a significant factor, along with making visual or formal choices? A. My idea has always been that in painting the way ideas are conveyed is through the way it looks and I see no way to avoid that, and I don't think Duchamp can either. To say that you don't care how it looks suggests something that I think is not quite possible, if what you’re doing is making some¬ thing to be looked at. Then, if it looks one way, it’s one thing, and if it looks another way, it's another thing. But one thing is not another thing. I under¬ stand that if you have an idea for a picture and if you make a picture, and if you take certain char¬ acteristics of a picture or whatever and make an¬ other picture, that they will share something, there will be some information, perhaps, which is con¬ veyed by either of them. But I think what is more interesting to me is the particular object encountered at any moment. Oh, that’s questionable, but I tend to think that the one object which is being examined is what’s important. Q, One might paint a number—the number "2” for example—because one merely likes the way it looks in some way, or one might decide to paint the number “2” because in the abstract sense the idea of painting a number was interesting. At some point did you find yourself interested in the idea of the number as an abstract idea or did it remain the

case as you described with the alphabet chart? You saw it and you liked the way it looked. A. Well, I don't understand what abstract sense can be implied. I don't know what would be meant there; I'm certainly not putting the numbers to any use, numbers are used all the time, and what’s being done is making something to be looked at. I don't know how to answer. I don’t want to insist upon making a beautiful object, which is not what I mean, but in making a painting, you work with what you see and what you do and the painting seems to me to be primarily concerned with those two things. The physical actions you take to make the painting, and the responses to looking at it. Q. The work up through ’58 or so had a far more static quality. There was less movement in the imagery and so on, until suddenly you did devise "Circle” and "Shade.” Something different happened there, and I wondered what you might tell us about your thoughts, what went on in your work, or what led to this change? How would you characterize the change? A. There was a change. I don’t think of it as drastic. Q. Somehow looking at all the work together, I don’t either, which interested me very much. If I looked one day at the “Flag on Orange" and an¬ other day at "False Start,” they seemed to be two drastically different things, and yet seeing it all together was less of a change. A. Well, of course, the "Flag on Orange” was involved with how to have more than one element in the painting and how to be able to extend the space beyond the limits of the image, the predeter¬

Jasper Johns, “Land’s End,” 67x48", 1963. (Coll. Edwin Janss, L.A.), Jasper Johns, “Light Bulb," sculpmetal, 1958. (Private Collection, Los Angeles).

27

mined image. And then the problem, I think, was how to make a painting without having that kind of object at all. Q. So this was the decision: to introduce from your point of view a more complex range of elements that would work together within the painting. A. Right. It got rather monotonous, making flags on a piece of canvas, and I wanted to add something —go beyond the limits of the flag, and to have dif¬ ferent canvas space. I did it early with the little flags with the white below, making the flag hit three edges of the canvas and then just adding something else. And then in the "Orange,” I carried it all the way around. The early things to me were very strongly objects. Then it occurs that, well, any painting is an object, but there was ... I don't know how to describe the sense alterations that I went through in doing this in thinking and in seeing. But I thought how then to make an object which is not so easily defined as an object, and how to add space and still keep it an object painting. And then I think in, say "False Start” and those paintings, the object is put in even greater doubt and I think you question whether it's an object or whether it’s not. Q. Then it would seem that a third stage was introducing actual objects into it in a very overt way. I was very struck by this in your recent work. What might have been the first work where this began? Of course, it's implied a bit in "Shade." A. Well it’s in the targets with plaster casts and in the "Grey Canvas” it's quite clear I think. I think if there was any thinking at all, or if I have any now, it would be that if the painting is an ob-

Jasper Johns. "Device," 21xl5V2". wash on paper. 1962. (Private Collection, N.Y.).

ject, then the object can be a painting . . . and I think that's what happened. That if on this area you can make something, then on this area you can make something. Q. I wondered how you might characterize the greater art situation in New York, your relationship to it. A. It is very busy ... I think it's difficult to make any kind of judgment there because it's very com¬ plicated. Many levels are not publicly acknowledged. The best thing about it is that there are many people working and a great deal of work is being done. I think that's what’s lively about it. Q. Have you felt merely an increased liveliness or any kind of change in the character of the situa¬ tion? I mean in the working art scene. Have you felt any change in that during the time you’ve been in New York? A. I've never been very close to very many artists; I was very close to Bob Rauschenberg and during a certain period was very familiar with Jim Dine’s work and saw it being made. That’s always lively, being close at hand when things are being done rather than simply seeing things presented. But I've seen very little in that way; I’ve seen a good deal publicly but not really been involved with people who were working because I haven’t been there very much. I've been either in the South or out of the country. Sometimes one would like a reinforcement that comes from closely contacting someone else who is working, seeing what his re¬ sponses to his own things are. But I haven’t been doing that in the last year very much. Q. Are there any works that you’ve done that seem particularly germinal to you, or that seem to particularly achieve what you may have wanted of them? A. I think the problem is more what to want rather than whether you get what you want. I mean, I think it s easy to get what you want in painting. If you want something, you just make it. But I’m

"False Start.” 67W" x 54". 1959. (Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, New York)

avoiding your question . . . Certain paintings are meaningful because they allow you to shift weight in a different way. Q. In other words, you might have what could be considered a specific image, an image that's open and could be shifted in format, handling, and so on? A. No. I mean that some paintings involve ele¬ ments which are not involved in other paintings and when those elements become involved then one is free from the boundaries of what one had been doing and can move. That kind of thing can happen either by dropping something, letting go of it, or by attaching something else, bringing something else in. For me, say a painting like “False Start,'' offered certain possibilities that I had not had. Q. Why did you call it “False Start?’’ A. Because I was working on the painting and I didn't know what to call it and it wasn't like my other paintings, and one day I was sitting in the Cedar Bar and looked up at a print of a horse race which was called “The False Start,” and I said that was going to be the title of my painting. Q. Some of your drawings ... is this correct? . . . are sketches before the fact of something that will be achieved in painting. Is it true that there are those that are drawings after the fact? A. Most are after. Only a couple, three or four, have been sketches or ideas which then were made into paintings, and were done with that intention. Generally the drawings have been made just to make the drawing, and the simplest way for me to do it was to base it on a painting which existed, although they generally don’t follow the painting very closely. Q. One drawing that I had never seen before was called "Memory Piece.” It looks as though it's dia¬ grammed for a piece of sculpture—an object to be made. A. Yes, it is; it's never been made. I keep a sketch book and sometimes I do little sketches in that for

ideas. I believe, I’m not certain, that I had sketches in the notebook trying to figure out how to do that piece. I may have done that drawing as a diagram for a carpenter who was going to make the cabinet, build a cabinet with drawers. But it never got made. Q. The sculpture seemed to come at a time when a good deal of your art was based closely on some of your own personal, immediately accessible ob¬ jects. Has there been a feed-back in some of the things you began to do in the sculptures into the sense of your painting? I felt that some of the things that you did, the painted bronzes and so on, began to, in one sense, influence some of the painting that you have done. A. In what way do you sense that? In the use of objects in the paintings? Q. I began to feel it a little bit in the case of the flashlight. It is not entirely a general thing. Flash¬ lights look very different, one from the other, so that having done the flashlight, it would seem to be yours. The beer cans, something that you would have had around in the course of your own life, and the brushes and the Savarin can, and so on, seem very much yours, very closely identified. A. Right out of the studio. They’d been sitting there a couple of years before I noticed. Q. Exactly. Out of the studio. Particularly in a painting like “Studio,” where it is literally the im¬ print of your own studio door, certain qualities seem more closely identified with your own life, working from some general area to more personal things. A. My only idea is that one ought to be able to use anything that one can see and any quality one can perceive. It's difficult for me to just do that because, I don't know, because I formed habits which only let in certain things or sometimes be¬ cause the qualities simply are not visible, until a certain time. Suddenly you see something you have not seen. I don't know for what reason, it's clearly not something you’ve invented. Q. The problem is then not really finding things that are hard to find, but suddenly recognizing what's just there. A. Yes, I think that, and also being able to use them, and just because they’re there doesn’t neces¬ sarily mean you're about to put them in the painting. Also what happens is you form habits, ways of doing things, and you’re so used to moving your body in a certain way, and your mind as well, that you never think to do another kind of action which would give you a different result. Q. I was thinking that one of the curious things about “Paint Brushes” is that they were in fact probably very much as we see them in the sculpture in bronze. In no other works, not even the beer cans, have you gone through all of the rather arduous process of creating them as a work of sculpture and bringing them right back to what is extraordinarily close to the way they actually were. A. Well, I think this is part of it. You have a model, and you paint a thing to be very close to the model. Then you have the possibility of completely fooling the situation, making one exactly like the other, which doesn't particularly interest me. (In that case, you lose the fact of what you actually have done.) I think what I hoped for was to get very close to that but to still have a sense of what the thing was, what it is. I like that there is the possi¬ bility that one might take the one for the other, but I also like that, with just a little examination, it’s very clear that one is not the other. ■

28

“If it was just a satirical thing there wouldn’t be any problem... i«

OLDENBURG LICHTENSTEIN WARHOL: A DISCUSSION

Roy

The following discussion, moderated by Mr. Bruce Glaser, was broadcast over radio station WBAI in New York in June, 1964. The transcript was edited for publication in September-October, 1965.

29

Bruce Glaser: Claes, how did you arrive at the kind of image you are involved with now? Did it evolve naturally from the things you were doing just be¬ fore ? Claes Oldenburg: I was doing something that wasn’t quite as specific as what I’m doing now. Everything was there, but it was generalized and in the realm of imagination, let’s say. And, of course, an artist goes through a period where he develops his “feel¬ ers” and then he finds something to attach them to, and then the thing happens that becomes the thing that he wants to be or say. So I had a lot of ideas about imaginary things and fantasies which I experimented with in draw¬ ings, sculptures and paintings, in every conceivable way I could. Through all this I was always attracted to city culture, because that’s the only culture I had. Then around 1959, under the influence of the novel¬ ist, Celine, and Dubuffet, I started to work with city materials and put my fantasy into specific forms. Then, under the influence of friends like Jim Dine and Roy Lichtenstein and Andy and all these peo¬ ple, the images became even more specific. But I can go back to my earlier work and find a tooth¬ paste tube or a typewriter, or any of the things that

Lichtenstein,

recent

ceramics.

appear in my present work, in more generalized forms. Glaser: You mention that some of the other artists who work with Pop imagery had some effect on you. Yet it is often said by advocates of Pop art that it arose spontaneously and inevitably out of the con¬ temporary milieu without each Pop artist having communication about, or even awareness of, what other Pop artists were doing. Are you suggesting something contrary to this ? Oldenburg: There is always a lot of communication between artists because the art world is a very small one and you can sense what other people are doing. Besides, America has a traditional interest in pop culture. In Chicago, where I spent a lot of time, people like June Leaf and George Cohen were work¬ ing very close to a Pop medium in 1952. George Cohen used to go to the dime store and buy all the dolls he could find and other stuff like that. Even though he used them for his own personal image there has always been this tendency. Also, in California, where I’ve spent some time, the tradition of getting involved with pop culture goes way back. But I don’t think the particular sub¬ ject matter is as important as the attitude. It’s a deeper question than just subject matter. Glaser: Roy, how did you come upon this imagery? Roy Lichtenstein: I came upon it through what seems like a series of accidents. But I guess that maybe they weren’t completely accidental. Before I was doing this I was doing a kind of Abstract Expression¬ ism, and before that I was doing things that had to do with the American scene. They were more Cubist

(Installation

view,

Leo Castelli

Gallery, November, 1965.)

and I used early American paintings by Remington and Charles Wilson Peale as subject matter. But I had about a three year period, just preced¬ ing this, in which I was doing only abstract work. At that time I began putting hidden comic images into those paintings, such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny. At the same time I was draw¬ ing little Mickey Mouses and things for my children, and working from bubble gum wrappers, I remember specifically. Then it occurred to me to do one of these bubble gum wrappers, as is, large, just to see what it would look like. Now I think I started out more as an observer than as a painter, but, when I did one, about half way through the painting I got interested in it as a painting. So I started to go back to what I considered serious work because this thing was too strong for me. I began to realize that this was a more powerful thing than I had thought and it had interest. Now, I can see that this wasn’t entirely accidental. I was aware of other things going on. I had seen Claes’ work and Jim Dine’s at the "New Forms, New Media” show (Martha Jackson Gallery, 1960), and I knew Johns, and so forth. But when I started the cartoons I don’t think that I related them to this, although I can see that the reason I felt them sig¬ nificant was partly because this kind of thing was in the air. There were people involved in it. And I knew Happenings. In fact, I knew Allan Kaprow who was teaching with me at Rutgers. Happenings used more whole and more American subject matter than the Abstract Expressionists used. Although I feel that what I am doing has almost nothing to do with en-

vironment, there is a kernel of thought in Happen¬ ings that is interesting to me. Glaser: How did you get involved with Pop imagery, Andy ? Andy Warhol: I'm too high right now. Ask somebody else something else. Glaser: When did you first see Andy’s work? Lichtenstein: I saw Andy’s work at Leo Castelli’s about the same time I brought mine in, about the spring of 1961. And I hear that Leo had also seen Rosenquist within a few weeks. Of course, I was amazed to see Andy’s work because he was doing cartoons of Nancy and Dick Tracy and they were very similar to mine. Glaser: Many critics of Pop art are antagonistic to your choice of subject, whether it be a comic strip or an advertisement, since they question the pos¬ sibility of it having any philosophical content. Do you have any particular program or philosophy be¬ hind what you do ? Oldenburg: I don’t know, and I shouldn’t really talk about Pop art in general, but it seems to me that the subject matter is the least important thing. Pop imagery, as I understand it, if I can sever it from what I do, is a way of getting around a dilemma of painting and yet not painting. It is a way of bring¬ ing in an image that you didn’t create. It is a way of being impersonal. At least that is the solution that I see, and I am all for clear definitions. I always felt, for example, that Andy was a purist kind of Pop artist in that sense. I thought that his box show was a very clear statement and I admire -

ness and one would hardly call Cezanne’s work im¬ personal. I think we tend to confuse the style of the finish¬ ed work with the method through which it was done. We say that because a work looks involved, as though interaction is taking place, that significant interac¬ tion is really taking place. And when a work does not look involved, we think of it merely as the prod¬ uct of a stencil or as though it were the same comic strip from which it was copied. We are assuming similar things are identical and that the artist was not involved. But the impersonal look is what I wanted to have. There are also many other qualities I wanted to have as an appearance. For example, I prefer that my work appear so literary that you can’t get to it as a work of art. It’s not that I'm interested in con¬ founding people but I do this more as a problem for myself. My work looks as if it is thought out be¬ forehand to such a degree that I don’t do anything but put the color on. But these are appearances and they are not what I really feel about it. I don’t think you can do a work of art and not really be involved in it. Glaser: You are lessening the significance of appear¬ ances but appearances can hardly be dismissed as a reflection of your intentions. Lichtenstein: But part of the intention of Pop art is to mask its intentions with humor. Glaser: Another thing; one may say he wants to make a work of art that is not self-conscious and that he doesn’t want to give the appearance of a self-con¬

passed through the mass media. Here for the first time is an urban art which does not sentimentalize the urban image but uses it as it is found. That is something unusual. It may be one of the first times that art focuses on the objects that the human be¬ ing has created or played with, rather than the hu¬ man being. You have had city scenes in the past but never a focus on the objects the city displays. Glaser: Is it fair to say that it is only to the subject matter that Pop art owes its distinction from other movements, and that there are relatively few new elements of plastic invention in your work? Lichtenstein: I don’t know, because I don’t think one can see things like plastic invention when one is involved. Oldenburg: If I didn’t think that what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art I wouldn't go on doing it. I think, for example, the reason I have done a soft object is primarily to introduce a new way of pushing space around in a sculpture or painting. And the only reason I have taken up Happenings is because I wanted to ex¬ periment with total space or surrounding space. I don’t believe that anyone has ever used space be¬ fore in the way Kaprow and others have been using it in Happenings. There are many ways to interpret a Happening, but one way is to use it as an exten¬ sion of painting space. I used to paint but I found it too limiting so I gave up the limitations that painting has. Now I go in the other direction and violate the whole idea of painting space. But the intention behind this is more important. ’ ’ ~ ..^ U MIWI C I I I l(JUI Lai 1i.

“THE EYE REVEALS THE TRUTH THAI

clear statements. And yet again, maybe Andy is not a purist in that sense. In art you could turn the question right around and the people that are most impersonal turn out to be the most personal. I mean, Andy keeps saying he is a machine and yet looking at him I can say that I never saw anybody look less like a machine in my life. I think that the reaction to the painting of the last generation, which is generally believed to have been a highly subjective generation, is impersonality. So one tries to get oneself out of the painting. Glaser: In connection with this I remember a show of yours at the Judson Street Gallery in 1959 which reflected your interest in Dubuffet, and that work clearly had a very personal touch. Your drawings and objects then were not made in the impersonal way that Roy uses a stencil or Andy a silk-screen. Lichtenstein: But don’t you think we are oversimpli¬ fying things? We think the last generation, the Ab¬ stract Expressionists, were trying to reach into their subconscious, and more deeply than ever before, by doing away with subject matter. Probably very few of those people really got into their subconscious in a significant way although I certainly think the movement as a whole is a significant one. When we consider what is called Pop art — although I don’t think it is a very good idea to group everybody to¬ gether and think we are all doing the same thing_ we assume these artists are trying to get outside the work. Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don’t really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this. Cezanne said a lot about having to remove himself from his work. Now this is almost a lack of self-conscious-

scious work of art, but it doesn’t matter whether you use an industrial method or whether you use a meth¬ od that emphasizes the artist’s hand. Whatever the case may be, we assume that if the artist has been working for any length of time he will acquire a certain lack of consciousness in the way he uses that particular method. As a result, consciousness, or the lack of it, becomes less of an issue. Oldenburg: I think we are talking of impersonality as style. It’s true that every artist has a discipline of impersonality to enable him to become an artist in the first place, and these disciplines are traditional and well known — you know how to place yourself outside the work. But we are talking about making impersonality a style, which is what I think char¬ acterizes Pop art, as I understand it, in a pure sense. I know that Roy does certain things to change his comic strips when he enlarges them, and yet it’s a matter of the degree. It’s something that the artist of the last generation, or for that matter of the past, would not have contemplated. Lichtenstein: I think that's true. I didn’t invent the image and they wanted to invent the image. Oldenburg: That’s right. And Andy is the same way with his BriJIo boxes. There is a degree of removal from actual boxes and they become an object that is not really a box. In a sense they are an illusion of a box and that places them in the realm of art. Glaser: Would you say that this particular ambiguity is the unique contribution of Pop art or is it the subject matter ? Oldenburg: Subject matter is certainly a part of it. You never had commercial art apples, tomato cans or soup cans before. You may have had still life in general, but you never had still life that had been

For example, you might ask what is the thing that has made me make cakes and pastries and all those other things. Then I would say that one reason has been to give a concrete statement to my fantasy. In other words, instead of painting it, to make it touchable, to translate the eye into the fingers. That has been the main motive in all my work. That’s why I make things soft that are hard and why I treat perspective the way I do, such as with the bedroom set, making an object that is a concrete statement of visual perspective. But I am not ter¬ ribly interested in whether a thing is an ice cream cone or a pie or anything else. What I am interested in is that the equivalent of my fantasy exists out¬ side of me, and that I can, by imitating the sub¬ ject, make a different kind of work from what has existed before. Glaser: What you say is very illuminating. How does this fit in with your intentions, Roy? Lichtenstein: Well, I don’t think I am doing the same thing Claes is doing. I don't feel that my space is anything but traditional, but then I view all space as traditional. I don’t dwell on the differences in viewing space in art history. For example, I can see the obvious difference between Renaissance and Cubist painting but I don’t think it matters. The illusion of three-dimensional space is not the basic issue in art. Although perspective as a scientific view of nature was the subject matter of Renaissance art, that perspective is still two-dimensional. And I think that what Cubism was about was that it does not make any difference, and they were restating it, making a formal statement about the nature of space, just as Cezanne had made another formal statement about the nature of space. So I would

30

not want to be caught saying that I thought I was involved in some kind of spatial revolution. I am in¬ terested in putting a painting together in a tradi¬ tional but not academic way. In other words, I am restating the idea of space because the form is different from the forms that preceded me. I think, like Claes, I am interested in objectifying my fantasies and I am interested in the formal prob¬ lem more than the subject matter. Once I have established what the subject matter is going to be I am not interested in it anymore, although I want it to come through with the immediate impact of the comics. Probably the formal content of Pop art differs from Cubism and Abstract Expressionism in that it doesn't symbolize what the subject matter is about. It doesn’t symbolize its concern with form but rather leaves its subject matter raw. Glaser: Claes, I want to find out a bit more about the nature of Dubuffet’s influence on you which we mentioned before. Your early work seemed to ex¬ plore the same areas of primitive art and expres¬ sion of the subconscious that he is interested in. Oldenburg: Yes, that’s true, but mainly Dubuffet is interesting because of his use of material. In fact, that is one way to view the history of art, in terms of material. For example, because my material is dif¬ ferent from paint and canvas, or marble or bronze, it demands different images and it produces differ¬ ent results. To make my paint more concrete, to make it come out, I used plaster under it. When that didn't satisfy me I translated the plaster into vinyl which enabled me to push it around. The fact

think of them as abstract painting when I do it. Perhaps that is where the deeper similarity lies, in that once I am involved with the painting I think of it as an abstraction. Half the time they are upside •down, anyway, when I work. Warhol: Do you do like Claes does with vinyl ketchup and french-fried potatoes? Lichtenstein: Yes, it’s a part of what you do, to make something that reminds you of something else. Oldenburg: This is something I wonder about. I know I make parodies on artists, as with the vinyl ketchup forms which have a lot of resemblance to Arp, but why? I wonder why we want to level these things. Is it part of the humbling process? Maybe it is be¬ cause I have always been bothered by distinctions — that this is good and this is bad and this is better, and so on. I am especially bothered by the distinction between commercial and fine art, or between fine painting and accidental effects. I think we have made a deliberate attempt to explore this area, along with its comical overtones. But still the mo¬ tives are not too clear to me as to why I do this. Lichtenstein: Nor with me either, nor even why I say I do it. Oldenburg: I don’t want to use this idea as an in¬ strument of ambition or facetiousness or anything like that. I want it to become work. But I am never quite sure why I am doing it. Glaser: There is a question in my mind as to whether much of the subject matter of Pop art is actually satirical. I have felt so many times that the subject matter and the technique are, indeed, an endorse-

mantic about that. This process of humbling it is a testing of the definition of art. You reduce every¬ thing to the same level and then see what you get. Lichtenstein: I am very interested in a thing that seems to happen in the visual arts more than any¬ where else. There is the assumption by some people that similar things are identical. If you were to do the same thing in music and play something that sounded like a commercial, it would be very hard to vary it from the commercial or not have it im¬ mediately obvious that you are “arting” it somehow, or making it esthetic. Your only alternative would be to play this thing — whatever it is — the simple tune, as is. If you did anything to it, it would imme¬ diately be apparent, and this is not true in the visual arts. Maybe this is one reason why this sort of thing has not been done in music. Although- it has had parallels in which commercial material is used it is always obviously transformed. Glaser: You are saying that one of the purposes of the subject matter of Pop art is to confuse the spectator as to whether the advertisement, comic strip or movie magazine photograph is really what it seems to be. Lichtenstein: This is true. In my own work there is a question about how much has been transformed. You will discover the subjects really are if you study them, but there is always the assumption that they are the same, only bigger. Glaser: Well, even if there is a transformation, it is slight, and this has given rise to the objection that Pop art has encroached on and plundered the private

THE KETCHUP LOOKS LIKE AN ARP.”

31

that I wanted to see something flying in the wind made me make a piece of clothing, or the fact that I wanted to make something flow made me make an ice cream cone. Glaser: I think it may even be fair to say that Du¬ buffet’s work is one of the main precedents for Pop art insofar as he was interested in banal and dis¬ credited images. And as you say, he worked with common or strange materials such as dirt and tar, or butterfly wings, to create his new imagery. Now, I would like to pick up something else we were talking about before, namely the possible im¬ plications of style in regard to Roy's work. I have had the feeling in looking at some of your paintings that they have more affinities with certain current styles of abstract art than with other kinds of Pop art. Your clearer, direct image, with its hard lines and its strong impact relate you to artists such as Al Held, Kenneth Noland or Jack Youngerman. Be¬ cause of these connections, discounting subject matter, I wondered whether you might be involved in some of the same stylistic explorations they are. Lichtenstein: Yes, I think my work is different from theirs and no doubt you think so too, but I also think there is a similarity. I am interested in many of these things, such as showing a similarity between cartooning and certain artists. For example, when I do things like explosions they are really kinds of abstractions. I did a composition book in which the background was a bit like Pollock, or Youngerman. Then I also have done the Picasso and Mondrians, which were obviously direct things, but they are quite different in their meaning than the other less ob¬ viously related analogies to abstract painting. I like to show analogies in this way in painting and I

ment of the sources of Pop imagery. It is certainly true that there are some satirical elements in this work, but apparently that doesn’t concern you too much. I wonder then, whether you are not saying that you really like this banal imagery. Lichtenstein: I do like aspects of it. Oldenburg: If it was just a satirical thing there wouldn’t be any problem. Then we would know why we were doing these things. But making a parody is not the same thing as a satire. Parody in the classical sense is simply a kind of imitation, some¬ thing like a paraphrase. It is not necessarily making fun of anything, rather it puts the imitated work into a new context. So if I see an Arp and I put that Arp into the form of some ketchup, does that reduce the Arp or does it enlarge the ketchup, or does it make everything equal? I am talking about the form and not about your opinion of the form. The eye reveals the truth that the ketchup looks like an Arp. That’s the form the eye sees. You do not have to reach any conclusions about which is better. It is just a matter of form and material. Lichtenstein: In the parody there is the implication of the perverse and I feel this in my own work even though I don’t mean it to be that, because I don’t dislike the work that I am parodying. The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire and I really don’t know what the implication of that is. Glaser: There is an ambiguity here too, part endorse¬ ment, part satire. Oldenburg: Anyhow there is something very beautiful in putting art back into the present world and break¬ ing down the barriers that have been erected for the appreciation of art. Nevertheless, I would like to say that I have a very high idea of art. I am still ro-

pleasure of discovering interest in what are ordina¬ rily mistaken as banal subjects. For example, if one privately enjoyed aspects of the comics, today one finds this pleasure made public in the galleries and museums. Lichtenstein: I am crying. Warhol: Comic strips now give credit to the artist. They say “art by.” Comic books didn’t give credit in the past. Oldenburg: It would be interesting to study the ef¬ fect of this on the average commercial artist who still remains a problem child. He is generally trying to figure out who he is and what he is doing. Maybe this will make them do more crazy things. I don’t know. Warhol: Commercial artists are richer. Glaser: That is a difference too. But I am more in¬ terested in the problems that come up in regard to your interest in popular imagery. For example, with you Claes, if at one time you saw in this ma¬ terial the possibility of exploring some kind of fantastic world, what you actually have done is to take the world of popular imagery and use it to a point where it is now becoming commonplace in museums and seen and talked about by cultured people, by critics and collectors. Your imagery no longer has any clear relationship to the public that the original popular image had, and the implication of this is that you may, in fact, have abandoned a very vital connection with a very large, but visually naive public. Oldenburg: We did not establish that my art had any clear relation to the public in the first place. I think the public has taken it for its own uses just as it takes everything you do for its own uses.

You can’t legislate how the public is going to take your art. Glaser: You did say that you were still interested in the idea of high art? Oldenburg: I am interested in distinguishing the art¬ ist as a creator from certain other people. If I make an image that looks very much like a commercial image I only do it to emphasize my art and the arbi¬ trary act of the artist who can bring it into relief somehow. The original image is no longer functional. None of my things have ever been functional. You can’t eat my food. You can’t put on my clothes. You can't sit in my chairs. Glaser: Traditional art is like that too. You can’t eat a still life. Oldenburg: But they haven’t been so physical, nor so close to you so that they looked as if you could eat them, or put them on or sit in them. Warhol: But with your bedroom set you can sleep in it. Oldenburg: You can sleep in it on my terms. But to get back to the idea of high art, I believe there is such a profession as being an artist and there are rules for this, but it is very hard to arrive at these rules. Glaser: What is your feeling about the audience that reacts to Pop art? Did you ever think that with such imagery you might be able to reach a larger audience

or do you want the same traditional art audience? Lichtenstein: When you are painting you don’t think of the audience but I might have an idea of how an audience would see these paintings. However, I don’t think that Pop art is a way of reaching larger groups of people. Glaser: Some commentators, having noticed the greater popularity and reception of Pop art, have said that this is so because it is representational rather than abstract. Lichtenstein: I don’t think Pop has found any greater acceptance than the work of the generation preced¬ ing. Oldenburg: There is a sad, ironic element here which almost makes me unhappy. I have done a lot of touring in this country and abroad for Pop shows and Happenings, deliberately, to learn how people feel about this outside of New York. There is a dis¬ illusionment that follows. When you come to a town they think you are going to be something like the Ringling Brothers. They expect you to bring coke bottles and eggs and that they are going to eat it and like it, and so on. But then, when they find that you are using different things you begin to grate on them. Warhol: Yes, but the wrong people come, I think. Oldenburg: But I hate to disillusion anybody, and you find people becoming disillusioned because it

turns out to be just the same old thing — Art. Glaser: Andy, what do you mean by the wrong people coming? Warhol: The young people who know about it will be the people who are more intelligent and know about art. But the people who don’t know about art would like it better because it is what they know. They just don’t think about it. It looks like something they know and see every day. Oldenburg: I think it would be great if you had an art that could appeal to everybody. Warhol: But the people who really like art don’t like the art now, while the people who don’t know about art like what we are doing. Glaser: Then you do believe that the public is more receptive to Pop art than to Abstract Expressionism? Warhol: Yes. I think everybody who likes abstract art doesn’t like this art and they are all the intelli¬ gent and marvelous people. If the Pop artists like abstract art it is because they know about art. Glaser: The criticism of Pop art has been that it reflects a growing tendency toward neo-conservatism that is apparent in certain areas of American life. On the most superficial level, reference is made to its turning away from abstraction and back to the figure. But on a more serious level, objections are raised about what seems to be the negation of hu¬ mane qualities which the more liberal segments of our society, rightly or wrongly claim as their special preserve. Superficially, one can point to the fact that you use industrial processes in making your work and deny the presence of the artist’s hand. There is also Andy’s statement, “I wish I were a machine.” Lichtenstein: This is apolitical. For that matter, how could you hook up abstraction with liberal thinking? Probably most artists may be more liberal politically. But Pop art doesn’t deal with politics, although you may interpret some of Andy’s paintings, such as those with the police dogs or the electric chairs, as liberal statements. Oldenburg: Andy, I would like to know, when you do a painting with a subject matter such as this, how do you feel about it? In the act of setting it up the way you do, doesn’t that negate the subject matter? Aren't you after the idea of the object speaking for itself? Do you feel that when you are repeating it the way you do, that you are eliminating yourself as the person extracting a statement from it? When I see you repeat a race riot I am not so sure you have done a race riot. I don’t see it as a political state¬ ment but rather as an expression of indifference to your subject. Warhol: It is indifference. Glaser: Isn’t it significant that you chose that par¬ ticular photograph rather than a thousand others? Warhol: It just caught my eye. Oldenburg: You didn’t deliberately choose it because it was a “hot” photograph? Warhol: No. Oldenburg: The choice of these "hot” subjects and the way they are used actually brings the cold at¬ titude more into relief. Glaser: Perhaps in dealing with feelings in such a way one may be exploring new areas of experience. In that case it would hardly be fair to characterize Pop art as neo-conservative. It might be more worth¬ while to consider its liberating quality in that what is being done is completely new. ■

32

Photo:

Dennis

Hopper

long live the happenings!

of the Tulane Drama Review, a special Happenings issue edited by Michael Kirby, Tulane University, Happenings are today’s only underground avantNew Orleans. Jean-Jacques Lebel is about to pub¬ garde. Regularly, since 1958, the end of the Hap¬ lish his book in Paris, and my book, “Assemblage, penings has been announced — always by those Environments & Happenings," Harry N. Abrams, Inc., who have never come near one — and just as reg¬ N.Y., will be out this spring. Besides this growing ularly since then, Happenings have been spreading literature, there is an increasing bibliography of around the globe like some chronic virus, cunningly articles of a serious nature. These publications — avoiding the familiar places and occurring where and the forty-odd Happeners — are extending the they are least expected. "Where Not To Be Seen: myth of an art which is nearly unknown and, for all At a Happening," advised Esquire Magazine a year practical purposes, unknowable. ago, in its annual two-page scoreboard on what's in Hence, it is quite in the spirit of things to intro¬ and out of Culture. Exactly! One goes to the Museum duce into this myth certain principles of action,* of Modern Art to be seen. The Happenings are the which would have the advantage of helping to main¬ one art activity that can escape the inevitable tain the present good health of the Happenings, death-by-publicity to which all other art is con¬ while — and I say this with a grin but without irony demned, because, designed for a brief life, they can — discouraging direct evaluation of their effective¬ never be over-exposed; they are dead, quite literally, ness. Instead, they would be measured by the stories every time they happen. At first unconsciously, then that multiply, by the printed scenarios and occasional deliberately, they played the game of planned obso¬ photographs of works that shall have passed on for¬ lescence, just before the mass media began to force ever — and which altogether would evoke more of the condition down the throats of the standard arts an aura of something breathing just beyond one’s (which can little afford the challenge). For the latter, immediate grasp, than a documentary record to be the great question has become "How long can it judged. In effect, this is calculated rumor, the pur¬ last?”; for the Happenings it always was “How to pose of which is to stimulate as much fantasy as keep on going?”. Thus, “underground" took on a possible, so long as it leads primarily away from the different meaning. Where once the artist’s enemy artist and his affairs. On this plane, the whole proc¬ was the smug bourgeois, now he was the hippie ess tends to become analogous to art. And on this journalist. plane, so do the rules of the game. In 1961 I wrote in an article, “To the extent that a 1. THE LINE BETWEEN THE HAPPENING AND Happening is not a commodity but a brief event, DAILY LIFE SHOULD BE KEPT AS FLUID AND PER¬ from the standpoint of any publicity it may receive, HAPS INDISTINCT AS POSSIBLE. The reciprocation it may become a state of mind. Who will have been between the man-made and the ready-made will be there at that event? It may become like the seaat its maximum power this way. Two cars collide on monsters of the past or the flying saucers of yes¬ a highway. Violet liquid pours out of the broken ra¬ terday. I shouldn’t really care, for as the new myth diator of one of them, and in the back seat of the grows on its own, without reference to anything in other there is a huge load of dead chickens. The particular, the artist may achieve a beautiful privacy, cops check into the incident, plausible answers are famed for something purely imaginary, while free to given, tow truck drivers remove the wrecks, costs are explore something nobody will notice." The Hap¬ paid, the drivers go home to dinner . . . pened jealous of his freedom, deflects public at¬ 2. THEMES, MATERIALS, ACTIONS AND THE AS¬ tention away from what he actually does, to a SOCIATIONS THEY EVOKE, ARE TO BE GOTTEN myth about it instead. The Happening? It was some¬ FROM ANYWHERE EXCEPT FROM THE ARTS, THEIR where, some time ago; and besides, nobody does DERIVATIVES AND THEIR MILIEU. By eliminating those things any more . . . the arts, and anything that even remotely reminds There are presently more than forty men and wom¬ one of them, as well as by steering clear of art gal¬ en "doing” some kind of Happening. They live in leries, theaters, concert halls and other forms of Japan, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, cultural emporia (such as night clubs and coffee Argentina, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Austria, Iceland, shops), the chance is that a separate art will de¬ — as well as in the United States. Probably ten of velop. And this is the goal. Happenings are not a these are first rate talents. Moreover, at least a composite or “total" art, as Wagnerian opera wished dozen volumes on or related to the subject are cur¬ to be; nor are they even a synthesis of the arts. Un¬ rently available: Wolf Vostell’s “Decollage No. 4,” like most of the standard arts, their source is non¬ Koln, 1963, published by the author; "An Anthology,” art, and the quasi-art that results always contains edited and published by Jackson MacLow and La something of this uncertain identity. A U.S. Marines’ Monte Young, N.Y., 1963; George Brecht’s “Water manual on jungle fighting tactics, a tour of a lab¬ Yam,” Fluxus Publications, N.Y., 1963; "Fluxus 1,” an oratory where polyethylene kidneys are made, a anthology edited by George Maciunas, also Fluxus traffic-jam on the Long Island Expressway, are more Publications, N.Y., 1964; Richard Higgins’ “Postface useful than Beethoven, Racine or Michelangelo. and Jefferson’s Birthday,” Something Else Press, 3. THE HAPPENING SHOULD BE DISPERSED N.Y., 1964; Michael Kirby's "Happenings," E. P. Dut¬ OVER SEVERAL, WIDELY - SPACED, SOMETIMES ton, N.Y., 1964; Yoko Ono's "Grapefruit," Wunternaum MOVING AND CHANGING, LOCALES. A single per¬ Press, L.I., N.Y., 1964; Jurgen Becker’s and Wolf Vosformance space tends to be static and limiting (like tell’s “Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realpainting only in the center of a canvas). It also is isme,” Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, 1965; Galerie Parthe convention of stage theater, preventing the use nass’ (in Wuppertal) “24 Stunden,” Verlag Hansen & of a thousand possibilities which, for example, the Hansen, Itzehoe Vosskate, 1965; Al Hansen’s “Primer movies take pictures of, but do not allow an audi¬ of Happenings and Time Space Art”; and "Four ence to actually experience. One can experiment Suits,” works by Philip Corner, Alison Knowles, Ben by gradually widening the distances between the Patterson and Tomas Schmit, both just released by events in a Happening. First, at a number of points the Something Else Press; and the Winter, 1965 issue ALLAN KAPROW

‘Summarized from my forthcoming oook, cited above.

along a heavily trafficked avenue; then in several rooms and floors of an apartment house where some of the activities are out of touch with each other; then on more than one street; then in different but proximate cities; finally, all around the globe. Some of this may take place en route from one area to another, using public transportation and the mails. This will increase the tension between the parts, and will also permit them to exist more on their own without intensive coordination. 4. TIME, CLOSELY BOUND UP WITH THINGS AND SPACES, SHOULD BE VARIABLE AND INDEPEN¬ DENT OF THE CONVENTION OF CONTINUITY. What¬ ever is to happen should do so in its natural time, in contrast to the practice in music of arbitrarily slowing down or accelerating occurrences in keep¬ ing with a structural scheme or expressive purpose. Consider the time it takes to buy a fishing pole in a busy department store just before Christmas, or the time it takes to lay the footings for a building. If the same people are engaged in both, then one action will have to wait for the other to be com¬ pleted. If different people perform them, then the A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS: “• • • The illustrations can stress one of the main points of the article: the importance of the non-art world for the substance and form of the Happenings. Pictures of jazzy gas stations (the most important architecture of California!); the Hell's Angels en masse; a march-in at Berkeley or U.C.L.A.; a big drugstore; giant cranes putting up a skyscraper; a dragster working on his chromeplated motor; a brain operation with all the sci¬ ence-fiction equipment; a board-meeting. This would be far more interesting than my work or anyone else’s, as far as I am concerned. And, besides their inherent interest, such illustrations would underscore the fact that photos of Hap¬ penings (when they exist, which is rarely) are inadequate records because they tend “to pictorialize” a moment out of many moments, while photos of daily events are not so much pictures but reminders of what we know (or could know) through active experience. Throw the emphasis away from art; I’d prefer that we all stay out of the act for now.” — Allan Kaprow events may overlap. The point is that all occurrences have their own time; these may or may not concur according to the fairly normative needs of the situ¬ ation. They may concur, for instance, if people, com¬ ing from different areas, must meet in time to take a train somewhere. 5. THE COMPOSITION OF ALL MATERIALS, AC¬ TIONS, IMAGES, AND THEIR TIMES AND SPACES, SHOULD BE UNDERTAKEN IN AS ARTLESS, AND, AGAIN, PRACTICAL, A WAY AS POSSIBLE. This does not refer to formlessness, for that is literally impos¬ sible; it means the avoidance of form theories as¬ sociated particularly with the arts, and which have to do with the idea of arrangement per se, such as serial technique, dynamic symmetry, sonnet form, etc. If I and others have linked a Happening to a collage of events, then Times Square can also be seen that way. Just as some collages are arranged to look like classical paintings,’ others remind one of Times Square. It depends on where the emphasis lies. A Happening perhaps alludes more to the form of games and sports, than the forms of art, and in this

34

photos this page: Ralph Gibson.

connection, it is useful to observe how children in¬ vent the games they play. Their composition is often strict, but their substance is unencumbered by es¬ thetics. Children’s play is also social, the contribution of more than one child's idea. Thus, a Happening can be composed by several persons, to include, as well, the participation of the weather, animals and insects. 6.

HAPPENINGS SHOULD BE UNREHEARSED, AND

PERFORMED

BY

NON - PROFESSIONALS,

ONCE

ONLY. A crowd is to eat its way through a roomful

of food; a house is burned down; love letters are strewn over a field and beaten to pulp by a future rain; twenty rented cars are driven away in different directions until they run out of gas . . . Not only is it often impossible and impractical to rehearse and repeat situations such as these, it is unnecessary. Unlike the repertory arts, the Happenings’ freedom is bound up precisely with their use of realms of action that cannot be fixed. Furthermore, since no skill is required to enact the events of a Happening, there is nothing for a professional athlete or actor to dem¬ onstrate (and no one to applaud either); thus there is even less reason to rehearse and repeat because there is nothing to improve. All that may be left is the value to oneself.

7.

IT

FOLLOWS

THAT

(AND

USUALLY

CANNOT

THERE BE)

SHOULD AN

NOT

BE

AUDIENCE

OR

AUDIENCES TO WATCH A HAPPENING. By willingly

participating in a work, that is, by knowing the sce¬ nario and one’s particular duties beforehand, a per¬ son becomes a real and necessary part of the work. It cannot exist without him, as it cannot exist without the rain or the rush-hour subway, if they are called for. Although the participant is unable to do everything and be in all places at once, he knows the overall pattern, if not the details. And like the agent in an international spy ring, he knows, too, that what he does devotedly will echo and give char¬ acter to what others do elsewhere. A Happening with only an emphatic response on the part of a seated audience, is not a Happening at all; it is simply stage theater. The fine arts traditionally demand for their appre¬ ciation a physically passive observer, working with his mind to get at what his senses register. But the Happenings are an active art, requiring that creation and realization, artwork and appreciator, artwork and life, be inseparable. Like action painting, from which they have derived inspiration, they will probably appeal to those who find the contemplative life by itself inadequate.

But the importance given to purposive action in the Happenings also suggests affinities with prac¬ tices marginal to the fine arts, such as parades, carnivals, games, expeditions, guided tours, orgies, religious ceremonies, and secular rituals. As examples among the latter group, there are the elaborate op¬ erations of the Mafia, civil rights demonstrations, national election campaigns, Thursday nights at the shopping centers of America, the hot-rod, dragster, and motorcycle scene, and not least, the whole fan¬ tastic explosion of the advertising and communica¬ tions industry. Each of these plays with the materials of the tangible world, and the results are unconscious rituals acted out from day to day. Happenings, freed of the restrictions of the conventional art materials, have discovered the world at their fingertips, and the conscious results are quasi-rituals, never to be re¬ peated. Unlike the "cooler” styles of Pop, Op, Ob and Kinetics, in which imagination is filtered through a specialized medium and a privileged showplace, the Happenings do not merely allude to what is going on in our bedrooms, in the drugstores and at the airports; they are right there. How poignant, that, as far as the arts are concerned, this life above ground is underground! ■ 36

ROGER SHATTUCK These things I hold to be self-evident: that pictures have frames: that art has a history —more than one in fact; that you can paint from a model; that things some¬ times look alike; that I shall be talking about a painter named Rene Magritte. My theme (his theme) will be the doubts that hover in the atmosphere like old smells around any piece of self-evidence. Rene Magritte, the artist in dark overcoat and derby, presents credentials as a wallpaper painter, speculative semanticist, and frame-up operator. Here's what he does. He takes the entire Western tradition of optical likeness, perfected through two and a half thousand years of subsidized research, and applies it scrupulously to challenge the act of thought. Every separate item in his paintings looks like something we know. No painting as a whole looks like anything we ever saw or conceived before we stood in front of it and looked. The cherubic Belgian who produces these cool enig¬ mas appears in photographs painting in a corner of the dining room of his suburban house in Brussels. His dress, his style, everything visible seems to conform to a secure tradition of the Netherlands painter in a bourgeois setting. He tells us himself that one of the rewards of painting is that it bestows a particularly pleasurable form of ownership — you can possess any¬ thing you care to paint. But this solid citizen turns out to be a prankster and voodoo figure. He tells why on the first page of a short autobiography he calls Lifeline. Things happened to him which he both noticed and remembered. In my childhood I used to play with a little girl in the old crumbling cemetery of an out-of-theway provincial town where I always spent my vaca¬ tions. We would open the iron grates and go down into the underground passageways. Climbing back up to the light one day I happened upon a painter from the capital; amid those scattered dead leaves and broken stone columns he seemed to me to be up to something magical. This was the first event. Soon after, the boy's mother committed suicide by drowning in the river. During the first World War, which he was too young to take part in, Magritte studied at the Academy in Brussels. After the war he continued his academic training, work¬ ed as a wall paper designer, and experimented with abstract painting. Somewhere in here came the second revelation. I grew able to look at a landscape as though it were but a curtain hanging in front of me. I had become sceptical of the dimension in depth of a countryside scene, of the remoteness of the line of the horizon. The magic of the first encounter with painting now becomes profound doubt. What's out there? The ap¬ pearance of things turns into a curtain hiding from us their true state. And the curtain, simplified into a draped standing prop or flat, recurs like a refrain in his paintings. It hides and reveals according to how you look at it. The curtain, in fact, furnishes the very subject and substance of one of his best recent paintings, last* seen in London in 1964. In front of and almost blocking out a window hung with conventional velvet curtains stand four large overlapping panels. Each shows a fragment of a recognizable scene: the dark green fo¬ liage of a forest, the stone facade with windows of an ordinary building, bright red flames, and, in the fore¬ ground, a clear blue sky with clouds. One recognizes that each panel is shaped in the form of a single free¬ standing curtain. The spendid play of color and texture

and depth between panels develops into a kind of lyric feast and earns every letter of its sensuous title, Tastes and Colors. Then, suddenly, the surface splendor sur¬ renders to three mauve-colored dead spots in the com¬ position just where the curtains are pulled back slightly. And one is sucked fatally into whatever mystery these brilliant curtains open onto, or into —three holes in the canvas and in the universe itself. Magritte's second revelation of landscape as a partially drawn curtain im¬ plies a great scepticism about the very act of sight. In the early twenties Magritte began a long and fruitful collaboration with the Surrealists, first in Brus¬ sels where a local group had its own reviews and meet¬ ings, and then in Par's where he spent three years from

1927 to 1930. As early as 1922 a reproduction of a paint¬ ing by the Italian, de Chirico, strongly influenced Magritte's style arrd his subjects. In an obviously aca¬ demic technique, de Chirico was then painting severed and cryptically, assembled objects; the titles he gave these compositions implied deep emotional and meta¬ physical significance. Magritte's doubts about the land¬ scape around him found expression not in Cubism or Expressionism but in terms of de Chirico's and Max Ernst's precise and opulent hallucinations. But Vasari, if we had him around, would tell a dif¬ ferent story, and he would be right. For in this same era a third personal revelation pushed Magritte's doubts to the limit. He refers to it himself as an: . . . intolerable interval of terror I went through in a working-class Brussels beer hall: I found the door mouldings endowed with a mysterious life and I remained a long time in contact with their reality. A feeling bordering upon terror was the point of departure for a will to action upon the real, for a transformation of life itself. This action painter, working apparently in coat and tie on a conventional easel in the dining room, has turned out well over two thousand works since then and lived

a life without scandal, without external upheaval, with¬ out marked changes in style and approach. Yet one senses that he has been living his painting, living in and through his painting, more than our Pop art dandies with all their publicized devilry. The reception Magritte has had is instructive. His conservative and figurative style of painting, which he describes as "objective enough to ensure that their upsetting effect would be experienced in the real world," has saved him from violent attack and from immoderate success. Ten years ago Cyril Connolly echoed the commonplace opinion: Magritte "remains a completely literary painter . . . who gives us little pictorial quality." After forty years he fetches good prices — very good prices. Some call him a secret agent; others think everything about his work is labored and obvious. He conveys "absolute common sense"; he is "reactionary" because his revolutionary sensibility does not affect his technique. The recent one-man exhibit that has traveled to four major museums after opening in New York at the Museum of Modern Art has brought the controversy out into the open again. Our national weeklies and the New York art critics appear to want to treat him favorably but do not have means of doing so: too enigmatic, too personal, a shock too subtle to reproduce easily on coated paper, no flamboyance in an interview (Dali tried to steal the show at the opening). Only Max Kozloff in the Nation has had perceptive things to say, and as usual he tends to swathe them in phrases like "epiphanies of artifice." For the art historian, Magritte presents the case of a painter who took precisely what he wanted from Sur¬ realism and dismissed the rest. In fact, he ignored the very fundamentals of doctrinaire Surrealism: the author¬ ity of the unconscious, automatism of behavior, the need for shrill provocation in public conduct. He kept what was already his by disposition and family in¬ heritance. Surrealism provided a new domain and a new vocabulary for the bright and burning sense of humor he had shown as a boy. That humor combined with two other elements easily identifiable with Sur¬ realism. Marxist dialectic taught him to "live with danger" in order to change the world rather than merely interpret it. He also tells us: "The powerful sen¬ timent of eroticism saved me from slipping into the traditional chase after formal perfection." These as¬ pects of his work leave one with the often disturbing impression that the smooth surface of his painting is about to split open and reveal what it scrupulously hides. Soon after moving to Paris in 1927, Magritte began painting a series of compositions that showed several carefully separated panels, each representing a different scene. In a related series called Bold Sleeper a man lying in a box apparently dreams of ordinary objects shown in silhouette below him stamped like cookie cutouts into a layer of uncertain substance. Sheer evocation of elemental values. Soon after, he tries the reverse tactic: an empty picture frame standing in a corner is prominently labeled "Landscape" and shows none. Through mysterious links of shape and presentation, these two series connect to a third that employs a door and its frame, and a jagged aperture giving a partial view of what lies beyond. Magritte was back in his Brussels dining room in 1934 when he began the series of paintings that he has repeated with variations ever since. His description of the under¬ lying attitude poses a problem in seeing. How is it we project the perceptual sensations within our bodies onto something "out there" where we believe the

objects are located?

or perhaps all of the curtains. Painting, like the eye,

ror by dictionary convention.

The problem of the window led to La Condition

finds a window on the world. If you stand where you

label sneaks in and causes a kind of semantic stall or

humaine. In front of a window, as seen from the

see

tilt, or, as in the famous composition, Wind and Song, a

interior of a room, I placed a picture that repre¬

very different. They turn on you.

the

window-frame

with

the

world,

things

look

painted pipe is labeled "This is not a pipe." Traditional

sented precisely the portion of landscape blotted

To see is to frame, an act which may then provoke

out by the picture. For instance, the tree repre¬

a failure in sight. But this is only half the story I must

exasperating device called

sented

tell about Magritte. Let us go back to the beginning.

happens when someone tells you: "Do not think of a

in the picture displaced the tree situated

rhetoric has a neat trick called praete/itio. There is an negative

invocation.

What

behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it

When we perceive something and at the same time

large body of water." Magritte produced another such

was simultaneously inside the room, in the picture,

become aware of the act of perception, two things

commonplace

and

thought.

can happen: vertigo, or the word —an utterance. Years

years ago: This is not a derrick.

Which is how we see the world, namely, outside

ago, Magritte painted a scrupulously naturalistic picture

But while Magritte has been scrambling the semantic

of us, through having only one representation of

to exact scale of a piece of Brie cheese, framed it, and

dictionary, he has been putting together another with

outside,

in

the

real

landscape,

in

it within us. (Lifeline)

for

the

Dallas-Houston

exhibit a

few

exhibited it under a glass cover with the title: "This is

his left hand. We barely noticed. Only in a few cases

a

Pop art

does he divulge its existence. The Promenades of Eu-

jokes about telling the dancer from the dance, about

progeny, Magritte understands that the word lends us

clide, which belongs to the painting within a painting

who perpetrated this picture in the middle of nowhere,

security;

and about the “familiar looks" Nature sends back at

out at will from under our vulnerable minds. Before

systematically

us if we stare at her. But all this painting of flats will

Wittgenstein earned his reputation as the great sophist

perception. The pointed turret "looks like" the broad

This series of paintings cracks a collection of laconic

piece of cheese."

But far more than

it is our crutch.

his

He can, therefore, yank it

sequence, also records a kind of resemblance we are trained

to

overlook

because

of depth

be better explained by a different quote. Listen before

boulevard if we can juggle vanishing point perspective

you laugh. It is gospel.

and flat canvas. But why bother? Because they rhyme.

It is likewise clear that the attempt to doubt any

Because we begin to see how much in Magritte's paint¬

object of awareness in respect of its being actually

ing turns on rhyme. Visual rhyme to start with. Levitat¬

there necessarily conditions a certain suspension of

ing boulders rhyme with clouds, and grisly anatomical,

[that the fact-world exists out there];

toes rhyme with the toes of boots (The Red Model).

and it is precisely this that interests us . . . The

Here is the place to fit the obsessive Surrealist master¬

the thesis

thesis undergoes a modification — while remaining

piece Magritte calls Rape; it violates the steadiness of

in itself what it is; we see it as it were "out of

our vision.

action," we "disconnect it," "bracket it."

with

In' this

female

torso.

rhyming And

the

dictionary, term

face

rhyme

rhymes suggests

Husserl has a very simple message behind the phenom¬

more than resemblance because it includes a domain

enological

we

double-lalk.

The

act

of

attention,

sheer

tend

to

exclude

from

painting:

sound. The act

looking hard at something or thinking hard about it,

of

is fatally accompanied by doubts about the existence

word.

of

.We cannot avoid such responses. In 1962

that very

thing.

Thus

Magritte's

doors,

windows,

framing,

of

Look.

paying

What

attention,

do

you

call

evokes this?

the spoken Think

of

a

curtains, mouldings, and inner paintings — they are all

Magritte painted a boulder on a beach and, hovering

frames,

over it, a cloud identical in size and shape. The title:

the

original

bracket.

We

squirm

before

the

very vividness of what is framed, for it has also been

The Origins of Language. Paul Nouge, an artist and old

undone.

friend

Painting within

painting

tells

us something

elementary and disturbing about the act of perception.

of

Magritte's,

has

written

one

of

the

most

perceptive texts on his work. He speaks of the "for¬

You see worst what you see best. In other words, that

bidden

castle, so perfectly perceived that its likeness has. been

to exploit their explosive force and with no desire to

painted, the

is it still

window?

there behind the painting, outside

Magritte's

tantalizing

answer

is

called

Night Must Fall (1964). The same old window has

images" which Magritte uses with full

intent

establish an esthetic distance that will neutralize them. Rene Magritte, This is Not a Derrick, drawing, 1960. (Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.)

Skillful paint-handling in the old tradition is the oper¬ ative strategy. And Nouge reports what we have suspect¬

either fallen too hard or someone has thrown a stone.

of language, before modern semantics had come into

ed all along: the word serves as a source of Magritte's

Broken glass lies on the floor; a few sharp fragments

its own, Magritte was practicing his own lay analysis of

poetic invention. Nouge refers explicitly to the "secret

remain in place around the edges of the frame. And

language in the pages of La Revolution surrealiste. He

the

called

pieces

of glass

on

the

floor still

show,

like

a

painting, portions of the landscape outside. Yet there,

his

illustrated

essay

Words and Images. The

cartoons animate the slippery relations between objects,

of rhyme." Now look at the revealing series of drawings reproduced

in

the catalog for the Modern

Museum

exhibit. Magritte was working up an idea that led to the

lo and behold, is the "real" landscape, safe and sound,

images, words - and by implication the mind which

painting called The Soul of Bandits (L'Ame des Bandits)

shining through the empty frame as well as through the

entertains them.

1960. The final product shows a violin standing on a

remaining glass. Or is it? After all, we are already look¬

"An object is not so stuck on its name that one

wing collar. If you read these desultory doodlings in

ing at a painting . . .

can't find

"A word sometimes serves only to designate itself."

French, here's what you get: violon, vipere, veste, vase, vigne. And there in the upper right hand corner he's

"An object leads one to believe there is something

toying with an

behind it."

rhymes the violin, which in French has a queue or tail, with pigtail or queue. And then the fun begins. Look

Perception makes things flicker, slip, and disappear. Nothing so reduction

changes

the world

as the

psychologist's

screen. Seeing is a curious mirror-function

of cutout, overlay, and transparency.

it another."

idea he finally discarded: he sets or

In this context,

"Everything leads one to believe that there is little

several other paintings of Magritte's have a perfectly

relation between an object and what represents it."

up violin in the dictionary: here's the page in the 1950

stable existence. Out of stability they sow doubt. The

"In a picture, words are made out of the same

Larousse; it may have been at Magritte's elbow. The

substance as images."

labeled parts of a violin are these:

False Mirror dates from 1930 and has made its way as a TV trademark. We look into the eye looking out at lis,

As Mallarme knew, to name anything is to destroy it,

with cloudland floating between. Who exists, and for

to obliterate it, even more than by looking straight at

whom? Who is bracketing whom? If you take aim with

it. Thus the tags, the names we attach to things, may

eye or firearm, you

save us from the vertigo of perception but they lead us

destroy. At dead

center of the

crosse or volute: scroll (crook, pistol grip, helix) chevilles: pegs sillet: nut touche: finger-board chevalet: bridge (wooden horse, saw horse, rack for

target eye lies the blind spot. Ten years later came

into other dangers. Magritte's own titles, the labels he

torture, easel)

In Praise of Dialectic: from outside you look through

dreams up with the help of friends after he has finished

a window into a space where you see, instead of the

his paintings, do not tell us directly what the painting

ame: sound-post (soul, rifle bore, core of a cable) table: belly bouton: tail-pin (bud, button, nipple, knob) ouies: sound-holes (hearing, gills) eclisses: ribs (wedges, splints, shims)

inside of a

39

Occasionally a correct

room, another building as if across the

is about. An entirely different principle now comes into

street. The eye is heavily present, alive like a camera

play that revalorizes language. It begins in the word-

lens on our side of the mirror-canvas, or lurking there

painting Magritte offers us in the series called The Key

on the other side of the street of dreams behind one

of Dreams, everyday, objects given names that are in er¬

And you find you missed the third meaning for violin.

painter's tool — comb and multiple brush for imitating wood grain. Pinceau also rhymes with pain de savon, thus turning soap into bread to go with the absent wine in the green glass — verre vert. The floor's tidy geo¬ metric perspective and the cumulus clouds in a blue sky — this is part of Magritte's signature and can be traced to de Chirico. We know all about the window and the double set of curtains around it, and the fact that the only undefined area in the painting lies exactly there in the shape created where the curtain is pulled back. In color, in meaning, in depth, that patch gener¬ ates

the

canvas.

Overhead,

the

moulding

begins

to

crack and crawl as it did in the Brussels beerhall. A match instead of .fire. A bed, but not really to tell us anything

about dreams and

love.

A

bed

because

it

belongs with the other objects and like every one of them announces the absence/presence of the person

Personal Values, 1952

who dwells among them and whose values they are: a room of one's own, food and drink; personal ap¬

"Les mots et les images." from La Revolution Surrealiste, December 15, 1929.

pearance; painting. "A kind of prison adjacent to a guard room or police

Magritte is often accused of being a literary painter,

station." I have not discovered the linkage in Magritte's

with implications of personal vice and artistic heresy.

first working title, Les Lettres Persanes, apparently lifted

He is a literary painter; no one need be ashamed of

from

the fact. Painting knows no permanent rules excluding

Montesquieu.

But

here

is

the

secret

opening

in, for bandits

it from the domain of semantics, sound, and hidden

are, of course, thieves, or voleurs, and all in the family.

circuits of meaning. A painter has intelligence as well

It's

as hands and eyes. The medieval altar painter could

through which a

painted

his later title sneaked pun

in

French.

Those

light-fingered

thieves who have souls and others parts like violins

be as much of a theologian as he wished and no one

will spend the rest of their days locked up in the prison

objected.

of Magritte's painted word-play. It is very contrived —

"dissociation of sensibility" to know that you cannot

and very lovely.

cut the mind in two and assume artists are mindless,

At its best Magritte's painting arises out of two recip¬

Have we

not finally

talked

enough

about

scientists blind to art? Magritte is sensitive to color, to

rocating acts. They are the acts most basic to human

displacement in normal vision, to ideas

consciousness or "thinking"; they are also prone to

and words that grow like mushrooms out of objects.

about images

violent distortions. First, he frames: he removes com¬

The flaws and errors Magritte incorporates into his sus¬

mon things from their usual settings, not to subdue

pended universe whisper that we may have been, wrong

them but to set them free. Then, consulting his diction¬

about things all our life, making mistakes about names

ary — a rhyming dictionary remember — he names them

and sizes and meanings. If we allow our grip to slip

afresh, explicitly by lettering inner or outer titles, or

ever so slightly, we might have to start all over again

implicitly by visual punning and rhyming. His subject,

from scratch. Magritte does so in every painting.

what he has been painting for forty years, accumulates

He

paints with

like a new and unsettling atmosphere around the ob¬

liminal

nostalgia

jects he paints and the colors he confers on them and

Surrealism came to him naturally, by race, milieu, and

the

clarity with

which

he blesses that mystery.

His

living

such

magical

as we

feel

when

a

remotely familiar but

person confronts us: "Do you

un¬

remember

infectious and

sometimes sub¬

the

of

moment. His works will

subject is a state of mind, an intellectual uneasiness

recognized

an for

for in

restorers. his

technique

masters.

last without providing a fat

Likeness,

hands,

the

and

mere

among

resemblance, sensitive

is

painters

today, Magritte is one of the first to have rescued that

The

magic. He also works with the simplest elements — sky,

challenge is the more disturbing when it comes from

sea, stone, trees, bread. I know no painting that con¬

a strongly attractive person,

veys so totally the sense of a universe in suspense, a

me? I'm sure you don't know who I am . .

like, a painting of 1952

entitled Personal Values. Magritte has built up a "pro¬

universe

found

in every sense. Your whole

moves. Is it possible that for forty years Magritte has

body participates in the act of looking through that

created a sustained artistic pun on one of the most

bottle-green

common terms in painting: still life? Life stilled, arrest¬

pictorial analysis" wine

glass at a

mirror

reflecting a sky

in which everything is waiting and nothing

visible through a transparent wall — Or painted on it.

ed,

No difference, as we now know. My first reaction in

nature morte, dead nature.

petrified.

It would

be the

same

in

his

French:

front of this handsome yard of painted cloth with its

After seeing any large group of his paintings, one

third dimension set at infinity, is to mutter Hopkins'

learns a subtle lesson. The only life we know is not the

poem "Glory be to God for dappled things..." And,

still life around us but the living life we can conceive

for some reason, this assemblage of floating, outsized

of as painted. The only painting Magritte will put on

objects strikes me as comforting. It is as if Magritte had

canvas gives us more than painting within a painting.

painted one of those little elevator rooms Einstein dream¬

At its most oracular moments it says, "This is not a

ed for his "thought experiments" in general relativity. And there is more. Every one of these objects will yield

information

for a

simple explication

de texte.

Identifying the objects splits them apart into diverse elements. On top of the armoire (armorial and clothespress) lies a pinceau (shaving brush, paint brush, pencil of light) which rhymes with the peigne nearby. Peigne shares the brush's double function as toilet article and

painting." seeing,

It disturbs

beautiful

as

us to think it may be,

that what we are

is not what we are

seeing but a cut-out, a frame-up we have staged for ourselves. ■ Author's note: This is a partial and revised text of a talk given for the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, in April, 1966. A lengthy biography and study of Magritte by Patrick Waldberg appeared in French after I had written the text. Magritte refer¬ ences can be found in a bibliography by Inga Forslund in the Museum of Modern Art catalog.

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, o/c, 21V!" x 283/*, 1

throughout

the

piece

is

a

consequence

of an initially chosen and ordered set (the semi-

> j

tonal scale arranged in a definite linear order).

~L cy L $ Till S k- nci 0 13: ", tv 1 Of ? °>0 (7. £ n 7 c' 0 t | i

1

4*

i

1

y

J

> it 11

i if

$ 1o * «# 12 ?

4 if J »T 1 t 5 1 f 4 A ! x * } 14 l t 1? 3 I r s 1 T j t / f 4 t

a

u 1 if h r 4 6 ! ± J 3 t t r * 5 41 i 4 It (0 X -t 9 l (X r f 11 S' 3 i « 1 l ? r 4 4.0 f i «j t r \3 r 1 1 Jt 3 n 3 4j> y j 7. 4 ? 4* r r 4 1 ! i r 3 U j 4 7 c rx « 4 r 9 i It ? * n }

Serial organization of musical notes by Pierre Boulez.

*1

simplified example of this method (see George Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality for a more detailed analysis). The prime set is repre¬ sented by these integers: P =

5, 1, 2, 4. By sub¬

tracting each number in turn from a constant of such value that the resulting series introduces no numbers not already given, an inversion results (in this case the constant is 6): I = 1, 5, 4, 2. A rota¬ tional procedure applied to P and I yields the third and fourth set forms: Rp = 2, 4, 5, 1; Rl = 4, 2, 1, 5. Mathematics — or more correctly arithmetic — is used as a compositional device, resulting in the

74

most literal sort of "programme music," but one whose course is determined by a numerical rather than a narrative or descriptive "Programme," —Milton Babbit The composer is freed from individual note-tonote decisions which are self-generating within the system he devises. The music thus attains a high degree of conceptual coherence, even if it some¬ times sounds "aimless and fragmentary." The adaptation of the serial concept of composi¬ tion by incorporating the more general notion of permutation into structural organization—a permu¬ tation the limits of which are rigorously defined in terms of the restrictions placed on its self-determi¬ nation constitutes a logical and fully justified de¬ Albrecht Durer,

Melancholia I, (detail.)

velopment, since both morphology and rhetoric are governed by one and the same principle. —Pierre Boulez The form itself is of very limited importance, it becomes the grammar for the total work. —Sol LeWitt Language can be approached in either of two ways, as a set of culturally transmitted behavior patterns shared by a group or as a system con¬ forming to the rules which constitute its grammar. —Joseph Greenberg Essays in Linguistics In linguistic analysis, language is often consid¬ ered as a system of elements without assigned meanings ("uninterpreted systems"). Such systems are completely permutational, having grammatical but not semantic rules. Since there can be no sys¬ tem without rules of arrangement this amounts to the handling of language as a set of probabilities. Many interesting observations have been made about uninterpreted systems which are directly ap¬ plicable to the investigation of any array of ele¬ ments obeying fixed rules of combination. Studies of isomorphic (correspondence) relationships are especially interesting. Practically all systems can be rendered isomor¬ phic with a system containing only one serial re¬ lation. For instance, elements can be reordered into a single line, i.e., single serial relation by ar¬ ranging them according to their coordinates. In the following two-dimensional array, the coordi¬ nates of C are (1, 3), of T (3, 2): R P D L B T C U O Isomorphs could be written as: R, L, C, P, B, U, D, T, O or R, P, D, L, B, T, C, U, O. An example of this in

language is the ordering in time of

speech to correspond to the ordering of direction in writing. All the forms of cryptography from crossword puzzles to highly sophisticated codes depend on systematic relationships of this kind. The limits of my language are the limits of my Albrecht

75

Durer,

Melancholia I, engraving, 9V2X7 5/16".

(Metropolitan

Museum.)

world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Certain terms, not common in an art context,

Alfred Jensen,

Interval in Six Scales, 50x56", 1963. (Graham Gallery.)

rangement of sounds will be 3, 12, 7, 8, 10, 2, 15,

are necessary for a discussion of serial art. As yet

6, 1, 13, 5, 18, 4, 19, 17, 9, 14. While being a

these terms, often abused, have remained unde¬

completely arbitrary use of row technique it does

fined. Some of the following definitions are stan¬

present an interesting possibility for the routini-

dard, some are derived from the above investiga¬

zation of spatio-temporal events. Sports, such as

tions, the rest are tailored to specific problems of

football, are based on similar concepts of se¬

the work itself:

quentially fixed

Abstract System — A system in which the physical units that are to function as objects have not been

ment. Alfred Jensen's involvement would appear to be

specified. Binary — Consisting of two elements.

judging from such titles as Square Root 5 Figura¬

probabilities of random

move¬

with an -unorthodox appreciation of "Number,"

Definite Transition — A rule that requires at some

tions, Twice Six and Nine, and the recent Timaeus

definite interval before or after a given unit, some

(Plato's dialogue on esthetics). For Plato, as well

other unit is required or excluded.

as Pythagoras, "Number" had an ideal existence

Grammar — That aspect of the system that gov¬

and was viewed as paradigmatic (a concept which

erns the permitted combinations of elements be¬

has been reintroduced into mathematical logic by

longing to that system.

Russell and Whitehead's concept of number as a

Isomorphism — A relation between systems so

"class of classes"). Whatever the derivation, order

that by rules of transformation each unit of one

in Jensen's paintings is defined in terms of pro-

system can be made to correspond to one unit of

gressional enlargement and diminishment of ad¬

the other.

jacent

rectangular

spaces.

Although

his

color

Orthogonal — Right angled.

choices seem arbitrary their placement is not, be¬

Permutation — Any of the total number of changes

ing arranged in bilateral symmetries or systematic

in order which are possible within a set of ele¬

rotations. The checkerboard pattern which he ad¬

ments. Probability — The ratio of the number of ways in

heres to is one of the oldest binary orders.

which an event can occur in a specified form to the total number of ways in which the event can occur. Progression — A discrete series that has a first but not necessarily a last element in which every in¬ termediate element is related by a uniform law to the others, (a) Arithmetic Progression — A se¬

The structure of an artificial optic array may, but need not, specify a source. A wholly invented structure need not specify anything. This would be a case of structure as such. It contains infor¬ mation, but not information about, and it affords perception but not perception of. —James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems

ries of numbers in which succeeding terms are derived by the addition of a constant number (2,

Larry Poons,

Art of the Fugue I, oil and enamel on

canvas, 56x56", 1958.

Perspective, almost universally dismissed as a

4, 6, 8, 10 . . .) (b) Geometric Progression — A se¬

concern in recent art, is a fascinating example of

ries of numbers in which succeeding terms are de¬

the application of prefabricated systems. In the

rived by the multiplication ,by a constant factor

work of artists like Ucello, Durer, Piero, Saendre-

(2, 4, 8, 16, 32 . . .) Rotation — An operation consisting of an axial

dam, Eakins (especially their drawings), it can be

turn within a series. Reversal — An operation consisting of an inver¬

onstrates not how things appear but rather the

sion or upside-down turn within a series. Set — The totality of points, numbers, or other

postulates are serial. Perspective has had an oddly circular history.

elements which satisfy a given condition.

Girard Desargues (1593-1662) based his non-Eu-

seen to exist entirely as methodology. It dem¬ workings of its own strict postulates. As it is, these

Sequence — State of being in successive order.

clidean geometry on an intuition derived directly

Series — A set of sequentially ordered elements,

from perspective. Instead of beginning with the

each related to the preceding in a specifiable way

unverifiable

by the logical conditions of a finite progression,

never meet, he accepted instead the visual evi¬

Euclidean

axiom

that parallel

meet at the

lines

i.e., there is a first and last member, every mem¬

dence that they do

ber except the first has a single immediate prede¬

they intersect on the horizon line (the "vanishing

point where

cessor from which it is derived and every member

point" or "infinity" of perspective). Out of his

except the last a single immediate successor.

investigations of "visual" (as opposed to "tactile")

Simultaneity — A correspondence of time or place

geometry came the field of projective geometry.

in the occurrence of multiple events. An odd "free" utilization of series was Allan

the means of projecting figures from the surface

Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. His initial set

of three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional

was capriciously chosen — seven smiles, three

planes. It has led to the solution of some of the

Projective geometry investigates such problems as

crumpled papers and nineteen lunch box sounds.

problems in mapmaking. Maps are highly abstract

The nineteen lunch box sounds were snapping

systems, but since distortion of some sort must

noises made by purchasing many kinds of lunch

occur in the transformation from three to two

boxes or recording a few and then altering them

dimensions, maps are never completely accurate.

until nineteen variations were obtained. The ar¬

To compensate for distortion, various systems have

76

been devised. On a topographical map, for ex¬ ample, the lines indicating levels (contour lines) run through points which represent physical points on the surface mapped so that an isomorphic re¬ lation can be established. Parajlels of latitude, iso¬ bars, isothermal lines and other grid coordinate denotations,

all

serialized, are further cases of

the application of external structure systems to order the unordered. Another serial aspect of mapmaking is a hy¬ pothesis in topology about color. It states that with only four colors all the countries on any map can

JL

be differentiated without any color having to ap¬ pear adjacent to itself. (One wonders what the re¬ sults might look like if all the paintings in the

J^^ ^ Mel Bochner, drymounted photograph, 46x46".

history of art were repainted to conform to the conditions of this hypothesis.) In the early paintings of Larry Poons it was not difficult to discern the use of serialization. The rules of order varied, sometimes they appeared to be based on probabilities of position and/or direc¬ tion and/or shape (dot or ellipsoid). Definite transi¬ tions or replacements occurred in some paintings. Enforcer appeared to be based on a system of quadrant reversal and rotation. Although Donald Judd's chief concerns seem to be "specific objects" he has utilized various modu¬ lar and serial order types. One of Judd's untitled galvanized iron pieces, consisting of four hemicylindrical sections projecting from the front face of a long rectangular volume, is based on the pro¬ gression: 3, 4, 3 Vi, 3Vi, 4, 3, 4’/2. The first, third, fifth, and seventh numbers are the ascending pro¬ portions of the widths of the metal protrusions. The second, fourth, and sixth numbers are the widths of the spaces between. The numbers are not meas¬ urements but proportional divisions of whatever length the work is decided to be. Fascinating pro¬ gressions of the above kind can be found listed in Jolly's Compilation of Series. Sol LeWitt orders his floor pieces by permuting linear dimension and binary volumetric possibili¬ ties. Parts of his eighteen-piece Dwan Gallery (Los

Eva Hesse, untitled, m/m, 1967. (Fischbach Gallery.)

Angeles) exhibition could have appeared at one of three height variables, in one of two volumetric variables (in this case all were open) and in one of two positional variables, on a constant 3x3 square grid. The complexity and visual intricacy of this work seems almost a direct refutation of Whitehead's dictum that the higher the degree of abstraction the lower the degree of complexity. LeWitt's two-dimensional orthogonal grid place¬ ment system is related to the principles of order in mapmaking. Other artists are currently exploiting aspects of seriality. Dan Flavin's Nominal Three to Wm. of Ockham (author of the law of parsimony) is based on an arithmetic progression. Jo Baer's paintings, Hanne

Darboven's

complicated

drawings,

Dan

Graham's concrete poetry, Eva Ffesse's construc¬ tions, William Kolakoski's programmed asterisks, Bernard Kirschenbaum's crystallographic sculpture, Robert Smithson's pyramidal glass stacks all sug¬ 77

Installation view, Sol Lewitt exhibition, Dwan Gallery,

Los Angeles, 1967.

gest future possibilities of serial methodology. ■

This is the fourth in a continuing series of articles on the subject, Problems of Criticism.

PROBLEMS OF CRITICISM. IV In the instances cited above, the tone is one

THE POLITICS OF ART

it in a manner that is familiar to anyone who has

of outrage, but the language is not unusual in

read

any way. To this tone of outrage, however, our

charge the opponent with "ideology," attempting

most brilliant critic, Michael Fried, has added the

to destroy opposition on the grounds that no dis¬

vocabulary of Marxist pamphleteering. If we ex¬

course is possible because the opponent is not

I can imagine, in these days of global inter¬

amine Fried's criticism, we find that not only the

representing the same world, that in fact the en¬

course and indiscriminate CIA subsidy, a cultural

tone and vocabulary of Marxist polemics, but a

tire edifice on which his thought rests is deter¬

summit meeting at a health spa outside of, say,

certain amount of its actual content is to be found

mined by- class values. In other words, the bour¬

Montevideo. Here South American revolutionaries,

there. For example, Fried writes of a new type

geoisie cannot understand the proletariat because

who

day

of disagreement among critics, "the disagreement

the bourgeois thought structure and world-view

and guerillas by night, could sunbathe with their

that occurs when two or more critics agree, or

is rooted in an ideology determined by its eco¬

Yanqui opposite numbers, former Trotskyites who

say, that the work of a particular artist or group

now contribute to the mass media, discussing cultural problems of mutual interest. Eventually

of artists is good or valuable or important, but

nomic position in the world. By saying that certain critics are in the grip of

when the terms in which they try to characterize

a fundamentally divergent thought system, Fried

it might hit home that American culture, and in

the work and its significance are fundamentally

is levelling at them a similar charge of "ideology."

particular

This is quite clear if we compare Fried's reasoning

found most useful in selling the American way

different."’ Describing

of life, is as unwanted and as unexportable as

when he reads what seems to him "bad or mere¬

our economic system. For the cultural problems

tricious criticism" praising work he admires, he

of an

PARTI BARBARA ROSE

might

be

underpaid

American

art,

intellectuals

the

by

commodity

lately

himself

as

angered

and

stunned

underdeveloped society on the brink of

states: "Indeed, I am surprised to find that I feel

revolution are radically opposed to those of the post-Revolutionary affluent society. One crucial

more desperate about what seems to me bad or

difference

sibly, in elucidation of art I admire than

is

that

revolutionary societies

tradi¬

meretricious criticism written in praise and osten¬ I do

tionally think of art in the service of revolution,

about bad

whereas a close reading of some recent American

must agree with Fried that what is at stake in

art writing will reveal that a disappointed political

any serious critical discussion is nothing less than

idealism, without hope for outlet in action, has been displaced to the sphere of esthetics, with the result that for some, art has become the sur¬ rogate for the revolution. The first clear indication of a displacement of political ideals into the area of esthetics is Harold Rosenberg's notion of "action painting." Ab¬ stracted from its Existentialist and political con¬

or meretricious art."2 Certainly one

“INe have come full circle from art in the service of the revolution to art instead of the revolution.”

Marxist

political

writings.

Such

polemics

with Karl Mannheim's analysis of the concept of ideology (in Ideology and Utopia): . . . previously, one's adversary, as the representa¬ tive of a certain political-social position, was ac¬ cused of conscious or unconscious falsification. Now, however, the critique is more thoroughgoing in that, having discredited the total structure of his consciousness, we consider him no longer capable of thinking correctly. This simple observation means, in the light of a structural analysis of thought, that in earlier attempts to discover the sources of error, distortion was uncovered only on the psychological plane by pointing out the personal roots of intel¬ lectual bias. The annihilation is now more thorough¬ going since the attack is made on the noological level and the validity of the adversary's theories is undermined by showing that they are merely a function of the generally prevailing social situation. (Italics mine.) Obviously I view Mr. Fried's charge of ideology

text until it could be generalized to deal with any kind of human activity, the concept of "ac¬

a critic's view of history. What ought to be ques¬

and his own exclusive position as quite danger¬

tion" was focused by Rosenberg on the act of

tioned, however, is why Mr. Fried should feel such

ous to any kind of appraisal of art. I feel that

painting. Writing about art, Rosenberg still resorts

anger, frustration and desperation, or for that mat¬

the

on occasion to the vocabulary and polemical tone

ter, as he himself put it, why it should matter

reads contemporary criticism is both dispropor¬

he used as a political writer in the thirties.

that much to him.

tionate and misplaced, and that it leads him to

sense of outrage

he experiences when

he

a

excesses in his own criticism having implications

and art writing with political writing is a typical

deeply committed critic. But beyond that, Fried

that must be considered. In Three American Paint¬

confusion among American critics. (In all fairness

explains

ers, Fried wrote of "the alienation of the artist

to

conviction

But Rosenberg's confusion of art with politics

It matters, that

of course,

because

his desperation

he

is such

depends on "the I'm

from the general preoccupations of the culture in

lately he has assumed the relaxed, detached tone

speaking, the terms in which certain paintings are

which he is embedded, and the prizing loose of

of the fashion commentator who feels his respon¬

described and certain accomplishments held up

art itself from the concerns, aims and ideals of

sibility is not to set style but to describe the

for admiration are blind, misleading, and above ail

that culture" as characteristic of the modern pe¬

latest numbers as they pass by.) Content aside, if we compared merely the tone of John Canaday,

irrelevant to the work itself and to the difficult,

riod. For Fried, "the most important single char¬

particular enterprise by which it was created."3

acteristic of the new modus vivendi between the

Frank Cetlein, Dore Ashton, and T. B. Hess, to

He imputes to such blind critics an inability to see

arts and bourgeois society gradually arrived at dur¬

name some of our most egregious polemicists,

what qualifies the works in question as paintings

ing the first decades of the present century has

we would find a striking similarity. I cannot ex¬

and an inability to understand the identity of their

been the tendency of ambitious art to become

plain

creators. He goes on to characterize the "open¬

more and

issues intrinsic to itself." What this means for Mr.

which this writer has contributed on occasion)

ness and tolerance and humaneness and distrust of extremism of all kinds" on the part of such

except on the grounds that the degree of intensity

critics as reflective of the "values of bourgeois lib¬

content. More than that, it means that political

expressed these days in discussions of art might

eralism," values which "amount instead to noth¬

content can actually work against esthetic quality,

at other moments in history have found another

ing

so

Mr.

Rosenberg it should

be

remarked

that

the tone of polemical virulence that has

characterized

recent American

art criticism

(to

kind of outlet, specifically a political expression, the context in which outrage at injustice is usually familiar.

more

that,

than

in

the

criticism

promiscuity and

of which

irresponsibility

verging on nihilism."4 Fried is not content, in other words, to discredit his opposition; he feels called upon to annihilate

more concerned with

problems and

Fried is that art has become purged of all political

in

fact it must

be purged.

Using

Picasso's

Guernica as an example, he writes, "in this cen¬ tury it often happens that those paintings that are most full of explicit human content can be

78

faulted on formal grounds." Paradoxically, the moment art is purged of po¬

thetic to encompass all modes of behavior. My

of course, in part, a reaction against the excesses

objection

of iconographical studies, which have neglected

litical content coincides with the moment art crit¬

would act to destroy the esthetic. Mr. Fried's posi¬

the importance of exclusively esthetic elements

icism begins to focus on the issues of the "dialec¬

tion, which is equally extreme, seems to me far

of form. But this criticism has by now itself be¬

that

such

an

infinite

extension

tic" of modernism and the "radicality" of specific

more dangerous because it would destroy more

come a form of excess. And I am not talking now

painters. These clearly Marxist political terms gain

than

about academic followers of Greenberg and Fried,

respectability in a critical discussion because they

thetic to encompass various types of human activ¬

who are writing dry, pointless, formal analyses that

have a certain art historical pedigree: The art his¬

ity, he would extend it to encompass systems of

are the sixties' equivalents of the purplest passages

torian Heinrich Wolfflin had constructed a system

ethical and political value. Such a displacement of

of action criticism. I am talking about Greenberg and Fried themselves, whose original contributions

the esthetic. Instead of extending the es¬

of analysis on a Hegelian model which is the basis

ethical and political values to the sphere of es¬

for Clement Greenberg's interpretation of mod¬

thetics has already produced inferior art; but as

must be acknowledged and appreciated by any¬

ernism,

a

the

one writing today. I see their necessity to purge

Wolfflin's cyclical progression was already super¬

esthetic of its only real justification — the giving

art of all social and political meaning as issuing

seded in the 19th century by a more sophisti¬

of pleasure, an aspect I do not remember Mr.

from a frustrating inability to come to terms with

cated evolutionary approach such as that of Alois

Fried referring to once. Moreover, this kind of

a political position calling for action in a situation

Riegl seems to bother no one. The periodic exhaustion and

exaltation of the life of the mind, in which polit¬

on

which

Fried admittedly relies. That

critical

position

it

threatens

to deprive

of art

ical acts take place only in the imagination and

in which action is virtually impossible. That this purgation of subject content from art takes place

through self-criticism that Fried, following Green¬

the "perpetual revolution" is available only in art

at exactly the moment when a vocabulary of polit¬

berg following Wolfflin, brings to contemporary

but never in life, permits precisely the accom¬

ically charged terms is adapted to a discussion of

art allows for an ideal of, as Fried describes it,

modation with bourgeois liberalism to which Mr.

art is no accident. The bizarre possibility of con¬

"perpetual revolution." Politically, Trotsky's thesis

Fried alludes in his condemnation of open-minded

structing a Marxist criticism in order to purge art

of the permanent revolution, which a phrase like

critics. His position here, I believe, is based on

of political content could only come to pass in

"perpetual revolution" echoes, split the socialist

a psychological projection: it makes it possible

America, where history is constantly twisted into a

camp with which both Greenberg and Rosenberg

not for radical art, but for the radical critic, to

were associated in the thirties. In the realm of

achieve a modus vivendi with bourgeois liberal¬

dialectical pretzel. Better suited to the complexity of the current

art, however, particularly in the unfettered realm

ism.

situation than a linear or cyclical view of art his¬

renewal

tory is perhaps a criticism based on a general

of pure abstraction, such an abstract idea can

When esthetics becomes the arena for action

take on substance. Moreover, it makes it possible

Rosenberg has described it as, or the sphere for

field approach.

to concentrate exclusively on the formal elements

political thinking Fried makes it out to be, the

trast and compare material horizontally instead of

in a work, to the degree that Greenberg, in a re¬

idealistic, Utopian mind, frustrated by a lack of

trying to organize it vertically as a series of rad¬

cent discussion of Picasso's The Charnel House

genuine political outlets, constructs rationales like

ical

action painting and ethical criticism which permit

tion."

did not feel called upon to mention, even in pass¬

advances

Such

an approach could con¬

constituting a "perpetual

Evaluation

would

revolu¬

necessarily be part of

ing, that the subject was a death camp, or to con¬

it to continue to function in a political manner.

such a criticism, but it would not be all of it, and

sider the specific expressive qualities of the vocab¬

The result in

such

ulary of forms employed by Picasso in its repres¬ entation.5

turns to cynicism, and the critic of the mass media becomes its employee, using his podium to hurl

Thus the sublimation of political issues with¬

epithets at himself. When idealism turns to fanat¬

vested interest in ignoring subject matter or sub¬

in an esthetic context makes it possible to ignore

icism, as it has for me in Fried's case, the opposi¬

ject content, is being practiced by a small group

(or even to begrudge) the political content of art.

tion is liquidated, that is, denied its right to exist

of art historians including William Rubin, Robert

In Mr. Fried's case it even makes it possible to dis¬

at all, since its mere existence is predicated on a

Rosenblum, and Leo Steinberg, who keep pace

cuss critical issues with a sense of passion and

state of error determined by the values of "bour¬

with developments in contemporary art. This type

outrage once reserved for questions of life and

geois liberalism." Ultimately the pleasure-giving

of rational, inclusive criticism should be the aim

death. But art has never been a question of life

source of esthetic value is replaced by its capacity

of younger critics entering the field. In the mean¬

and death, and to address to it the intensity and

to subsume ethical and political value. In an es¬

time, however, criticism is dominated by an ele¬

sense of urgency that should be reserved for ques¬

thetic context the ethical spirit can discharge its

ment of the disenchanted American left, led by

tions of life and death is repugnant. I am not

passion without any economic, social or political

Rosenberg and Greenberg, which has managed to

objecting to the intellectual content of Mr. Fried's

risk. In fact, even the concept of risk itself is trans¬

achieve a rapprochement with the society it once

criticism, which is of the highest order, but to the

ferred to esthetics, where all dramas may be harm¬

rejected. Traumatized by Stalinism, anesthetized

exclusivity of his position and the passion and ur¬

lessly and inconsequentially played out. This kind

by McCarthyism, and pacified by affluence, it has

gency of his tone, which might be appropriate to

of thinking is a case of pure sublimation. We have

found a home, and a comfortable home at that,

a discussion of black power, urban renewal or war

indeed come full circle from David: from a con¬

resistance, but which seems somehow out of con¬

cept of art in the service of the revolution to one

in art criticism. Although its excesses may be un¬ derstandable as the excesses of a misplaced zeal,

text in a relatively dispassionate and morally and

of art instead of the revolution.

Rosenberg's case is that idealism

For some time now I have found certain of the

true of course that art has already usurped re¬

assumptions of a criticism that confines itself to a

ligion as the refuge of the spiritual. Is it now to

discussion of exclusively formal

subsume ethics and politics as well? Even if that

that others exist, obnoxious for the reasons I have

were possible, would it be desirable?

tried to qualify here. The strictness with which a criticism

of

pure

visibility

that

evaluation would come after, not before,

classification and investigation. Already a

synthetic criticism,

which

has

no

its transferal of the ideals of the active life to the

politically neutral activity like art criticism. It is

In an article on "didactic art" I expressed my 79

was

issues, denying

allows

for

no

reservations about a prevalent attitude, derived

esthetic relevance to be assigned to subject mat¬

from Surrealism, which seeks to extend the es¬

ter or subject content as currently practiced is,

context of the contemplative life constitutes a per¬ version of idealism.® Part II of The Politics of Art will be published in a subsequent issue. 1. Art

Criticism in the Sixties (Symposium of the Poses Institute

of Fine Arts, Brandeis University), 1967.

Ibid. Ibid. 4. Ibid.

2.

3.

Picasso Since 1945, ARTFORUM, Oct 1966. Value of Didactic Art, ARTFORUM, April, 1967.

5. Clement Greenberg, 6.

The

MANNY FARBER Each Godard film is

of itself widely varied in

persona as well as quality. Printed on the black¬ board of one of his Formica-like later films, hardly to be noticed, is a list of African animals: a giraffe, lion, hippo. At the end of this director's career, there will probably be a hundred films, each one a bizarrely different species, with its own excruci¬ atingly singular skeleton, tendons, plumage. His stubborn, insistent, agile, encyclopedic, glib and arch personality floods the films, but, chameleon¬ like, it is brown, green or mudlark grey, as in Carabiniers, depending on the film's content. Al¬ ready he has a zoo that includes a pink parakeet (A Woman

Is a

Woman), diamond-back snake

(Contempt), whooping crane (Band of Outsiders), jackrabbit (Carabiniers), and a mock Monogram turtle (Breathless). Unlike Cezanne, who used a three-eighths inch square stroke and a nervously exacting line around every apple he painted, the form and manner of execution changes totally with each film. Braining it out before the project starts, most of the in¬ vention, the basic intellectual puzzle, is pretty well set in his mind before the omnipresent Coutard gets the camera in position. He is the new species creator, related directly to Robert Morris in sculp¬ ture, in that there is an abhorrence of lethargy and

being

pinned

down

in

a work,

alongside

a strong devotion to Medium. Travel light, start clean, and don't look back, is the code de corps. Each of his pictures presents a puzzle of parts, a

unique combination

of elements to prove a

preconceived theory. Some of his truculently for¬ mulated beasts are: Woman Is a Woman ("I wanted to make a neorealistic tion.")

musical, which is

a

is

already a

contradic¬

monotonously scratching,

capering

version of a hack Arthur Fried musical, perhaps the most soporific, conceited, sluggish movie of all time. The crazy thing about this movie is the unrehearsed cinema verite feeding on littleness, love of the Real slamming against the Reel, the kind of studio-made pizazz that went into My Sister Eileen. The elements include deliberately artificial

Times

Square

color,

humorless

visual

puns, each scene pulled out like taffy, the action told so slowly it paralyzes you, awful mugging that is always fondling itself while the bodies are dormant.

“Each new movie is primarily about form in relation to an idea.” A

critique on young French Maoists; a documentary

a Joan of Sartre, a prostitute determined to be her

film of extraordinary purity. Les Carabiniers. A rambling picaresque-piquant

ber, sophisticated portrait of an existential hero

own woman. The format is a condensed Dreiserian

war film, seen through the exalted, close-to-earth

of confused commitments.

novel: twelve near-uniform segments with chap¬

vision of a Dovchenko. As a bitter against-war

stance,

ter headings, the visual matter used to illustrate

tract, the film is a gruesome contradiction, played

syntax to go with a doctrinaire group of modular

the captions and narrator's comments. This is an

as deadpan slapstick with two murderously stu¬

kids. The movie's not only in one classroom-like

extreme

his

pid rustics for its heroes. Since war is a grand

room, but the actors are in an

films, with sharp and drastic breaks in the con¬

mistake that sweeps across borders, the movie

arena in the manner of fervid teachers in front

tinuity, grim but highly sensitive newsreel photo¬

leans heavily on mistakes, vulgarity, around-the-

of a blackboard, and the camera and the actors

graphy, a soundtrack taped in real bars and hotels

globe and around-the-calendar hikes. Each new movie is primarily an essay about

never move except in a straight left-right motion.

touched. The unobtrusive acting inches along in

form

idea: a very deliberate

ported intention of the films and their actuality.

little,

choice of certain formal elements to expostulate a

And it's the undeveloped space between intent

My Life to Live. The fall, brief rise, and death of

documentary,

the

most

biting

as the film was being shot and then scuttling

steps,

always

in

of

left un¬

one direction,

achieving a

parched

memory-ridden

in relation to an

beauty.

report on prostitution, poetic style; or a grey, som¬

is

incredibly

La Chinoise, for in¬

formalized,

a

doctrinaire

up-tight acting

However, there is a huge gap between the pur¬

and end product that gives them their nutty, Dr. Kronkite character. In front, the movie is the most ponderous undertaking: in Le Petit Soldat, an as¬ sessment of the political climate after the Algerian war is the theme, but the actual film time is taken up with a dull day in Geneva: One driver ineptly trying to get in front of another, a photographer shooting rolls of film, a mock torture scene. Cer¬ tainly Karina and her usual inept, little-girl ex¬ hibitionism is a Grand Canyon away from the point of My Life to Live, which is to document the short career of a spunky, self-educating Heart of Gold able to go through a phase of prostitu¬ tion without losing decency or chipping her soul. There is so little sex in the movie that she could be pure High School, 1950 version, acting cute with her lollypop Louise Brooks hair, if the nar¬ rator didn't tell us she was a risk-all prostitute. There is something so far-fetched about Anne Wiazemski, La Chinoise, solid lassitude inside a girl's fastidiousness and politely controlled snob¬ bery, living communally, murdering coldly, plot¬ ting a bombing of the Louvre. The overlapping constants of his cerebral, slap¬ dash movie can be summarized in the following seven points: (1) Talkiness. His scripts are padded coruscated with Chatter in all its forms, from lecture hall to after-dinner talk. His actors become passive billboards for a mammoth supply of ideas, liter¬ ary references, favorite stories. That he is a man of verbal concepts should never be forgotten: his visual image is an illustration of an intellectual idea and often his lists, categories, rules, statistics, quotes from famous authors come across with pictorial impact. (2) Boredom. This facetious poet of anything goes is the first director to reverse conventional film language in order to surround the spectator with long stretches of aggressive, complicated nothing¬ ness. There is a contrary insistence on outrageous lengths, lassitude-ridden material, psyche-less act¬ ing, the most banal decor, a gesture that is from left field. (3) Ping-Pong motion. The heartbeat of his vo¬ cabulary is the pace and positioning of a slow Ping-Pong match. Marital couples compose them¬ selves and their wrangling into a symmetrical ding-dong. One of his pet systems has a couple seated opposite one another, between them a dead lamp, ornate teapot or a train window open¬ ing on a travelogue French countryside. Why should the most intellectual director employ such a primary one-two, one-two rhythm? His is bas¬ ically an art of equal emphasis: it's against cres¬ cendos and climaxes. Violence becomes a boring, casual, quickly-forgotten occasion. La Chinoise, his most controlled film, is also his most equalized, and behind all of its scenic ploys is the regular, slicing motion of a pendulum in a narrow area. (4) The Holden Caulfield hero. Inside every char¬ acter is a little boy precocious who resembles a Salinger's articulate, narcissistic dropout.

(5) Mock. Rather than being a mocker, a real underground film (Warhol), has practically wash¬ satirist, Thackeray or Anthony Trollope, he makes ed his film away from all of its eclectic old movie mock versions of war, a Maoist cell, a husbandmoorings. wife fight, strip acts. He even makes mock profound At the Breathless station, fourteen features and conversation, and, in those Greek statue shots in ten shorts ago, he had not yet perfected his idea of Contempt, he is doing a mock-up of beautiful the actor as a mere improvising face which pops photography. Mockery suggests an attitude of be¬ in and out of a carnival curtain while the direc¬ ing against; invariably this director is in a middle tor throws verbal baseballs at it. This is a strange position, finding it a more flexible, workable elaboration of the Ping-Pong effect, which had situation not to take sides. The role of pseudo¬ the ball bouncing erratically back and forth, first specialist allows his movies to go where they will one face talking, then the other, while the top go, with no feeling of clampers on the material. of the screen appeared to curl over in the sagging (6) Moralizing. An urban Thomas Hardy, he sees atmosphere. During the next years he perfected the world as a spiky place, the terrible danger of this abstractionism into a shooting gallery effect, brassiere ads, the fierce menaces of Coca Cola first one face moving into range, then another, and Richard Widmark, the corruption implicit in while the bodies diminish into strings and their praising a Ferrari when in the character's heart-ofowners recede behind the words. hearts it's Maserati all the way. Just as Tess, the But this Ping-Pong technique has impelled a once-laid milkmaid, is a landscape-consumed fig¬ minimalizing that gives a pungent tactility to his ure, the idiot children in Band of Outsiders — worst (Made in U.S.A.) and best film (My Life to wafer-like, incubated snits—are beset by, and get Live). When Anne Wiazemski, La Chinoise, is talk¬ their meaning from, the darkling air around them. ing about serious things (and a lot of the audience The moralizing is always a tone that sneaks in to sleep), plucking at her lip, showing her two despite the ambivalence that keeps his surface middle teeth, the image is pure, spare, reduced, brittle and facetious. and rather wondrous. (7) Dissociation. Or magnification of the mole¬ Boredom and its adjuncts—lack of inflection, hill as against the mountain, or vice versa. He's torpor, mistake-embracing permissiveness—get a thing director, though he doesn't imbue articles his movie to its real home: pure abstraction. with soul in Polanski's manner. Mostly he goes When he is just right, his boredom creates kinds in the opposite direction, free-wheeling across the of character and image that reverberate with a scene. He dissociates talk from character (a tough clanking effect in one's mind and gets across that secret agent in a freak-boring-weird discussion of morbid nullity which is so much at the heart of conscience), actor from character (Bardot is often his work. In the last analysis, it is just the amount flattened, made into a poster figure rather than of deadness that gives the film a glistening hu¬ the spunky-shrewd wife in Contempt), action from mor: Veronique and her partner, seated in card¬ situation (two primitives in a Dogpatch kitchen board Victorian elegance at opposite ends of the holding life-size underwear ads against their bod¬ table, a fancy tea service between them. The ies) and photography from scene (a mile-long whole scene picks up the loveable gimmick of bed scene, the cheapest record-cover color on a children's books, the stand-up illustration that Petty-posed, baby's-flesh nude.) goes into three dimensions as you open the page, It is easy to underestimate his passion for and then dissolves into flatness as you close it monotony, symmetry, and a one-and-one-equals- again. Looking blankly across the table, she says two simplicity. Probably his most influential scene "etcetera" and Guillaume repeats the word with was hardly noticed when Breathless appeared in the same deadpan inflection, so that each syllable 1959. While audiences were attracted to a like¬ carries a little, sticking, Elmer's Glue sound. able, agile hood, American bitch, and the hippityBehind the good (Band of Outsiders), bad hop pace of a '30s gangster film, the key scene (Woman Is a Woman) and beautiful-bad (Carawas a flat, uninflected interview at Orly airport biniers is visually ravishing at any moment, but with a just-arrived celebrity author. The whole nearly splits your skull) is the spectre of an ersatz, movie seemed to sit down and This Thing took lopsidedly inflated adolescent, always opposed to place: a duck-like amateur, fiercely inadequate the existing order, primitivistic either in his think¬ to the big questions, slowly and methodically ing or in terms of conscience and feelings. In all trades questions and answers with the guest ex¬ the films' expressions is the feeling of a little boy pert. His new movies, ten years later, rest almost drifter, a very poetic and talented self-indulgent totally on this one-to-one simplicity. Tom Sawyer, who can be a brainy snot throwing This flat scene, appearing at points where other doctrinaire slogans or coyly handling books films blast out in plot-solving action, has been so that the hip spectator can just barely make subtly cooling off, abstracting itself, with the out the title. Every one of his actors, with the words becoming like little trolley-car pictures exception of Michel Piccoli in Contempt, has passing back and forth across a flattened, neuter- been shifting his performance around this Salinger ized scene. This monotony idea, which is re¬ adolescent as a grown-up: Few of these people peated in so many crucial areas, in sculpture —Seberg (tinny, schoolmarmish), Belmondo (out(Bollinger), painting (Noland), dance (Rainer) or landishly coy and unfinished; squiggly little grim-

aces

with

his

spunky

Les Carabiniers. Cleopatra is a primping, prancing,

egotism,

real primitive, the mistress of a dinky one-room

peculiar in that it is so self-absorbed, out of sync

stolidly sissified), Jack Palance (fiercely elegant,

house that shifts around a dirt plot and a mail¬

with

better silent), Sami Frey (whip-like), Macha Meril

box that spits letters the way old movie calendars

(fairly human pug-nose), Jean Pee Loud (vigorous

once dripped leaves.

beautifully sinuous mock absorptions.

shrewdness),

rodent),

mouth), Brialy

Brasseur

Bardot

(coarse,

(old-fashioned

(chunky,

mock

distinguished dance style in Band of Outsiders is his

two

partners;

occasionally

suggests

itself

something

amongst

his

methodical),

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, in Alpha-

Semeniako (nicely unpushy; high school clarinetist

ville), known as Richard Johnson to his enemies,

to an

type), Fritz Lang (business-like self-effacement and

a bullfrog whose face has been corrugated by a

clothes, basically unpretentious and everyday, are

warmth)—seem less than obnoxious or escape the

defective waffle iron, has the flexibility of an un¬

supplemented

flattening technique of a director always present

distinguished low-income “project" building. His

unnecessarily heavy overcoat and prol cap from

Since the role is almost invariably a reference image or actor out of film with

misaligned

history, the

outre

items:

an

as a shadow over each actor. Actually his actors

role consists of walking through hallways, rooms,

Potemkin, a trench coat and Sam Spade lid from

are halves, and it is only our awareness of the

and up and down staircases, either pinching his

Dashiell Hammett. The gestures also seem tack¬

director's dramatic presence behind the camera

non-existent lips or blinking against the torrential

ed on. A blob-faced actor (Juross in Carabiniers)

that gives the character a bogus completion.

onslaught of lights.

dressed in dirty swaddling clothes fatuously and

Ordinarily

the

character is

queer,

sawed-off,

two-dimensional, running the gamut from brain¬

Compared to the soft-shoe nonchalance

of a

Hawks war hero as played by Cary Grant, the

hammily pats

his

hair into

place.

Kovacs and

Veronique at pensive moments, one every two

less brutish in Carabiniers to the shallow, disgust¬

moronic

ingly

that

Carabiniers, are heavy, stillborn bricks falling off

their lips, a gesture that is a flagrant pun on mouth

in

a building. Why does a celebrated artist devote

tricks, from Bogart through Steve McQueen. In¬

Woman Is a Woman. There's one last variant of

so much time to inane time-wasting cockiness,

this type, the politically sensitive boys in Mascu-

the show-boating of a character so limited he's

stead of being unobtrusive, these tics are applied like thudding punctuation.

lin-Feminin;

cute

worries

Belmondo-Brialy-Karina

about getting a

also

triangle

stripper pregnant

the narrowly smug

Michel-Ange

and

Ulysse

in

minutes, pass a thumb

in

slow motion

across

in

close to a wisp? Karina's little fawn, eyes blink¬

He just doesn't care whether any of these ac¬

La Chinoise, who are loaded with sophistication

ing and hair shaking, limbs used like stilts, hasn't

tions carry conviction. There is no anti-war scene

and act as

self-contained

units

(or

clique

warriors,

eunuchs).

anything of reality or good acting but she has a

more strained and

Obviously these new, stark, cool characters have

robust, complacent ego that presumes her one-

methodically

a closer kinship with the director than Nana, a

note acting is tireless. A collegiate little girl, a

raising

and

irritating than

terrorizing lowering

a

a kid soldier

female

her skirt,

hostage

by

delicately, with

prostitute who is hung up on personal freedom.

partisan captured in the forest in Carabiniers, has

the tip of his machete. Meant as a real raking

Secret, Ban and Fresh, his new product, come off

this same unchallenged chutzpah. There's an in¬

under of the military, it's a slow, crude, visual

the screen strong-willed, determined, passionate¬

ner sureness that he's going to score, no matter

metaphor for rape, ending in a house being burn¬

ly committed, and they give his movie a new

what he does, that is repellent in Juross's dumpling

ed.

decision and affirmation that can make a specta¬

Michel-Ange. The director is like a street vendor

havoc is played so deadpan: a lot of emphasis on

tor feel flabby and drifting by comparison. With

who has a suitcase of wind-up dolls which he

the dopey way he orders her to "unbutton," the

its

sur¬

sends out to do their little, cranked up turns.

Rembrandt self-portrait on the wall underlined.

faces, and photography that shoots from the waist

One of his personal gambits is the cocky fun

Instead of the atmosphere of outrage, the senti¬

up as though the camera were resting on the

that he gets into these scuttling figures: his fake

ment is reversed and the scene played as though

counter, La Chinoise is like a modern diner em¬

Bogarts and Mary Pickfords shoot, slide, and trot

the next door neighbor had come in and de¬

ploying a summer waitress (Wiazemski), busboy

in a bizarre carbonated fashion on a semi-abstract

manded a cup of sugar. This severe dissociation

(Leaud), a skulled scullery maid

screen constructed like a pinball machine. It's a

of tone from

toast boy (Semeniako, who dispenses intelligence

trademark of his

he cuts

grotesquerie, a fantastic comic strip feeling com¬

despite a sitting-still position and a scene that

against the

image by formalizing the

ing off the screen, discordant bits of ungodli¬

sinks him up to his blue eyeballs in words).

shot: a diagrammatic line of action, a syncopated

ness like Juross's glazed leer, the fact that the

stop-go

tick-o-

skirt is raised at a point dead-center on her per¬

shallow

space,

shadowlessly

antiseptic

(Berto)

and a

Had he done nothing else, Godard should be remembered

for

having

invented

an

army

landscape work that

newsreel

sound

track,

someone

yapping

The oddness

about

the

scene

is

that the

content spreads the scene with

of

tick, tick-o-tick. A funny, waistless chick in cute

son. He is a master of the brusque and angular.

graceful, clumsy, feeble oddballs. With footloose

cotton pants embraces her nude breasts in a de¬

He'll

acting in the most sketchily-written roles, these

fiant X formation and marches outdoors and in¬

tence because it brings him an anti-heroic oafish bayonet-pointing line of action. This kind of jab¬

play along with Juross's booby incompe¬

figures come across like Chin Chillar in Dick Tracy

doors

or Andy Capp, defined to their teeth, exposed in

yards, a car chase shot backwards in rigid, linear

bing, off-balance virulence is at the very heart

space from the awkward feet to their crazy heads

patterns, Bardot pacing diagonals on a roof, using

of his brilliantly diseased message.

like a

football

referee

stepping off the

(which are always punched up with some carica¬

her arms like the guy who signals an airplane

Godard's legacy to film history already includes

turing element: mostly hats and wigs, occasion¬ ally an obscenely large eyeball).

down to a carrier (did he do this because the

a school of estranged clown fish, intellectual in¬

villa roof is the size and shape of a ship's landing

effectual,

One of these, Arthur (Band of Outsiders), mem¬

field?). Cleopatra waltzing out into a dusty yard,

about, a good eye for damp villas in the suburbs, an

a

vivid

communication

of

mucking

orable for his woolen stocking cap pulled down

does a couple of big-footed pirouettes, and with

ability to turn any actress into a doll, part of the

over most of his malignant Jim Thorpe face to his

decor, some great still shots that have an irascible

nose, is an Argyle-sweatered sweetheart to forget.

a melodramatic shove sends an aging lover pack¬ ing in a Sennett Essex.

energy, an endless supply of lists. I think that I

As the chosen beau in a triangle, he implacably

He gets the most singular acting response, prob¬

shall never see scenes with more sleep-provoking

keeps his eyes,like a hungry Airedale, glued to the

ably

like

powers, or hear so many big words that tell me

curb, while Claude Brasseur acts him with the

"That's OK for now." The response he gets is

nothing, or be an audience to film writing which

unyielding sneakiness of a furtive fireplug.

supreme slackness, seemingly without worry or

gets to the heart of an obvious idea and hangs

pre-thought about the role, and a sublime con¬

in there, or be so edified by the sound and sight

fidence

of decent, noble words spoken with utter piety.

Another, as poetic in a different but equally crazy way,

is a bunchy, layered concoction of

with

in

a

magical

the

dishwater

director's

command

unerring

genius.

The

vamp makeup and Thrift Shop clothes acted as

result is a mindless drifting in which reactions

In short, no other filmmaker has so consistently

a latter day Gish sister by Catherine Ribero in

come mystifyingly late. Brasseur's desultory, un¬

made me feel like a stupid ass. ■

82

Since 1961 I have supported attempts to revive

SIDNEY TILLIM

least on facility, such as that of Wayne Thiebaud

an art that in the context of modernism would be

and

Modern art, like modern literature and

radically representational. There have been many

think would be more fulfilled if he relished his

modern life, has lost much. In some direc¬

"new realisms" touted since that time, commencing

facility more, imposes an austerity that compels

tions it has more than compensated for the

with Pop art, but none have actually been en¬

his work to look Surreal.

loss, developing its own complexity and its

gaged in what I think is the main business of any

As some of these names suggest, this new "Pop"

own—far more subjective—inwardness. But

realism isn't exactly that new, but its recent no¬

as one brought up on the past (like every¬

"new realism" — the production of an authentic new episode in the history of representation. Thus

toriety is fairly new. In fact, if Aspects of a New

one else), I cannot help regretting what has

the work I have supported and, it must be added,

Realism

been lost. The regret is futile, yet I believe

identified with as an artist, is distinguished by the

failed, it is because it is the only one to have

Richard

Estes.

succeeds

Even

where

Lowell

like

Nesbitt, who I

exhibitions

that this nostalgia for the past, responsible

fact that it is basically an art of representation,

ratified a movement or to produce enough work

though it has been for academicism, has also

whereas what is generally passed off as a new real¬

with the concerted effect of one. Movements are

been a vital ingredient of the greatest ad¬

ism is rather a rehash of some older style like

part of the received history of modernism, and

vanced art of our times. The artist immune

Dadaism, Surrealism or Expressionism or is simply

Aspects of a New Realism provides in quantity

to it has that much less to struggle with, but

another variant of Pop art. The latter seems to be

work which, whatever individual differences there

he is also so much the poorer for his immu¬

the case with roughly two-thirds of the work in

are, manages to agree on one point. All of it

nity. A certain dosage of nostalgia, a certain

Aspects of a New Realism.

twinge of academicism, the very struggle

scrupulously seeks out but refrains from glorifying

Aspects of a New Realism is devoted largely to

overtly inglorious subject matter — from sullen

against it seem to me to have been indis¬

what

Pop art.

suburbia to seamy New York or, in the case of

pensable to both Matisse's and Picasso's

Lawrence Alloway's designation for much of this

John Clem Clarke, George Deem and Malcolm

I

would

call

second

generation

greatness and to have contributed to the

kind of work is post-Pop art, a phrase which be¬

Morley's Portrait of the Artist in His Studio (Ver¬

superior largeness of their art. . . . Not that

cause it is brief, catchy and sounds pertinent is

meer), reversing the process by taking old art as

the work of the modern artist must by any

likely to stick. But like the phrase "post-painterly",

the point of departure and then painting out the

means

must

"post-Pop" tends to imply more stylistic independ¬

glory in it.

show some sense of it, a realization of its

ence from the parent form than the work actually

Among the representational painters, however,

presence and attraction. Otherwise he dis¬

has. Post-Pop art quite plainly derives from major

there is almost anarchic disagreement. They all

sipates himself in sheer quality and fails to

Pop art and is a dilution of it where it most resem¬

have completely individual, if not perverse, takes

impose that order and shaping which are

bles it, as in the work of artists like Malcolm Mor-

on the history of modernism in art and the history

indispensable concomitants of high art, and

ley and John Clem Clarke. There is the same use

of art in general. Some are closer to the present

without which the truly cultivated specta¬

of prefabricated subject matter (old master paint¬

in their thinking (Alex Katz, Jack Beal), some are

tor is left thirsty. High art resumes every¬

ings, magazine reproductions, photographs), the

far more reactionary, seemingly (Gabriel Laderman,

thing that precedes it, otherwise it is less

cult of the banal and again an attempt, literally

myself) and some seem to equivocate (Alfred Les¬

than high.

and symbolically, to reject "good taste", in terms

lie, Philip Pearlstein). All have a certain proble¬

of paint handling, even in work which depends at

matical

resemble

the past,

but

he

—Clement Greenberg, 1948

quality that defines both their distance

A VARIETY OF REALISMS everything depends on where an artist stood in relation to modernist art when he made his commitment to figuration.”

& Id

Richard Estes,

.

83

have

.

realism

one

and

Bar Window. o/masonite, A8V2 x 66", 1968.

(Mr. & Mrs. O. Kelley Anderson, N.Y.)

must concede a connection between the persistence of Pop ideas in the conceptual diversity of the representational painters . .

from one another and their distance from other

to all extents and purposes always been a highly

kinds of allegedly figurative art. Thus there are no

conceptual

conceptual

the

new

worked

from

nature.

The ambivalence of the new representation is further underscored by the fact that its regressive

"Pop"

This ideological disunity has not, however, hur¬ ried the revisionist impulse of the new represen¬

literary associations in Pearlstein's powerful por¬

lie and Laderman, who run a gamut, respectively,

tation into collapse before the new Pop realism.

traits (A! Held and Sylvia Stone), Katz's feeling for

of h umorously sophisticated

intimacy, dramatic

It has, however, contributed to its peripheral assim¬

genre is rich in sophisticated sentiment, and Lader-

confrontation and cerebralized perception. Sur¬

ilation by post-Pop art and slowed its develop¬

man's

face similarities between Beal and Pearlstein dis¬

ment generally. If Aspects of a New Realism makes

their feeling for the classical picturesque, have

appear upon brief reflection into the deep con¬

anything clear, it is that the new representation-

psychological as well as historical overtones. The

ceptual gulf that actually separates them, as is

alists share with the "new realists" the same re¬

still life was once his forte. Finally, Alfred Leslie

their

between

who

realists as great as that between say Katz, Les¬

evident in

contrasts

artist

handling of color alone,

Beal

modernist

elements

recent

and

notwithstanding,

exceptional

there

landscapes,

are

with

luctance to shed certain modernist attitudes espe¬

has attempted a very large "history painting," an

choking his pictures with "hot" and "cool" hues,

cially

with respect to the picture plane. Specifi¬

extremely problematical work which, at the time

Pearlstein setting off basically cool chalky color

cally,

frontality

schemes with sudden unbroken bolts of strong

shallow

modeling

(Leslie), (Katz,

cropping

(Pearlstein),

who years ago

antic¬

this paper was written, was still unfinished and not expected to be included in the exhibition.

color, usually in his drapery. If there is any sim¬

ipated Pop art and then was influenced by it) and

(My own interest in narrative painting is evident

ilarity between any of the artists it is the result

abstract color (Beal) all evoke a surrogate planarity,

from my picture in the exhibition, A Dream of

of influence rather than affinity. Obviously Richard

the latent iconoclasm of which is confirmed by

Being, and I must apologize for mentioning it, ex¬

Joseph, who lives in California, has studied Pearl¬

the fact that the problem of subject matter, espe¬

cept that it is pertinent at this point in my argu¬ ment.)

stein, though his use of large interior setups is

cially narrative subject matter, is ignored in vir¬

somewhat reminiscent of Beal. (Similarly, among

tually all of the work. Pearlstein, in fact, has de¬

the Pop realists Ralph Goings almost too blatantly

nied that he is interested in anything but a way

been

derives from Thiebaud.)

of seeing, Beal's new pictures are abstract to an

have ignored more conventional representation)

almost alarming degree and Laderman has yet to

as singular figures of the "new realism" as they

create his first major figure painting.

call it, or worse, the new "inhumanism." It is not

My own feeling is that the representational camp need not, perhaps ought not to be so diversified.

It is clearer now why Pearlstein and Leslie have singled

out

in

the

mass

media

(which

Still it is not surprising that stylistically the work

Correspondingly, post-Pop art is not only not in¬

is anything but homogenous, since everything de¬

terested in representation as such, its most rep¬

cupation with detail

pends on where an artist stood in relation to mod¬

resentational artists, Thiebaud, Bechtle, Estes, ex¬

with

ernist art when he made his commitment to fig¬

hibit both the same frontality or actual flatness

and Constant West, the latter his best single figure

uration. Alfred Leslie was a well-known younger

that inhibits maximum illusion. In fact, Estes, in

to date)

Abstract Expressionist until the early '60s whereas

order to deepen the space of compositions beset

Rather recognition of modernist structure is by

Pearlstein was only influenced by it externally.

by

Katz has always accepted the surface weight of a

crimped, Manetesque style,

residually Cubist picture plane while Laderman,

illusionist "abstractions"—the

who once studied briefly with de Kooning, has

city in hub caps and shiny automobile bodies.

too

many

overlapping

planes

set down

merely that Pearlstein's almost unsavory preoc¬ and

Leslie's preoccupation

giant, frontally posed figures (Self Portrait evoke the popularized enfant terrible.

in

now reflexive, especially as the effect of one or

to paint

two figures is, despite the complexity of the forms,

reflections of the

essentially reductivist in spirit. Theirs is a kind of

is obliged

Philip Pearlstein,

Minimalism in figurative terms. Some ineluctable

Al Held and Sylvia Stone, o/c, 66 x 72", 1968

(Dr. & Mrs. Michael Stone, N.Y.)

Sidney Tillim,

A Dream of Being, o/c, 72 x 90", 1968-9. Noah Goldowsky Gallery.

". . . the first artist to reestablish credible volume in credible space in figurative terms ..."

site

attitudes

it

requires,

to

break out of the

grip of latent serialization. As

for

Pearlstein,

he has

been

endlessly in¬

ventive in putting one and two figures through a series of frequently provocative-compositions, but he turned some time ago to portraiture, obviously to heighten the complexity of a style in which tech¬ nique was developing faster than his conception could find challenges for it. In his latest one-man show in New York (in April, at the Frumkin Gal¬ lery), there was a skilled clarity of handling that seemed almost too fine for the still somewhat grossly

proportioned

male

and

female

nudes

which Pearlstein continues to paint. Because of this subtlety, which records his increasing visual acuity, I thought I detected some loss of monumentality. Interestingly enough, serialization is in¬ Jack Beal,

Table #77, o/c, 68 x 69", 1969.

Gabriel Laderman,

(Allan Frumkin Gallery, N.Y.)

compatible with anecdotal painting, thus paving

View of North Adams, o/c, 40 x 50", 1968.

(Schoelkopf Gallery,

the way for the return of the masterpiece.

N.V.)

No confrontation develops, then, in Aspects of a New Realism which, despite a ratio of three to one in favor of "new realism," held out the pos¬ modality seems to conspire to keep the figures

Stanley have done a series of pictures that depend

sibility of one. At that, one can find at the ex¬

from being much more than presences. They are

on subject for variety because the formal problem

tremes of both ideologies profound unresolvable

powerful presences, even terrifying, to be sure,

at stake is virtually non-existent. On the other

differences. Otherwise, the boundary line between

but their rhetoric is not as complex as that evoked

hand, Wayne Thiebaud is very closely related to

post-Pop "realism" and the new revisionist rep¬

in the painting of true monumental narrative.

Leslie in his serialized frontality, but there is very

resentation is blurred, if not generally, in enough

little room for profound serialization, hence, va¬

instances to justify a redefinition of the possibil¬ ities of outright representation at the present time.

But the modernist tic that post-Pop and prePop figurative art have most in common, albeit

riation

with different results, is a tendency to serialization.

moved away from frontal figures into tilted land¬

Indeed, one must concede a connection be¬

Serialization

formal

scape, or turned his figures somewhat, or always

tween the persistence of Pop ideas in realism and

themes within given conceptual conditions with a

denied them hieratic formality (unlike Leslie), so

the conceptual diversity of the representational

given

number of elements and a characteristic

too has Leslie felt the restriction of the frontal

painters. I don't think that Pop consciousness gen¬

combination of these elements. It is not merely

format, hence his significant plunge into anec¬

erally would have assumed the dimensions it has

a variation on a theme but a renewal of the basic

dotal subject matter.

refers

to

the

variation

of

problem each time. All painting, insofar as it is a

problem-solving

activity,

involves

a

form

of

attained, had a radical reorientation of art in terms

Among the pre-Pop illusionists (I am running out

of

synonyms

for

representation)

the

most

of

representation

been

attempted with

greater

ideological solidarity. As it is, second generation

particularly characteristic

prominent of serialists are Beal and Pearlstein,

Pop art itself, in inclining in some instances to¬

and most clearly seen in certain kinds of abstrac¬

particularly the former as more and more he com¬

wards representation, confirms the long-term trend

tionist art such as Noland's targets and chevrons

bines

the

towards a restatement of art in terms of imitation

or Stella's shaped diagrams or looping bands. Se¬

same pictures and constructs setups that are obvi¬

and invention. Not that radical representation has

rialization lends itself particularly well to the prin¬

ously "machines" which provide an endless flow

failed to develop or, at least, evoke a sense of style. I remain convinced the groundwork for a

serialization,

but

it is

two-and three-dimensional

design

in

ciple of reductiveness in art, i.e., the increasing

of varied shape, pattern and color. This may be

simplification of structure to the point that shape

the place to say something about Beal's recent

major new figurative art has been and is being

and composition as such virtually disappear from

use of color, since it links up with serialization as

the pictorial surface.

an anti-representational element. Color has be¬

established at a ratio proportionate to the growing attenuation and inbreeding of modernist art, which

serialized "realism" if indeed it is not defending

come Beal's way of deepening a figurative state¬ ment expressively because he is unable or unwill¬

considerable conceptual

itself against inevitability by satirizing the very

ing to reject the serialized format of the still life

has been made in the last nine years; the artists

process which seemed to hasten its development

with figure, the figure itself being an addition to

have persisted and in most instances the work is far more convincing than it was nine years ago.

Consequently, much of post-Pop art is either

85

in frontality. Just as Thiebaud then has

is overly simple if not simplistic now. Furthermore, and

technical

progress

toward an almost absurd over-simplification. Thus

implement the expression of the still life. Grad¬

John Clem Clarke will use the same painting by

ually color, optical color at that, has inundated his

Nor is it in any way "minor" art. It is an independ¬

John Singleton Copley again and again fCov. and

compositions at the expense of his now residual

ent entity with its own "minor" figures and not a

Mrs. Thomas Mifflin is but one of a series) and

subject, thus heightening the incidence of serializ¬

lesser version of some presumably "major" current

extrapolate from it different abstract combinations

ation and confirming his enveloping withdrawal

statement. If anything, what I have called the new is

experiencing

its

first

crisis—-

from virtually any true representational

whatsoever. Of course, Beal does not have to be a

that of expanding its conceptual beachhead into

rialization in the paintings of Jasper Johns and

figurative artist, but he was a very promising one.

an enduring community of ideas. A crisis of this

Andy Warhol,

on

His case, and the way his solutions have turned

kind presupposes very real basic accomplishment.

post-Pop art is particularly strong, comes off partly

into a rejection of the basic problem, is a par¬

That the new representation is a growing influ¬

as satire, however inadvertent, of abstract serial¬

ticularly dramatic illustration of the difficulties that

ence

ization. But the serialism of some post-Pop art is

beset the new representation which must, in fact,

around the country and encountered students in

actually corrupt.

come to grips with subject matter, and the requi¬

Syracuse,

two

artists

Both

whose

Lowell

influence

Nesbitt and

Bob

interest

representation

that are colored, but not shaped, in a way that is closer to Kenneth Noland than to "nature." Se¬

also ’ cannot

be

Bloomington

denied. and

I

have

Baltimore,

traveled to

men-

tion just a few of the places, who know what is

brushwork congenitally afflicted by Abstract Ex¬

ard Miller, comes to a rejection of open form, the

going on, who write letters and ask for slides of

pressionism, was required. The impetus of a new

restoration of the monolith and the repudiation

work

of the influence of painting on sculpture. As the

companies

post-abstractionist representation thus returned to

ignore. In New York a figurative artists discussion

the East and in fact began to make itself felt just

latest forms of Minimal sculpture indicate, this is

group,

has

prior to the advent of Pop art. It was especially

very difficult, if not impossible, to do in non-

sprung up. It is an utterly disorganized, rancorous

dramatized by an exhibition by Philip Pearlstein

figurative terms. It Is nonetheless worth recogniz¬

group already threatened with domination by sev¬

in 1963, but seeds of the Eastern figurative idea

ing that Minimal art and relevant figurative art

eral older artists, but portentous, nonetheless.

were already sown in the early work of artists like

share a common problem but represent opposite

Larry

which

the

involving

commercial many

slide

younger

painters,

Still, the fact is that the will to representation

Rivers, Jan

Muller,

Georges,

in

and

Paul

poles of the same impulse. The rest of modernist

has for some

time

art has another, and older, history.

Wolf

fact,

Kahn

has not yet yielded enough major work of indi¬

Georges.

vidual conviction and quality to establish anything

attempted to restore a grand manner to figurative

The interest in realism has been different, in

but its greater probability now. Instead there are

art. He lacks, however, a conceptual temperament.

degree and kind, than the interest in any other

a number of individual artists whose main distinc¬

As I have already indicated in some detail, East¬

kind of modernist art. Some of it is purely "polit¬

tion outside the quality they have managed to

ern representation has not developed either as a

ical," of course, but I do not think that politics

wrest from extremely problematical terrain is to

movement or with as much clarity of intention as

accounts for both the persistence of interest and

have been among the first to both perceive the

movements generally imply. Its best known artist

the aura of hope and anticipation that frequently

possibility of a new representation and accept the

is

difficulties inherent in any attempt to translate

have earned him both the criticism that he cannot

surrounds the issue of a new figurative art. There is a nostalgia about it that, far from being reaction¬

possibility into probability. There are those who

draw

ary, expresses a desire to reclaim lost ideals in

think it can't be done. In any event, the strain

image that for the mass media is all you need to

life and lost quality in art. It seems to me that the

of conception is evident in the work, proving at

be avant-garde. But Pearlstein was the first artist

essential idealism at stake in civil rights, where

least that the new representation is as difficult a

to reestablish credible volume in credible space

it is not corrupted by power or destroyed by re¬

mode in which to create as any other form of

in figurative terms and thereby to infer if not actual

action,

modernist art.

linearity a positively dense, rock-like painterliness

Western imagination for a "new order." Technol¬

that is an effective substitute, restoring as it does

ogy is the avant-garde of a bourgeois imagination;

unbroken, unflecked color surfaces and with them

we must have instead an art which once more

Before going on, first to some critical and finally some

theoretical

matters,

one

basic

misunder¬

standing surrounding the new representation has

still

Pearlstein (which

is

whose absurd)

"brutalist" and

a

inclinations

sensationalized

confirms

a

longing

somewhere

in

the

transmits individual pride to humanity. It is right,

a new integrity of shape.

to be cleared up. Most people are especially un¬

Thus if the wide and disparate assortment of art¬

then, that racial issues and issues of identity are

clear as to the historical line to which the new

ists who can, however tenuously, be associated

synonymous, but the identity of the human race

representation belongs or rather the historical mo¬

with revisionist values have anything in common,

is also at stake.

ment which it represents. It is true of course that

it

after

It therefore seems to me that the issues involved

a traditional, realistic sort of painting persisted in

strongly modeled form, clear contours and deep

in the question of realism, or representation, as I

the shadows of the New American Painting (Ab¬

illusionistic space. Second generat on Pop art is

prefer to call it, are ultimately moral ones, and

stract Expressionism) and, in fact, still does in the

more illusionistic than the first generation kind,

is

a

comparable

lusting after

tactility,

era of late Painterly Abstraction. The names most

but its insensitivity to value as demonstrated by its

frequently mentioned in this connection, though

most illusionistic artists

more than half a generation separates them in

Estes) combines with an essentially impressionistic

years, are Fairfield Porter, the elder of the two,

attitude towards the painting of mass to cancel

and

out the gain.

Richard

Diebenkorn.

Both

are

impressive

(Morley, Thiebaud and

painters; Porter is the more consistent figure but

Figurative tactility is actually the exact opposite

has not tried to be the innovative figure that Die¬

of the new abstract illusionism which is based

benkorn, the more conceptually uncertain artist,

either on color or diagrammatic surface division, or both. These are designed to preserve the highly

was, theoretically, in the late fifties. Nevertheless, much of the appreciation of these

generalized facade of the typical modernist abstrac¬

artists epitomizes, I fear, the generally patronizing

tion. But it is an illusionism without real tactility.

attitude of the avant-garde towards new represen¬

Touchability is never evoked, despite the discrete

tational art in general. In the case of the elder

surfaces brought up into fields of color which

statesman and independent, Edward Hopper, adu¬

stain them, despite the shaped surfaces of dia¬

lation

grammatic painting which infer tactility only when

in vanguard circles can, at times, be as

obsessive as tokenism is invariably obliged to be¬

thought of as a kind of flat sculpture. Hence a

come in rigidly liberal milieus. But of the moderns

phenomenon of color painting and the shaped

of roughly Diebenkorn's generation (these include,

canvas I once called "bulked space." Figurative

incidentally, quite a number of accomplished art¬

tactility, then, is the most radical implication of

ists working out of various French precedents of

the new representation and that which separates

the late 19th and early 20th centuries), not even

it from

Diebenkorn has challenged modernist assumptions

therefore anti-tactile a style as that of an artist

about art

like Diebenkorn.

fundamentally.

He

has

not,

that

is,

as distinctive but overly painterly and

brought an essentially new historical perspective

I am also suggesting that a new representation

to problems of modernist style as I think others

would constitute the most radical solution to the

have been attempting to do since the early sixties.

"crisis" of shape which developed in modernist

And a function of a new representation would

painting with the ascendancy of color over all

be to effect this historical reorientation. Conse¬

other considerations. The same phenomenon in

quently an alternative to West Coast realism, its

sculpture, as demonstrated by the work of Rich¬

Ralph Goings,

Pam S., o/c, 48 V2 x 32Vi", 1968.

(Mr. Ron Petersen, Sacramento, Calif.)

that a choice between Pop sensibility and revision¬

". . . taking old art as the point ol departure and then painting out the glory in it . .

ist consciousness is a moral one. By moral in the context of art I mean a style which executes the deeper social and psychological function of form, as opposed to a particular aspect of vanity called taste. Pop sensibility, Pop consciousness, Pop sen¬ timentality have been invaluable in clarifying the provincialism and nostalgia that actually permeate a culture that has come to pride itself on its so¬ phistication. But they have not resulted in a new high art simply because the requisite idealism has been lacking. Indeed,the distinguishing conceptual feature of the "new realism" from its early moments to the present is that its relationship to realism as such has been at best symptomatic of its own failure to be realistic. I mean by this that where revisionist artists are working out of the possibility of a new figurative art, the "new realists" are motivated by or accept the impossibility of it. They possess the inclination to quite literally reshape the modernist picture plane with more than diagrams or "fields," but lack the will to endure the difficulties a deep reform in these terms would entail. Inclination directs itself to possibility but the will

must,

eventually,

confront

the

probability

and decide, usually in the face of great imponder¬ ables, whether to persist or desist. And a man's

John Clem Clarke,

Samuel F. B. Morse — The Old House ol Representatives, o/c,

90 x 142", 1969. (Kornbtee Gallery.)

choices have to be respected. Nevertheless, I feel that difficulty in both the conceptual and technical sense will be a decisive factor in determining the quality of art in the near future. The cult of intu¬ ition and spontaneity has recognized the signifi¬ cance of difficulty in art by inventing the notion of risk as a substitute. But it has not been enough to prevent the attrition of that meaningful friction that is caused by a confrontation of technique and inspiration. Technique is necessary for the sake of the imagination. Complex technical ability is fre¬ quently displayed in much "new realist" art, espe¬ cially in terms of sheer illustration. Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Estes are nothing if not facile. But even

as attractive as these artists momen¬

tarily are, conceptually their pictures do not meet the formal challenge raised by their illustrative¬ ness. The equation here is that of difficulty with mor¬ ality and I offer it with some trepidation assured only by the fact that it is a commonplace of art¬ ists' criticism of each other that some solutions are "too easy." Alas, the principle is frequently only the affectation of an otherwise too permissive milieu

in which

indulgence has long masquer¬

aded as freedom and self-expression. But I do

Richard Joseph,

Blue Roll, o/c, 66x61", 1968.

(Dell Gallery, Chicago.)

accept the paradox of a negative conviction. The early works of Jasper Johns, still a source of in¬ spiration to new Pop artists, are among the most

87

photograph of anything — being there at all. And

successful examples of unintentional parody that

the way was paved for comic strips and candy.

results from painting out of the despair of a con¬

And beer cans. Johns' sculpted beer cans et at

viction as to the impossibility of representation and illusion while desiring them all the same. It

merely underlined the sense of the impossibility of meaningful pictorial illusion. But in the end

is a despair redeemed by the irony of anything

impossibility is a poor substitute for possibility and

like a subject — a number, a flag, a movie star, a

we can no longer choose not to choose. ■

Alfred Leslie,

Constance West, o/c, 108 x 72", 1969.

(Mr. & Mrs. Robert C. Scull, N.Y.)

. . a kind ol Minimalism in figurative terms . .

“Common to the art in question is that it searches for a definite sort of system that is part of the work. Insofar as the system is revealed it is revealed as information rather than esthetics.”

SOME NOTES on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated Stonework detail from Machu Picchu. . . the significant meanings of this monu¬ ment are to be sought in reconstructing the particular building activity—the eccen¬ tric grinding and fitting of the stones—and not in a formal analysis of the architecture . .

ROBERT MORRIS Art tells us nothing about the world that we cannot find elsewhere and more reliably. —Morse Peckham Between the two extremes—a minimum of organization and a minimum of arbitrariness —we find all possible varieties. —Ferdinand de Saussure I A variety of structural fixes have been imposed on art—stylistic, historical, social, economic, psy¬ chological. Whatever else art is, at a very simple level it is a way of making. So are a lot of other things. Oil painting and tool making are no dif¬ ferent on this level and both could be subsumed under the general investigation of technological processes. But it is not possible to look at both in quite the same light since their end functions are different, the former being a relation to the environment, oneself, society, established by the work itself while a tool functions as intermediary in these relations. Perhaps partly because the end function of art is different from the intermediary function of practical products in the society a close look at the nature of art making remains to be undertaken. Authors such as Morse Peckham' have looked at art as behavior but from the point of view of discovering its possible social function. He and others divide the enterprise into two basic categories: the artist's role-playing on the one hand and speculations on the general semi¬ otic function of the art on the other. My partic¬

ular focus lies partly within the first category and not at all within the latter. Psychological and so¬ cial structuring of the artist's role I will merely assume as the contextual ground upon which this investigation is built. The interest here is to focus upon the nature of art making of a certain kind as it exists within its sociaf and historical framing. I think that previously, probably beginning with Vasari, such efforts have been thought of as a systemless collection of technical, anecdotal, or bi¬ ographical facts which were fairly incidental to the real "work" which existed as a frozen, time¬ less deposit on the flypaper of culture. Much attention has been focused on the anal¬ ysis of the content of art making—its end images —but there has been little attention focused upon the significance of the means. George Kubler in his examination of Machu Picchu2 is startlingly alone among art historians in his claim that the significant meanings of this monument are to be sought in reconstructing the particular building activity—the eccentric grinding and fitting of the stones—and not in a formal analysis of the archi¬ tecture. I believe there are "forms" to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end products. These are forms of behavior aimed at testing the limits and possibilities in¬ volved in that particular interaction between one's actions and the materials of the environment. This amounts to the submerged side of the art iceberg. The reasons for this submersion are probably va¬ ried and run from the deep-seated tendency to

separate ends and means within this culture to the simple fact that those who discuss art know almost nothing about how it gets made. For this and perhaps other reasons the issue of art making, in its allowance for interaction with the environ¬ ment and oneself, has not been discussed as a distinct structural mode of behavior organized and separate enough to be recognized as a form in itself. The body's activity as it engages in manipulating various materials according to different processes has open to it different possibilities for behavior. What the hand and arm motion can do in rela¬ tion to flat surfaces is different from what hand, arms, and body movement can do in relation to objects in three dimensions. Such differences of engagement (and their extensions with technolog¬ ical means) amount to different forms of behavior. In this light the artificiality of media-based distinc¬ tions falls away (painting, sculpture, dance, etc.). There are instead some activities that interact with surfaces, some with objects, some with objects and a temporal dimension, etc. To focus on the production end of art and to lift up the entire continuum of the process of making and find in it "forms" may result in anthropological designa¬ tions rather than art categories. Yet the observa¬ tion seems justified by a certain thread of signifi¬ cant art which for about half a century has been continually mining and unearthing its means and these have become progressively more visible in the finished work.

mental logic but in the "tendencies" inherent in a materials/process interaction. Pollock was the first to make a full and deliberate confrontation with what was systematic in such an interaction. Until Pollock, art making oriented toward two-di¬ mensional surfaces had been a fairly limited act so far as the body was concerned. At most it involved the hand, wrist and arm. Pollock's work directly involved the use of the entire body. Coupled to this was his direct investigation of the properties of the materials in terms of how paint behaves under the conditions of gravity. In seeing such work as "human

behavior" several

coordinates

are involved: nature of materials, the restraints of gravity, the limited mobility of the body interact¬ ing with both. The work turned back toward the natural world through accident and gravity and moved the activity of making into a direct engage¬ ment with certain natural conditions. Of any artist working in two dimensions it could be said that he, more than any others, acknowledged the con¬ ditions of both accident and necessity open to that interaction

of body and

materials as they

exist in a three-dimensional world. And all this and more is visible in the work.

II To see a certain strain of art making as be¬ havior which has the motivating urge to reduce the arbitrary is to do more than impute a certain

Marcel Duchamp, Trois Stoppages etalon, 1913-14. (Museum of Modern Art.)

psychology to artists or assert a particular histo¬ rical interpretation. The very framing of the issue implies oppositions of the arbitrary and non-arbitrary. Not only have psychologists such as Morse Ends and means have come progressively closer together in a variety of different types of work in

of the work. The kind of duality at work here in splitting off the structural organization from the

the 20th century. This resolution re-establishes a bond between the artist and the environment. This

physically perceived still has strains of European Idealism about it. However, for Cage such Ideal¬

reduction in alienation is an important achieve¬

ism was forged into a dual moral principle: on the

ment and

that is going on in art now.3 However, what I wish

one hand he democratized the art by not supply¬ ing his ordering of relationships and on the other,

to point out here is that the entire enterprise of

by his insertion of chance at the point of decision

ultimately, at the biological level: "Finally, some

art making provides the ground for finding the

about relationships, he turned away the engage¬

authors are confident that digitalism, which is the

limits and possibilities of certain kinds of beha¬

ment with "quality"—at least at the point of struc¬

rival of the analogical, is itself in its purest form

vior and that this behavior of production itself is

tural relationships where it is usually located. It

distinct and has become so expanded and visible

is not possible to mention Cage without bringing

—binarism—a 'reproduction' of certain physi¬ ological processes, if it is true that sight and hear¬

that it has extended the entire profile of art. This

in Duchamp who was the first to see that the

ing, in the last analysis, function by alternating

extended profile is composed of a complex of in¬

problem was to base art making on something

selections."4 Even this statement in its contrasting

teractions involving factors of bodily possibility,

other than arrangements of forms according to

accompanies

the final

secularization

Peckham and Anton Ehrenzweig been concerned with oppositions that lie along an axis similar to the arbitrary/non-arbitrary division but, linguists and anthropologists as well have been concerned with the structural "binarisms" embedded in lan¬ guage and operating behind myths. Support for the pervasiveness of a binary structuring is sought,

taste. It is not surprising that the first efforts in

the analogical and the binary as alternatives has a binary form. The linguist, de Saussure, sees lan¬

temporal dimensions of process and perception,

such

guage operating primarily according to opposi¬

as well as resultant static images.

would seemingly deny certain aspects of preferred relationships—chance ordering. The entire stance

the

nature of materials and

physical

laws, the

Certain art since World War II has edged to¬

an enterprise would be to embrace what

tions and it naturally follows that his theory itself comes in the form of oppositions and polarities which he ascribes to mental activity itself. Such a

ward the recovery of its means by virtue of grasp¬

of a priori systems according to which subsequent

ing a systematic method of production which was

physical making followed or was made manifest

Kantian outlook is seen also in Levi-Strauss's anal¬

in one way or another implied in the finished

are Idealist-oriented systems which run from Du¬

yses of myths. Key terms in both de Saussure and

product. Another way of putting it is that artists

champ down through the logical systems of Johns

Levi-Strauss are themselves dual: diachronic/syn¬

have increasingly sought to remove the arbitrary

and Stella to the totally physically paralyzed con¬

chronic,

from working by finding a system according to

clusions of Conceptual

which they could work. One of the first to do this

thread of how the systematic has been enlisted to remove the arbitrary from art activity.

vated. I am especially concerned with the last pairing of terms for the present analysis—terms

was John Cage who systematized the arbitrary itself

art. This has been one

deliberate

Another thread of system-seeking art making,

chance methods for ordering relationships. Cage's

distinct enough to be called a form of making,

deliberate chance methods are both prior to and not perceptible within the physical manifestation

has been built on a more phenomenological basis

by

devising

structures

according

to

where order is not sought in a priori systems of

syntagmatic/associative,

arbitrary/moti-

which held quite a bit of importance for de Saus¬ sure: Everything that relates to language as a system must, I am convinced, be approached from this viewpoint, which has scarcely received the atten-

Marcel Duchamp, Sculpture de Voyage, colored rubber bands hung from ceiling. (Work lost). '‘Duchamp was the first to see that the problem was to base art making on something other than arrangements of form according to taste . .

tion of linguists: the limiting of arbitrariness. This is the best possible basis for approaching the study of language as a system. In fact, the whole system of language is based on the irrational principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, which would lead to the worst sort of complication if applied without restriction. But the mind contrives to introduce a principle of order and regularity into certain parts of the mass of signs, and this is the role of relative motivation. If the mechanism of language were en¬ tirely rational, it could be studied independently. Since the mechanism of language is but a partial correction of a system that is by nature chaotic, however, we adopt the viewpoint imposed by the very nature of language and study it as it limits arbitrariness.5

I cite this passage since it frames a parallel effort made here in analyzing how a certain tendency in American art has pushed toward reducing arbit¬ rary formal rearrangements by substituting syste¬ matic methods of behaving. There is a binary swing between the arbitrary and non-arbitrary, or "motivated," which is for de Saussure an histo¬ rical, evolutionary, or diachronic feature of lan¬ guage's development and change. Language is not plastic art but both are forms of human behavior and the structures of one can be compared to the structures of the other. That there should be some incipient general patterning modality common to both should not be surprising. Nor is it surprising to find Ehrenzweig at other levels characterizing certain psychological perception as rhythmically alternating between "differentiation and dediffer¬

entiation" or scattering (arbitrariness) and contain¬ ment (motivation). What resolves the duality as a tendency in behavior at many levels is, for de Saussure as well as Ehrenzweig and others, the alternating passage between the two poles, a ten¬ dency toward the one and then the other. Ehren¬ zweig reduces oppositions to the basic conflict be¬ tween the life and death urges or the Eros-Thanatos duality. Discontent with Freud's admission in the late writings of no longer being able to distin¬ guish the two, Ehrenzweig reasserts their opposi¬ tion but sees a constantly alternating swing be¬ tween the two. "The act of expulsion (dedifferen¬ tiation) in the service of Thanatos is linked with containment (re-differentiation) in the service of Eros."6 Peckham speaks of the related tendencies to over- or under-pattern7 and assigns art the role of a practice run for life by providing an area within a psychically "insulated" framework where disori¬ entation is the rule of the game in successive innovative moves. He hints at a biological founda¬ tion different from binary tendencies in his citing of the principle of "entelechy." According to this, neural firings have tendencies for repeating se¬ quences. Entelechy is seen as a tendency to pat¬ tern as built in as tendencies for binary patterning in the brain—although Peckham opts for the pre¬ dominance of an "analogical" thought mode to follow from entelechy tendencies. De Saussure, on the other hand, concluded from his linguistic investigations that the digital and the analogical corresponded to the two available types of mental activity.8 The nature of the patterning is not so central to Peckham's thesis as is the assertion that it is predominantly there in mental activity and it is the function of art to interrupt this patterning. That is, art's function as an adaptive mechanism is as an antidote to the habitual. Its social value lies in its presentation of a practice area where one can embrace the disorienting experience. Since innovative art provides the most incisively disorienting art experiences it is the most valu¬ able, according to Peckham. Such thinking might seem to run counter to the structure of art iso¬ lated here: the accelerating tendencies toward avoiding the arbitrary would have to be identi¬ fied with increased patterning. A few distinctions have to be kept in mind. Peckham's term "disori¬ entation" is one descriptive of the viewer's res¬ ponse, not necessarily the artist's. The term in¬ volves how art is read, or its semiotic functions. While this is not the area to be explored here it might be touched on in order to make the focus of this investigation clearer. The semiotic function of new art in terms of the viewer's response has a diachronic structure. New art always disorients; only a posteriori is it seen to have presented orders and patterns. Duchamp in his famous single lec¬ ture’ would not allow an easy separation between art and its audience, the artifact and its semiotic radiations. For Duchamp the semiotic is more a function of the viewer's projection and without it the art remains unfinished. That is, the diachronic

shift from disorientation to perceived order in the artifact is the progress toward a definition provid¬ ed by its viewers. The final definition can never be known by the artist in advance, since the work's completion is in the hands of the viewers. Whether Duchamp, the most aristocratic of artists, was being ironic in making art a gift to democracy is impossible to know. In any case it is not a very convincing argument. What has been left out is the degree to which the elitist corps of subsequent artists, rather than the public viewers, "complete" and define a predecessor's work by the way in which they move away from it in the future: by ignoring it, by extending its implications, or by having a dialectical relation to it. Duchamp's still cogent statement of the problem of formalism and his uses of chance are cases in point. The features of making in innovative art need not be extended to considerations about its semi¬ otic nature insofar as non-artists are concerned. Peckham himself has pointed out that the roles of artist and perceiver are not interchangeable. The disorienting in innovative art is the as yet unper¬ ceived new structure. All past art that is no longer disorienting gives us no evidence that patterning was ever absent and new art is not disorienting to those who are engaged in making it. Yet another distinction has to be made here, namely that the kind of patterning involved in a search for motivated art takes place on the level of behavior which is prior to visible formal results. Insofar as this be¬ havior is visible in the end results, it participates in a semiotic function. But these intentional acts of process revealed say nothing as to whether or not the impact of the entire experience will be disorienting for the viewer. It would seem that the making of art approaches the polar situation of arbitrary/non-arbitrary on a synchronous front as opposed to the viewer's access to these alterna¬ tives which is always diachronic—i.e., from the ex¬ perience of disorder to that of order with time. It might be said that the current art with which I am dealing presents the least amount of for¬ malistic order with an ever greater order of the

Donatello, fudith and Holofernes, bronze, c. 1460; detail showing cloth and wax separation. "... a systematic, structurally different process of making being em¬ ployed to replace taste and labor . . ."

Michelangelo, Captive, from the Boboli Cardens, after 1519.

making behavior being implied. It is as though the artist wants to do the most discontinuous, irrational things in the most reasonable way. And there seems to be almost an inverse ratio at work in this progress toward the recovery of means: ever more disjunctive art acts carry ever more or¬ dered information regarding the systematic means of production. This information is increasingly allowed into the work as part of the image. Any process implies a system but not all sys¬ tems imply process. What is systematic about art that reduces the arbitrary comes out as informa¬ tion revealing an ends-means hookup. That is, there is about the work a particular kind of sys¬ tematizing that process can imply. Common to the art in question is that it searches for a definite sort of system that is made part of the work. Inso¬ far as the system is revealed it is revealed as in¬ formation rather than esthetics. Here is the issue stated so long ago by Duchamp: art making has to be based on other terms than those of arbitrary, formalistic, tasteful arrangements of static forms. This was a plea as well to break the hermeticism of "fine art" and to let in the world on other terms than image depiction. Ill The two modes of systematizing employed by American art over the last half century have been briefly sketched in. The materials/process approach tends to predominate now. American art, unlike American thought, has occasionally had a strong Idealist bias but the a priori has so farproved unnerv¬ ing and uncomfortable tools for the American artist.

To pursue a more material route was, in the late '40s, to be up against the formalism of Cubism. Pollock was the first to beat his way out of this. But all art degenerates into formalism, as Pollock himself found out. The crisis of the formalistic is periodic and perpetual and for art to renew itself it must go outside itself, stop playing with the given forms and methods, and find a new way of making. Certain artists are involved in the structures I am stating here. They form no group. The nature of the shared concerns does not mold a move¬ ment nor preclude the validity of other ap¬ proaches and concerns. The term "mainstream" is political. Several present-day critics can be ob¬ served wading down one, hoping to one day float on the back of the oarsmen they have in tow. In fact, the current art swamp is awash with trick¬ ling mainstreams. Art that has or is participating in the structures articulated here is, to me, eithei interesting or strong or both.'0 Of the many con¬ cerns in art, the ones dealt with here have given powerful leverage in opening up possibilities whether as mere tendencies in past work or selfconscious methods in present work. Other kinds of art making focus other concerns—the nature of color in art making would, it seems, be totally outside these investigations. The issues here stretch back into art history but in no particularly linear way. The concerns are partly about innovative moves that hold in com¬ mon a commitment to the means of production. Duchamp, Cage, Pollock, Johns, Stella, have all been involved, in different ways, in acknowledging process. Quite a few younger artists are continu¬ ing to manifest the making process in the end image. But the tendencies to give high priority to the behavior end of making can be found in much earlier artists. Rather than modeling parts of the costume in the ludith and Holofernes, Donatello dipped cloth in hot wax and draped it over the Judith figure. This meant that in casting the molten bronze had to burn out the cloth as well as the wax. In the process some of the cloth separated from the wax and the bronze replaced part of the cloth revealing its texture. This was a highly finished work and corrections could have been made in the chasing phase had the artist wanted to cover it up. It has also been claimed that the legs of the Holofernes figure were simply cast from a model rather than worked up in the usual way. " Evidence of process in this work is not very apparent and could only have been noticed by the initiated. But here is an early example of a sys¬ tematic, structurally different process of making being employed to replace taste and labor and it shows up in the final work. Draping and life cast¬ ing replace modeling. Michelangelo's "unfinished" marbles give far more evidence of process but with the important difference that no structurally new method of making is implied. What is particular to Donatello and shared by many 20th-century artists is that some part of the systematic making process has been automated.

The employment of gravity and a kind of "con¬ trolled chance" has been shared by many since Donatello in the materials/process interaction. However it is employed, the automation serves to remove taste and the personal touch by co-opting forces, images, processes, to replace a step for¬ merly taken in a directing or deciding way by the artist. Such moves are innovative and are located rn prior means but are revealed in the a posteriori images as information. Whether this is draping wax-soaked cloth to replace modeling, identifying prior "found" flat images with the totality of a painting, employing chance in an endless number df ways to structure relationships, constructing rather than arranging, allowing gravity to shape or complete some phase of the work—all such di¬ verse methods involve what can only be called automation and imply the process of making back from the finished work. Automating some stage of the making gives greater coherence to the activity itself. Working picks up some internal necessity at those points where the work makes itself, so to speak. At those points where automation is substituted for a pre¬ vious "all made by hand" homologous set of steps, the artist has stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art. This is a kind of regress into a controlled lack of control. Inserting the discon¬ tinuity of automated steps would not seem, on the face of it, to reduce the arbitrary in art making. Such controlled stepping aside actually reduces

i

Mia

tfifinIlliN

Jasper Johns, Numbers in Color, encaustic & collage on canvas, 67x49V2", 1958-9.

(Albright-Knox Gallery.)

the making involvement or decisions in the pro¬ duction. It would seem that the artist is here turned away from the making, alienated even more from the product. But art making cannot be equated with craft time. Making art is much more about going through with something. Automating processes of the kind described open the work and the artist's interacting behavior to completing forces beyond his total personal control. The automated process has taken a variety of forms in various artists' work. Jasper Johns fo¬ cused very clearly two possible ways for painting. One was to identify a prior flat image of target or flag with the total physical limit of the paint¬ ing. Another sequentially systematic mode that implied process was the number and alphabet works. These, and Stella's subsequent notched striped paintings, present total systems, internally coherent. Both imply a set of necessary sequen¬ tial steps which, when taken, complete the work. Less painterly and far more deliberate, Stella's work of the early '60s was some of the first to fold into a static, "constructed" object its own means of production. I have discussed elsewhere12 how the work of both artists, with its deliberate¬ ness of execution according to an a priori plan implies a mode of making, or form of behavior, that can be more fully realized in the making of three-dimensional objects. So-called Minimal art of the early and mid-six¬ ties was based on the method of construction. The structure necessary to rectilinear forming pre¬ cludes any "arranging" of parts. The "how" of making was automated by accepting the method of forming necessary to rectilinear things. What is different about making objects, as opposed to applying a surface, is that it involves the body, or technological extensions of it, moving in depth in three dimensions. Not only the production of objects, but the perception of them as well in¬ volves bodily participation in movement in three dimensions. It might be said that the construction of rectilinear objects involves a split between mental and physical activity and a simultaneous underlining of the contrast; on the one hand the obviousness of the prior plan and on the other the extreme reasonableness of the materials used to manifest the structure. A certain strain of con¬ structed art of the '60s continued an emphasis on refined or colored surfaces and optical proper¬ ties—essentially an art of surfaces moved into three dimensions. Other constructed art opted for the emphasis on more traditionally sculptural values—volume, mass, density, scale, weight. The latter work tend¬ ed to be placed on the floor in one's own space. This is a condition for sculptural values in mate¬ rials to register most fully since it is under this condition that we make certain kinesthetic, hap¬ tic, and reflexive identifications with things. I have discussed the nature of this perceptual bond to things in our own body space before.13 For the argument here it is only necessary to reiterate a few points. The body is in the world, gravity oper¬

ates on it as we sense it operating on objects. The kinds of identification between the body and things initiated by certain art of the '60s and con¬ tinued today was not so much one of images as of possibilities for behavior. With the sense of weight, for example, goes the implicit sense of being able to lift. With those estimations about reasonableness of construction went, in some cases, estimations of the possibility for handling, stability or lack of it, most probable positions, etc. Objects project possibilities for action as much as they project that they themselves were acted upon. The former allows for certain subtle iden¬ tifications and orientations; the latter, if empha¬ sized, is a recovery of the time that welds together ends and means. Perception itself is highly struc¬ tured and presupposes a meaningful relation to the world. The roots of such meanings are beyond con¬ sciousness and lie bound between the culture's shaping forces and the maturation of the sense or¬ gans which occurs at a pre-verbal stage. In any event, time for us has a direction, space a near and far, our own bodies an intimate awareness of weight and balance, up and down, motion and rest and a general sense of the bodily limits of behavior in relation to these awarenesses. A certain strain of modern art has been involved in uncovering a more direct experience of these basic perceptual meanings and it has not achieved this through static images but through the experience of an interaction between the perceiving body and the world which fully admits that the terms of this interaction are temporal as well as spatial, that existence is process, that the art itself is a form of behavior that can imply a lot about what was possible and what was necessary in engaging with the world while still playing that insular game of art. Recent three-dimensional work with its empha¬ sis on a wide range of actual materials and locat¬ ing the making with possibilities of behaving or acting on the material in relation to (rather than in control of) its existential properties brings very clearly into focus that art making is a distinct form of behavior. This is underlined even more now that the premises of making shift from forming toward stating. Around the beginning of the '60s the problem presented itself as to what alterna¬ tives could be found to the Abstract Expression¬ ist mode of arranging. The Minimal presented a powerful solution: construct instead of arrange. Just as that solution can be framed in terms of an opposition (arrange/build) so can the present shift be framed dialectically: don't build . . . but what? Drop, hang, lean, in short act. If for the static noun of "form" is substituted the dynamic verb of "act" in the priority of making, a dialec¬ tical formulation has been made. What has been underlined by recent work in the unconstructed mode is that since no two materials have the same existential properties, there is no single type of act that can easily structure one's approach to various materials. Of course the number of pos¬ sibilities for the basic kinds of interactions with

materials are limited and processes do tend to become forms that can be extrapolated from one material interaction to another. But what is clear in some recent work is that materials are not so much being brought into alignment with static a priori forms as that the material is being probed for openings that allow the artist a behavioristic access. What ties a lot of work together is its sharing of the "automated" step in the making process which has been enlisted as a powerful ally in the recovery of means or time and in in¬ creasing the coherence of the making phase itself. Not only in plastic art but in art that specifically exists in time there have been recent moves made to reduce that existential gap between the studio preparation and the formal presentation. Some theater and dance work now brings rehearsal and literal learning sessions for the performers into the public presentation. One could cite other in¬ stances in film and music where the making proc¬ ess is not behind the scenes but is the very substance of the work. Peckham speaks of the necessity of preserving a "psychic" insulation within which the strain of disorienting art moves can be made.14 Studios, galleries, museums, and concert halls all function as insulated settings for such experience. Much re¬ cent art that is being discussed does not require a studio and some recent plastic art does not even fit inside museums. In contrast to the indoor urban art of the '60s much present work gets more and more beyond studios and even factories. As ends and means are more unified, as process be¬ comes part of the work instead of prior to it, one is enabled to engage more directly with the world in art making because forming is moved further into the presentation. The necessary "psychic in¬ sulation" is within one's head. ■ 1. Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos, Schocken, New York, 1967. 2. George Kubler, "Machu Picchu," Perspecta 6, 1960. 3. Annette Michelson, "Robert Morris," The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Garamond/Pridemark Press, Baltimore, Md., p. 23. 4. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Hill and Wang, New York, 1967, p. 54. 5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Philosoph¬ ical Library, New York, 1959, p. 133. 6. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967, p. 220. 7. Peckham, Ibid., p. 321. 8. De Saussure, Ibid., p. 123. 9. Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act," Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, Trianon Press, Paris, 1959, p. 77. 10. No art writing can avoid carrying some political load due to the structure of the art community—i.e., the general silence of art¬ ists in print, the economics and psychology of elitist art which identifies quality with scarcity, a tendency for those who sup¬ port art to be able to hear about it better than see it. Such an ambience tends to elevate (reduce?) criticism to a form of power broking. I do not wish to ignore individuals relevant to the issues here but I want to underline the fact that the con¬ structs presented are my own. For me to cite an established artist as an example of a structure that goes beyond his own per¬ sonal work does not involve the presumption of speaking for him, promoting him, or collecting him as a follower. Obviously the ideas discussed in this article are grounded in my own work as well as in those I cite as examples This preempts me as an artist from citing recent work by younger artists in the interest of speaking more to issues than for individuals. 11. Bruno Bearzi, Donatello, San Ludovico, Wildenstein, New York, n.d. (1948), p. 27. 12. Robert Morris, "Beyond Objects," Artforum, Vol. VII, No. 7, April, 1969. 13. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part II," Artforum, Vol. V, No. 2, October 1966. 14. Peckham, Ibid., p. 82.

Andy Warhol. He too is high on my favorite list

CINDY NEMSER

to isolate a basically intuitive idea and then work

... He is the most as an artist that you could be.

up some calculated system and follow it through

His art and his statements and his person are so

Do you identify with any particular school of painting?

equivalent. He and his work are the same. It is

—that supposedly being the more intellectual ap¬ proach—than giving precedence to soul or pres¬

•what I want to be, the most Eva can be as an

ence or whatever you want to call it ... I am

artist and as a person ... I feel very close to Carl

interested in solving an unknown factor of art and

I don't think I ever did any traditional paintings—

Andre. I feel, let's say, emotionally connected to

an unknown factor of life. For me it's a total image

except

I

his work. It does something to my insides. His

that has to do with me and life. It can't be di¬

most loved de Kooning and Gorky, but that was

metal plates were the concentration camp for me.

vorced as an idea or composition or form. I don't

what you

call

Abstract Expressionism.

believe art can be based on that. In fact my idea

personal—not for what I could take from them. But I know the importance of Kline and Pollock

now is to counteract everything I've ever learned

If Carl knew your response to his work what would be his reaction?

or been taught about those things—to find some¬

enburg is an artist that I really believe in. I respect

I don't know! Maybe it would be repellent to him

my thoughts. This year, not knowing whether I

his writings, his person, his energy, his art, the

that I would say such a thing about his art. He

would

whole thing. Ete has humor, and he has his own

says you can't confuse life and art. But I think art

knowing whether I would ever do art again. One

use of materials. But I don't think I've taken or

is a total thing. A total person giving a contribu¬

of my first visions when I woke up from my opera¬

used those materials in any way. I don't think

tion. It is an essence, a soul, and that's what it's

tion was that I didn't have to be an artist to justify

I've ever done that with anybody's work. To me, Oldenburg is wholly abstract. The same with

about ... In my inner soul art and life are insep¬

my existence, that I had a right to live without

arable. It becomes more absurd and less absurd

being one.

and now I would say Pollock before anyone, but

thing that is inevitable that is my life, my feeling,

I didn't feel that way when I was growing up. Old¬

survive or not was connected with

AN INTERVIEW WITH EVA HESSE

not

It's so personal . . . Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has hap¬ pened that hasn't been extreme—personal health, family, economic situations. My art, my school, my personal friends were the best things I ever had. And now back to extreme sickness—all extreme —all absurd. Now art being the most important thing for me, other than existing and staying alive, became connected to this, now closer meshed than ever, and absurdity is the key word ... It has to do with contradictions and oppositions. In the forms I use in my work the contradictions are certainly there. I was always aware that I should take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small, and I would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites ... I was always aware of their absurdity and also their for¬ mal contradictions and it was always more inter¬ esting than making something average, normal, right size, right proportion . . . How about motifs, the circle for instance? You used it quite frequently in your early work. I think that there is a time element in my use of the circle. It was a sequence of change and matura¬ tion. I think I am less involved in it now ... In the last works I did, just about a year ago, I was less interested in a specific form like the circle or square or rectangle ... I was really working to get to a non-anthropomorphic, non-geometric, non-

How do you feel about craftsmanship in the proc¬ ess of your work? I do think there is a state of quality that is nec¬ essary, but it is not based on correctness. It has to do with the quality of the piece itself and nothing to do with neatness or edges. It's not the artisan quality' of the work, but the integrity of the piece . . . I'm not conscious of materials as a beautiful essence . . . For me the great involvement is for a purpose—to arrive at an end—not that much of a thing in itself ... I am interested in finding out through working on the piece some of the poten¬ tial and not the preconceived ... As you work, the piece itself can define or redefine the next step, or the next step combined with some vague idea . . . I want to allow myself to get involved in what is happening and what can happen and be completely free to let that go and change ... I do. however, have a very strong feeling about honesty—and in the process, I like to be, it sounds corny, true to whatever I use, and use it in the least pretentious and most direct way ... If the material is liquid, I don't just leave it or pour it. I can control it, but I don't really want to change it. I don't want to add color or make it thicker or thinner. There isn't a rule. 1 don't want to keep

any rules. That's why my art might be so good, be¬ cause I have no fear. I could take risks . . . My attitude toward art is most open. It is totally un¬ conservative — just freedom and willingness to work. I really walk on the edge . . . How do the materials relate to the content of your work? It's not a simple question for me . . . First, when I work it's only the abstract qualities that I'm working with, which is the material, the form it's going to take, the size, the scale, the positioning, where it comes from, the ceiling, the floor . . . However I don't value the totality of the image on these abstract or esthetic points. For me, as I said before, art and life are inseparable. If I can name the content, then maybe on that level, it's the total absurdity of life. If I am related to certain artists it is not so much from having studied their works or writings, but from feeling the total absurdity in their work. Which artists? Marcel Duchamp, Yvonne Rainer, Jasper Johns, Carl Andre, Sartre, Samuel Beckett . . . Absurdity?

non . . . When I came back from Europe, about 1965-66, I did a piece called Hangup. It was the most im¬ portant early statement I made. It was the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through. It was a huge piece, six feet by seven feet. The construction is really very naive. If I now were to make it, I'd construct it differently. It is a frame, ostensibly, and it sits on the wall with a very thin, strong but easily bent rod that comes out of it. The frame is all cord and rope. It's all tied up like a hospital bandage—as if someone broke an arm. The whole thing is absolutely rigid, neat cord around the entire thing ... It is extreme and that is why I like it and don't like it. It's so absurd to have that long thin metal rod coming out of that structure. And it comes out a lot, about ten or eleven feet out, and what is it coming out of? It is coming out of this frame, something and yet nothing and—oh, more absurdity!—is very, very finely done. The colors on the frame were carefully gradated from light to dark—the whole thing is ludicrous. It is the most ridiculous structure that I ever made and that is why it is really good. It has a kind of depth I don't always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning or feeling or intel¬ lect that I want to get ... I know there is nothing unconnected in this world, but if art can stand by itself, these really were alone. And there was no one doing anything like this at the time. I mean it was totally absurd to everybody. That was the height of Minimal and Pop—not that I

Eva Hesse, Vinculum I, m/m, 8'8" x 2', 1969.

95

(Mr. and Mrs. Victor Ganz.)

Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion, m/m, 10 x 15 x 20', 1969.

There is a piece called Area which I did in 1968 that I made out of the mold of another piece which was Repetition 19. I took the bottoms of the containers and rubberized the forms, attached them, and sewed them together. It's twenty feet long and I have a personal attachment to the piece. The pieces are totally disconnected. Repeti¬ tion 19 was made of empty containers and there was that sexual connotation—it is anthropomor¬ phic. Area isn't, or is in a totally different way. It is used as a flat piece with a suggestive three-di¬ mensionality. Area is so ugly, I mean the color, Repetition 19 is clear fiberglass.

%

Your most recent work seems more free and daring than ever.

Eva Hesse, Vinculum II, m/m, 3 x 16', 1969.

care—all I wanted was to find my own scene—my own world—inner peace or inner turmoil, but I wanted it to be mine. You did a piece called Ennead in 7965 that starts out symmetrical and ends up in a chaotic tangle. Yes. It started out perfectly symmetrical at the top and everything was perfectly planned. The strings were gradated in color as well as the board from which they came. Yet it ended up in a jumble of string . . . The strings were very soft and each came from one of the circles. Although I wove the string equally in the back (in the back of the piece you can see how equal they are) and it could be arranged to be perfect, since they are all the same length, as soon as they started falling down, they went different ways and as they got further toward the ground the more chaotic they got . . . I've always opposed content to form or just form to form. There is always divergency . . . That huge box 1 did in 1967, I called it Accession. I did it first in metal, then in fiberglass. On the outside it takes the form of a square, a perfect square, and the outside is very, very clear. The inside, how¬ ever, looks amazingly chaotic, although it's the same pieces of hose going through. It's the same thing, but as different as it could possibly be . . . But it is a little too precious from where I stand now. It's too beautiful, like a gem, and toe right. I d like to do a little more wrong at this point. ., Why do you repeat a form over and over again? Because it exaggerates. If something is meaning¬ ful, maybe it's more meaningful said ten times. It's not just an esthetic choice. If something is absurd.

it's much more exaggerated, more absurd if it's repeated ... I don't think 1 always do it, but repetition does enlarge or increase or exaggerate an idea or purpose in a statement ... At times I thought, "The more thought the greater the art," but now I wonder about that ... I think there is a lot that I'll just let happen and maybe it will come out the better for it . . . Maybe if I really believe in me, trust me, without any calculated plan, who knows what will happen . . . You mentioned Duchamp before as an artist you felt close to. Perhaps you are also involved with the element ol chance, say in a work like Sequel? Yes, it's all loose. It's at random. The circles can be manipulated at random. The only limitation is the mat and these shapes could roll off the mat because they're basically cylindrical . . . The piece is made of half spheres that are rigid. They were cast from half balls and then they were put to¬ gether again but not completely. They were put to¬ gether with an opening so that the whole thing was "squooshy." It was a solid ball but it wasn't a solid ball, it's collapsible and it's not collapsible because it's rubber, and then it's cylindrical, but yet it's not, but the balls could still be moved. The whole thing is ordered but again there's that duplicity. But this is an old piece and it interests me less of course as a problem. Again that duplic¬ ity—-before 1 said I was not interested in formal problems, but Sequel obviously represented a formal problem to me. Is there another work that particularly embodies your impulses towards contradictions?

I would like to do that now—well, why not? I used to. plan a lot and do everything myself. Then I started to take the chance—no, I needed the help. It was a little difficult at first. I worked with two people, but we got to know each other well enough, and I got confident enough, and just prior to when I was sick I would not state the problem or plan the day. I would let more happen and let myself be used in a freer way and they also— their participation was more their own, more flexible. I wanted to see within a day's work or within three days' work what we would do to¬ gether with a general focus but not anything spe¬ cified. I really would like, when I start working again, to go further into this whole process. It doesn't mean total chance, but more freedom and openness. Has the new openness changed your work? I can think of one thing that it changed. Prior to that time, the process of my work used to take a long time. First because I did most of it myself, and then when I planned the larger pieces and worked with someone, they were more formalistic. Then, when we started working less formalistically or with greater chance the whole process be¬ came speeded up. When we did one of the pieces at the Whitney that I love the most, the ladder¬ like piece, Vinculum I, it took a very short time. It was a very complex piece, but the whole atti¬ tude was different, and that is more the attitude that I want to work with now, in fact, even in¬ creased, even more exaggerated . . . That was one of the,last pieces I did before I got so ill. It was one of the pieces we started working on with less plan. I just described the vague idea to two people I worked with, and we went and just started doing it. There were a few things that I said to one of the people that I worked with. I said I wanted to make a pole. He made a perfect pole—it wasn't what I meant at all. So we started again and then he understood . . . Vinculum II also seems involved with chance ele¬ ments, particularly in its potential for movement. Vinculum II is connected to the ladder piece in that it is made with the same rubber hosing. But Vinculum I is solid and staid and inflexible except

for the hose, while Vinculum II, though very similar, is totally flexible. There isn't anything that can be staid or put. All these parts can be moved, every connection is movable. So it has a very fragile, tenuous quality. It is very, very taut as it is attached from two angles. There is lots of tension, yet the whole thing is flexible and moves. It's made of wire mesh with fiberglass and the parts are just stapled so they can really go up and down; they

are positioned but they can be moved. And then through the wire and fiberglass is a hole and these irregular rubber hoses go through them. They're all different lengths. Everything is tenuous because the hoses are not really knotted very tight and they can change and I don't mind it, within reason. You said you weren't interested in environmental pieces, yet Expanded Expansion, with its size and

presence has an environmental quality. I guess this is the closest thing I've done to an environment. It is leaning against the wall like a curtain and the scale might make it superficially environmental but that's not enough ... I thought I would make more of it, but sickness prevented that—then it could actually be extended to a length one would really feel would be environ¬ mental. This piece does have an option ... I think that what confuses people in a piece like this is that it's so silly and yet it is made fairly well. Its ridiculous quality is contradicted by its definite concern about its presentation . . .

What about Right After? I want to tell you about the background of that work. I have to go back a bit, because it's rel¬ ative. I started the initial idea a year ago. The idea totalled before I was sick. The piece was strung in my studio for a whole year. So I wasn't in con¬ nectiveness with it when I went back to it, but I visually

remembered

it.

I

remembered

what

I

wanted to do with the piece and at that point I should have

left it, because it was really daring. It

was very, very simple and very extreme because it looked like a really big nothing which was one of the things that I so much wanted to be able to achieve. I wanted to totally throw myself into a vision that I would have to adjust to and learn to understand . . . But coming back to it after a summer of not having seen it, I felt it needed more work, more completion and that was my mistake. It left the ugly zone and went to the beauty zone. I didn't mean it to do that. Eva Hesse, Metronomic Irregularity I, m/m, 12 x 18 x 6", 1966. (Robert Smithson.)

You found it too decorative? I don't want to even use this word because I don't want it to be used in any interview of mine, connected with my work. To me that word, or the way I use it or feel about it, is the only art sin. I can't stand gushy movies, pretty pictures and pretty sculptures, decorations on the walls, pretty colors, red, yellow, and blue, nice parallel lines make me sick . . .

Getting back to Right After.. . My original statement was so simple and there wasn't that much there, just irregular wires and very little material. It was really absurd and totally strange and I lost it. So now I am attempting to do it in another material, in rope, and I think I'll get much better results with this one. How can you ignore the formal aspects of art? So I am stuck with esthetic problems. But I want to reach out past ... I want to give greater signifi¬ cance to my art. I want to extend my art perhaps into something that doesn't exist yet . . .

Like falling off the edge? That's a nice way of saying it. Yes, I would like to

97

Eva Hesse, Right Alter, fiberglass, 6V2 x 15 x 10', 1969. (All photos, unless otherwise noted, courtesy Fischbach Gallery.)

do that. ■

PHILIP LEIDER Art has never been a question of life and death . .. —Barbara Rose Art is the only thing worth dying for. —Abbie Hoffman We took this really nice house in Berkeley that some friends were vacating for the summer. Lots of rooms, a few pieces of old furniture, dark wood paneling, and the basic item of Bay Area life, a round oak table around which there always seems to be a lot of people. Shortly after our arrival I was supposed to meet Richard Serra and Joan Jonas to drive down to Nevada to see Heizer's

Double Negative. I had been talking to Serra on and off for about two years. He has a gargantuan appetite for art and its problems. Ideas explode in his head with the regularity of Dexedrine spansules popping.He has a fine sense of art world theatrics and times his art world (life) actions with the precision of an Abbie Hoffman. As a matter of fact, Hoffman's name came up in the ride to Nevada pretty fre¬ quently. Serra had gone to school at Santa Bar¬ bara and, after Isla Vista, was having serious doubts about whether he was the most revolution¬ ary thing that ever came out of that campus.

What, we argued, was the most revolutionary thing to do?* Serra was wondering whether the times were not forcing us to a completely new set of ideas about what an artist was and what an artist did. I argued for Michael Fried's idea that the conventional nature of art was its very essence, that the great danger was the delusion that one was making art when in fact you were *"Revolution" was the most often-used word I ran into this summer. Nobody used it to mean the transfer of political power from one class to another. Most of the time it seemed to refer to those activities which would most expeditiously bring America to her senses and force her to stop the war, end racism and begin to take the lead among nations in rescuing the planet from the certain destruction toward which it is headed.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION orv

Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah (Read about it in Artforumf) Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1100 x 42 x 30', Virgin River Mesa, Nevada, 1969.

doing something else, something of certain value but not the value of art. That's where Hoffman came in:

4 more arson attacks zapped Oakkkland late Mon¬ day night and early Tuesday. $60,000 damage reported. That makes 19 alleged arsons since last Saturday. And underpaid firemen prepare to go on strike. —The Berkeley Tribe, July 3-10, 1970.

I'm more interested in art than in politics, but, well, see, we are all caught in a word box. I find it difficult to make these kinds of divisions. Northrup, in Meeting of East and West, said, "Life is an undifferentiated esthetic continuum." Let me say that the Vietcong attacking the U.S. Embassy in Saigon is a work of art. I guess I like revolutionary art.

Serra wasn't quite ready to absorb even elegant military actions into art, but neither was he ready to dismiss the idea that there are certain moments when what artists do is suddenly thrown up for grabs. Was it possible that Hoffman had seen where a whole lot of art, from the Happenings on, had been leading? Throwing money onto the floor of the Stock. Ex¬ change is pure information. It needs no explanation. It says more than thousands of anti-capitalist tracts and essays.

The car broke down about fifteen miles outside of Bakersfield, and we had to spend the night. As we walked across the parking lot of a truck stop toward the diner, Serra said, "Jesus Christ, look at that—bombs!" A huge truck, parked in the lot, was stacked full with open-slatted crates contain¬ ing, sure enough, bombs. We walked over to it and continued our political discussion: "B-O-M-B-S," spelled Serra, reading the stencils on the crates. He looked at me. "They're bombs." "Look, they pack the nose cones separately," I said, meaning the warheads, or the tips, or what¬ ever they were. •"A whole truckload of bombs," said Serra. "Maybe they only travel at night," I said. We ate in the diner. When we came out, the bombs had left, off to Cambodia. Would they have gotten past Abbie Hoffman that easily? Heizer's piece was on a giant mesa high behind the town of Overton, Nevada. We were all ex¬ pecting something strong, but none of us were quite prepared for it, as it turned out. We were all yipping and yowling as if Matisse had just called us over to look at something he was think¬ ing of calling Joy of Life. The sun was down; we wound up slipping and sliding inside the piece in the dark. The piece was huge, but its scale was not. It took its place in nature in the most modest and unassuming manner, the quiet participation of a man-made shape in a particular configuration of valley, ravine, mesa and sky. From it, one ori¬ ented oneself to the rest in a special way, not in the way one might from the top of the mesa or the bottom of the ravine, but not in a way competing with, or at odds with them either. The piece was a new place in nature. That seemed to me a risky kind of art; there was a range of con¬ sequences in doing it wrong that one wasn't used to contemplating in relation to art. But Double Negative was not doing it wrong. We came back again to see the piece in the early morning, and Joan made a video tape of it.

The movement sisters objected strongly, as did many of the men, on the basis that a fuck-in was cool, but a video-taped fuck-in was just another media rip-off, and exploited women as well. It was decided to confront the video freaks at the lake, and rip-off the fuck-in. —-"The Black Shadow," Rolling Stone, July 23, 1970.

Paul Wunderlich, untitled lithograph, 18x24", 1970. "We're tired of being bodies, and we’re tired of being sold . . U’ wy

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'°Ofl _/ **C>~2>* 9oo°v„„. 0 structured, jointly shared, and jointly financed, rather than one museum to ssue and

ves, we'd love it. but only two or three vears from now. Usually , thev can ’t keep their show together for that length of time. Nevertheless I think both because first-rate people are doing first-rate shows elsewhere, and because no matter how good a curation we have we can't have experts in everything, we will take such shows as often as we can. We have, of course, had numerous guest directors, and that is one way of solv ing the substantive if not the financial problem to a limited extent. But I think in the future we w ill certainly take more shows originated by other institutions than we have in the past. Sometimes a smaller institution near New York will do quite an important show that should ha\e been seen in New York. Certainly that happens. Wed love to get such shows if we can. But thev don't have to be at MOMA. New York now has three other museums with modern programs — four if vou include the Met. Even the Brooklyn Museum does an occasional modern show. None of these museums shares one space between five departments and thev are thus more flexible in “lead time. MOM A doesn't hav e the best temporary exhibition space in the city anvwav. But doesn t the Modem have more cachet?

sell them to other museums. The problem with your question is that it's based on false assumptions. Just as vou felt that this museum was always with the avant-garde, which it was not, so vou feel we have always had a policy of not taking other shows, which is simply not true. The Seurat show, which took place here, was entirelv produced by the Art Institute of

Even if that s true, it shouldn't matter. People sometimes sav “Isn't it an elitist notion that vou have to generate vourown shows?' Well, I think the real elitist notion would be to think that shows aren't reallv the same if thev happen somew here else. If the work is good and it s decently and honestly presented that's all that counts. ■ *

Chicago.10 W'e also took a Leger show from the Art Institute of Chicago." We hav e cosponsored a large number of shows with museums all over the country. If we tended to originate most of our shows, there was good reason for it — though the situation has changed fairly recently. That is to say, the kind of shows and catalogues

2. 3a

MOMA wanted to do, the quality it wanted to maintain — one could not assume this would be forthcoming from most other institutions. But. as I said, when the Museum felt it was forthcoming, it did, indeed, take shows that were entirelv developed elsew here. Many of our recent shows are cosponsored; the Duchamp

5.

show was coproduced with the Philadelphia Museum; the Caro show will be cosponsored w ith the Boston Museum. We have talked recently about encouraging

r

other i nstitutions to propose shows to us. For the very reason that you thought that w e never took other museums' shows, we sometimes don t get proposals that might be

~. 6. 9.

interesting. I want to elicit those proposals. However, such shows, when we take them, will still represent a minor part of the program. There are real problems. Since we share the exhibition space among five departments, and because we design installations for each show, we must program at least a few years in advance. When another museum offers us a show that is ready to go in a year, we might have to reply

7.C 1T

a. red H Savoas arfx^ed t'-e ftsst Director or M^rseur^ or N%oder-' at ^ '929 worked to set up t“>e Vfcjseurris to : ariiTi»«is*rat*\e ssrocture }94~-e'~ re sewed a> [> rector at Goftections, rs prese'-'-N a cocinseor to —e MQMA Bca-c os Trustees. Ba— s pubfished wore includes Cubism and AdsL-act Art ,1936 'sae Vco?-~ fefx 7 943' ^casso 5C years o' His At 794*. ^rd Vatsse Hs At and hrs Pn&ix: .19511 anc Acsract At caSaflogue o A:red H. Barr *r_ The Museum or Modern Art. 1936c Farrtasbc At Dada arrd Surreal isra catoBogue Allred H. Basr,, Jr- The Museum at Modern Art 1936Dorot~. v e- joined mOv.a as Ass-tsar* to the Di-ector ~ 1934 >re wcnec as Associate Curator cm Parting and Scu cc-re r-orr 7 935—t>. as Curator rem *943—then as Curator oi the Mu?eun Collections from 194'—6 ~ and ffnalh as See or Curator or Pa re-g a.nd Scu pture '-vr- 1 9*s~-6? >*>e orga- cec and wrote cata-ogues tor Americans 1942 — 15 Vrss ror~ \te Scares oxcarts '9*3 — Rea sEs arc Mage Rea sis catalogue eo'ted with Ared Sar14 A-rercars rt *946 *5 Arercars - 1952 72 A—exeats ~ 1956 "16 Americans m 1959 and "Americans 1963-' The A-e-car P&rertg as Shown n Egrt £d*opean Courses D. M «sr 1959 ex-txtion dreoor cata-c^re htnxiuctior b* Aired Barr. arres ~*Y2. See*. ree^ a n«OMA trustee snee ’942. serwee as I> rector or a-d Sculpture rem 7943-45. as Cha'H—ara or ~re Trustee Co>~~ Tee or ?a:~t re a~c Sculpture re-* 194o-c* and > oreserc \ ■>or>cra'\ chatrman cm that corre- ~ee. Sob* has w.^rtert on Giorg-o be Osnox. PaC Aiee and Joan Miro a-re>re othersThe N^ori ve cata in C Setz The vtuseurn or N'coe— Art *935 “16 AnencsnsT 1959. '!~re Protects^ se-es is sr -rerPecarrreta cregraT. Sre>%s ob re»* art are De«ie^' ~ec ov a revoh co?rvn r^ee f.rsJ cha rec Curator or ^a ■r'-tire Soapture A>T»as*on ^fcSr ~e in 79" Artsissho^- ~ the series include: 19~l Sorri'e*- Ve 5cc~~eGila— and hano Gea\es '9~2 ^ee :reca-oe- Rcwarc Long E-'~iar>^e h?re»re IffitHhaH TjG?e ard Vcn^os.. Luis Benedt 1973. Cose arc ^ a^a "orteir Davd ^re~ien. Ca_ Arere Rcoe’T \Vh*~tan Eea~.3r Arer Waus R -^e 1974, 3^-n Flanagan. G*a«o Pao ~ Ra*ae rere 5ona SSerdan and :■■’«

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Alfred Jensen,

Reciprocal Relation, Per 1 and Per 2, 1969, oil on canvas, 71x71

were actually structured that way, much as—as Jen¬ sen himself notes writing about his Mayan calendar

types our country seems regularly to produce: tran-

pictures—the Mayans meant their temples to be a literal transposition of the structure of heavenly

civilized preoccupations, who remind us of the eternal in the midst of the transient, and who make the eternal

movement. For Jensen, it is only in an ecstatic state that one can see the equivalence. In Jensen, the old

seem more of an adventure than the domestic preoc¬ cupations of our everyday lives. They remind us of our

idea that the perception of facts interferes with our

original freshness,as it were, the freshness before our

he has never had a major retrospective before, de¬

wonder at their sheer givenness does not work: the perception and the wonder mutually ground each

fall to the banal, and of the grace we had before we were concerned about the ordinary. Emerson's con¬

spite the enthusiastic endorsement of his work by

other. The fact of color in his art has both operational

cluding paragraph puts the whole situation very well:

and ontological status. Ecstatic wonder is the very instrument of color perception. Jensen’s calculatedly childlike wonder at such primary phenomena as color and time, and their correlation, as well as at the cosmic verities in general and the rhythmic way they unfold, pulsing in a polarized construction, suggests a larger naivetb. He is not only methodologically naive, like a systems buff recalculating systems the way the Douanier Rous¬ seau "recalculated" reality, as if it were impossible to lose hold of it by taking it step by step, but he is also culturally naive. It is not only that the modular units become color corpuscles, as if we could thereby intensify universality, but that the systems are meant to signify a return to first principles, a provincial missionary zeal leading us out of our civilized wilder¬ ness. Jensen is one of those marvelous, ingenuous

in fuller union with the surrounding system.

scendentalists who spring us from the trap of our

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute or a subscription of stock; for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a larger business; for a political party, or the division of an estate;—will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these im¬ provements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes:—all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the sea-beach with a white colony today, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours,

Jensen does mean to have a “fuller union with the surrounding system," and he is one of those solitary, hermit voices bespeaking first principles and cosmic thoughts hardly heard in this country. Now in his 70s,

Allan Kaprow and Donald Judd. Only in Europe has he had major recognition—like Tobey, another artist with a cosmic bent, and like Poe, also romantically obsessed with systems, to the point of nervous break¬ down.

Europe, for all its presumed over-civilization,

still seems to have a place for artists who make an emotional return to cosmic essentials, who emotion¬ ally invest in the transcendentally abstract and thereby make it concrete. To take the transcendental personally has become a mistake in today's cool abstraction, with its presumably redeeming crudity (which is mild and innate to the material) of surface. But in Jensen the systems are like artifacts uncovered during a dig into the depths of emotion, and the surface, an aroused encrustation signalling the up¬ heaval caused by the dig and its discoveries. The personal note is struck repeatedly in Jensen, perhaps most climactically in The Family Portrait, 1975. What we seem to have here explicitly, and elsewhere

Alfred Jensen, Eternity, 1959, oil on canvas, 46 x 36".

implicitly, is the use of system as a sanctuary away

painting, and in his acknowledgment of Faraday as

from the banal world. To commit oneself to system is

the source of this conception (See Mr. Faraday's Diagram 1975). Faraday was indeed the inventor of

they were seismographs. It is not simply that he gives us vibrating color, which French art has been in¬ terested in from early Impressionism to late Cbzanne,

•the field concept. He wrote: "I do not perceive in any part of space, whether (to use the common phrase) vacant or filled with matter, anything but forces and

but that he gives it to us systematically—more so than Seurat—and as a sign of universal energy. In Seurat color is not altogether candid because it is still

the lines in which they are exerted.’’ (He originated

representational. In Jensen it is simultaneously repre¬ sentational and abstract, but what it represents is the “objectivity" of the field of universal energy, and its abstractness is simply the presentational mode of this

to escape from the smaller to a larger world, while at the same time affirming the intimate systems that are of value to one, that permit one to preserve oneself, in the smaller world, and that thus have a larger signifi¬ cance which links up with that of the larger world. Transcendence to the cosmos thus becomes an intimate act, continuous with one’s important in¬ timacies in the common world. And the creation and firm establishment of intimacy is the ecstatic acknowl¬ edgment of unity for Jensen, so that in a sense the

also the concept of lines of force; in Maxwell these become vectors.) Einstein and Infeld, using Fara¬ day’s conception, assert that “the properties of the field alone appear to be essential for the description

psychic reaching out to cosmic unity becomes an apotheosis of intimacy, as much as it does an affirm¬

of phenomena; the differences in source do not matter." This has been taken, in some quarters, as an argument for the priority of energy over matter, in¬

objectivity. It is not, as in Seurat, the source of any illusion of nature, but the ultimate reality of nature. Color is the ultimate reification of energy, and the system of color the ultimate reification of the field. The

ing of absolute values. If we conceive of Jensen’s work as involving, to use an old term, a participation

deed, for the nonexistence of matter. It simply be¬ comes a certain density of energy, which is already

idea of the systematic continuum of the field is crucial for Jensen, and his treatment of its inner surfaces—its

mystique in cosmic unity, we can say that the first step toward unity is intellectual participation in the system,

structured (polarized). It has thus been said that an object is simply a sign of energy, in a certain config¬

structure is often like a Chinese box system for him—as so many tensions within an uninterrupted

with the second and final step emotional participation in the color—which gives the system its momentum, its mystique. The sheer physicality of the color lifts the intellectual system into cosmic place. The color gen¬

uration, and “at a position called the surface" of the object the field changes, while continuing within the object.

erates personal empathy for the abstract system, while at the same time demonstrating its concrete¬ ness.

uniformity of the color field he establishes, and its clear articulation as a field of energy (much systemic

flow of energy shows the inherent “expressivity" of the field. That is, as it extends it charges whatever object it encounters with its own momentum, so that the object appears to emerge from the field—appears as a series of inner surfaces “empathetically" in¬

Jensen’s belief in the continuity between individual and cosmos is reified in his field conception of

the way, as in Men and Horses, 1963, he uses objects to register changes in the force of the field, almost as if

That Jensen is aware of these ideas is shown by the

art does not show its grid explicitly energized) and by

volved in the field, rather than as an independent entity. The object becomes a contingent moment within an eternal field, and as such is altogether ab¬ sorbed. In Jensen's latest works the field is present without qualification. Marcia Tucker's catalogue essay tries hard to de¬ pict Jensen’s work as a fusion of art and science, in the manner of Leonardo. This just doesn’t come off. Jensen’s observations are minimal compared to Leonardo’s and his pictures are not, as Leonardo's in a sense were, testable theories. Jensen's work has more to do with religion than science, in the sense in which William James wrote of religion in the Varieties of Religious Experience (on which, incidentally, Vari¬ eties of Artistic Experience could easily be modelled). There, extending Pierce’s principle of pragmatism, James argues that the attainment of belief is of pragmatic importance for the individual involved. It gives him the integrity, the integration—“selfidentity,” “self-integration” or “unity" of self, as Jen¬ sen called it—necessary to act. It gives him, one might say, using James’s term, the "active habit" of self. Jensen’s mandalalike images are clearly meant to be self-images as well as cosmic images: the mandala form traditionally codifies both, articulating their simultaneity. The fundamentality and simplicity of the form stands for the fundamentality and simplic¬ ity of the self, once achieved, once precipitated out of the life process—the cosmic process. In this sense, the self and the cosmos can be “deduced” from one another. Once again, ecstatic art is used to reinforce—“enforce”—belief and self-belief, its im¬ pulsiveness absorbed in a system which confirms the dignity of the self.B Donald B. Kuspit is professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Alfred Jensen,

207

The Family Portrait, 1975, oil on canvas, 86 x 102".

The Alfred Jensen retrospective, which opened at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in January, will be on view at the New Museum. New York, from March 18 to April 21. From there it will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla; the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

ART IN RELATION TO ARCHITECTURE Dan Graham While American Pop art of the early 1960s referred to the surrounding media world for a framework, Minimal art of the mid- through late 1960s would seem to refer

Made of standardized, replaceable units that, in Flavin's words, "can be bought in any hardware store," his arrangements of fluorescent tubes within the interior (or adjacent exterior) architectural frame of

subjective experiences of the people placed inside its boundaries. Daniel Buren’s work and writing focus on the specific architectural/cultural function of the gal¬ lery in producing art's institutional meaning. In gener¬

the exhibition space function only in situ and upon completion of the exhibition cease to function artisti¬

al, all institutional space provides a background having the function of inversely defining what it places

cally. Unlike the self-defined or conceptual artwork, for example Duchamp’s "found objects,"3 they take

in the foreground. Since the Enlightenment, public

on meaning by being placed in relation to other works

cal, utilitarian and idealized. Thus they provide a

container tended to literalize it. Both the architectural

of art or specific architectural features in an exhibition space; being part of the architecture/lighting of the

seamless, clinical, recessive, white ground to set off Man’s enlarged activities. The art gallery is an aristo¬

container and the work it contained were meant to be

gallery, they tend to underscore both the function of

seen as nonillusionistic, neutral and objectively factu¬ al—that is, simply as material. The gallery functioned

the space and other art’s dependence upon the standard illumination of the gallery setting. Placed

cratic relative of this conventional white cube. Its major task is to place the art object, and the specta¬

literally as part of the art. One artist's work of this period (although not always his later work) examined

within a group of other paintings and sculpture,

in the interior, and, in so doing, to conceal from the

Flavin's lights radically disturb the other art's function¬

spectator any awareness of its own presence and

how specific, functional architectural elements of the gallery interior prescribed meaning and determined

ing, for it is then unable to rely on the neutral white ground of the gallery walls. The fluorescent illumina¬

function. So:

specific readings for the art defined within its archi¬

tion plays on the surfaces of paintings, highlighting or

tectural frame: Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light installa¬

creating shadows that disturb their illusionary planes, undercutting (and so revealing) the latent illusionism

to the gallery's interior cube as the ultimate contextual frame of reference for the work. This reference was only compositional; in place of an internal composi¬ tional reading, the art's formal structure would appear in relation to the gallery’s interior architectural struc¬ ture. That the work was equated to the architectural

tions. The lighting—even light fixtures—within the archi¬ tectural setting of the gallery are normally disregard¬ ed, or considered merely functional or minor interior decoration. As gallery space is meant to appear

employed in their construction. Similarly, the space in which the spectator stands is highlighted and drama¬ tized. The effect is both constructivist and expression¬

neutral, the lighting, which creates this neutrality as

ist. In one installation, the use of all green lights plunged the interior space into lurid green, while

much as the white walls, and at the same time is used to highlight and center attention on the art work on the

turning the view from outside, defined pictorially by the windows of the gallery, into its after-image, a

wall or floor, is kept inconspicuous. While the back¬

lavender-purple. The effect can be read ironically, as reversed illusionism, or, literally, as (physical) light

interiors have been largely unornamented, geometri¬

tor’s focused consciousness of it, at eye-level center

Nothing which is not the work (of art) manages to distract the eye. ... A work is thus dramatized or emphasized (against its will or by request) by the so-called neutral architecture, or indeed the work turns up its nose at any external influence and attempts, despite everything, to attract the eye regard¬ less of the context. ... In most normal artistic settings, which we have seen in the majority of cases are white cubes, the problems set by the architecture attempt to conceal them¬ selves, in order to support (artificially) the triumph of a bourgeois art, which thus given value can assert itself "freely,” within the soft shelter which receives it.4 The Modern Movement in architecture is the history

and the obverse of the illusionary illumination radiat¬

of two conflicting conceptions of the role of the architect. On one hand, the architect is seen as an

ing from the conventional painting.

engineer, on the other, as an artist. Functionalism,

gallery arrangement function, is both part of the gallery apparatus and part of the larger, existing (non¬

Systematically, Flavin has investigated this gallery architecture by placing his arrangements of fluores¬

from the Russian Constructivists through Le Corbu¬

art) system of electric lighting in general use: “I believe that the changing standard lighting system

cent tubes: a) on the wall in either vertical, horizontal and

should support my idea within it."1 Flavin’s installa¬

diagonal bands;

ground in general makes the artworks visible, the lighting literally makes the works visible. The lighting system, within which the specific light fixtures of a

tions make use of this double functioning (inside and outside the gallery/art context) as well as the double connotation of lighting as minor decoration and the

b) in the corners of the room; c) on the floor; d) relative to exterior light-sources (near windows,

anonymously functional creator of the gallery’s neu¬

open doors); e) as partially visible/partially invisible, behind col¬

trality: “I believe that art is shedding its-vaunted mystery for a common sense of keenly realized deco¬ ration. Symbolizing is dwindling—becoming slight.

umns, architectural supports, or in niches; f) in the hallway before the spectator enters the

We are pressing downward toward no art—a mutual

gallery, thus altering the spectator’s perception when

sense of psychologically indifferent decoration—a neutral pleasure of seeing known to everyone.”2

he enters to view the work; g) in outside space, which serves as an en¬ tranceway or antechamber to the gallery/museum

Flavin’s arrangements of light fixtures in a gallery depend contextually for significance upon the func¬ tion of the gallery, and the socially determined archi¬ tectural use of electric lighting. Electric light is related to a specific time in history. Flavin has observed that when the existing system of electric lighting ceases to exist, his art will no longer function.

itself. Just as art is internalized within society, the archi¬

sier, culminating in the Bauhaus School of Gropius, can be seen as a method of resolving this conflict as well as the contradictions between two bourgeois value systems: humanism and technological operationalism. The solution, as envisaged by the Bau¬ haus, lay in subjecting the architectural work and men’s needs to a "scientific” analysis in order to produce a functional system. Man’s needs were seen as social needs and were to be incorporated into a unified (total) formal (esthet¬ ic) program. An abstract language composed "scien¬ tifically,” like the basic elements of physics, would be used to produce a materialist architecture built from a language of elemental, ideal forms. Based on a total, reductive analysis of esthetic form, social needs and technical requirements, this approach enabled sci¬ ence and technology to be wedded to esthetics in the

tecture which displays it is defined by the needs of society at large, and by art as an institutional internal

interests of social progress. Art/architecture was to be constructed of democratic, recomposible, open mod¬

need. Art as an institution produces ideological meanings and positions that regulate and contain the

ular units (in opposition to totalitarian blocks). Art/ architecture, as pure technology, came to be identi-

ARCHITECTURE IN RELATION TO ART

evident materiality of the glass and steel that are exposed directly to view, as are the human activities within the building. The social function of building is subsumed into its formal disclosure of its technical, material and formal (self) construction. The neutrality of the surface, its '‘objectivity," focuses the viewer's gaze only on the surface material/structural qualities, deflecting it from the building’s meaning/use in the social system's hierarchy. The glass gives the viewer the illusion that what is seen is seen exactly as it is. Through it one sees the technical workings of the company and the technical engineering of the build¬ ing’s structure. Yet the glass’s literal transparency not only falsely objectifies reality; it is a paradoxical camouflage: for while the actual function of the corpo¬ ration may be to concentrate its self-contained power and to control by secreting information, its architec¬ tural facade gives the impression of absolute open¬ ness. The transparency is visual only: glass separates the visual from the verbal, insulating outsiders from the locus of decision-making and from the invisible, but real, links between company operations and society.5

Dan Flavin,

Pink and Gold, 1967, installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

tied with the earlier notion of “art for art’s sake,” as the Bauhaus architects saw the function of their architec¬ ture as the creation of a language of “its" own. This language was liberalist—antirhetorical, antisymbolic and (supposedly) free from ideological contamina¬ tion, a utopian language of pure function and pure materiality. Because in the functionalist building symbolic form—ornament—is (apparently) eliminated from the building (form and content being merged), there is no distinction between the form and its material struc¬ ture; that is, the form represents nothing more or less than the material; second, a form or structure is seen to represent only its contained function, the building’s structural and functional efficiency being equated with its real utility for those who use It. Esthetically, this idea is expressed in the formula: efficient form is beautiful and beautiful form is efficient. This has a “moral" dimension; "efficient" connotes a pragmati¬ cally “scientific” approach seemingly uncontaminat¬ ed by "ideology,” which has (capitalistic) use value (“efficiency” is how well a building contributes to the operations of the company housed within it).

209

One can examine the later buildings of Mies van der Rohe, especially his corporate office buildings. These use transparent glass "curtain walls" to eliminate the distinction—and contradiction—between outside and inside. Glass and steel are used as “pure" materials, for the sake of their materiality. Until recent¬ ly, these Bauhaus-derived buildings were sheathed in transparent glass. They read from inside out, making evident their functional construction. The function of the building is expressed in terms of the structural,

In attempting to eliminate the disparity between the facade (which conventionally mediates its relation to the outside environment) and its private, institutional function, this type of architecture appears to eliminate the distinction between outer form and inner function. The self-contained, transparent glass building denies that it has an outside and that it participates as an element in the language of the surrounding buildings in the environment. Ratherthan coming to terms, within its formal statement, with the social language of the surrounding commercially built environment of which it forms a part, the classic modernist building is aloof and noncommunicative. It Dan Graham,

Ziggurat. 1967. black and white photograph.

mercial proposition. The building's functionalism con¬

World." Used as an overseas branch office, the International Style building functions ideologically as

ceals its less apparent ideological function, justifying

a neutral and objectified rationale for U.S. export

the use of technology or technocratic bureaucracy by

capitalism, although it would like to be taken as

large corporations or government to impart their

merely an abstract (not symbolic) form. Karl Bever¬

particular version of order upon society. Where other

idge and Ian Burn have indicated this symbolic

buildings have conventional signs of their function

rationale, which America had for its activities and which the form of its corporate architecture (and art)

does not acknowledge that it, too, is usually a com¬

oriented toward public scrutiny, the glass building’s facade is invisible and unrhetorical. The esthetic purity of the glass building, standing apart from the common environment, is transformed by its owner into social alibi for the institution it houses. The building claims esthetic autonomy over the environ¬ ment (through its formal self-containment), yet it evinces transparent "openness” to the environment (it incorporates the natural environment). This rhetori¬ cal ploy efficiently legitimizes/naturalizes the corpo¬ rate institution's claim to autonomy (“The World of General Motors"); the building builds the corporate myth. A building with glass on four sides seems open to visual inspection; in fact, the “interior” is lost to the architectural generality, to the apparent materiality of the outward form, or to “Nature" (light, sun, sky or the landscape glimpsed through the building on the other side.) Thus, the building stands apart from any lan¬ guage but its own. Esthetic formalism and Functionalism in architec¬ ture are philosophically similar. By the same token, Functionalist architecture and Minimal art have in common an underlying belief in the Kantian notion of artistic form as a perceptual/mental “thing-in-itself," which presumes that art objects are the only category of objects “not for use," objects in which the spectator takes pleasure without interest. Minimal art and postBauhaus architecture also compare in their abstract materialism and their formally reductive methodolo¬ gy. They share a belief in "objective” form and in an internal self-articulation of the formal structure in apparent isolation from symbolic (and representa¬ tional) codes of meaning. Both Minimal art and Func¬ tionalist architecture deny connotative, social mean¬ ings and the context of other, surrounding art or architecture. By the end of the war, three Bauhaus architects, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Breuer, had emigrat¬ ed to the United States and established themselves as influential teachers in large university architecture departments. There, as advocates of the Modern Movement, they trained a new generation of Ameri¬ can architects. The architects as well as the architec¬ ture produced by them and their former Bauhaus teachers were given the name "International Style” by the architectural historians Flenry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. Mies' classicist glass office towers and apartment buildings became the new standard of American technology, especially as this style was easily exported to other areas of the world by American big business. Mies’ classicism was based on an apparent trueness to materials (materi¬ als being seen for what they were, instead of dis¬ guised by the use of ornamentation) wedded to an idealized, “universal," and highly abstract, notion of space. These modernist structures soon became popular packages for international (multinational) corporate branch offices in the capitals of the “Free

reflected during the postwar period: . . . a technology which is democratic because it is good, neutral, and progressive, a technology which is equally available to everyone—the means for a better life, and free from ideological bias. The American artists of the sixties and seventies have reproduced this pattern, becoming the cul¬ tural engineers of "International art.”6

last, to distract you from its formal content. I think the formal statement in my work will become clearer in time.7 Lichtenstein's choice of indirect, and ultimately artistically self-referring, esthetic “political" strategies is a typical one for “progressive” artists of the ’60s, who believed that, at best, the radicality of their art activities could “trickle down” to society at large, despite the fact that the art might utilize mass media— popular elichbs—for its “content.” But Lichtenstein’s work, whether reproduced (“second-hand”) in the mass media or viewed in art galleries, did allow for such a dual reading. Lichtenstein is ambivalent about whether he wants to consider his work political. In American culture to define a work as

ostensibly

“political" automatically categorizes it as academic or

Not that some American artists and architects have been unaware of the dilemma of their work's possible

“high" art; mass culture will have little interest in it, because it assumes what for the mass public is a

expropriation, once it is in the public sector, in the

patronizing attitude. As a category, "the political" is negatively coded: it means, "no fun." Andy Warhol’s

interests of the elite “Establishment" and also by commercialized mass culture. Politically conscious American artists have evolved two basic esthetic strategies to deal with this twofold social expropri¬ ation. The first is to avoid having the art product packaged automatically by the media by the simple procedure of having the art package itself. The Ameri¬

films, his Brillo boxes presented as sculptures, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,"8 and the rock group "The Ramones” are various examples of self-conscious works placed in the public media and capable of dual readings as both"high"and “low”cultural forms, but,

can Pop artists of the early to middle 1960s equivocat¬

ironically, being neither one or the other. It is easy to condemn this approach from a ration¬

ed between imitating the cultural clichbs prepack¬

alist Marxist perspective.because the work appears

aged by the media (in one sense, accepting the popular or vernacular code/reading) and various

to equivocate in its attitudes toward commercial,

formal distancing devices making the “common” and

conventions and sentiments. Instead of negating (and proposing an alternative to) degraded American

ordinary appear strange (as these devices are formal and artistic method, this also allowed their works to be read as “art for art’s sake”). A second strategy was to use popular techniques and subject matter and at the same time (in the same work) allow the work to read alternatively from a formal, “high" art perspective. A work by Lichtenstein, for example, can be both “art for art's sake" and something assimilable to popular cultural meanings. Both readings are simultaneously correct. Owing to its seeming ephermerality in terms of the popular code, such work cannot immediately be assimilated into the institutions of “higher” culture; conversely, the work cannot be immediately assimi¬ lated into the value-system of commercial, popular culture (although it speaks the same language) be¬ cause of its anchorage in “high” art. The aspect of two equivalent, total/complete readings allows a work to

vulgarized mass culture, even adopting some of its

popular culture, it seems either passively to reflect or actively to celebrate it. European “leftist” architectural critics unconsciously equate mass culture with Fas¬ cist irrationalism, seeing rationalist socialism as both a “negation” of “degraded” mass culture and as the only “constructive” solution to the problems it con¬ fronts. They see present-day American society in terms of Europe of the 1930s. Similarly, in their critique of the use to which American International Style architecture is put, they use an idealist and historical model as an implicit standard, "Revolutionary” art for them is identified, for historical reasons, with the Russian Constructivist period. In fact, the work of Russian art and architecture after the Revolution was contextualized to real conditions and needs at that

question the position for the spectator which either

time; architects wished to purge personally symbolic (aristocratic-“art-for-art’s-sake") elements from the

one of these two readings poses and it also permits a questioning of both “popular” and “high" art’s formal

architectural language to functionalize and socialize the means of artistic/architectural production. El Lis-

assumptions. As Lichtenstein told Gene Swenson:

sitzky summarized this approach:

I think that my work is different from comic strips—but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art. What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified. The purpose is different, one intends to depict and I intend to unify. . . .The heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but I don't take them seriously in these paintings—maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political point. I use them for purely formal reasons, and that's not what those heroes were invented for. Pop art has very immediate and of-the-moment meanings which will vanish—that kind of thing is ephemeral—and Pop takes advantage of this "meaning" which is not supposed to

(1) The negation of art as mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair. (2) ‘Objective’ work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will be regarded as a work of art. (3) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of wellprepared objective-scientific criteria. Such an architecture will actively raise the general stan¬ dard of living.9 The difficulty with applying Constructivist standards to present-day architectural/social problems is that they impose a blinder on reality as it exists at present.

The neo-Constructivist theoretician wishes to remake this reality in accord with "revolutionary" (in fact highly

for a realist (conventional) and multivalent architec¬ ture, one whose structure is conventional (semiotic) rather than abstract or materialistic, and whose aim is basically communicative. Venturi and Rauch’s unbuilt 1967 project for the National Football Hall of Fame is

forms and techniques has an economic dimension. In public building it is usually more (cost) efficient, in both capitalist and Bauhaus fgrmal terms, to build conventionally. If "good design” costs twice as much, then “good design” is not realistic and needs re¬

claim autonomy from the surrounding social environ¬ ment. It represented only itself, as a factual, structur¬

an example of combining architectural allusion with communicative devices taken from the commercial vernacular.

ally self-referring language. It deliberately sought to suppress both interior (illusionistic) and exterior (re¬

Unlike modern “masters" who advocate unconven¬ tional solutions, Venturi advocates using known con¬

definition. And, as Denise Scott Brown notes, in practice Bauhaus-style total design, usually advocat¬ ed by governmental planning boards, is often "used to betray rather than support the social concerns from which ... it sprang."10

presentational) relationships to achieve a zero de¬ gree of signification. Beveridge and Burn point out that when this type of art is used by big business, the government or the cultural Establishment, either do¬

ventions, even humdrum ones. In dispensing with the myth of the "heroic and original” building, which in its search for new forms and expressive use of materials has simply fueled the surplus economy of late capital¬

The question that the work of the American and British Pop artists and Venturi raise is the relation and socio-political effect of art and architecture to its immediate environment. Actually, this issue is implicit,

mestically or as a cultural export, it functions perhaps contrarilytothe artist's intentions—to affirm America's

ism and helped to provide large corporations with the alibi of “high culture,” Venturi and his associates'

merely on a daily, pragmatic basis, in all architectural work. What Venturi appropriates from the Pop artists

apolitical, technocratic ideology. For: "to reproduce a form of art which denies political or social content...in fact provides a cultural rationalization for just such a

approach implies a critique of post-Bauhaus ideolo¬ gy. The Bauhaus had associated efficiency and the notion of techhical/formal innovation: “revolutionary” design would be efficient design. Today "efficient"

is the understanding that not only can the internal structure of the architectural work be seen in terms of a relation of signs, but that the entire built (cultural) environment with which the building is inflected is constructed from signs. Pop art acknowledges a common code of schematic signs, conventionalized meanings and symbols which link vernacular, envi¬

elitist) solutions “from above" and only in terms of his own specialist and theoretical language. Like International Style Functionalist architecture, Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s seemed to

denial." In rejecting the reductivism and utopianism of modernist architectural doctrine, Robert Venturi and

design is more symbolic than real; it symbolizes not cost efficiency, but the corporation that has built the

his collaborators propose an architecture that ac¬ cepts the actual conditions, social realities and given

structure's hegenomic power (possibly due to its efficient use of social technology). Although the build¬ ing's structure may read as "revolutionary" (in an

economics of a particular situation. This means, for commercial buildings in a capitalist society, taking

often than not reactionary. Venturi prefers to take the

the syntax of the commercial vernacular seriously, including the building’s relation to the surrounding

esthetic sense), its function (in a social sense) is more ideological or symbolic assumptions of a cultural vernacular at their face value in determining his program. "Democracy” and pragmatic “pluralism" as

ronmental signs to artistic/architectural signs. Ab¬ stract art’s opposition to representational realism denies that an abstract work speaks the same lan¬ guage as its surrounding environment. The ideology of abstract art equates realism with representational art and, in turn, with an illusionism that can be manipulated to convey univalent, ideologically reac¬ tionary information to the masses, who might only

built environment, the program of the client on whose behalf it was built, and the public’s reading and cultural appropriation of the building. A Venturi and Rauch building relies on both popular taste and

given ideological values and cultural conventions of the local vernacular can be assumed to be part of the architectural object and, as they are taken into con¬

specialist codes. By displaying its rhetoric and (so¬ cial) function openly, and by using contradictory

sideration, are free to emerge in terms of the build¬ ing’s rhetoric with alternative meanings/readings.

understand the older convention (an often cited ex¬ ample is the Socialist Realism of Stalinist Russia). Modernist art has been committed to a purge of illusionist/connotative meaning in order to forge a

conventional codes in the same building, Venturi opts

Venturi and Rauch’s advocacy of conventional

purely formal, abstract and functional language. For

the modernist, realism is identified not only with representational art, but with a morally pejorative pragmatism. If both the cultural and the “real” envi¬ ronment are seen in terms of a culturally connected semiotic coding, and if in practice an abstract work also functions, symbolically, in relation to other cultur¬ al signs, then a “new realism" whose basis is the function of the sign in the environment is necessary. Signs in architecture can be either denotative, architectural signs, referring to building itself; or connotative, representing what is to be found within the building (literally or metaphorically), or to alterna¬ tive—perhaps contradictory—meanings elsewhere. Both types of architectural sign connect with the codified sign system of which they are a part and to all other signs in the cultural environment. Unlike the buildings of Mies and his followers, whose idealistic purism veils a corporation’s less than pristine business practices, Venturi and Rauch build¬ ings incorporate the “commercial” in their code, which allows them, ironically, to comment upon the predominant capitalist commercial environment of the American built landscape. This is also an ac¬ knowledgment that meanings in architecture are not inherent to or exclusively framed within the work of architecture itself, but already exist as part of the environment in which the building is placed. A good example is the Guild House where, instead of idealiz¬ ing or sugar-coating the realities of the lives of the elderly, or of the rather banal environment surround¬ ing the building, or its institutional nature, the building simply tries to make evident what those assumptions are.This is done by building a clearly standard, cheap building and by expressing an ideology (shown in the building’s aspirations to elegance) that suggests alternative symbolic meanings. Thus Venturi and Rauch build conventionally, but use this “convention¬ ality" unconventionally to express human conditions in a realistic, discursive manner. In this anti-utopian, anti-introspective merging of realism and irony, the approach parallels that of Pop art. For Roy Lichtenstein Pop art assumes an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think art since Cbzanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art; it is utopian. It has had less to do with the world, it looks inward-neo-Zen and all that. This is not so much a criticism as an obvious observation. Outside is the world; it’s there. Pop art looks out into the world; it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad but different—another state of mind.11

Venturi specifically acknowledges the influence of Pop art as well as “popular” culture.12 Venturi prefers to make a building's symbolic function apparent by emphasizing it; this is done in a code which is understood not only in the architectural world, but also in the vernacular. An example is the pro¬ posal for a Town Hall, part of a larger city plan, for Canton, Ohio, from 1965, whose front is more important than its back. . .. The change in size and scale in the front of the town hall is analogous . . . to the false fronts of western towns, and for the same reasons: to acknowledge the urban spatial demands of the

street. . . . The front screen wall ... is faced with very thin white marble slabs to reemphasize the contrast between the front and the back. . . . The enormous flag is perpendicular to the street so that it reads up the street like a commercial sign.13

The flag displayed on a public building emotively signifies, in a code understandable to all Americans, at least two related readings: the pride of American citizens in their country and, especially when the flag is displayed on a commercial building, the confusion of capitalism with the American system (of govern¬ ment). It is interesting to compare Venturi's use of a symbolic, heraldic flag on a public building to recent works of Daniel Buren using flaglike hangings in his conventional vertical-strip pattern. In the Wind: A Displacement, done in 1978 as part of the exhibition “Europe in the Seventies: Aspects of Recent Art” at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., featured eight flags hung from flagpoles in the museum’s central courtyard (an area that reads as interior when viewed from the inner windows of the museum but which is exterior from the point of view of people outside the museum, as it is an extension of the entrance courtyard). The flags hang perpendicular to the building with their flagpoles titled slightly upward; in other words, the vertical stripes read the same relative to spectator and to the ground as do conven¬ tionally displayed American flags. The flags were arranged in a circular sequence; so if the first flag is blue and white, the second is black and white, the third is orange and white, the fourth is black and white, the fifth is green and white, the sixth is black and white, the seventh is yellow and white, and the eighth is black and white. While Venturi and Rauch’s project

ironically acknowledges the symbolic potency of the U.S. flag, Buren's work neutralizes any connotational reading for the work, allowing it to refer back to its architectural positioning and to help render the archi¬ tecture's/art's assumptions and functions more ap¬ parent. Buren’s work is designed to negate its own potential appropriation as either "high" art or symbol¬ ic content. For instance, the use of alternate blackand-white-striped flags between each of the colored flags is a way to cancel the presence of rival symbolic content which the work (a sum of flags) might take in relation to the symbolic function of (other) flags. Unlike the Functionalist building and unlike the neutrality of Buren’s material means, Venturi's archi¬ tecture acknowledges the same communicative codes that vernacular architecture exploits (usually to sell products). In Learning From Las Vegas Venturi, Brown and Izenor criticize the new Boston City Hall (and modernist megastructures in general) for not overtly acknowledging its symbolic assumptions of, or aspirations to, monumentality. They observe that it would have been cheaper (more efficient) for the architects to have built a conventional building to satisfy the Hall’s functional requirements topped by a large sign: “The Boston City Hall and its urban com¬ plex are the archetype of enlightened urban renewal. The profusion of symbolic forms . . .. and the revival of the medieval piazza and its patazzo pubblico are in the end a bore. It is too architectural. A conventional loft would accommodate a bureaucracy better, per¬ haps with a blinking sign on top saying I AM A MONUMENT.”14 As Venturi and Rauch’s buildings admit more than one linguistic code, they can sometimes express conflicting present-day values rather than being tied

to a “higher" language of unified form. Venturi, Brown and Izenor criticize upper-middle-class American architects for their rejection of the forms and symbolic importance of architecture of their own vernacular: They understand the symbolism of Levittownand do not like it, nor are they prepared to suspend judgment on it in order to learn and, by learning, to make subsequent judgment more sensitive to the content of the symbols. . . . Architects who find middle-class social aspirations distasteful and like uncluttered architectural form see only too well the symbol¬ ism in the suburban residential landscape. . . . They recog¬ nize the symbolization; but they do not accept it. To them the symbolic decoration of the split-level suburban sheds repre¬ sents the debased, materialistic values of a consumer economy where people are brainwashed by mass market¬ ing and have no choice but to move to the ticky-tacky, with its vulgar violations of the nature of materials and its visual pollution of architectural sensibilities. . . . They build for Man rather than for people—this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular upper-middle-class values, which they assign to everyone. . . . Another obvious point is that "visual pollution" (usually someone else's house or business) is not the same order of phenomenon as air or water pollution. You can like billboards without approving strip mining,15

Similarly, "beautification” substitutes for serious eco¬ logical planning and is aggressively promoted by Lady Bird Johnson, big land developers and Exxon; it clearly serves the ideological interests of those who have the most to lose if the idea of American depen¬ dence upon a consumer economy and overuse of energy is seriously challenged. Venturi and Rauch will mix the "low” commercial code with the "high” architectural code, so that the commercial look of one of their buildings tends to subvert its reading as "hlgh”-value architecture. And

213

in a reverse fashion, the specific historical-architec¬ tural references in their buildings tend to question, to put into historical perspective, the usually immediate, unexamined assumptions communicated through commercial, popular codes. This commercial code has evolved to merge the interests of middle-class desires. The code of "high” architecture is a coalition of upper-middle-class "cultured” values, upperechelon Establishment “taste," with values of the architectural profession as institution. The Internation¬ al Style unifies upper-middle-class and upper-class values in the interest of corporate business and government; at the same time, it looks down upon the “blight” and “visual pollution" it discerns in the com¬ plex diversity of smaller, less organized and lowerclass codes, all representing alternative value-sys¬ tems. Venturi uses irony as a way to acknowledge contra¬ dictory political realities, rather than to suppress or to resolve them in a (false) transcendence, employing it to make certain assumptions of a building’s given program overt. This use of irony as a "distancing” device suggests Brecht’s notion of the self-aware style of acting (as found in classical Chinese theatre): "The Chinese performer limits himself to simply quot¬ ing the character played. . . . The performer’s self¬ observation, an artful and artistic art of self-alienation, stops the spectator from losing himself in the charac¬ ter completely. ... Yet the spectator’s empathy is not entirely rejected. . . . The artist’s object is to appear strange and surprising to the audience. . . . Everyday things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and automatic.”16 In the commercial environment“pure”architectural forms are often modified or violated by applied verbal

Venturi and Rauch, drawing for Town Ha II, North Canton, 1965

signs. This is common, as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes have both noted, for communications media in general: Today, at the level of mass communications it appears that the linguistic message is present and independent in every image: as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon.17 Picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him [the viewer], right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each simple picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.18

Venturi and Rauch facades often function as lin¬ guistic modifiers of the building to which they are attached. For example, beneath the quartz-light fix¬ ture that illuminates the large painted number "4” at the top of Fire Station 4 in Columbia, Indiana (1965), itself a verbal and heraldic sign, two black bricks are set into the white brickwork that constitutes the facade to underline the light fixture; the line functions as literary irony and in the decorative/architectural modes simultaneously. Walking along Main Street or driving in an auto¬ mobile one sees a row of signs in sequence. Each sign stands out from the signs preceding and follow¬ ing it, having a prescribed, separate meaning in relation to the other signs that surround (and define) it in terms of its position. For a sign to convey meaning, it must conform to the genera! code shared by the surrounding signs and distinguish itself from—estab¬ lish its position relative to—other signs. Each sign depends ultimately for its meaning upon its position in relation to the others. Signs change (and react to change in other signs) relative to their function, to general changes within the code of signs, and to shifts in the sequence of signs of which they are a part. Functions of buildings change (a real-estate office might become a medical clinic and then a usedcar showroom or an art gallery), which is reflected in their representation in the sign-system. By the early 1970s this notion of art as continual innovation came to be seriously questioned. Ecologi¬ cal concerns had generated a new cultural ethos that did not accept an idea of progress with its imperative to experiment with nature in order to create an evernew future. Conservation of natural resources went along with conservation of the past. These changes in social perspective were reflected culturally in the 1970s fashion for “historical" re-creations of past decades, in the “new nostalgia,” as well as in the neoColonial look of the facades/decor of vernacular architectural forms. The historically eclectic, domestic (national, indi¬ genous, vernacular and "homespun” as opposed to International Style) and "rustic” aspects of this style owed something to the “high” architecture of the late 1960s post-modernists (Venturi, Charles Moore and others), but used these influences for its own ideologi¬ cal purposes. It is possible that revivalism, in its nostalgic aspect, doesn't intend to clarify, but is

conjecturally reconstructed parts of Williamsburg must be called fake. And even the use of indoor plumbing and

.... [while that for] the National Football Hall of Fame

electricity in Gunston Hall would have to be viewed as a

is a building and a billboard.”21 The task of the work of art or architecture is not

compromise. Clearly, such an unrealistic definition of au¬

the resolution of social or ideological conflict in a

thenticity

beautiful artwork, and not the construction of a new

presumes

that

architectural

tradition

cannot

change over time without losing validity or collapsing alto¬ gether. . . . An architectural tradition is composed both of references to an ideal type and of accommodations to particular

ideological counter-content; instead the artwork di¬ rects attention to the seams in various ideological representations (revealing the conflicting variety of

circumstances. Viewed in this way, the Colonial tradition is

ideological readings).22 To do this the work uses a

more than just a set of 18th-century buildings or latter-day

hybrid form, one which partakes of both the popular

replicas. In other words, the Colonial tradition is a collection

code of mass media and the “high” code of art/

of architectural elements to be used in contemporary build¬

architecture, of both the popular code of entertain¬

ings to evoke to the modern eye (and in the modern heart)

ment and a theoretically based political analysis of form, and of both the code of information and of the

both the shapes and the size and, finally, the feel of 18thcentury America.'9

The historical, in the form of an architectural allu¬ sion, signifies an ideal; but its specific meaning only has relevance in its relation to surrounding, present-

esthetically formal.■ 1

is important to make a distinction. Duchamp took an object produced as a apparent contradiction of both the usual function of the gallery (which is to designate certain objects "art" and to exclude others) and of other ‘noncontaminated" art objects within the gallery. This would seem to question, on the level of abstract or logical truth, the aristocratic function of art and of the art gallery as institution. In fact, Duchamp's critique is only on the conceptu¬ al/philosophical level, and was immediately integrated back into the art

past is symbolic, never "factual.” In architecture a

institution's definitions of what consititutes (the function of) art without

sign of the past signifies a myth larger than the mere

directing the spectator's attention to the specific details/practice of the functioning of the gallery or of art in relation to society at a specific historical

architectural function. "History" is a highly deceptive concept, as there are only histories, each serving

moment. Duchamp's work resolves the contradiction between gallery art and art in relation to society into a totalizing abstraction; further, it is ahistorical: the condition of "art" is seen as neither social nor as subject to

some specific present-day ideological need.

change. By contrast, Flavin's fluorescents only "work" through specific

Philadelphia, 1968 (renovations later removed).

Venturi and Rauch's 1968 restoration for the Saint

situation installation, either through necessity or esthetic calculation. 4. Daniel Buren, "Notes on Work in Connection with the Places Where It Is

Francis de Sales Church in Philadelphia heuristically cause the newly introduced (actually revived ancient)

fagade being replaced by use of reflective (or semireflective, one-way)

ary, Venturi and Rauch left it as it was and installed an

the culturally mediated memory of coming of age in one of these recently past decades mythically stands for America's Past. In media representations the present appears confused with the particular "past” time being revived. In films and in television series such as “Happy Days,” "Laverne and Shirley ” and “The Waltons,” one sees the projection of presentday, largely middle-class “problems,” represented by lower-middle-class characters (possibly "our” family forebears, one generation removed) situated back in the half-accurately depicted, half-nostalgically recalled decades of the ’50s, the ’30s, the AOs or the ’60s. The problem of the authenticity of historical recon¬ structions is now seen to be crucial, not only in the "new nostalgia" of popular culture, but in the recent, clearly parallel, interest of architecture in the nature of historical syntax: What makes a building real or fake? And what constitutes an architectural tradition? Consider. . . [these] buildings, the restored Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg, and the 1970s gas station called “Williamsburg." If the claim for authenticity is that they must actually have been built in the 18th century, or as an exact replica of the same, then, alas, the gas station and the

mirror-glass. Unlike the earlier transparent glass structures, which openly

liturgical practice of the Catholic Church required a

delimited, self-contained decades, as first the '30s, then the ’50s, and now the '60s are revived. The

we "grew up.” Like the cultural form of the western,

Studio International, September-

October 1975. 5. In recent years the transparent glass style has been inverted with the glass

free-standing altar to replace the traditional one

ory”: memory associated by media with the time when

Situated. Taken Between 1967 and 1975,"

overlaps present and past. It was constructed be¬

position we are in now. In place of integrity, postwar history to the present is broken into a confusion of

public’s access to these "magic" eras is further confused with personal nostalgia: history as "mem¬

Artforum, December 1967

commodity from the non-art sector and introduced it into the art gallery in

present representation of one ideological view’s ex¬ planation of the past in relation to present reality. The

the connection between "the way we were" and the

. . Excerpts from a Spleenish Journal,"

3. Peopletend to compare Flavin’s fluorescents to Duchamp's readymades. It

environment. And this is never neutral, but an active,

meant to veil an accurate reading of the recent past:

. ,

2. Flavin. "Some Other Comments,"

day meanings, expressed by surrounding signs in the

Venturi and Rauch, Renovation of Church of St. Francis de Sales,

Dan Flavin. "Some Remarks

Artforum, December 1966.

against the wall. Instead of destroying the old sanctu¬

revealed their structural framework, the glass building now presents the viewer on the outside with a purely abstract form (from the inside it allows the corporate worker a concealed vantage point)—a cube, hexagon, trapezoid, or pyramid. 6. Karl Beveridge and Ian Burn, "Don Judd,"

The Fox, No. 2,1975, pp. 129-42,

electric cathode light tube (since removed) suspend¬

esp. p. 138 7. Roy Lichtenstein, as interviewed by G.R. Swenson.

ed on a wire, ten feet high, parallel to the ground and

1965. 8. The American television series “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" functioned in

just above the eye-level of seated parishioners. The

a way not dissimilar to Lichtenstein's art. On one level it could be read as

Art News, November

"soap opera." It was impossible for the viewer to know if it was one or the

electric line defined an ellipsoidal semicircle inflected inward, and following the perspective of the parish¬

other. Its adherence to principles of identification with characters in a narrative format, its emotional directness, and other conventions of "soap opera," allowed it to be a believable "soap " In "Mary Hartman. Mary

ioners' line of sight, as well as the line ofthe old altar. It

Hartman" the validity of the satire itself was continually undercut by the

ran from just behind the new altar, following the curve

emotional "reality" of the characters' problems, which, in fact, resembled

of the apse behind it, to define a boundary that separated the old, rear altar from the new altar whose

as a form of both "high" and "vernacular" art, the writers and actors on the

activities its light functionally illuminated. Here the light tube functioned only as a sign (replacing noth¬ ing), a two-dimensional, graphic indicator, drawing a

those of most Americans. Because the show was conceived in this fashion show never deluded themselves into thinking that the program was a "higher" form of art, nor did thev take themselves totally seriously as "stars" or media-manipulators. 9. El Lissitzky, "Ideological Superstructure," (Moscow, 1929), in

Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, tr. Eric Dluhosch, Cambridge. Mass.,

1970, pp. 70-71. 10. Denise Scott Brown, "An Alternative Proposal That Builds on the Character

(mental) line through the old altar (thus leaving it in relative darkness) without physically destroying it. It literally illuminated/delineated the new area and so juxtaposed the old and the new, placing them in an historical, or archeological, relation to each other. Venturi proposed the word “hybrids” for such works that combine two contradictory or mutually exclu¬

and Population of South Philadelphia,"

Architectural Forumt October 1971.

11. Lichtenstein, interview (note 7). 12 Robert Venturi. Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenor,

Learning From Las Vegas, Cambridge, Mass., 1972. 13. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture, I), New York, 1966. 14. Venturi, Brown and Izenor,

Learning (note 12)

15. Ibid. 16. Bertol Brecht, "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," in

Brecht on Theatre,

trans. and ed. John Willett, New York, 1964, pp. 91-99. 17. Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image." in his

sive categories of meaning/description: "I like ele¬

Image—Music—Text,

trans. and ed. Stephen Heath, London. 1977, pp. 32-51.

ments which are hybrid rather than 'pure' .... am¬

18. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zohn, New York. 1969,

biguous rather than’articulated’. . . . I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality .... I prefer 'both-

pp. 217-42. 19. Richard Oliver and Nancy Ferguson, "The Environment Is a Diary." Architec¬

and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes

20. Venturi, Complexity (note 13), p. 23. 21. Robert Venturi, quoted in Robert Maxwell. "The Venturi Effect," in

gray, to black and white.”20 Again: "Our scheme for the F.D.R. Memorial was architecture and landscape; our foundation for the Philadelphia Fairmount Park Commission was architecture and sculpture; our de¬ sign for Copley Plaza, architecture and urban design

tural Record, February 1978. Venturi

and Rauch: The Public Buildings, New York, 1978. 22

This runs parallel in French semiotic theory to Julia Kristeva's critique of the unitary text based on "the construction of a single identity (with its own consistent identity)." She advocates instead a plurivocal text "where (var¬ ious) discourses confront each other

. . in opposition" and which is "an

apparatus for exposing and exhausting ideologies in their confrontation."Ju¬ lia Krivesta. "The Ruin of a Poetics,"

20th-Century Studies, 7/8, 1972.

Up to six players can compete. First, throw the dice to decide if you are: a) b) c) d)

Roll the dice again and find your place in the Pecking Order:

Female or Male Person of Color or Colorless Person Gay or Straight Visual or Verbal

Proceed according to instructions on the bored. Follow the rules below: 1) Remember your priorities—fame first, fortune second, art third, tap dancing fourth, socio-concern last. o

2) Raise your consciousness to high art (but not over your buyer’s head). 3) Become a feminist because, what the hell, you aren’t making it as a male-identified woman anyway. But don’t let politics interfere with your personality.

Lo-Cal Arts

4) Cultivate your avant-garden. If you have no plot, resort to modernism. 5) Subscribe to Artforum; read only your own reviews. Don’t join a Marxist or a feminist study group; you won’t get points. 6) Stand up for individualism against creeping collectivism. Only Individ¬ uals are In. Only creeps collect.

Whole-Wheat State

7) Dress for excess. Don’t underdress in overalls. 8) Move downtown, no matter where you live; lift your profits to the lofts. Don’t feel guilty about the South Bronx. 9) Remember when dining, if you haven’t made a deal, you haven’t had a meal.

Kunthalle

10) When you’ve reached the top, don’t leave the house. You’re judged by the company that keeps you. 11) Invest in the right shock. Purism, puerilism and pluralism all pay. If your art has a message, muffle it. 12) Sleep with the Right people. Don’t sleep with the Leftovers. 13) Don’t mix your art and your politics. You might get indigestion.

Universal Everyperson’s Art School Equivalency (UNEASE)

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OK. WHO WON?

IF YOU THINK MAKING IT IN THE ART WORLD WAS THE POINT OF THIS GAME, YOU LOST! You just acquired a reputation it’ll give you ulcers to keep up. A bank ac¬ count that’ll cost you a fortune in taxes. A dealer you can’t trust. Collectors who invite you to dinner. Sore feet from stepping on the little hands on the rung below. Reviewers who want to shoot you down. Jealous colleagues who wish you’d shoot up. A ghoulish gang of four purple-haired unisex groupies in Nazi uniforms with paper clips in their eyelids. There you are, clinging to the pinnacle of your success, worrying about how long it will last and what it’s doing to your art. A pinnacle is a sharp and uncomfortable place to hang out. And what happens if pinnacles go out and caves come in? Will you be up to underground art?

DO YOU THINK? IF SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THESE ALTERNATIVES? Get off the Star Track. Eliminate race-ism in the art world. Open a storefront. Find your audience. Make art that counts. Make collabqrative art, cooperative art, collective art. Make anonymous art. Sell your art but not your name. Stop complaining and start organizing. Meet with other artists for cultural change (but first be sure you know what it is). Graduate from Alma MoMA. Call the patriarchy Dada instead of Pop. Stop and think. What do you think art’s for? Then see what kind of art you make.

The collective which collaborated on this magazine piece publishes Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. We are Ida Applebroog, Sue Heinemann, Elizabeth Hess, Alesia Kunz, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Melissa Meyer, Carrie Rickey, Elizabeth Sacre, Elke Solomon.

Cubes. R. Gerlovin with

A-Ya).

zas ws

(reprinted with the permission of

Foj

THE BARREN FLOWERS OF EVIL Truly now, Isn't it a strange phenomenon? The Peters¬ burg artist! An artist in the land of snows, in the land of Finns, where everything is wet, smooth even, grey, cloudy. Nikolai Gogol, Nevsky Prospect

Komar and Melamid Translated by Jamey Gambrell How difficult it is to understand something you know nothing about. Leafing through the pages of books arrived from afar, it is pure torment to get inside a foreign text, to separate metaphor from reality. In order to form a mental picture of another world through the comparison of words and images, texts and illustrations, one must possess a truly iron will and a stubborn belief in the necessity of such an activity. Besides, such an endeavor requires that the re¬ searcher combine the acumen of Sherlock Holmes and the caution of Doctor Watson, particularly when countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain are concerned. A detective's work is frequently unglamorous but is always exciting, at least for mystery

219

easier. However, we were not deterred by such difficulties. We pored over those glossy pages with reverence, scrutinizing the colored splashes of the reproductions, the self-expression of distant and un¬ known American souls, until our eyes blurred. Gogol once described us, Russian artists, in the epigraph at the beginning of this article. While living in Italy, he wrote of his distant homeland and came to the most pessimistic conclusions concerning both Russia, and the fate of Russian artists: "They (artists) often pos¬ sess true talent, and if only the fresh air of Italy could blow upon them, this talent would undoubtedly spill forth as freely, widely and brightly as a plant which has at last been taken out into the fresh air." Much has changed since Gogol’s time; Italy's artis¬ tic reputation waned, and the capital of Russia was moved from Petersburg to Moscow. Nevertheless, more and more often, as if on Gogol’s advice, Russian artists are leaving their country, sowing themselves about the world in order to blossom in the smog of Paris, Tel Aviv, Munich and New York. We ourselves settled in New York over a year ago. And what a

lovers. It is with nostalgia that we, the authors of this article,

surprise was in store for us! The participants of the Moscow readings of Artforum and still other of our

remember Igor Shelkovsky's small studio which could barely hold our friends: Rimma and Valerii Gerlovin,

Moscow friends came to lie on our American table in the chic gloss of a Western European magazine: A-

Sasha Kosolapov, and several others. Ivan Chuikov was the only one of us who knew English, and we would gather and listen as he translated for us from the pages of the very magazine which you, dear reader, now hold in your hands. The articles of an art critic with the Russian name Kozloff, being structura¬ list in form and elusive in content, created special difficulties for the translator. And the others were no

Ya, Contemporary Russian Art, Unofficial Russian Art Revue. To work once again! Once more we set ourselves the task of divining already thoroughly forgotten secrets. But how can you, Americans, how can you under¬ stand what this all means? Never fear, dear reader, we will help you to pass through the labyrinth of an alien and enigmatic culture.

Of course, it’s possible to doubt the necessity of this endeavor. However, mystery fans have been intri¬ gued by this pretty novelty. The press of Europe and America has informed the entire world. A certain excitement is in the air, and not all for Hecuba. The magazine is baffling from the word go: the title is untranslatable in any Western European language (Ya is the last letter of the Russian alphabet as well as the pronoun” I"),-the magazine is published in Paris, though it is printed in Russian and English; and subscriptions may be obtained by writing to Switzer¬ land. The front cover is strewn with English and Russian words, incomprehensible signs, and the Russian word DANGEROUS, repeated fourtimes. Are you expecting explanations? Much of the above cannot be explained. Only conjectures are possible, conjectures which might harm those authors living in the Soviet Union, bring down upon our heads the wrath of those who have emigrated, and fail to satisfy the editorial board of Artforum by turning from the path of pure art into the wilds of socio-political re¬ search . We will confine ourselves to what we do know. The magazine is published through the selfless efforts of a few artists, recent bmigrbs from the Soviet Union, in particular Igor Shelkovsky, a sculptor who left Russia several years ago and who currently lives in Paris. It is almost entirely devoted to Moscow artists who began their creative careers or sharply changed their style in the 1970s. The section of the journal entitled “Studio" examines six of them and contains a large number of reproductions and texts in which (for the most part) the artists speak for themselves. In the “Gallery” section, biographical information on nine artists is accompanied by reproductions and, in some

cases, short theoretical manifestoes. The remaining

it. It shouldn’t take place apart from it but inside it."

vain will you search for the illusory depths of a

pages are divided as follows: "Critics on Art”; “Artists

As the outstanding contemporary Russian writer

classical landscape within these frames. You’ll run up

on Artists"; and the archival "Sources of the AvantGarde" (K. Malevich, Diary "A", 1922).

Zinovii Zinik noted: “Russians are tormented by the desire to have their say, and the fear of saying too

against the flat bottom of a shallow recess, more

The magazine is devoted to those artists who are

much." The name of this magazine, entirely devoted

window views forces us to recall the tactile principle of

called unofficial, dissident or nonconformist in the world from the Bering Straits to the Baltic Sea. At this

to the visual arts, consists of letters, and for that matter, of all the letters of the Russian alphabet, from

point some clarification of these terms is necessary,

suitable for the touch than the eye. The relief of these Braille. The blind window of Chuikov’s landscapes is a

the first (A) to the last (Ya). Apparently the editors

stage in a tiny theater, a nostalgic fiction of cosmic space, the cynical consolation of a prisoner for whom

based upon our not-so-distant experience of such

have in mind words which remain unspoken, or

the sky beyond his prison bars long ago became a

artists. Turning the pages of this respectable publica¬

cannot be pronounced, an important factor in con¬ temporary Soviet art.

geometrical abstraction. Speaking of the "several levels of-interpretation of an artist’s work,” the author

tion, it is truly difficult to imagine in relationship to what these artists constitute an opposition. But wait! In accordance with Leninist dialectics, an action, and

The magazine A-Ya differs from its Western coun¬ terparts in its goals. It is a dispatch, a coded commu¬

likewise its result, cannot be evaluted in and of

nique, the whisper of someone crying in the wilder¬

themselves, but only in the context of their meanings.

ness, a secret sign to the world, the art critic, the

Whatever helps a good cause—is good; what doesn't help—harms, i.e., it's bad. Whether or not our action is

curator, the art dealer. Reading through the maga¬

admits that “the most important level of exegesis is the silent declaration." In truth we have here a fright¬ ening theater, where mute actors perform before a blind audience. Chuikov's trees most closely resem¬ ble the mountains of a relief map. What are their

good or bad is a matter to be decided by the plenipotentiaries for the separation of good from evil,

zine, we come to understand that the texts do not explain the works but create their meaning. The exterior is deceptive and frequently a sham. The

leaves rustling about? What is the author's silent statement?

who in the everyday parlance of socialist reality are referred to as officials.

painting is a covering, clothing which conceals and warms the author’s soul, and is linked to the sinful

This question can only be answered by an inhabitant of the Russian Empire who is skilled in the Aesopian

Each official has his particular department which

external world and therefore always either ugly or neutral. One could formulate a common rule of thumb

language of Soviet culture. The author is concerned with a simple question: where is the boundary be¬

for self-evaluation for the majority of these artists: "Everything depends on the content which is poured

tween falsehood and truth? His Russian audience seeks an answer to this question. Where are the social

into the form.” (Joseph Stalin)

and ethical truths concealed behind a veneered theatrical setting rudely imitating space which cannot

deals with a well-defined range of questions. Should something arise which does not fall under the aegis of existing departments, then a new one is created. Officials think and speak in a language of instructions and fulfill the role of censors. Everything produced in

The Hegelian division of phenomena (including art)

the Soviet Union, from buttons to milk cartons, passes

into form and content found fertile soil in the Russian

through bureaucratic hands. Thus, if an artist has created a work of art and wants to exhibit it, he must

consciousness whose duality was also noted by

approach the proper department and explain to the official, in officialese, what the work of art means, and into which category of existing instructions it fits. The department which handles art—The Union of Art¬ ists—is divided into various sections: sculpture, mu¬ rals, and monuments; graphics; design; criticism; painting,etc. Therefore, if an artist were to draw something in pencil on canvas, it could not be exhibit¬ ed, because that would be mixing the Graphics section (pencil) with the Painting Section (canvas), and there would be no appropriate section for the

Freud—see Dostoevsky and Parricide. For this rea¬ son it is impossible to limit ourselves to an exclusively formal analysis of this strange art which is at the outer reaches of a specific mode of spiritual life. The social consciousness of the country in which we were born possesses a series of secret sore spots or zones which are both erogenous and pathologically hyper¬ sensitive. The value of cultural phenomena is defined by the nature of the zone and the manner in which the author touches it.

What does concern him, if it is not esthetics or style?

be entered? And the artist, balancing on the edge of silence and revelation, hems and haws, saying that "an artistic object is by its very nature paradox—is ambiguous,” reality and fiction simultaneously. In order to explain to the patient reader just why it is that the Russian intelligentsia is so preoccupied with the search for some abstract truth and the logically hopeless task of its separation from an all-too-concrete lie, we must digress a bit from problems of “pure art" and venture on yet another historical excursion. The problem is that in 1917, no ordinary revolution took place in Russia. In 1917, a secret society rose to

“I am not interested in problems of style and

power in a huge country. The traditions and cultures

esthetics as such,” acknowledges Ivan Chuikov, an

of such societies remain remarkably obscure despite

work. The same thing occurs with the artist who does

artist who is profusely reproduced in the journal.

not approach any departments and publicly shows

When Warhol makes this sort of statement it’s under¬

their "instinctive antiquity," to which the presence of secret fraternities among pagan tribes and the games

his works. The artist who pursues such a path is

standable; Andy is making money. But what interests this 45-year-old Russian whose work cannot be ex¬

played by children of perfectly civilized parents at¬ test.

eventually transferred to a section in an entirely different department, organized in the bowels of the secret police. Such are the artists represented in this magazine. The journal A-Ya did not pass through bureaucratic hands. The authors of the articles speak freely. But just freely enough so as not to wind up in prison. Their language is at times evasive and it requires an experienced eye to draw meaning from the words. Take, for example, the dialogue of the two major

hibited and who has no buyers? With wiliness worthy of a Russian diplomat speaking to Kissinger, the author avoids any direct answer, intimating that there exists a certain “context" which “makes any object placed in it something bigger, something more, in¬ vests it with a certain fiction. . . .” The clash between this fiction and reality occurs in his work. As promised, we'll try to make our way through this labyrinth. Let us turn to the artist's biography and art.

contributors to the magazine, the critic Boris Groys

In early childhood Ivan Chuikov began painting land¬

and the artist Eric Bulatov: "You were saying that the space of authentic existence—is the space beyond

scapes in the Post-Impressionist manner of Socialist Realism. Gradually this manner became more individ¬ ual, and finally in the 70s the artist began to seek a

the visible world, and now it seems the sense arises that this space is inside the painting." Bulatov: “No, that space is on the other side. But how to get there, that’s the question." Groys: "So, how do we get there?" Bulatov: “How do we get there? Through the painting. Once we say that the painting is a model of the world, then everything that exists in the world should be in the painting. All of salvation should be in

It is impossible to understand contemporary Rus¬ sian culture if one does not take into account the fact that the Bolsheviks came to power with no experience governing anything other than a secret society. They had their own laws and traditions. Thus it is not surprising that they gradually transformed the entire country into one enormous, secret society. This is the key to understanding our homeland with its mania for secrecy, the Party's doubling of govern¬ mental administrative functions and other such de¬ lightful customs. Having deciphered the pages of the magazine with the help of this key. you will understand that these artists, like all Soviet citizens, are part of a 260-million member secret society. This society con¬

way out of the traditional framework of the romantic landscape. He started combining planar elements and volume, laying pictorial and graphic images over objects and constructions. The cycle "Windows” with its plastic pun worthy of

of a member of a secret society is a schizophrenic Russian Bloody Mary of the legal and illegal. This is a

an artist of the proto-renaissance is particularly inter¬ esting. The picture frame is the window frame. But in

theatrical psychology—it's fitting to recall here that Lenin and his friends often had to disguise them-

tains different "lodges" and its members are involved to varying degrees of complicity. The consciousness

selves and changed their identities as effectively as the trickster heroes of Russian fairy tales—the psy¬ chology of a participant in the social spectacle enti¬ tled "Soviet Russia," where each person, from the cradle to the grave, without intermission, identifies with his role to the point that he cannot distinguish the lie from the reality. He begins to confuse things. Where is the mask? Where is the face? Does the face lie beneath the mask, or the mask beneath the face? Content be¬ comes form, and form content, and everything fuses in a strange carnival which actually resembles the

visible world has become a deceitful veil of Maya covering alternately the void or matter.” In such conditions "the works mentioned remain ambiguous in part," since the picture is transformed into "some. thing not identical to itself." Calling on artists to "liberate themselves from ambi¬ guity," Groys writes, "the positive view of art as an autonomous sphere of activity has always been alien to the Russian mind. . . . Romantic Conceptualism in Moscow not only testifies to the preservation of the

development of Russian social thought. Dialectical reminiscences of this conflict can be found on the pages of A-Ya. We have already given a sample of the dialogue—worthy of the Theatre of the Absurd—between Groys and Bulatov. We now quote another typical fragment from this interview. Groys: ". . . in your paintings there is always a certain ambiv¬ alence for the people living in the painting—it seems that they have either frozen on this plane, or that they might expand into space. . . .” Bulatov: "I can under¬

organized boredom of military parades. The partici¬ pants in this permanent happening perform their roles

integrity of the Russian soul,’ but is a positive attempt to make known the conditions under which art may go beyond its borders. . . .” Though we do not consider such an approach to art the exclusive property of the

so sincerely and realistically that they are capable of deceiving such experienced Western spectators as

"Russian soul," the author is correct in everything else. The work of art, as is the case with every

Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger and even that old skeptic Bernard Shaw. Of course, people aren’t

phenomenon in Russia, is fatally unable to disengage itself from its context of social and religious ideas. It

concept of space as such is of course linked with spiritual life—with liberation for me. The absence of space—is prison.”

angels in any country anywhere—they are capable of to lying. But a ritual culture

becomes an ethically heroic deed on the part of the creator—the visible form of an invisible ideological

One needn’t be a profound thinker to detect that very same duality in this statement. Freedom (space)

of lies, worked out down to the smallest details, has been created by this secret society, one in which a

content, a flat mask which conceals an inexpressible depth.

the East (Siberia). Bulatov: ".Rilke has a defini¬

theatrical camouflage imitates the superficial impres¬ sion of a normal state. The artist's mask has also become an aspect of the camouflage in this curious society.

The dialectical duplicity of Russian culture is a tradition with a much longer beard than those of the

tion: the beautiful is the terrifying to a safe degree. So you see, for me, this is not to a safe degree. I

founders of dialectical materialism,Marx and Engels, and is vastly longer than Lenin’s short little beard. This

We hope that by now the reader understands why it is that the Russian viewer seeks an answer to this

tradition has its origins in the country’s geographical situation, located as it is on the periphery of Western

constantly perceive this as danger. I feel only a constant terror in relationship to this. And once there is terror, there can be no esthetic relationship. . . .

naive question, “Where is truth?” This question is the sore spot behind the unoffensive mask of Chuikov’s and Shablavin's landscapes, with their play on condi¬ tionality and illusion.

and Eastern civilizations. In is reflected in the struggle dimensional treatments of time of the Petrine reforms,

Boris Groys is the most prolific contributor to this magazine. His introductory article, “Moscow’s Ro¬ mantic Conceptualism” on four artists, and his inter¬

decorativeness of Russian icons came into conflict with proto-renaissance painting which arrived from Western Europe. The interaction of the two continues to this very day to define the development of Russian art, just as the well-known disputes of the Slavophiles and the Westernizers in the last century directed the

deceit and are not averse

view with Eric Bulatov occupy a third of the entire magazine. In speaking of Chuikov’s works, Groys defines quite precisely the belief of his circle that “the

the visual arts this duality between two- and threespace and color. At the the strictly regulated, flat

stand surface to be depth as well. . . . I understand social existence as surface. Everything visible is surface. And if we penetrate beyond that which is hidden, then we only see an inner surface anyway., . . Space itself, in my understanding, is not distance. The

vs. non-freedom (surface). The West (democracy) vs.

Perhaps this is also terror in relationship to today.” Look carefully at Bulatov’s work on the magazine’s cover. The optic depth of this serene landscape, created by linear perspective, alternately engulfs and repulses the alien, flat, “red banner” words: DAN¬ GER, DANGER, DANGER, DANGER. This very same flat color, now in the guise of a ribbon from some medal or trophy, covers the sea-sky horizon in the painting Horizon. This work could serve as an illustra¬ tion to the biography of the sculptor Sokhanevich (see the Gallery section). Not content to wait for opportuni¬ ties made by dbtente, this artist escaped from the Soviet Union by crossing the Black Sea at the end of the 1960s, in a flight that was full of dangerous exploits. As far as we know, despite the existing possibility, Bulatov does not wish to emigrate into "space.” As if they had come straight off a Soviet political poster, the red letters "No Entry” barricade the sky blue “Entrance” in another of Bulatov’s works. We do not wish to reduce the problem of perspective and flatness in the painting exclusively to the problem of crossing the well-guarded borders of the Soviet Union. To do this would be to oversimplify, and to impoverish the complexity of the material we have analyzed. In the troubled mind of a frightened spirit, the image of the Western “other world" splits and takes on religious overtones of “paradise" and "inferno." The relationship to the West (that "machine for the produc¬ tion of things and ideas") has changed throughout Russia’s history, but nevertheless it has remained the cornerstone of the intelligentsia's world view. How¬

V. Bakhchanyan, 1978.

(reprinted with the artist's permission)

V. Bakhchanyan, 1978

(reprinted with the artist's permission).

ever, neither those who saw in the West an “earthly paradise," nor their opponents, the Slavophiles, could foresee the paradoxical consequences of the 1917 Revolution, when the idea of socialism, bor¬ rowed from the West, transformed Russian culture

into one of the most original phenomena in history.

in Russia.” Similar ideas are expressed by V. Patsyu-

large and small, bear labels describing their particu¬

Today Soviet Slavophiles understand that any indi¬ vidual Western phenomenon, when brought into Rus¬

kov in his article on the landscapes of Sergei Shablavin. Shablavin’s “magical" realism is for some reason

lar qualities, either from the author's or the cube’s point of view. For example: the cube's pronounce¬

sia, finds itself in a different context, and begins to

ascribed to hyper-realism and photo-realism.

ment, “This is—me."; “Mongolia"; “This cube is 5

shine with some Holy Light, in the way that Edison's

The sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, a participant in the

centimeters closer to the Moon than this one.” Still

electric light bulb became Lenin’s light bulb when it crossed into Russia.

infamous argument with Khrushchev, once very wittily called Russian counterculture “a catacomb.” And

others remain silent, but are accompanied by cap¬ tions. The first thing that comes to mind when we see

who knows, perhaps a new paradox will bear fruit in the third Rome. Religion is beginning to play the role

that we could build something with them. But no! For

Grays

is

a

typical

representative of this “neo¬

patriotism." He has set himself the goal of pouring old vodka into modernist wine skins. Sometimes it seems that a drunken mix-up occurred in the printer's shop

of a “left" opposition, using the avant-garde forms of

the pile of cubes scattered at Rimma Gerlovin’s feet is

modernism,an“ism”genetically and spiritually bound

then they wouldn’t be able to open and we wouldn't be able to read what’s written in and on them, and this

where the magazine was typeset, so obvious is the

with socialist dreams of the destruction of the old

clearly was not part of the artist’s intent.

lack of correspondence between Grays’ arguments

world. In this regard, the incomparably bolder experi¬

for Russian originality, and the thoroughly ordinary

ments of Polish and other Eastern European artists are of great interest.

Gerlovin’s cubes really resemble more precisely the music boxes of our grandmothers’ time. Reading

performances of artists such as Francisco Infante and the group "Action.” The photographs of these works

the label on the top, we open the box and see a label

It’s difficult to foresee what the character of the coming cultural revolution will be, not to mention

inside. When the melody is over we close the top. You can’t play with music boxes, and you can’t put any¬

whether or not it will be the result or cause of a social revolution. As we were taught at the Moscow Institute

thing in them; Grandmother might get mad. You can

national originality in the restrained elegance of In¬ fante's kinetic games. We see how his triangular

of Art and Design, a revolutionary situation arises

What do they say? They speak in ambiguities. Box:

mirrors, like some unexpected neo-Cubism, decom¬

when new content, quantitatively growing inside an

“There's a sphere inside me." The inside of the cube:

pose the reflected landscape into illusory planes,

old form, comes into contradiction with a form and destroys it, resulting in the appearance of a new form,

cube inside: "But I am." This is not a dialogue, but a

might have come from the pages of Avalanche. Try as one might, it is difficult to see any mystical

containing the world in a utopian diamond whose geometrical edges refract tree trunks, grass, a river sandbar and the sky. These artifacts could, with equal success, reflect the skies of Russia or Spain, as well as the skies of any other country or climatic zone. Unfortunately, the magazine did not print, as they

monologue in which the inside plays the role of an

Hegel imagined all this not quite as simply as our professors presented it to us. Still, it’s an interesting

omy of Homo-Box’s consciousness. As the Gerlovins

question; can the renewal of modernism from the inside, that is, the search for content, give birth to new phenomena, or more promisingly, continue purely

This blunder endows the visually most "Western”

formal searches which have lost their revolutionary

work in the magazine with a purely Russian air of mystery. Grays manages to see a certain magic

content and become fully respectable traditions? This is the question which, at the beginning of the 1980s,

innate to Russian art in these works as well. Not afraid

concerns not only us.

ward problems which face art as such”; i.e., the group possesses a quality which is not inherent in the “Russian mind," if we are to believe the propositions laid forth in another of the critic’s articles.

"He's a sphere, I’m a cube." Box: “You think." Small

a new quality. Of course, it may be that we confused everything, or have forgotten, and it’s possible that

promised, the texts which are an integral part of the performances of Alekseev, Monastyrsky, and others.

of contradictions, he acknowledges that “this group is less concerned with social issues: it is oriented to¬

only listen, opening and closing them.

inner voice. Here we are face to face with the dichot¬ see it "with the aid of play, mastery and accessible knowledge of the world occur; internal and external conflicts of self-orientation are overcome and selfanalysis takes place." An indisputable, widely ac¬ cepted statement. But what are we supposed to play? Is listening really playing? No. In the case of cubes, we cannot be led to self-analysis. We must employ analysis quoting

The husband and wife team, Valerii and Rimma

the Gerlovins once more: “The author is not in opposi¬

Gerlovin began working separately and now work almost exclusively in collaboration. They give us their

tion to the object." The implication is clear: we have been listening to Gerlovin herself. These are her

own solution to this problem, and it differs significantly from that of the rest of the artists in this journal. Their

beautiful materials, they are clothed alternately in

works contain words or are accompanied by texts. In

boxes and her voice. The cubes are covered with

The same absence of Russian dialectics can be

their opinion, conceptualism “is the most topical and

pajamas and in evening dress. The only woman in contemporary Russian modernism exhibits a pro¬

seen in Infante. The reality of his artifacts is “free from

fruitful stage of Russian art.” Their extensive philo¬

found inventiveness in designing a wardrobe for her

suspicion insofar as it does not require any penetra¬

sophical treatise is published in the magazine. Num¬

soul. Rimma Gerlovin’s soul, if we are to believe the

tion beyond its form." But nevertheless (this is dialec¬

bers in the text refer to separate descriptions and

accompanying texts, yearns for freedom, to go out

tics for you!) “Infante's performance differs signifi¬ cantly from Western (performances),” since in the West there’s no way on earth you’ll find "technological reveries recalling a distant childhood." Note that the erudite author compares the familiar names of Mos¬ cow artists, not to concrete Western names, but to no

reproductions as if underlining and explaining the

into society, but her place is on the shelf along with

authors’ ideas. One has the impression the Gerlovins are afraid they will be misunderstood, or not taken

other idle knickknacks.

seriously. Here we have an opportunity to compare

well. "In the work, The Big Dipper, we see people as astral bodies.” Where are people to go? Must they

“talking" works with the “speaking" authors, to see how and to what extent desire is transformed into

The Gerlovins have other, more global ideas as

either conceal themselves on a shelf or soar into the

less than the entire West! This global gesture intend¬ ed to resolve concrete, individual problems is incredi¬

reality. They begin their treatise straight away by

heavens? Thus, in resolving world problems, the

separating form and content, proposing, with the help

bly typical of the apocalyptic mind.

of content (given their "indifference to the formal

Gerlovins propose that we leave this world. The logic of their work led them to emigrate from Russia several

At this point it must be said that we, the authors of

perfection of the work"), "to resolve moral, religious

Of

and social problems on the basis of our philosophical

months ago. It is easy to suppose that their image of another world, which consciously or unconsciously

course, at a safe distance, it is easy to speak ironically

viewpoint." Such an approach is said to be "a charac¬ teristic tendency of contemporary art” in general and

was associated with the real world of Western Europe and America while they were still in Russia, will prove

a fundamental principle of Russian art in particular.

to have been an illusion, as has been the case for the

At one point in their treatise, the Gerlovins suggest that we engage in play to solve the above mentioned

world will move to Russia, and along with this, the

this article, also have contradictory feelings.

of the judgments of a provincial patriot who isn't here to defend himself. But what if a real surprise is ripening in Russia—one of the many at which the world has not yet ceased to wonder? Grays is not

majority of Russian emigrants. For them, the other

alone in his conviction that Western art "in one way or

problems. They refer to Rimma Gerlovin’s work,

understanding will arise that every “other” world (be it

another speaks about the world," while "Russian art,

Cubes. The work consists of cardboard cubes which

from the icon to the present, wants to speak of another

are covered with cloth and open on one side. Inside

social, religious or whatever) is hell. Thus Russian modernism, and world modernism are deprived of yet

world.” This “other world" lies at the crossroads of

some of these cubes lies one or more smaller cubes. Some of the large ones are empty. Some of the cubes,

another fundamental of their illusions—creation in the name of the betterment of mankind. For us, the

religion and art, whose relations “are extremely tense

authors of this article, recent bmigrbs from Russia, it is

From this starting point—activity—possibilities as¬

horrifying. But if our philippics are understood, not as

obvious that the world is not only monotonously bad, but that changes in it have no meaning.

cend by overcoming the "pale cast of thought." And the fifth: "It is possible to classify possibilities accord¬

Likewise, change in art is meaningless. Art ceases to be a movement from and to, and becomes only a reshuffling of what exists. Dragging in ideas from all

ing to the degree of their comical qualities." The following paragraphs classify comic possibilities. It is possible to mystify, eliminate, speak about, represent, disregard, consider, and most importantly, as the last, 122nd paragraph declares: “It is possible to not think about the consequences, they will be

a condemnation, but as a statement of stubborn facts, and if they are believed, then this could be regarded as something like an artistic platform (laid out by points above), a certain original esthetic. Of course, from the point of view of American esthetic norms,

over the world—Hinduism, Buddhism, Eastern So¬ cialism, African art, etc.—European artists of the last 200 years have created an illusion of progress. How¬ ever, the quantity of combinations of the existing, though large indeed, is nevertheless limited. People who have been through two worlds know this. It is imperative to mention Joseph Beuys' recent show here. Though Beuys has not emigrated, he has experienced life in two worlds. Beuys is an anti¬ fascist, reared on fascism, just as some Russians are anti-communists, reared on socialism. They have ideas which they take for convictions. The complex of a "normal" person, who believes in certain truths, torments them, and forces them to put on various masks—of prophets, philosophers, political activists and God knows what else. But in their heart they know that this is all bullshit. They have to lie, dodge, make art—in order to be like everyone else. Their art dis¬

The most important part of the magazine opens with an article by a contemporary art critic and closes with

“And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of

a version of a 1922 essay by Malevich. Here we can see how far Russian artistic thought has progressed.

making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (Ecclesiastes 12:12.) Read, for example, beginning with the words, “Many take refuge in silence at certain moments," etc., up to “The author thrives in silence.IJ (New Intermission: 4.) A possessed bureaucrat, a prophet, a silent Moscow prattler, a samizdat author, a candidate for the crazy

books. Perhaps this is knows?

Who

Suprematism—think about the name a bit: super -t-mat (mother in Russian)—but he was also an active

Combining the good and the bad, Rubinstein has

Commissar, one of the first of the Soviet bureaucrats who concerned themselves with the separation of good from bad in the realm of the arts. His bureaucrat¬

Rubinstein himself.

the taboo, float about in the head of any intelligent person on either side of the Atlantic. A comic effect

claimed goals and the things created, according to the principle that the end (content) justifies the means (form). 4. Anti-estheticism. The placing of the work of art in a non-artistic context. (The “negative" image of Du¬ champ's anti-estheticism where an object from an¬ other realm was placed into an artistic context.) The artists represented in the magazine A-Ya, as we have already mentioned, were creatively formed in the 70s. Their predecessors, the "left-wing" artists of the ’60s, struggled with the "remnants of the personal¬ ity cult" through artistic means: Cezanne’s tradition versus the academic formalism of Socialist Realism. Like their Western colleagues of the same period, they believed that to alter form is to change one’s world view. There is good style and bad style. But according to a Russian proverb, “the bad is only a step away from the good." Lev Rubinstein takes this step in his brilliant texts. Unfortunately, he is given very little space in the magazine—only small excerpts (and those without English translation). Rubinstein is the author of small, typed books, three of which are mentioned: The Catalog of Comic Innovations, New Intermission, and A Working Program. To look at, his books are typical samizdat (underground self-pub¬ lished works)—poorly typed pages bound in card¬ board. The Catalog of Comic Innovations is a master¬ piece of spiritual bureaucratese. It consists of numbered aphorisms, each one sentence in length and each beginning with the words, "it is possible to . . .’’ The range of possibilities is vast, and according to Rubinstein there are 122 of them. The first possibility: “It is possible to do something."

becomes particularly evident when you read his

farm, and a subtle lyric poet—everything is mixed together in Rubinstein’s image of the author of his

1. Conscious or unconscious deceit.

3. The lack of correspondence between the pro¬

Grays is undoubtedly an intelligent and penetrating critic whose ignorance of the world around him pre¬ vents him from seeing certain things, a fact that article in the West. But it is difficult to say anything serious about Malevich's asinine scribblings. We can only point out that not only was Malevich an illiterate philosopher and the inventor of the artistic movement

the wisdom not to reject anything—that is, to remain himself. Fragments of holy truths, the permissible and

latter reigning supreme. (Which on occasion results in a tragi-comic effect.)

223

comic in character." We are hearing the voice of a doubting prophet, who utters indisputable truths.

plays certain common characteristics:

2. The division of art into form and content, with the

post-totalitarianism seems hideous, both artistically and morally. But this has been the accusation leveled at every new movement in art.

results when they come into conflict. This is obvious in the Gerlovins’ works and is hinted at in Bulatov’s canvases. Frequently, irony as a form of the paradox¬ ical is invisible but is present in many of the works reproduced in the magazine A-Ya. The critic Grays says, "There is an entire tradition (in contemporary Russian art) of separating oneself from the world we live in through jest or satire." And truly, there are such artists in Russia today. The work of Vagrich Bakhchanyan, who emigrated a few years ago and now lives in New York, illustrates this trend. The problem of jest and irony in art is much more profound than Grays imagines. We ourselves belong to this group of “ironic” artists. It is hard to judge all of new Russian art on one 55page issue of a journal. A-Ya is not the “alpha and omega" of Russian art. Russia is large and has many artists. However, in a journal which is "not the mouth¬ piece of any particular group (and whose) pages are open to everything new, bright and independent," it is pleasing to see such a fully defined and distinct tendency. The magazine deals with postmodernist, or in our terminology, post-totalitarian Russian art. There are no more than about 30 such artists in Russia as far as we know, and what they do is a miracle. The reader must imagine for him or herself the situation in which they live and work. Dreary, boring, terrifying Moscow, whose inhabitants are oppressed by a monstrous fear. We mention this, not to stir pity in the reader, but in order to explain the peculiarities of this new art. We are linked by friendship with the majority of artists in this magazine. We met some of them when we were only beginning our work in this new direction. We have worked side by side with some of them. For this reason, it’s hard to say what part of our review is about them, and what is self-portrait. Many of our accusations in regard to these artists may seem

ic heirs, having exchanged Malevich’s bad form for their own good uniforms, left his content untouched, and currently reign supreme in Russia. Recognizing this, Russian artists discovered that Lenin's avantgarde and Stalin’s academism are essentially only two different sides of the same socialist utopia. With the failure of this utopia its art too was discredited. Indeed, if stylistic opposites are bad, then there’s no point in discussing subtleties. Having just learned, with great difficulty, the mod¬ ernist ABC's from the West, Russian post-avantgardists unexpectedly revealed the full and horrifying power of that which is now called the avant-garde. These artists began their education during Stalin's lifetime and completed it after his death. In the 1970s they realized that it is impossible and unnecessary to struggle against Communist reality, for we ourselves, individuals, citizens and creators, are both its main ingredients and its leaders. It became apparent that time does not exist in Soviet reality and yet space submits to it. In contrast to their Western colleagues, who think in terms of color, line, etc., and who can be evaluated in comparison to each other, if only because there are many of them, these new Russians turned out to be much more radical. All their subterfuge, dialectic blather and stylistic exercises clearly demonstrate the complete and senseless void of dead European culture. Sacred European traditions have been laid to waste, and the scabs of dead forms flake off from the extremities of Europe. Malevich’s squares, though they did bring something "new” with them, turned out to be empty in all respects. However, to understand this, Russian artists had to go through Stalin's acade¬ mism—the last attempt to stop European time.*

The artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid began working together in Moscow in 1965. They now live in New York City.

Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics and Statements: The Lightning Field is a permanent work. The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work.

least a 24-hour period.

value. Part of the essential content of the work is the ratio of

The original log cabin located 200 yards beyond the mid-point of the northern most row has been restored to accommodate visitors’ needs.

people to the space: a small number of people to a large amount of space. Installation was carried out from June through Octo¬ ber, 1977.

A permanent caretaker and administrator will reside near the location for continuous maintenance, protec¬ tion and assistance.

The principal associates in construction, Robert Fosdick and Flelen Winkler, have worked with the sculp¬

A visit may be reserved only through written corre¬ spondence.

before the location in New Mexico was selected.

ture continuously for the last three years. An aerial survey, combined with computer analysis,

The cabin serves as a shelter during extreme weather conditions or storms.

Desirable qualities of the location included flatness, high lightning activity and isolation.

determined the positioning of the rectangular grid and the elevation of the terrain.

The climate is semiarid; eleven inches of rain is the yearly average.

The region is located 7,200 feet above sea level.

A land survey determined four elevation points sur¬ rounding each pole position to insure the perfect placement and -exact height of each element.

Sometimes in winter, The Lightning Field is seen in light snow.

The work is located in West Central New Mexico. The states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas were searched by truck over a five-year period

The Lightning Field is 11 Vz miles east of the Continen¬ tal Divide. The earliest manifestation of land art was represented in the drawings and plans for the Mile-Long Parallel

It took five months to complete both the aerial and the land surveys. Each measurement relevant to foundation position,

Occasionally in spring, 30- to 50-mile-an-hour winds blow steadily for days. The light is as important as the lightning. The period of primary lightning activity is from late May through early September.

Walls in the Desert, 1961-1963. The Lightning Field began in the form of a note, following the completion of The Bed of Spikes in 1969.

installation procedure and pole alignment was triplechecked for accuracy.

The sculpture was completed in its physical form on November 1, 1977. The work was commissioned and is maintained by the

The poles’ concrete foundations, set one foot below the surface of the land, are three feet deep and one foot in diameter.

thunder and lightning activity can be witnessed from

Dia Art Foundation, New York.

Engineering studies indicated that these foundations will hold poles to a vertical position in winds of up to

The invisible is real.

In July, 1974, a small Lightning Field was constructed.

110 miles per hour. Heavy carbon steel pipes extend from the foundation

The observed ratio of lightning storms which pass over the sculpture has been approximately 3 per 30 days during the lightning season.

This served as the prototype for the 1977 Lightning

Field. It had 35 stainless steel poles with pointed tips, each 18 feet tall and 200 feet apart, arranged in a fiverow by seven-row grid. It was located in Northern

cement and rise through the lightning poles to give extra strength.

There are approximately 60 days per year when

The Lightning Field.

Only after a lightning strike has advanced to an area of about 200 feet above The Lightning Field can it

Arizona. The land was loaned by Mr. and Mrs. Burton

The poles were constructed of type 304 stainless steel tubing with an outside diameter of two inches.

Tremaine. The work now is in the collection of Virginia Dwan. It remained in place from 1974 through 1976

Each pole was cut, within an accuracy of Vioo of an inch, to its own individual length.

Several distinct thunderstorms can be observed at one time from The Lightning Field.

and is presently dismantled, prior to an installation in a

The average pole height is 20 feet 7Vz inches. The shortest pole height is 15 feet.

sense the poles.

The tallest pole height is 26 feet 9 inches.

Traditional grounding cable and grounding rod pro¬ tect the foundations by diverting lightning current into the earth.

The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics.

The solid, stainless steel tips were turned to match an arc having a radius of six feet. The tips were welded to the poles, then ground and

Lightning strikes have not been observed to jump or arc from pole to pole. Lightning strikes have done no perceptible damage

The Lightning Field measures one mile by one kilome¬

polished, creating a continuous unit. The total weight of the steel used is approximately 38,000 pounds. All poles are parallel, and the spaces between them are accurate to within V25 of an inch.

to the poles. On very rare occasions when there is a strong electri¬ cal current in the air, a glow known as "St. Elmo’s Fire”

new location.

ter and six meters (5,280 feet by 3,300 feet). There are 400 highly polished stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips. The poles are arranged in a rectangular grid array (16 to the width, 25 to the length) and are spaced 220 feet

Diagonal distance between any two contiguous poles

apart. A simple walk around the perimeter of the poles takes

is 311 feet. If laid end to end the poles would stretch over one and

approximately two hours. The primary experience takes place within The Light¬

one-half miles (8,240 feet). The plane of the tips would evenly support an imagi¬

ning Field.

nary sheet of glass. During the mid-portion of the day 70 to 90 percent of

Each mile-long row contains 25 poles and runs eastwest. Each kilometer-long row contains 16 poles and runs north-south. Because the sky-ground relationship is central to the

225

work, viewing The Lightning Field from the air is of no

the poles become virtually invisible due to the high angle of the sun. It is intended that the work be viewed alone, or in the company of a very small number of people, over at

may be emitted from the tips of the poles. Photography of lightning in the daytime was made possible by the use of camera triggering devices newly developed by Dr. Richard Orville, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut and Robert Zeh, of the State University of New York at Albany. Photography of The Lightning Field required the use of medium- and large-format cameras. No photograph, group of photographs or other re¬ corded images can completely represent The Light¬

ning Field. Isolation is the essence of Land Art.

A CHAMELEON IN A STATE OF GRACE

Edit deAk More truth/more intelligence/ha ha More future/more laughs/more culture . . . I need more than an ordinary grind And the more I think the more I need More carsll'll take more money/more champagne I can’t forget my brain —iggy Pop All italicized quotes in parentheses are from Oscar Wilde's discussion of Christ as a supreme romantic type in De

dark movie houses, TV sets and newspapers fall somewhat short in sentience of texture; the generic

the pedigree “Artist." In this endeavor the artist is

national visual fiber of print and celluloid is the umbili¬

verifiably an artist. In the Eternal City (Rome) it is better to be a

cal cord which feeds the groping baby hand making

chameleon in a state of grace, redeeming oneself

pictures. The Italians, too, go to the cultural visual

incrementally. It is better to take the scenic route.

sources of their traditions/regions. Image seems to make them happy—they are free to draw their dreams (the myth of craftsmanship), their allegories (the pow¬

History is not to be subsumed or consumed, but appreciated, reanimated, assimilated, understood; it is a search, probing and appropriating, finding and

(just as iconography), free to be specific about their

amplifying your own rhythms in the art of the past. The layers of tradition are charted history claimed and

heritage (fancy pink frescoes, the best soulful marble fountains in the world)—about being Italian. In New

to do with linear tracks. It is difficult to take an

er of metaphor), free to treat entire historical styles

inherited so many times back and forth, and have little

York right now there is an extraordinary situation of a

attitude—to be smart, moral, relevant—with this much

free young generation of painters babbling in strait-

material looming behind you. An artist in this position

Nascent still in its native lands, yet already flourishing

jackets—visual artists claiming leisure time, taking

as export, imagism is not like nationalist movements we have known before. One of the most intriguing

points from entertainment. Media technocrats, the true primitives of culture, have been ruling for practi¬

looks to achieve an atmosphere within the work that has cultural logic, imagery with a referable heritage,

factors about imagism is that its meaning and quality

cally all of the second half of this century.

Profundis.

intend to refer to the visual/cultural dialect from which

Ever since empiricism, art has been conscious of

it arises, but it is not a provincial result of “unaware," “local" artists’ sensibilities, nor is it a resignation to

being "art.” Before art generated a canon of visual criteria that separates art from its maker, artists were

local traditions, in retreat from a central cultural hege¬ mony. It represents a sophisticated attitude deliber¬

satisfied to make visual statements. But then these statements developed sophisticated rules, and a

and (at the same time) make art which contains the magic of the intrinsically personal and private. The Italian imagists that we are hearing about the most are being grouped together, “booked" together, and alphabetized together. This shared showcasing has facilitated an "ism," as it always does, but it

ately choosing indigenousness, consciously opting

system of art emerged that is practically independent

cannot force a synthesis. These are individuals, com¬ ing from different regions, from different traditions,

for the particular and the idiosyncratic. At dangerous stake is the misunderstanding of this work as provin¬

of artists, (immune to the shortcuts of gesture, the

making very different work.

impress of personality, and impervious to idiosyncracy). In a way, what was happening with ’60s art,

tially in the rich, heavy, religious Neapolitan climate,

cial rather than as an elation of the particular, the

Francesco Clemente, born in 1952, drenched ini¬

personal, the regional and the national. Finally, we have a potential dialogue instead of the whitewashed

analytic of itself, seemed a deduction—generated as

lives in Rome, and his work naturally refers to that

a pure, exalted scholastic exercise—from the autono¬

homogeneous international style. The immediate in¬ ternational contextualization (in particular) of Italian

mous visual tradition. The practice of art meant relin¬

creative ambience—the Roman way, where artists sit in the Prive. (I remember saying once to Andre Gide,

imagists pitted against American ones is, if anything, all about "International National.” Sealed as a taboo for too long, image has finally popped open in an international national convention of obstinate genies at the Tower of Babel. Generally the Italian image painting that surfaced in

quishing personal idiosyncracy, and artists attended to an inheritance considered weightier than them¬ selves. Critical to recent imagist consciousness is the realization that artists exist within a system of visual configurations and its concomitant traditions. That is where some of them live their lives. That is where Francesco Clemente lives his, Repeated history can be boring for critics always

New York this past fall was better, more sophisticated, a lot more intriguing, complex and cultivated, and

on the lookout for newness. When artists consciously

more sensual and sexual, than the bulk of the new American work using imagery. However, precisely because of this deciphering and differentiating, it was

refocus on elements just declared to be passe, it is partially to stop the choir from singing, “Oh, boring.” Now, artists with conceptual backgrounds are paint¬

glided over. There is definitely a culture gap confront¬ ing the emphatically foreign, metaphysical, physiog¬

ing because it is the most obstinately endeavor-like art form. “Painting never changed: it is just this

nomic, pictographic repertoire of Italian artists—a problem analogous to discussing Jasper Johns with¬ out knowing the American flag.

endeavor,” Brice Marden says. It is not even art, it is

Many of the so-called “new imagists" in New York refer to a photo-reproductive picture reservoir. Ameri¬ cans are Puritans at base, and images coming from

painting, says Ryman. There is a big difference. Even when Beuys can say that everyone is an artist, and even when, in the vernacular, "art" becomes inter¬ changeable with "quality," not everyone is a "Paint¬ er.” So the artists who make paintings doubly claim

as we sat together in some Paris cafe, that while metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfillment.) The metaphysical conceptualists, (Di Dominicis, Pisani, Prini, etc.) presided over the club when I was first there five years ago, and they were sitting there in exactly the same way/manner/ position (I swear) when I stopped by this past sum¬ mer. They must have been there when Clemente went out for esthetic mingling. This is not, by the way, ridicule; it is a heart-warming matter. It is the climate in Rome; it is art. Intrinsic to the processes of ideational dialogue, poetic gesture, metaphysical transmuta¬ tion, enigmatic obscuration, ironic stance, cafe-style bravura wit (Bohemia) and the sheer presence of these artists, is the focus on the image of the artist as such (or as myth). Paralleling the attitude-oriented mental/existential

10, 10, 0 -

Ert&cEMi fcortANC

All line drawings and rebuses heading the columns and on the following pages are drawings by Francesco Clemente.

cunnings of the conceptualists were the Arte Povera group's (Boetti, Kounellis, Merz, etc.)mafen'el-oriented sensual/textural strategies of the hand, that re¬ leased the latent energy in matter, and produced voluptuous tactile pleasures. As assistant to Boetti, Clemente witnessed this venture (too) into patterning craft and using traditions of the Orient. While much of the tone and ponderings and postur¬ ings of the Roman conceptualists detectibly perme¬ ates Clemente’s work, he releases the anxiety that pervaded their muffled gestural intellectualism: he has assumed visual space for articulation. He has as well anchored the ultimately permissive overflow of myriad organic materials in Arte Povera, by transform¬ ing its physical sensuality into drawing and picture making—retreating into patented esthetic territory. He has a body of work. This body may manifest itself in any two-dimensional medium (or in any combina¬ tion of two-dimensional media: from photos to col¬ lages to sketches to pastels to watercolors to tem¬ peras to oils to frescoes to mosaics to books and installations, which are also, in his case, additive compilations of two-dimensional elements in situ). The work is a process of picture-articulation achieved predominantly through the activity of drawing. Clemente draws in many styles and genres—from high style, according to the craft’s sophisticated standards, to drafting with chiaroscuro, which allows for the grey area of what might be the truth—but the majority of his design is naive drawing. Naive draw¬ ing’s posture is that it’s really better than what it chooses to show; it professes to leave accuracy behind to aim for the truth, thus implying morality. It’s a flash-in-the-pan revelation. Naive drawing doesn’t necessitate editing, refinement, polish. It doesn’t have to be consistent. It allows for a whole gamut of consciousness. The key to the recent outpouring of imagery—a phenomenon in which sheer abundance seems more important than consistency or refinement of tech¬ nique, a phenomenon with an urgency about defining itself—is drawing. Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant personal declaration of what is important and what is not. Drawing comes (back) as the most unalienated medium; private, it practically doesn’t have an audience in mind, just the artist's expression. Because it is private it can be measured by its 227

idiosyncracies. There is a pile of drawings over a foot high, wall to

wall, almost entirely covering the floor of Clemente's studio in Rome. As a matter of course, he lets visitors just go through them, pulling them out, catalyzing a surfacing process for layers too long beneath, too long unseen. Clemente’s drawings seem to have been made involuntarily and just deposited there. I doubt if the artist himself ever thoroughly looks through them. They are there like "stuff," a breathing repertoire, a reservoir—of notations, ideas, full-blown drawings, naive drawings, stylistics, designs, doo¬ dles, idiosyncracies, image, image, image. Some of them may get noticed, preferred, singled out, sepa¬ rated, chosen, by someone else. Sometimes Cle¬ mente uses these drawings in installations, as private images that are mutated in a variety of sizes and media for public presentation. In the course of the perpetual flow of Clemente’s drawing activity, IMAGE seeps through without selfconsciousness. Clemente’s images are like post cards written and then scattered around, isolated from, but referring (with flippy rigor) to the situations from which they arise. Loitering on the scenic route of image culture, Clemente's haphazardly attentive yet softly rolling visual voice quotes a fragment, a me¬ mento, anything with a particular visual ambience. There are always innumerable foci of interest in situations from life, and Clemente picks his nebulous, idiomatic inventory from his own hierarchy of bias. "Things” chosen from his immediate surroundings— a watch, an emblem, an animal—have together a kind of nonchalance, the ease of a non sequitur, the rhythm of poetic utterance. In one collage the artist is seen, from a bird’s-eye view, in the middle of his studio. He is standing on and surrounded by drawings hanging from the ceiling and rolling onto the floor. These drawings are images of "things” that he has appropriated into his world by depiction (just as the bull was "captured" by its image on the cave wall). Forming a panelled frame around the room are motifs of the not-yet-appropriated, the still-outside. This world view is concentric, forming itself around Clemente as he finds images for it. The new image lexicon uprooted is vast, and artists all have carte blanche. Image painters pick images and put them on essentially blank surfaces. New images do not fall into an iconographic field like a Renaissance altar painting (especially if you consider that for imagists like Sandro Chia the Renaissance altar painting itself can be just one more image on his voided pictorial surface). Image in Clemente’s pic¬

tures takes its place within the field of emotive articu¬ lation, not in a semantic field. However, if the notion of identity could be accepted as belonging to iconogra¬ phy (and it should be, with Clemente), in turn, its locution, the emotive, could be considered as belong¬ ing to a semantic field. Clemente’s proliferation of trademarks, flags, signs, slogans, heraldic imagery as subject matter have the collective character of all being shorthand for the idea of identity. The choice of such consistent motifs must be more than incidental. Clemente seems most intrigued by their declarative character, as proprietary emblems. Exercising cre¬ ative metaphysics he appropriates the image of a coat of arms, separates its vested visual value from its pre-empted function (making it, for example, into a painting) and thereby recharges it with a new person¬ al insignia as well as new art status. Inserted into Clemente’s floating picture plane, these traditionally axiomatic emblems are flooded with surplus mean¬ ing; intersected with multiplicity and disorganized from original orders, their significance is short-circuit¬ ed. Doubt, elusion and duplicity of meaning are not negative zones for Clemente. Uncertainty is his sym¬ pathetic terrain. This picture land of reverberating, interchangeable almosts is sown with personal indis¬ cretions, distortions and improper references. Hover¬ ing over personal particularities and cultural traditions lies the question of which way is truth or which way is esthetic solution. Ambiguity of interpretation is a characteristic of the visual image. So why not have ambiguity enter at the making of the visual image, enter into the process from the start? Like a grazing animal, Clemente assumes image into his work, and the image passes from one internal venue to another, each ruminating with its own enzyme of fermentation. The products of his ponderings are teeming overlays that have an effect similar to that of patting your head while circling your other hand in front of your stomach. Images play a hide-and-seek of meanings in a forest of coding devices, while codes metamorphose into imagery. Clemente transforms, phases, flexes image amidst various contexts, installations, styles, scales, etc., as he shifts, displaces, scatters and compounds its scope, implication, meaning and even content. Tiny hidden watermarks are disproportionately overem¬ phasized into the stature of painting; philosophical concepts are presented as rebuses; frescoes pose as portable allegorical self-portraits; geometry, meta-

linguistics, Oriental religions are playfully crammed into doodles; and humble objects from his environ¬ ment, boosted with sentiment, take visual value way beyond their downhome, everyday connotations. Clemente is meddling in the most haunting issue of our time—the big-game hunting of contemporary man—the contest in a hazy land between identity and image. (A contest, by the way, in which there is no open aggression, no open confrontation on an ideo¬ logical plane.) Image used to be just a clue to self, an embellishment; now it has taken over and almost replaces the self. In fact, the less self you have, the more clearly your "image” can come through. In Clemente's self-portraits, manners and gestures as body language, as well as the dramatized evi¬ dence of the actions of internal organs, become properties of his attitude towards himself. As Die¬ trich's body was for Sternberg a visual projection of his libido (a transvestite in a world of delirious, unreal Francesco Clemente, Se i buchi del corpo sono nove o diece (If the holes of the body are nine or ten), from Vefta, by Francesco Clemente (Modena: Emilio Mazzoli, 1979).

adventures), Clemente’s transfigurations are for Cle¬ mente a nearly Gothic, neurotic and deviant physiog¬ nomic ritual (the saga of turning inside out at every orifice). Clemente's depiction of bodily functions shows streams of waste, washing away toxic effluvia. According to modern Western sensibilities the pro¬ cess of secretion is an involuntary but nonetheless delinquent process, and a state of physiognomic decadence. But what we see are not simply pictures of overheated bio-motor systems in intense, diaristic, navel-centric, erotic eruption, expressing an urge to fix meaning in being. According to Joyce, the artist is a priest of the eternal imagination transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life. Clemente's radiant, consecrating fig¬ ure—the body mystical—is itself transformed as it transmutes. Obviously the holes of the flesh are for discharging the fermented innards, but they are also receptors through which the world is channeled into personalized existence, points of high tension where interaction with the world takes place, and they are the domain of direct negotiation. The rendition of the body as a purgative, redemptive machine is imbued with Judeo-Christian overtones. Freudian theory traces personality development to the gradual control of the use of the orifices, but to treat Clemente's work as merely an illustration of this would be much too simplistic.

The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often very difficult to Interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them.

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and the most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. —O.W.

Detail of inside back cover from Vetta, by Francesco Clemente (Modena: Emilio Mazzoli, 1979), from a series of drawings.

Clemente’s representation of human orifices im¬ plies expressionist underpinnings to his work, but he is not so much an expressionist per se as an artist fluent in many styles. His treatment of orifices, sexual, sensory and excretory, is obsessional; it serves also as a cunningly employed designating device of dia¬ grammatic representation—he uses dots to indicate the sex of the depicted figures in a gamesome, cool code. Human orifices are vulnerable connecting points with the world; the possibility of drama lies where different elements meet. (Abstract painting, for example, spent at least two decades with the "sensi¬ tivity of the edge" as a central concern.) (We know

now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate of sense impressions.) Clemente's inordinate involvement with body ori-

expression, it could be elevated to the moral level of purposeful nebulosity. His stance may often be ironic, may often seem jaded, yet it is more like a smile with a

-1EIMI E ... my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the great passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh water to red wine; or the glowworm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon. —O.W.

fices is paralleled only by the attention he pays to the mirror—gadget of empirical self-scrutiny. It is not simply Clemente’s visage that appears in his selfportraits, but the physiognomy of a unique type of man with meta-creative redemptive power—a being called the Artist—whose body is often depicted as if in the midst of an autistic ritual, a pantomime about image pronounciation (and form annunciation), per¬ formed with features charged in sympathetic pain. Startled by his own movements, thrilled by the most bizarre contortions, he sizes up this figure of the Artist practicing image-exorcism. Seeing himself becomes the emotional boomerang that chops through the torso and the limbs as it returns from and to the sight lines. His eyes, looking at themselves, transfixed with intensity, repugnance and lust; and his neck, frozen in rhapsodic position, imply an eagerness to climb onto his picture surface (reflection), to be fused with his work, with his self-portrait, with his self. (For is not truth

in art, as I have said, 'that in which the outward is expressive of the inward; in which the soul is made fiesh and the body instinct with spirit in which form reveals.') Bugged by the Holy Ghost/flagellated by the Spirit, his

gestures signal, as if he were saying:

let me rest here in visual space. Let my identity rest in peace. The frontality necessary for mirror-imaging is what makes his characters glance outward no matter what the orientation of the body. Clones of Clemente in coupled figures populate some of his pictures. In constantly touching configurations, they seem to want to confirm their existence. They are snaps of mirror reflections. These figures come body to body, one to one, whimsically implying clashes of intentionality and physicality. Their gestures are similar, almost mimetic. (It is quite true. Most people are other

people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives are mimicry, their passions a quotation.) They do not look at each other,and their expressions are so homogeneous that they hardly communicate. It is more like talking to oneself. The extraordinary magic of this series of work is that the particular dispositions of body parts and the interpersonal friction seem to indicate something

particular ambience. This smile, redolent of epi¬ gram, racy pun, libertine imagery, dissolves progress into confetti to be thrown in the air of academic traditions. "I don’t have a progressive notion of art— one step after another. Thinking you can change history—that's not something minor artists can think about," noted Clemente. He is wooing art with great esthetic acumen. He is like an existential Orphist. He charms everything (with the grace of art). The aura of the work is like a magnetic field which buoys the art, keeping it out of any of the wretched corners art has had a habit of slipping into so easily. (I see no difficulty at all in

believing that such was the charm of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls in anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot their pain . . .) Always seeing itself in

subliminal and specific, but in fact don't. A set of body

terms of “problems," much contemporary art has had

signals is mixed with signs and vernacular gestural slang that are not signals (emanating with precision)

both hypochondria and an allergy to itself. Clemente has the attitude that art shouldn't lose, that to lose is a

but signs, which are iconic, passive, pictorial and cliched. But signs are merely stand-ins (as are clones), and the tableaux get a lot of static but not much action—sneaky cruising, teasing. This is in fact

consequence, and that to lose has a consequence. As an elegant solution to some elusive calculus problem might appear simply by changing the posi¬ tion of parentheses, so Clemente’s solution is to romance art. He adores it. He likes other artists better than himself; cherishes and appropriates the emotive textures in forgotten masters. One of his major rea¬ sons for making paintings recently is that he likes what other painters did, or have been doing, with painting. Besides, he is a picture maker, not so much a painter per se. Clemente's pictorialism is not cynical, parasit¬ ic gamesmanship. When society is not in step with its visionary ambitions, creative ponderers and visual logicians become surplus personae. Clemente deals with this by being more vocational than volitional; by

what gives them a more mysterious and intricate status than,say,Neil Jenney’s coupled characters that didactically refer to each other (cat/dog; girl/doll). This recurring theme of double male figures in various wild gestural interactions is one of the most lulling and peculiar features of Clemente's work. Pushing each other’s eyes out, cutting throats, scratching arses, stuffing fingers into their mouths, embracing, kissing . . . they all have the allure of taboo. Homoerotic iconographic interpretation would be off-base. What we see is associative autoeroticism. Clemente’s work innately, as well as by association, excites a certain nimble lechery—the lechery of styl¬ ishness, chicness, mannerism, taboo. Disguising the¬ ory in genteel beauty, erotic eruption in naive compo¬ sitions, Clemente is such a master of the implied rather than the stated that he makes complex aspects of his work seem too damn easy and attractive. But he is way beyond coy poetic imagery. (I could bear a real

tragedy if it came to me with purple pall and a mask of noble sorrow, but that the dreadful thing about moder¬ nity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking in style. It is quite true about modernity. It has probably always been true about actual life.) Like a gentleman who would knock three times before seducing, Clemente proceeds in his picture-making as if lisping, speaking with a timid, secret and confidential manner, and thus far has managed to sidestep pidgeonholing analyses. Cle¬ mente's art is elusive. One chases it. He teases you into going after it. You want to catch it, but not pin it down. His posturings of permissive messiness are protective clutters against the “vanguard’' mania for novelty, for newness, which pressures artists to pro¬ duce an art which appears non-derivative. If there is to be found a lack of sincerity in the mode of his self¬

accepting himself as surplus and eschewing pro¬ gressive notions, he attends to his visual culture and tradition, roaming that scenic road in any direction. He is foot-loose in time, culture and metaphor. His work is an allegory about creation. Nuancical kinkiness, whimsicality, unruliness—all are like excess circles around him, and generate that field of charming licentiousness. Is this rascal energy a byproduct of the fact that he is trying to be ethical in an esthetic context where few things can be meaning¬ ful? (His morality is all sympathy, just what morality

should be.. . . His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be . . . for him there were no laws; there were exceptions merely . . .)

Edit deAk writes about contemporary art.

Since motifs and even entire works appear and reappear in different forms and media within Francesco Clemente’s body of work, the captions accompanying the reproductions in this article identify the source which we used to illustrate the work. They do not necessarily describe the “original" painting or drawing. —Eds.

THE END OF THE AVANT-GARDE?

Bazon Brock

AND SO THE END OF TRADITION.

Some strange events are apt to make us ask questions. 1.

While I was preparing this article, an excel¬ lent and significant artist tried to stop me from mentioning his colleague Anselm Kiefer. He then attempted to intimidate me so I would not give more emphasis to Kiefer’s painting than to his own or that of his friends. What could explain this behavior, which unfortunately is not unique?

2. In 1980 the Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer exhibits in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale were almost universally rejected by the German.critics. The true reason for their disdain could be perceived behind the veneer of “artistic” criteria; they felt that Kiefer and Baselitz were using obsolete artistic methods to promote equally obsolete German mythology. This objection is untenable. What is behind such unanimous mis¬ conception? 3. Although there has been no shortage of intelligent criticism of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Our Hitler, 1977, in France, Britain and the U.S., in West Germany the film is put down because it is ap¬ parently paving the way for National-Socialist mythology. 4. When Richard Serra's large 1977- Documenta sculpture was installed on a public site in the city of Bochum, the public and officials reacted in a manner that was reminiscent of the Nazi cam¬ paigns against “degenerate art.” Although this should no longer seem possible, such events are quite common in West Germany. There is a gradu¬ ally increasing awareness that the campaigns against "degenerate art" did not cease with the end of the Third Reich, nor are they limited to obscure circles. From Henri Nannen's criticism of the 1958 Venice Biennale to Thilo Koch’s mockery of the 1972 Documenta, this attitude about “de¬ generate art" has, in actual fact, been kept alive. 5. Eduard Beaucamp of the Frankfurter Allgememe Zeitung recently stated that "the survival of art does not depend on its avant-garde qualities. In no way does the end of avant-garde amount to an end of art." Like many of his colleagues, Beaucamp is accepting all this talk about the end of the avantgarde, or even the end of modernism. What is it that created this curious agreement between the former champions of avant-garde and its long¬ time enemies?

Considering the current active, even aggressive, conflicts in West Germany, the recognition that this Georg Baselitz.

Massai, 1972, pencil and ink, 22% x 17W. Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Cosmopolitan Arts Foundation. [ In the original issue this image appeared upside down due to our printer’s "correction", - Ed. ]

Notes on the Present cKulturkampfs in West Germany

talk about avant-garde perpetuates the same pe¬ ripheries that have existed for the past 70 years is useful, although unlikely on the part of those who are doing the talking. Do we have to accept that there have been no fundamental advances in the visual arts

within the last 70 years? Since it is only now—now that the world’s economic and political problems prove the usual explanation for the 12-year "mere accident" in German history to be insufficient—that a discussion of Germany's National-Socialist past is taking place, this debate about modernism could, in fact, be a good omen. But if it cannot be based on different and better arguments, we may soon be sharing the responsibility for another cultural disaster. We need not necessarily become war criminals again. In certain respects, says Syberberg, peace criminals are just as bad. In many ways a world experiment is taking place in Germany, with the side-by-side existence of socialist East Germany and capitalist West Germany. Both countries share the same cultural history, the same language and the same intense internalization of the fiction of a German national character. The existence of the two Germanys and their unique experience is of immense value for present cultural debates. Though conventional world opinion sees the Prussian mind (under scrutiny this year in numerous exhibitions and studies in both East and West Berlin) as industrious, self-sacrificing and productive, its true nature is radi¬ calness leading, of necessity, to self-destruction. In a recent essay, Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel, has shown German history—inasmuch as it was determined chiefly by Prussia in the last 240 years— to have been a series of crazy acts of brinkmanship. Frederick the Great, Bismarck, William II, and Hitler acted with a horrendous consistency that was by no means chance coincidence. Their attitude and that of their thousands of subordinate fuhrers can be charac¬ terized by the statement that Hitler made in April 1945, in his last will and testament, concerning the disaster he had created: "If our political and military decisions should result in a catastrophe, the German people deserve no better.” What is the fascist element in this behavior, behav¬ ior that had prevailed long before fascism and Nation¬ al-Socialism were established as a political system? Heinrich Heine supplied an answer, describing the Germans as building their society and their state “in the realm of the airs," centuries after the French and the English had succeeded in creating actual states on earth. The Germans considered and continue to consider philosophical, literary and artistic worldconstructs—purely intellectual designs—to be actual realities. They read philosophy and artistic works as if they were down-to-earth operating manuals for the

231

translation of ideas and imaginary constructs into reality, instead of using them to justify criticism of the conditions actually prevailing in a given period. Ex¬ amples of this can be found in the systematic liquida¬ tion of the Jews as a disciplined sacrifice supposedly made in the name of unpleasant duty, in the wide¬ spread acceptance of censorship of intellectual activ¬ ity as being necessary to demonstrate the honor and purity of true Germanness, in the public destruction of “degenerate" art and the hounding of the creators of that art. Only in Germany was it possible for a compe¬ tent Nobel prize-winning scientist in experimental physics, Professor Lenard, to accuse Professor Ein¬ stein and his colleagues of advancing “un-German" physics.

hans-jUrgen syberbergs

■■IOURHH

HITLER A FILM FROM GERMANY

Poster for Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Our Hiller, A Film from Germany, 1977

“What art is, [or is not,] I will decide.”2 Even though Friedrich Schiller, whose teachings formed an indispensable part of German high-school education for a long time, held that the constructs of art were real only as "beautiful appearances,” the Germans have always had difficulty understanding the English pragmatic approach to, or the French constructs of, beautiful appearances, since recogniz¬ ing the idea of beautiful appearances was tantamount to denying the real and the true. The proverbial "German profoundness" results from an inability to accept beautiful appearances—figurative ideas or mythic narratives or scientific systems of thought—as just that: mere appearances. They have always seen

the relation between surface and depth, appear¬ ances and inner nature, imagination and physical reality, in terms of plan and execution. Artistic state¬ ments were judged in terms of how they could be methodically translated into reality; an autonomous sphere of esthetic appearances could not be ap¬ proved. Anglo-Saxon pragmatism selected artistic and philosophic systems based on how well they would fit into the reality of everyday life. The German idealists forced their philosophical and artistic system constructs onto everyday life. That is why it seemed natural to German leaders that they should decide which philosophical and artistic thoughts could or could not be admitted. To the majority of Germans, it

A.R. Penck,

Structure TM, 1976, tempera, 287/8x40'/2". Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Cosmopolitan Arts Foundation

was quite natural that William II or Hitler should act as

the reconstruction period. West German ideology

the supreme arbiter of art and science.

was determined by the same forces, by the same scientists and artists who, without much evidence of

Today we are still inclined to see the absurd Third Reich ideologies in art and science as products of the stupidity of political officials. Actually, the ideology of "un-German” physics, the supposedly empirical ra¬ cial doctrine, the theory of the superiority of German culture, the assertion that medieval gothic was a German invention, and the legal application given to the ancient Germanic virtues—all were made up not by party big shots, but by ordinary academic profes¬ sors. Hitler himself cracked jokes about this. Hitler was not forcing his own inventions on the people; he simply literally actualized a relationship between thought and act, plan and execution, art and reality, that had gained currency long before him. The Ger¬ man archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had given a resounding and convincing demonstration of this when he succeeded in discovering historical Troy and Mycenae by taking the mythic fiction of Homer’s

pressure, had shown themselves willing to support National-Socialism and to integrate their professional organizations with the new regime as early as 1933,

That is the function of avant-gardes. For traditions are not secure and unchanging things of the past that continue to affect the present; on the contrary, they have to be rebuilt every time from the present into the past. Traditions are the forms by which we appropri¬ ate history as an effective force in the present. All

long before ordinary citizens allowed themselves to be drawn into the new order.

concepts of modernism and the avant-gardes insist on the creation of something new. But if something is

I am bringing all this up because this field of our intellectual history is being tilled again in the present

really new, it certainly is unknown, unrecognized, not understood and not definable.

cultural conflict. We are living through a permanent

The majority of people wants to understand the new—avant-garde art—in its own terms, all by itself;

iconoclastic battle, and in this age of technological production and distribution of images this could in recent years have led to radical results, as radical as in the Third Reich or the German Democratic Repub¬ lic, if the constitutional courts had not been as strong as they were until now. It seems doubtful, however, that the constitutional guaranties can be maintained much longer.

and this, of course, is impossible. Artists who are prone to misrepresent their creation of the new as simply a break with the old and the preexisting, encourage such a simplistic view. But they cannot break with traditions unless they have a knowledge of unambiguous, constant and secure traditions. Panofsky, Warburg, Kubler and others have shown why this is so; why form and content can barely be

epic as a practical guide. Like Schliemann and the majority of his colleagues in science and art, Hitler proceeded in the same manner. But instead of limiting

The function of avant-garde.

himself to constructing a new history of our culture, he applied his literal interpretation of esthetic appear¬ ances and his literal understanding of artistic and

avant-garde came to an end in Germany before it ever began; the avant-garde has never been able to establish itself in Germany. Avant-garde works are

scientific mythology to his present. The results are well-enough known even though the background is rarely understood. The first years of West Germany were openly—though perhaps unwittingly—called

those that compel us to see the seemingly familiar works within our traditions in a totally new way. The very creation of that which is new and incomprehensi¬

The discussion about the end of the avant-garde has a special flavor in West Germany because the

ble is a necessary prerequisite to forming traditions.

communicated from one individual to another, let alone from one generation to another. The same form changes its content, the same content appears in a different form. All renaissances were de facto failures, even though the individuals involved, lacking histori¬ cal knowledge, might have believed that they had succeeded in resurrecting traditions. Renaissances cannot aim at the resuscitation of traditions, but they can make sense as an attempt to create new tradi¬ tions out of historical inventory.

Markus Lupertz.

Atelier, ca. 1973-74. tempera and crayon, 16Vfex22". Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Cosmopolitan Arts Foundation.

What motivates this, what compels people again and again to create traditions anew? It is the pressure of the unknown, the incomprehensible, the unrecog¬ nized, that appears in avant-garde works. No one can remain indifferent to something new and unknown that suddenly comes into the environment. Most often it either will be destroyed or, by means of all sorts of projections, will be renamed in familiar terms. But sometimes an artist will proceed to exploit the new fact to induce a new attitude toward that which was, until then, the old and known. One can only learn about the known from the new, one can only experi¬ ence the new with a new view of the old.

233

reject old traditions, it seems more likely that people are afraid of the new because they are afraid to admit that they did not understand the seemingly old, known and traditional, either.

The present leaves the artists without hope, utopia is worn and decrepit. So they are looking for a link with something old to give them a new beginning, and imperceptibly this has changed the way 20th-century avant-garde sees itself. Since the end of the 19th century, art history has been a history of the avant-garde. Avant-garde—that was the van¬

The making of a new past.

guard advancing into unknown territory—anticipating an uncertain future—creating the new—not afraid of shocking

There is no point in classifying Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorff, A.R. Penck, Markus

confrontations. 1968 saw the rise of a fundamental critique of the cult of

Lupertz and any of the first-rate painters of the “Mulheimer Freiheit” as neo-Expressionists or neo-

artists. They are no longer totally committed to the new that

Thus the public for avant-gardes should trust its perception that these works are unknown, unrecog¬ nized, uncomprehended. For this implies that this public knows other works it has already recognized and understood. If someone considers a work by Joseph Beuys to be incomprehensible, he or she is bound to assert that there is a work by Rembrandt, Kaspar David Friedrich or some other artist that is

Fauves, for this would suggest that these artists are part of the modern movement but reflect a long obsolescent stage in it. Ideas about artists returning to traditions are meaningless. The opinions on the substance of traditions are themselves no more than contemporary constructs. Evidence of how difficult it is to understand this can often be seen in criticism of "post-modernism." As long as we label "post-mod¬ ernism” (in the various fields) as an adversary of modernism, as long as we lump it with the perpetual

known, recognized and familiar. This is of course a fallacy, since even with these artists there is no such thing as unchanging knowledge and permanent fa¬ miliarity. The new avant-garde works prove them¬ selves each time by forcing us to see and understand the same historical work once again in different terms, showing us the same Rembrandt as though we had never seen it before. Whereas the usual argument has it that the avant-garde is rejected for fear of having to

enemies of all the avant-gardes, we are adding unnecessarily to the strength of these adversaries. In architecture, most critics do not even attempt to claim that “post-modernism" is related to modernism; in¬ stead, they treat it as a new eclecticism and historicism, that has turned the clock back to the days before Louis Sullivan and Adolf Loos. One of these critics, Uwe Schneede, director of the Flamburg Kunstverein, wrote in 1980:

innovation, and this has since affected the practice of young the art dealers had been demanding from them (and profit¬ ing by) in the ’60s. In those years the industrial trade fairs provided annual reassurance for the ideology of economic growth and the proliferating consumption approach to life, whereas the bustling art world found new strength in the innovation ideology at the annual art fairs. This obsessive forward pressure has waned. Today the avant-garde is no longer identical with the cult of innovation. Today’s avantgarde creates the new out of pensive retrospection.

This does not make much sense. First Schneede says that today’s avant-garde is no longer aiming to create something new, then he concludes that today’s avant-garde creates the new in pensive, searching retrospection, i.e., it does create some¬ thing new. What Robert A.M. Stern has said for the current development in architecture should be repeated: One cannot emphasize enough that today’s post-modern¬ ism is not a new style outside of modernism Nor is post-

modernism a revolutionary movement inside ot and against modernism. It aims to correct the shortcomings of the earlier development, to restore the balance between tradition and innovation after the revolution of modernism that had been puritanical and limited to small circles,3 The critics were similarly in conflict about the latest Venice Biennale. On the one hand they said that the young artists had no new ideas; on the other hand they complained that the artists were constantly dup¬ ing the public with a rapid succession of novelties that were nothing but new. For a long time Picasso had a reputation with both laymen and experts as the epitome of the noveltyminded artist. But at the same time they were trying to prove that his novelties were not half so new. Stierlin wrote in his treatise on 11th-century Spanish book illuminations that "the treatment of an apocalyptic horse by the facundas master is already reminiscent of Picasso's horse in Guernica." The other way around it makes sense: it is Picasso's disturbingly new way of seeing things in Guernica that makes us see the facundas master differently. If contemporary artists cease to produce avant-garde works, they give up their ability even to perceive the seemingly old and known, the traditional. It is the impact of the new that makes us look back at historical inventory, so we can experience the energy of the actually new in the modified view of the old. Baselitz, Kiefer, Immendorff, Penck, Lupertz and their colleagues are not looking back; they are not neo-Expressionists, neo-Fauves or neo-anything. Their work makes us discover aspects in the Expres¬ sionists or the Fauves that could not have been perceived before their work began to exercise its effect on us.

Which past is the present of the arts? The achievements of 20th-century avant-garde can be compared only with those of the 5th century B.C. in Attica and those of the 15th century in Northern Italy. The criterion for the level of achievement in this century is how earlier art was reviewed, thanks to the avant-garde pressure. Cezanne compelled the art historian von Rintelen to arrive at a wholly new discov¬ ery of Giotto's artistic achievements. Cubism proved itself to be an effective avant-garde by causing an entirely new view of the artistic manifestations of the so-called primitives (especially their sculpture). Ex¬ pressionism amounted to an effective avant-garde because it did away with the prejudice of the period against El Greco (until 1908 he had been considered a mere daubster) and many other Mannerists. Archi¬ tectural thought from Loos to the Bauhaus resulted in an entirely new view and reevaluation of Palladio and Brunelleschi. This series continues to the present time, where Bernhard Johannes Blume demands a new definition of art deco as a further formal canon in European art history. In the 1970s, conceptual art brought up 15th-century conceptionalism. Baselitz' Jorg Immendorff, Cafe Deutschland, 19/8, tempera, 11%x8%”. Collection, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Cosmopolitan Arts Foundation.

upside-down paintings create a totally new Tintoretto for us. Seventeenth-century trompe I'oeil, which had been considered mere genre painting, was revealed as epistemological painting by Spoerri's tableaux pieges. With his materials and sculptural values

Beuys compelled us to find a new attitude toward everyday waste materials that had been considered irredeemably amorphous. Penck’s painting shows how the transition from the black-figure to the redfigure style at the turn of the 5th century B.C. can become a revolutionary reorientation in presentday painting. And so forth—the achievements of the avant-garde in this century are so numerous and dense that they prove all this talk about modernism losing historical dimension to be totally off the mark. The dense representation of history in our present (as an achievement of the avant-garde) simply cannot be rejected by calling it historicism or eclecticism.

to establish themselves as public institutions, this . results in a cultural-political pact powerful enough to break up cultural communities and friendships be¬ tween artists. And this is what is happening, as suggested in my introduction, at present in West Germany.

The avant-gardes on their way into the diaspora. There is a popular strategy, invented in West Ger¬ many but since employed in other countries, mainly in

If one wants to discuss modernism as a clearly

France, which is a like-minded attack on democracy by the radical left, the radical right, the dropouts and the copouts. Recently, an American, Noam Chomsky, wrote a preface for a radical right-wing polemical

defined and historically unique period, this is the conclusion: modernism is an attempt to understand

publication, and he justified his attitude with the definition of this strategy. He said that the Western

artistic problems as exclusively immanent, i.e., as purely formal problems. This has in fact been going on for 100 years, the aim being to show progress in art

democracies are not real democracies since they prevented radical right-wing opinions from being published. In Germany, young people in particular

as progress in the mastery of formal problems. But if one asks why the artists of a given period deal as they do with formal problems, one cannot help posing questions other than those about formal problems. Nobody has yet succeeded in seeing art works purely in terms of formal problems. This is why such a concept of modernism (as a history of solutions to formal problems) is not very useful.

are once again succumbing to the sickness of taking

What is the meaning of modernism?

There are no traditions without an avant-garde. Thus we have to assume that the responsibilities of the modern avant-gardes are not historically unique, but that they occurred in all societies, in all cultures and periods as the task of preserving the connection between the contemporarily new with history. Soci¬ eties that employed dictatorial measures to stifle the creation of new things in order to protect hallowed traditions were the first to lose their traditions. The more intense the battle against the new, the faster the loss of tradition. And this is what makes the avantgarde problem in Germany so explosive. Prussian radicalism arises from the lack of tradition and control that had to result from the rejection of the new. I am not saying that the situation in West Germany today is the same as it was in the ’30s, but I am saying that it is analogous. The diversity claimed in all artistic, scientific and political statements and constructs to exist in West Germany has an anti-avant-garde and thus antihistorical drift even in the absence of totalitar¬ ian measures. That this should be so can be under¬ stood more readily by a cdmparison with Frederick

235

this has long since gone too far in the other direction. When major collectors can enlist government support

the Great's Prussia. He, too, enjoyed a reputation as being tolerant and diversity-minded. Yet his account of the literature of his period mentions neither the names nor the works of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller or any of the other innovators of that time. In Germany, any artistic, literary or scientific pro¬ duction immediately has a political dimension, and not only for the reasons outlined so far. The arts and sciences are greatly dependent—above all, financial¬ ly—on state institutions. Though it may have been a good idea to make these fields independent of the tastes of private patrons (or of the “average public"),

system constructs literally. This time it is the West German constitution they are taking literally, and that, of course, makes it very easy to' denounce actual conditions as not consistent with the constitution. This is fine as long as the constitution serves as a refer¬ ence and inspiration for criticizing our political and social reality. But an insistence on literal compliance with the constitution would result in totalitarian condi¬ tions even if the constitution had been drafted by Jesus Christ and all the saints. It has always turned out that the uncompromising identical application of a system construct is bound to have inhumane and destructive effects, since the very strength of thought is always rooted in the discrep¬ ancy between plan and execution, between idea and practice. Even the most ideal artworks and the most humane policies may only be construed as "ruins." The radical hatred of the Jews in Germany arose principally from the permanent opposition of Jewish theology to any literal execution of a myth, a revela¬ tion, or a system of thought. This was the very substance of the German dream of the realization of the Holy German Empire. The present, increasingly explosive attempts to take scientific and artistic sys¬ tem constructs literally, and to enforce their exact execution, need to be watched carefully. This may explain why artists like Syberberg and Kiefer en¬ gender such widespread hostility in Germany, for their works imply an analysis of this cultural history and in the process they wreak havoc on the exist¬ ing alliances. ■

A project by Anselm Kiefer follows on the next six pages* Although Kiefer's picture constructions are not illustrations of history, it is useful (but only that) to know that this particular work takes the epic of Gilgamesh as its dramatic miseen-scene. Kiefer's surface reference here is a point along the journey of Gilgamesh and his servant companion Enkidu that took them into a forest with a mountain that was green from cedar trees. One motive that prompted this expedition was the need for timber, with which Gilgamesh could display his power by building great walls and temples. The monumental structures required long beams, for which tall cedar trees were perfect. Conquering the evil Humbaba, the monster who guarded the green mountain and roared with breath of fire, was the other reason for the journey. Kiefer’s books and paintings always express both cultural history and art history as open-ended, unstable and continuously renewed. These two histories operate simultaneously in this artist's work: the topographical markings on these pages are as likely to be outlines of a painter’s palette as they are cedar growth-rings: the light on the characters' faces is as much a fact of photography as it is a reflection of the pessimism inherent in Mesopotamian stories, in which heroes depend on kisses or curses from the gods; and the paths and trees represent contemporary pastoral pictures of what may be the woods near Kiefer’s country house (or even woods brought in for studio setup shots) as much as they construct the outer bounds of earth and reality. —INGRID SISCHY

Bazon Brock is Professor of Esthetics at the University of Wuppertal This article was translated from the German by Frederick J. Hosenkiel

1

KuHurkampf or culture conflict refers to the roll-back of the influence of the Catholic Church attempted by Bismarck in 1872 and abandoned in 1887 It was largely a conflict between concept-minded Protestant idealists on the one hand, and Catholic supporters of an autonomy of esthetic appearances

2

on the other Declared by William II in a speech. 1901. and by Adolf Hitler as described by Joachim C Fest. Das Gesicht des NSDAP," Munich: Ft Piper. 1963.

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VIOLENCE OF

Bernard Tschumi There is no architecture without action, no architec¬ ture without events, no architecture without program. By extension, there is no architecture without vio¬ lence. The first of these statements runs against the main¬ stream of contemporary architectural thought, wheth¬ er "modernist'’ or “post-modernist," by refusing to favor space at the expense of action. The second statement argues that although the logic of objects and the logic of man are independent in their relations to the world, they inevitably face one another in an intense confrontation. Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades. By “violence," I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity, but a meta¬ phor for the intensity of a relationship between individ¬ uals and their surrounding spaces. The argument is not a matter of style: “modern” architecture is neither more nor less violent than classical architecture, or than Fascist, Socialist or vernacular variations. Archi¬ tecture's violence is fundamental and unavoidable, for architecture is linked to events in the same way that the guard is linked to his prisoner, the police to the criminal,.the doctorto the patient, orderto chaos. This also suggests that actions qualify spaces as much as spaces qualify actions; that space and action are inseparable and that no proper interpretation of archi¬ tecture, drawing or notation can refuse to consider this fact.

• What must first be determined is whether this relation between action and space is symmetrical— opposing two camps (people versus spaces) that affect one another in a comparable way—or asym¬ metrical, a relation in which one camp, whether space or people, clearly dominates the other. Bodies violating space First, there is the violence that all individuals inflict on spaces by their very presence, by their intrusion into the controlled order of architecture. Entering a

ARCHITECTURE

building may be a delicate act, but it violates the balance of a precisely ordered geometry (do archi¬ tectural photographs ever include runners, fighters, lovers?). Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpect¬ ed spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architec¬ ture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, whose bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought. No wonder the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition. Violence is not always present. Just as riots, brawls, insurrections, and revolutions are of limited duration, so is the violence a body commits against space. Yet it is always implicit. Each door implies the movement of someone crossing its frame. Each corridor implies the progression of movement that blocks it. Each architectural space implies (and desires) the intrud¬ ing presence that will inhabit it. Space violating bodies But if bodies violate the purity of architectural spaces, one might rightly wonder about the reverse: the violence inflicted by narrow corridors on large crowds, the symbolic or physical violence of build¬ ings on users. A word of warning: I do not wish to resurrect recent behaviorist architectural ap¬ proaches. Instead, I wish simply to underline the mere existence of a physical presence and the fact that it begins quite innocently, in an imaginary sort of way. The place your body inhabits is inscribed in your imagination, your unconscious, as a space of possi¬ ble bliss. Or menace. What if you are forced to abandon your imaginary spatial markings? A torturer wants you, the victim, to regress, because he wants to demean his prey, to make you lose your identity as a subject. Suddenly you have no choice; running away is impossible. The rooms are too small or too big, the ceilings too low or too high. Violence exercised by and through space is spatial torture. Take Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. You walkthrough one of its axes and as you cross the central, space and reach its other side you find, instead of the hillside landscape, the steps of another Villa Rotonda, and another, and another, and another. The incessant repetition at first stimulates some strange desire, but soon becomes sadistic, impossible, violent.

Such discomforting spatial devices can take any form: the white anechoic chambers of sensory depri¬ vation, the formless spaces leading to psychologi¬ cal destructuring. Steep and dangerous staircases, those corridors consciously made too narrow for crowds, introduce a radical shift from architecture as an object of contemplation to architecture as a per¬ verse instrument of use. At the same time it must be stressed that the receiving subject—you or I— may wish to be subjected to such spatial aggression, just as you may go to a rock concert and stand close enough to the loudspeakers to sustain painful— but pleasurable—physical or psychic trauma. Places aimed at the cult of excessive sound only suggest places aimed at the cult of excessive space. The love of violence, after all, is an ancient pleasure. Why has architectural theory regularly refused to acknowledge such pleasures and always claimed (at least officially) that architecture should be pleasing to the eye, as well as comfortable to the body? This presupposition seems curious when the pleasure of violence can be experienced in every other human activity, from the violence of discordant sounds in music to the clash of bodies in sports, from gangster movies to the Marquis de Sade.

Violence ritualized Who will mastermind these exquisite spatial de¬ lights, these disturbing architectural tortures, the tor¬ tuous paths of promenades through delirious land¬ scapes, theatrical events where actor complements decor? Who . . .? The architect? By the seventeenth century, Bernini had staged whole spectacles, fol¬ lowed by Mansart’s fetes for Louis XIV and Albert Speer’s sinister and beautiful rallies. After all, the original action, the original act of violence—this un¬ speakable copulating of live body and dead stone— is unique and unrehearsed, though perhaps infinitely repeatable, for you may enter the building again and again. The architect will always dream of purify¬ ing this uncontrolled violence, channeling obedient bodies along predictable paths and occasionally along ramps that provide striking vistas, ritualizing the transgression of bodies in space. Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center, with its ramp that violates the building, is a genuine movement of bodies made into an architectural solid. Or the reverse: it is a solid that forcibly channels the movement of bodies. The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual. Sixteenthcentury pageants and the reenactment of the storm¬ ing of the Winter Palace in Leningrad, for example, are ritualistic imitations of spontaneous violence. End¬ lessly repeated, these rituals curb all aspects of the original act that have escaped control: the choice of time and place, the selection of the victim. . . . A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Noth¬ ing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute.

239

PROGRAMS: Reciprocity and Conflict

ernism versus humanism, formalism versus function¬

Few regimes would survive if architects were to

alism, etc.—which architects and critics are usually keen to promote.)

program every single movement of individual and society in a kind of ballet mecanique of architecture, a

Most relations, of course, stand somewhere in between. You can sleep in your kitchen. And fight and

Such control is, of course, not likely to be achieved.

permanent Nuremberg Rally of everyday life, a pup¬

love. These shifts are not without meaning. When the

pet theater of spatial intimacy. Nor would they survive

typology of an 18th-century prison is turned into a

if every spontaneous movement were immediately

20th-century city hall, the shift inevitably suggests a critical statement about institutions. When an industri¬

frozen into a solid corridor. The relationship is more subtle and moves beyond the question of power, beyond the question of whether architecture domi¬

al loft in Manhattan is turned into a residence, a similar shift occurs, a shift that is undoubtedly less dramatic.

nates events, or vice versa. The relationship, then, is

Spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are

as symmetrical as the ineluctable one between guard and prisoner, hunter and hunted. But both the hunter

qualified by spaces. One does not trigger the other; they exist independently. Only when they intersect do

and the hunted also have basic needs to consider,

they affect one another. Remember Kuleshov’s ex¬

which may not relate to the hunt: sustenance, food, shelter, etc. Hunter and hunted enjoy these needs

periment where the same shot of the actor’s impass-

independent of the fact that they are engaged in a

i ble face is introduced into a variety of situations, and the audience reads different expressions into each

deadly game. They are respectively self-sufficient. Only when they confront each other's reality are their

tecture: the event is altered by each new space. And

strategies so totally interdependent that it becomes

vice versa: by ascribing to a given, supposedly

impossible to determine which one initiates and which

“autonomous” space a contradictory program, the space attains new levels of meaning. Event and

one responds. The same happens with architecture and the way buildings relate to their users, or spaces

successive juxtaposition. The same occurs in archi¬

space do not merge, but affect one another. Similarly,

relate to events or programs. For any organized

if the Sistine Chapel were used for pole-vaulting

repetition of events, once announced in advance,

events, architecture would then cease to yield to

becomes a program, a descriptive notice of a formal series of proceedings.

gression would be real and all-powerful. Yet the

its customary good intentions. For a while the trans¬

When spaces and programs are largely independ¬ ent of one another, one observes a strategy of indiffer¬

transgression of cultural expectations soon becomes

ence in which architectural considerations do not

advertising rhetoric, the broken rule is integrated into everyday life, whether through symbolic or techno¬ logical motivations.

depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another. Such were the Crystal Palace and the neutral sheds of the 19th-century’s Great Exhibitions, which accommodated anything from displays of elephants draped in rare colonial silks to international boxing matches. Such, too—but

accepted. Just as violent Surrealist collages inspire

If violence is the key metaphor for the intensity of a relationship, then the very physicality of architecture

in a very different manner—was Gerrit Rietveld's

transcends the metaphor. There is a deep sensuality, an unremittent eroticism in architecture. Its under¬

house in Utrecht, a remarkable exercise in architec¬

lying violence varies according to the forces that are

tural language, and a not unpleasant house to live in, despite, or perhaps because of the fortuitous juxtapo¬ sition of space and use.

put into play—rational forces, irrational forces. They can be deficient or excessive. Little activity—hypoactivity—in a house can be as disturbing as hyper¬

At other times, architectural spaces and programs

activity. Asceticism and orgiastic excesses are closer

can become totally interdependent and fully condi¬

than architectural theorists have admitted, and the asceticism of Gerrit Rietveld's or Ludwig Wittgen¬

tion each other’s existence. In these cases, the archi¬ tect’s view of the user's needs determines every architectural decision (which may, in turn, determine

stein's house inevitably implies the most extreme bacchanals. (Cultural expectations merely affect the

the user’s attitude). The architect designs the set,

perception of violence, but do not alter its nature;

writes the script, and directs the actors. Such were the ideal kitchen installations of the twenties' Werkbund,

slapping your lover’s face is perceived differently from culture to culture.)

each step of a near-biochemical housewife carefully monitored by the design’s constant attention. Such

Architecture and events constantly transgress each other's rules, whether explicitly or implicitly.

were Meyerhold’s biomechanics, acting through Po¬

These rules, these organized compositions, may be questioned, but they always remain points of refer¬ ence. A building is a point of reference for the activities set to negate it. A theory of architecture is a

pova’s stage sets, where the characters' logic played with and against the logic of their dynamic surround¬ ings. Such also is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. It is not a question of knowing which comes first, movement or space, which molds the other, for ultimately a deep bond is involved. After all, they are caught in the same set of relationships; only the arrow of power changes direction. (If I outline these two relations of independence and interdependence, it is to insist on the fact that they exist regardless of the prescriptive ideologies—mod¬

theory of order threatened by the very use it permits. And vice versa. The integration of the concept of violence into the architectural mechanism—the purpose of my argu¬ ment—is ultimately aimed at a new pleasure of archi¬ tecture. Like any form of violence, the violence of architecture also contains the possibility of change, of renewal. Like any violence, the violence of architec-

ture is deeply Dionysian. It should be understood, and its contradictions maintained in a dynamic manner, with their conflicts and complementarity.

• In passing, two types of partial violence should be distinguished, types which are not specifically archi¬ tectural. The first is formal violence, which deals with the conflicts between objects. Such is the violence of form versus form, the violence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s juxtapositions, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau collages and other architectural collisions. Distor¬ tions, ruptures, compressions, fragmentations, and disjunctions are inherent in the manipulation of form. This is also the disruption inflicted by any new con¬ struction on its surroundings, for it not only destroys what it replaces, but violates the territory it occupies. It is the violence of Adolf Loos’ House for Tristan Tzara in the context of vernacular 19th-century suburban Paris or, alternatively, the disruptive effect of an historical allusion in a curtain-wall avenue. This con¬ textual violence is nothing but the polemical violence of difference. To discuss it is the task of sociology, psychology, and esthetics. A door flanked by broken Corinthian columns sup¬ porting a twisted neon pediment, however, suggests farce rather than violence. Yet James Joyce’s “doorlumn” was both a pun and a comment on the cultural crisis of language. Finnegans Wake implied that particular transgressions could attack the constitu¬ ent elements of architectural language—its columns, stairs, windows, and their various combinations—as they are defined by any cultural period, whether Beaux-Arts or Bauhaus. This formal disobedience is ultimately harmless and may even initiate a new style as it slowly loses the excessive character of a violated prohibition. It then announces a new pleasure and the elaboration of a new norm, which is in turn violated. The second type of partial violence is not a meta¬ phor. Programmatic violence encompasses those uses, actions, events, and programs which, by acci¬ dent or by design, are specifically evil and de¬ structive. Among them are killing, internment, and torture, which become slaughterhouses, concentra¬ tion camps or torture chambers. ■

241

Pictures from p. 44 Tschumi, "The Manhattan Transcripts," montage from The Fall, 1980. P. 45, left column, top to bottom: Bernini, Piazza Navona, Rome, 1648; Appellate Division, New York State Supreme Court, 1900; entrance, Galerie des Machines, Paris, 1889; Lang, Metropolis, 1926; Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, Rome, 1942, Right column, top to bottom: Rameau minuet, dance figure, 1750; pageants, Florence, sixteenth century; Schlemmer, Gesture Dance Diagram, 1926; Klein, layouts from Frictionless Living, 1928; football tactical moves. P. 46, top to bottom: Meyerhold and Stepanova, set for Tarelkin's Death, 1922; Golosov, Zuyev Club, Moscow, 1928; Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, 1936, Speer, Nuremberg Rally, 1936; Bel Geddes, New York World's Fair, 1939. P. 47, left, top to bottom: Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919; Schwitters, Merzbau, 1923; Malevich, Architekton, 1923-27; Rietvelt, Schroder house, Utrecht, 1924; Libera, Brussels World's Fair, 1935. Right: Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin, 1925.

1

PORTRAITS...

Richard Serra: “Yeah, Chagall’s hot. What I’m saying is that this generation right now ac¬ cepted all the structure of making painting. The structures were already determined. Symbol, sign, iconography is up for grabs. Who can do it better than whoever. Whether it’s Keith Haring or David Salle or whatever. The movement will be as good as the people are to express it. . . . This movement is a little bit like the child of Pop Art dealing with the ethos of Abstract Expressionism, so there’s a contradiction. How do you get your feeling out in terms of contemporary iconog¬ raphy? I mean how do you love Pollock and Warhol and make a connection? There are two mythological figures in the culture— Pollock and Warhol. You have a lot of young painters and a few sculptors actually, hut you have Warhol and Pollock standing for enormous notions of model figures for young painters to come up to ... I mean, that’s what we’re talking about. What do they do about that contradiction . . David Salle: “Are you asking me who my mythological figures are or are you imposing them on me?” Richard Serra: “I’m not asking you, this thing is an accepted fact.” David Salle: “Not to me.”

NECROPHILIA MON AMOUR by Joseph Kosuth (The comments I’ve written here were written in one sitting and basically as you find them. I’ve tried to be as chatty as possible; it seemed appropriate to the form of this project. Needless to say the excerpted portions of the conversation that accompany my text here, in gray, become only a quasi-factual account; not that people didn’t say what is attributed to them, but the transforma¬ tion of an oral discussion into a written text is nothing less than radical. Often, because of multiple voice-overs, the transcriber is obliged to approximate or reconstruct with only parts of the dialogue. I’ve tried to leave such parts out, but it is always a pity: they tend to be the heated or excited parts of the conversation. Also, I’ve tried to choose portions in which people other than myself speak, since I have the last word here.) I have friends, whose opinions I respect, who maintain that for me to consider the work that I discuss here is to lend credibility to it. They say if we all remain silent it will quietly disappear, like photo-realism or pattern painting. I disagree, for two reasons. First, the issues at stake have become too crucial to ignore any longer, and second, because I don’t really think the, uh, ‘shelf life’ of weak work can be terribly extended by even reams of verbiage; but I do think that relevant work can suffer from a lack of a critical dialogue. Artists who don’t risk asking themselves hard questions about what they are doing, and about what others are doing,

Richard Serra; “It’s interesting because in the ’60s the definition of an artist was open. What’s happened in the ’80s is the definition is determined and the framework’s deter¬ mined, the galleries are determined, the in¬ stitutions are determined. Ail you have to do [now] is satisfy the extension of what’s meaningful within this framework, but the no¬ tion of challenging is over for these people, they don’t even know about it. .. . You can look at what that work [of the ’60s] implies, right. Then you can look at the recoil, the reaction to that work.... So now we have Chagall.” David Salle: “Looks good, he’s very hot right now.”

In late February of this year Kathy Acker, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner invited Sandro Chia, Philip Glass, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, and Richard Serra to join them around a table for the conversation that is referred to in the following three sections of this project. The project for Kosuth and Weiner was to construct a sub¬ jective response to that conversation, which naturally centered around current art practice, production, and promotion. The project for Acker was to write about Kosuth’s and Weiner's work. The project for Robert Map¬ plethorpe was to take their pictures. —Ed.

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Sandro Chia: “Each artwork is a personal research for a certain identity. The work is the

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can’t grow. The dialogue is necessary in order to see the work, and find out its relationship with the world. Simply looking at work won’t do it; we’re just too close to it. We set up a discussion situation with people—other artists—

ing, each sculpture is just a step that you reach in this opera, in all the work you do during your life and this is why art is more in¬ teresting than politics or society or anything else. Because this is the physical proof of metaphysical existence. This way is better than politics, because it doesn’t make up your mind.” Kathy Acker: “What sort of tools and mechan¬ ics are you using now to keep on working?” Sandro Chia: “1 try to give as little impor¬ tance to materials and tools as is possible. If I use brush and canvas and colors, I’m doing painting, and i find them to fee the less para¬ doxical, the less sophisticated means of achieving my step in the feig world because they are obvious and already assumed by the tradition in the work. So there is no invest¬ ment in the materials. Don’t be distracted from the real substance of the work, which is not in the materials you use. The materials fee e-fi ..sv-euse eefe me^eiee

who share a community and a problem. In some sense we are defined by our relationship to that problem—the problem being, from my point of view, the aftermath of what is unhappily titled ‘The End of Modernism,’ or, to be more upbeat, ‘The Beginning of Post-Modernism.’ Some of us around that table, I suppose, have been participants in one, the other, or both. But no one would want to press such claims; art historians jealously guard their preserve—when we’re as ‘smart’ as they we just get called selfserving. What is more relevant is that we are functioning artists, now. And we know Ad Reinhardt had a point when he said, “In art, the end is always the beginning.” The locus of the conversation was the effect we’ve had on each other’s present work because of, rather than in spite of, the kind of baggage we brought with us to that table. This wasn’t discussed, but it organized the discussion. Anyway, as I have repeatedly said—and those who understand the value of hyperbole will appreciate it—artists work with mean¬ ing, not form (if such a separation were possible). To think the reverse is tantamount to saying that when you speak you think in terms of grammar (let’s see: i need a noun, a verb, a subject) rather than in terms of what you want to express. The analogy, once stated, is limited; language functions instrumentally in a way art does not. In art, the tradition of organized meaning functions as authority; it speaks louder than any individual can. The individual artist must rupture the forms of that authority; that is, he or she makes meaning by canceling, redirecting or reorga¬ nizing the forms of meaning that have gone before. It is in this sense that the art of this century—the ‘avant-garde’ tradition—is

Kathy Acker: “I was just asking David Salle how he worked—I was just saying I saw a painting of his that totally interested me. . . . David Salle: “On the most banal level it’s just deciding to identify with a certain image, even if the image is something which is an abstraction. The image of abstract paint¬ ing ., . and then reacting to it by putting something next to it or adding something. That’s just the obvious. Now, I mean why that color bar? And the color bar came first. 1 had an idea that I wanted to make this painting that looked like a painting that you’d see in a movie, a kind of hip movie where the decor was from the ’60s or the late ’50s. That really was the starting point ...” Barbara Kruger: “When you said you identi¬ fied with the image you didn’t say you pre¬ sented this specific image, you said you iden¬ tified with it.” David Salle: “I said, after I decided to do it, then it was a process of identification, and then wanting to in a sense make visible why 1 thought it might be of some good in the first place. Because by itself, somehow, it’s not really visible . . .”

associated with the political. Since the demise of that historicist discourse called Modernism, a kind of generalized vacuum of meaning

has

seemed to develop.

The discourse previously

framed and gave meaning to work, but it now appears to have disintegrated. The art of the late ’60s bared the mechanism of Modernism, in a sense, and much of the self-reflexivity became, as a style, simply self-consciousness. Many younger artists, a couple of whom participated in the discussion which is the subject here, as art students naturally found some of us to be the representations of authority, and therefore of institutionalized meaning. The antithesis to what we appeared to represent, the rupture-device, seemed easy: use painting. To speak positively first, the better work in this category is more complicated than that; often it’s not simply painting but a reference to painting, a kind of visual quotation, as if the artists are using the found fragments of a broken discourse. (One thinks of the beach scene in Planet of the Apes). Such work has critically internalized the issues of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and in some ways, even if through negation, is tied to that earlier work. (One of the more charitable things I could say is that when the best of the work of certain younger artists is compared with the worst of the art that preceded it, the latter could be described as a test posing as an illustration and the former as an illustration posing as a test.) I’m often asked what I have to say about this ‘rebirth’ of paint¬ ing, since I have always maintained that painting was dead. Actually, when I first described it as dead I was a kid—and I was projecting into the future. Let’s just say that it’s dying—although a slower and more agonizing death than I at first thought. Of course, what one is talking about is the death of a particular beliefsystem, the death of certain meanings. In fact, this continuation

of painting as a kind of ‘painted device’ is a necessary part of that ‘dying’ process. Work that had a critical relationship to painting

external to it provided painting with a kind of meaning from the outside, as the other half of a dialectic. Obviously, such work couldn’t directly eclipse it in any widespread or permanent way because the dynamic of painting, due to the power of its rich history, had been established as a cultural institution for too long; customs can live on as formal conventions long after they’ve lost their meaning. I think the work of this period that will remain with us will do so in spite of the fact it’s painted. As for the rest, it continues the death of painting through its uncritical extolling of painting’s past virtues while it simultaneously devalues those same traditional qualities through bad craft and an intentional undermining of an earlier era’s concept of ‘quality’ through the confused identification of formal invention with the use of what becomes too simply ‘what those other guys left behind.’ In other words, such work devalues those same qualities that provide the authority from which it speaks—as a process it is in an entropic tailspin. Such work, unlike my generation’s critique of painting, is neither reflexive nor external, but becomes naively internalized; in short, it becomes actualized in practice as a kind of terminal illness. It seems that many artists are cannibalistically revisiting the earlier art of this century and cancelling it through inflated but empty celebrations marketed as ‘formal invention.’ This erasing of earlier meaning seems destructive, rather than creative, pre¬ cisely because the critical relationship is lacking. By using the earlier work as ‘nature’—something found, to be used—and not ‘culture,’ it is being depoliticized as an institution with economic and social meaning. It is through that (missing) critique and reflexiveness that one historically locates oneself and takes responsibility for the meaning one makes, which is the conscious¬ ness one produces. It’s that distancing that describes one’s own historical location; self-knowledge and the production of knowl¬ edge itself is impossible without it. The power of the work we see in museums is exactly this. It is the authenticity of the cultural production of a human being connected to his or her historical moment so concretely that the work is experienced as real; it is the passion of a creative intelligence to the present, which informs both the past and the future. It is not that the meaning of a work of art can transcend its time, but that a work of art describes the maker’s relationship to her or his context through the struggle to make meaning, and in so doing we get a glimpse of the life of the people who shared that meaning. (For this reason, one can never make ‘authentic’ art—in the sense given here—by simply attempt¬ ing to replicate the forms of an earlier powerful art.) In this sense all art is ‘expressionist.’ But one must understand the complexity, even delicacy, of the way in which a work of art must be so singularly the concrete expression of an individual (or individuals) that it is no longer simply about that individual, but rather, is about the culture that made such expression possible. Because of this, Expressionism, as an institutionalized style, by focusing on the individual artist in a generalized way (abstracting that which must remain concrete) has become the least expres¬ sive art of our time. It is the preferred art form for the artists who have the least to say, because they count on the institution of Expressionism to do their talking for them. The “Wild Ones” couldn’t be tamer. Let’s talk about money. The art market, which by nature is conservative—particularly in this country—loves paintings. Ev¬ ery illiterate, uncultured dingbat (rich or not) knows that paint¬ ings are art, are great investments, and look swell over the couch. Forget whatever historical necessity was thoughtfully felt by some artists for a return to painting; the market is delighted to 245

Lawrence Weiner: “We were just talking about Expressionism before you came In/ Barbara Kruger: “Expressionism?” Lawrence Weiner: “Yes, and what it consti¬ tutes. Joseph {Kossuth] was explaining what it constituted for him and f was questioning whether there was any may to say that me difference is that the Expressionism that I find a bit socially distasteful is the Expres¬ sionism that uses the idea of expression a:> the content rather than the context since all art is expressive and all art is a form of ex¬ pression.” *

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Barbara Kruger: “Expressionism is identified with a history of work and to me that is the expression. It’s the expression of where someone chooses to locate themselves with¬ in a particular practice more than it is a very valorized feeling.”

Richard Serra: “I’m talking about the weight of the content on the money. I never thought of the copper penny as being political. It’s got Lincoln’s head on it. i never thought of it as being political.” Barbara Kruger: “Well, f do. Just the place¬ ment of Lincoln’s head is a specific indicator TP ■ P-P

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pick as our heroes, who we choose for our fathers.” Richard Serra: “If you want to make the cop¬ per penny political you can make every paint¬ ing in every gallery political. I think there was probably art on the money before there was money on the art.”

Sandro Chia: “During the 1960s an implicit and often explicit declaration in works by art¬ ists was that politics was a universal critical method applicable to everything. Artists wanted to open up art and politics for every¬ one. So you had an inflation of art, as well as of political, production. The result was that the artists actually ended up depriving people of the specifics of art and confusing practical political action with ideology. I think art is useful, socially useful only when it maintains distinct boundaries and intensi¬ fies itself rather than diffusing itself info everything.” Barbara Kruger: “But what I’m saying is that what is that power that names the specific thing as a political event, rather than an on¬ going sort of unraveling of events.”

5

have paintings hip again; it can pretend that the last 20 years didn’t happen, celebrating old hacks and new opportunists indis¬ criminately. How has this happened? That ‘vacuum of meaning’ caused by the collapse of the previous discourse (Modernism) and the, as yet, noticeable nonarrival of a replacement (‘postModernism’ is more of a notion than a discourse) has meant that new work is increasingly given its meaning by movement within the art market. Careers are made, not on new ideas, but new taste: as the cliche goes, art has begun to function in earnest as expensive fashion. Artists unheard of three years ago are commanding $40,000 a painting—prices it used to take artists a whole career to arrive at. Once, the idea of art historical importance stabilized the market value of an artist’s work, but prices no longer reflect this—how could they? Now they reflect speculation on short-term market scarcity; and the mode of painting is ideally suited to marketing scarcity. However, there may be problems in paradise. Sales at those prices are either between dealers (who don’t seem to keep the work for very long) or to, well, people who know little about art and take the dealers’ advice on a la mode investments. At those prices people get nervous, and when some¬ body else becomes chic, the newly arrived will unload (since their relationship to the work is superficial to begin with) and prices will most probably come crashing down—something not unlike what happened to the Greenberg gang in the late ’60s. The pity is that all this has very little to do with the art; certainly very little to do with the artist’s relationship to his or her work. But in the end it does because such pressure makes it very difficult for artists to go in the direction that their work is taking them, in such a situation there isn’t sufficient time for the work to be evaluated on its own terms and establish its own meaning. How many of us can be unaffected in our evaluation of work that got too hot too fast and then too cold too fast? When a work goes from $40,000 to, say, $8,000, will we still be able to see the ideas of the artist, or will we be looking instead at lapels too wide—or simply at ‘fail¬ ure’? I think there is a certain responsibility of the artist to fight for the meaning of her or his work, it is as much a part of the making process as the manipulation of materials; without that struggle art becomes just another job. The inarticulate murmurs of the art critical/historical establish¬ ment in the face of this market onslaught is noteworthy. Most of the ‘criticism’ is promotional, with the critics, like the dealers and collectors, trying to pick the ‘winners.’ Now this is certainly not new; some form of it is how careerism works. But with all the hoopla in the market and public media the dearth of analytical writing about this ‘new art’ isn’t just appalling, it’s frightening. I used to talk, in quasiconspiratorial terms, about an art critical/ historical market complex (to mangle Eisenhower), but I’m will¬ ing to put that away in order to appeal to those critics (well, anyway, people who like to write about art) who fancy themselves as intellectuals (is that illegal yet?), to speak up. Bure, money talks, but it doesn’t have to be a monologue. I used to complain that artists had to struggle with art historians and critics for control of the meaning of work, but at least they have a name, a face, and ideas for which they can be held accountable. There is something going on in the art world; it’s taking different forms in various countries, but its implications for this country are potentially profound. In America we tend to see cultural events in international terms: we can have no ‘national’ character yet, not in the profound sense, and so we made Modernism itself our culture. By exporting our provincialism we re-formed other cul¬ tures and made the mess look ‘universal.’ Our conception of Modernism spread with our economic and political power. Be-

cause our culture didn’t evolve from one place on the globe, we increasingly saw our location as a place in time—this century— rather than a place on Earth. We have exported a synthetic culture without a history—McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Hilton Hotel environments, and so on. To the extent that local cultures gave up their culture for ours, they of course lost control over the mean¬ ing-making mechanisms within their lives, and became politically and economically dependent on us. But both here and abroad something happened in the late ’60s—maybe the Vietnam war broke the bubble of our sales pitch. More and more, I think, artists in other countries began to re-examine the context of their life and their art—as the art we were making at the time necessitat¬ ed—and they began to look less and less to America for ‘guid¬ ance.’ Nonetheless, experimental or ‘advanced’ art—the remains of what an earlier era called ‘avant-garde’—in this country has been supported by Europeans for the past 20 years. But it’s all rather paradoxical, at the least. While we were dependent on Europe for not just money but that discourse that provides mean¬ ing (the heavier intellectual production), they were dependent on that relationship to feel anchored in the 20th century, at least this

7

half of it. It seems to be changing. The significance of, uh, ‘bye-bye to Modernism’ is that the European can look to his or her own culture for a context in which to work, but the Americans, as usual, will have to start again from scratch. The alienation our popular culture breeds hasn’t just turned off the Europeans, it’s turned us off. Making art, even just being involved with it, is one of the least alienating activities in our society. If that is subsumed by the forces of our economy, it’s a very bad sign—not just for our cultural life, but for our political life as well. Beyond the value of

6 There were some

the work itself, the reason that Clemente and Chia will have an easier time of it then, say, Salle and Schnabel, is that even while addressing the issues of Modernism, the best contemporary Italian art has always indexed itself to its own history and culture. Contemporary Italian art never seemed to export well before; outside of Italy it always seemed less ‘international’ than the work of other countries. Some of the chauvinistic painting going on elsewhere in Europe is, of course, simplistic and vulgar, but whatever our judgment of it, one thing is certain: it will force a radical re-evaluation of American art, not just there, but here. In our sociopolitical system, cultural engagement is expressed in economic terms; we can’t get away from that. Thus it won’t do to cast all art dealers and collectors as ogres. There have been great, creative dealers in this century who have been essential to the art being in the world; the warning being issued here is about the direction and character of a system, not a moralizing about individuals. (Regarding the moral problem, it is up to you, dear reader, to consider what your relationship is to the problem.) Beyond the obscenity of the present government administration, artists seem demoralized. I’ve seen, and I keep seeing, artists who have been working for years lose the personal meaning of their work as they begin to doubt their own history: it’s as though the value of their work is only the commercial value set by the market (if that were the case LeRoy Neiman and Andrew Wyeth would be among the greatest artists of our age). Denied the historicism of Modernism, denied the culture and history of an older nation, how will artists in America—and those who care about art—resist the almost total eclipse of meaning? The art market has been there all along, as has criticism of it, but what I’m discussing is a significant change in the quality of the relation¬ ship younger, supposedly radical, artists have with it, and the effect it is having on their work. Who we are, both as individuals and as a people, is inseparable from what our art means to us. ■ 247

Europe was sending for exfiedif sorts anil supporting the art of American and it was wot reciprocated m - .r ; there were very few invitations to come nsr* Now, it’s different. It was really one way- me direction for a long time.” Lawrence Weiner: “They’ve got national quotas in some of these big shows now. The say no more than 6% American, no more iha: 2% American, no more than 2% Canadian, nc more than 3% Italian, it’s not a joke. And I’m totally astounded when I hear it ami c-f course you can never get anybody to write it in print. There is no proof.”

SECTION 2,

by Lawrence Weiner

■

■

■

^■

I AM NOT CONTENT. MY COLLEAGUES AND I, DESPITE GOOD WILL, GOOD GRACE, AND A NEED TO KNOW, REVOLVED AROUND THE CONTEXT OF ART. THE QUESTIONS TO BE FOUND REVOLVE AROUND THE CONTENT OF ART. THE ECUMENICISM NECESSARY FOR A MATERIALIST ARTIST TO CONCEIVE OF THE NEEDS AND ASPIRATIONS OF EXPRESSIONISM NEW AND/OR OLD ELUDES ME. THE PRESENT PREOCCUPATION WITH THE MARKET’S DETERMINATION OF ESTHETICS IS A MOOT CONCERN. THE MARKET CAN ONLY DETERMINE THE AMBIANCE. ART IS AND MUST BE AN EMPIRICAL REALITY CONCERNED WITH THE RELATIONSHIPS OF HUMAN BEINGS TO OBJECTS AND OBJECTS TO OBJECTS IN RELATION TO HUMAN BEINGS.

PORTRAITS Lawrence Weiner, taped conversation:

IMPASSIONED WITH Since I write neither art history nor art criticism but only primary text, that is, language which is more than it is about,-the only way I can and want to write about the works Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth were making between the years 1968 and 1974 is to write with Weiner and Kosuth now. Such a methodology is subjective. Such language describes who is speaking it more

Rather than presume to know what our

than what is being spoken of. Weiner's and Kosuth’s choices of the artists they wanted to talk to and the artistic subjects they wanted to talk about give the reader "accurate" portraits of Weiner's and Kosuth's works. The more subjective, my dear Media, the more accurate. Let us rely on the most tainted of languages, such as-pornography and morality.

peers are concerned with, we’ve

chosen to invite people for a cocktail

and to basically discuss what their

LAWRENCE WEINER: THE SAME CONVERSATION Lawrence Weiner, taped conversation: There's been more of an emphasis on context than on content. OK. I'll go on record with this, but we find ourselves having to deal with work because it fits into a stylistic context which previously we didn't deal with. [Weiner is referring to the current expressionist art wave. This seems to be one of the main topics both he and Kosuth want to bring up.] / found myself going to the exhibition of somebody I’m very fond of and whom

I've known personally for a long time. I've watched him mature as an artist. I went into his exhibition. I wanted to have a feeling. It didn't have anything to do with me. It didn’t relate. I wasn’t against it; I wasn't for it. There is a lot of art being produced right now that seems to have no use for anybody except as a commercial product. From Lawrence Weiner’s 1975-1978 notebook on how art is not anecdotal but essential: “The acceptance of individual experience in itself is not fallacious but would in all necessity require its use toward an objective end to avoid the possibility of expressionism.”

concerns are and from that text we’ll

And from Lawrence Weiner’s 1981 notebook: "ART IS NOT A METAPHOR UPON THE RELATIONSHIPS OF HUMAN BEINGS TO OBJECTS AND OBJECTS TO OBJECTS IN RELATION TO HUMAN BEINGS BUT A REPRESENTATION OF AN EMPIRICAL EXISTING FACT . . .’’

be able to build our own text, perhaps

Weiner’s argument is that the value or meaning of an artwork must come from itself, not from any outside source such as fashion.

Joseph Kosuth, tape: . . . with the absence of discourse [now] there becomes a vacuum in which the market begins to provide meaning [to art events]. How does an artwork give itself value? How does an artwork mean? Edmund Husserl in the beginning of Ideas: "The object-giving (or dator) intuition of the first, ’natural’ sphere of knowledge and of all its sciences is

quoting, perhaps not quoting, perhaps

natural experience, and- the primordial dator experience is perception in the ordinary sense of the word. . . . The World is the totality of objects that can be known through experience (Erfahrung), known in terms of orderly theoretical thought on the basis of direct present (aktueller) experience.”

dropping the whole conversation

The world is the totality of (mental) apparitions. Shiftings, slidings, all that change thus deceive. Uncertainties; therefore dependent on one another for values or meanings. How can I talk about the objective when I’m a human? From Lawrence Weiner’s 1975-1978 notebook: PUT DOWN

except for one line and addressing

FOR AS LONG AS IT LASTS PICKED UP FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF A DOUBLED STANDARD. Even though, if it is so, fashion is now giving artworks their values and meanings, fashion itself isn’t objective but dependent on other apparitions.

that line.

Shiftings, slidings, all that change thus deceive—a Derrida-ian language become material. Allowing only subjectivities, where, my dear Moral Majority,

250

SOME SONG WE, by Kathy Acker there can be no absolute or simplistic morality. These apparitions become material. Not to judge absolutely but to perceive (let be) is to allow (perceive) the objective.

Lawrence Weiner, tape: Why I choose language, why you choose to paint on canvas: that's a real personal choice. This is what I've been saying for 15 years: such a personal choice doesn't mean anything in the context of art. It's not the context that counts, it’s the content. This is why Duchamp isn't an interesting artist. Context doesn't connote art: context connotes how art is used at a certain time only. Richard Serra, tape: [The relationship of my art to culture has] never changed, ever, never changed. I mean that may make me a dinosaur, but it has never changed. Barbara Kruger, tape: So, then, where do these internal interests come from? Are they genetic?

First Repetition: The Mirror Husserl: "That it [the real world, or appearance] exists—given as it is as a universe out there (daseiendes) in an experience that is continuous, and held persistently together through a thread of widespread unanimity—that is quite indubitable.” How does what is flux become objective or material? Weiner says he is a realist. Husserl: “It is thus within the intersubjectivity, which in the phenomenological reduction [or awareness of primary mental causes after allowing, bracketing givennessj has reached empirical givenness on a transcendental level, and is thus itself transcendental [that is, being-for-itself], that the real (reale) world is constituted as ‘objective,’ as being there for everyone.” Lawrence Weiner, exhibition at the Kitchen, 1976: WITH RELATION TO THE VARIOUS MANNERS OF USE: WITH PINK, VIOLET, SILVER HAVING BEEN BROUGHT TO PASS To allow apparitions as they are and to bracket all phenomena is to turn the mind on itself and trace primary causes or relation. This is the actual connection between contexts and content or the explanation of how apparitions have meaning for us. It is obvious that language represents. Lawrence Weiner, 1981 notebook: “Art (it) functions as and what it REPRESENTS.” A representation, if it is function of language is becomes the thing, the Lawrence Weiner, 1981

nonjudgmental, becomes material. The dual nature/ being and meaning. Thus the mirror, the representation appearance itself. notebook: "Art is presentational. ... Art (it) functions

as and is what it REPRESENTS.” Context and content are not dualities.

Second Repetition: Desire Lawrence Weiner, tape: Where does desire come in? We know it's a misnomer that desire equates ideology; it doesn't. . . . But desire might be the same thing as an idea. This world of shiftings, slidings, all who change are changing thus deceive. Lawrence Weiner, 1980 notebook: ". . . figure (in female clothes) with both binocular and arm obscuring face, . . . looking out of . . . street window or out

251

Lawrence Weiner, tape: As long as I can accept the fact that my job as an artist is to find the question. David Salle, tape: How do you know what kind of research you're going to do? Lawrence Weiner, tape: We are sure of the questions that we're addressing but we have no way of being sure of the answers. Kathy Acker, tape: You are sure of the questions you’re addressing? Lawrence Weiner, tape: Once material has a certain imperative about requiring certain questions that have not previously been adequately asked of it. This may sound really egotistical but when presented with a material, I begin to address its imperative. For instance, a cigarette. One of the imperatives, the one that Richard Serra presents, is that a cigarette seems to produce cancer. Another of its imperatives is that it seems to have a taste structure. The third is the fact that it burns. It burns with chemicals and without chemicals and now we're getting closer to the materiality that I can understand. I understand then that the things that burn with chemicals and without chemicals are capable of producing cancer as well as doing X and Y and Z. That’s an imperative of the material. It doesn't matter what the material is. This model of art-making resembles my belief or model that writing is listening.

Kathy Acker, tape: Are you so sure of your perception? Lawrence Weiner, tape: I am sure of my perception around the structures of [the given] knowledge and I have to take a chance on my sureness or else I would spend my life in total self-doubt of my being sure enough of the structures of what to question. But here the most dangerous area of self-doubt might be the clue. I remember a college professor of mine, Kurt Wolff, said that the crux of a person’s work—I believe he was talking about Marx—could be found where Marx was contradicting himself. Lawrence Weiner, 1980 notebook: IT I S/SHOULD BE—THE CONTENT THAT GIVES THE PERCEPTIONS AND OBSERVATIONS OF AN ARTIST (WITHIN THE PRESENTATION/ART) A USE FACTOR WITHIN THE SOCIETY. Content is not function and content determines function. Function cannot determine content. Yet in the same notebook he says, “THE CONCEPT (IDEA) OF ENDEAVOR (WORK) WITHOUT A COMMITMENT (POLITICAL) IS NOT A REASONABLE ASSUMPTION.” The turnings and twistings, the language of uncertainty the uncertain language, must be left to turn and twist.

Lawrence Weiner, tape: Where does desire come in? We know it's a misnomer that desire equates ideology, it doesn’t. Desire is not the same thing as ideology. But desire might be the same thing as an idea. David Salle, tape: If you say that, then this is an idea/desire. It's a desire to have this thing here, you know, to look at it and then to react to it. Kosuth in quoting Jurgen Habermas’ "Why More Philosophy," 1971, partially explains why art language in order to be language can no longer be scientific or pure (as is Weiner's): “Philosophical thought after Hegel has passed into a new medium ... we understand it as critique. Critical of the philosophy of

of boat window: obverse. L.W. is at present travelling.” Above all, this is the world of desire. Of my inability to know anything and of

origins, it dispenses with ultimate grounds and with an affirmative exegesis of the whole of things in being. . . . Critical, finally, of the elitist manner in which traditional philosophy is understood, the new philosophy insists on universal enlightenment [without absolutes, without any language in which any meaning

my questioning.

is absolute] including enlightenment about itself."

JOSEPH KOSUTH: A CONVERSATION WITH HART CRANE On the Nature of Conceptual Art Language (All of the following statements by Joseph Kosuth except those indicated as abstracted from the taped conversation come from the recent catalogue of his work The Making of Meaning, Selected Writings and Documentation of

Investigations on Art Since 1965, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Kunsthalle Bielefeld. The quotations from Hart Crane are from his 1930 poem The Bridge.) Joseph Kosuth: “Our youth was spent in an environment clouded over by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust; our children face an equally grisly, and more likely, prospect: life under the merged bureaucracies of multi-national corporations and Communist state capitalism . . Hart Crane:

cultural authority. Expressionism, which is more about the ism than about the expression, is organized to function within the matrix, i.e., a sort of map of power relations within the culture. So the artwork that is expressing itself is expressing itself within an art market which is giving this "expression" its real meaning. Therefore the art critics and the art historians love expressionism because they can control it[s values and meanings], that is, they can make culture out of it. The art critics and the art historians want those artists the meanings of whose work they can define. And culture is one of the tools the power elite uses to control a populace. For instance, in 18th- and 19th-century'Ireland, Irish children learned in their schools English history and literature, rather than Irish, as do Americans. What does it mean when a child is educated in this country? Hart Crane: And does the Daemon take you home, also,

I started walking home across the Bridge . . .

Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?

Joseph Kosuth: “Art cannot be apolitical. When I realize this I must ask myself:

After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors—

if art is necessarily political (though not necessarily about politics) is it not

The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,

necessary to make one’s politics explicit? If art is context dependent (as I’ve always maintained) then it cannot escape a socio-political context of meaning (ignoring this issue only means that one’s art drifts into one)."

Richard Serra, tape: It's all very 19th century for probably all of us. Somebody else controls the money, the power, the framing, the distribution, for all of us. Sandro Chia, tape: The power Is very clear. Because it’s not in fact a political power, it’s economic power and economic power is something that decides how to split the world, the amount that South America belongs to the United States and Eastern Europe belongs to the Russians and there is nothing to do in relation to this situation. Nothing can change it. Joseph Kosuth: “For this [reason] it is necessary to make one’s politics explicit (in some way) and work toward constructing a socio-political context of one's own in which (cultural) actions are anchored for meaning."

Joseph Kosuth, tape: There are no new forms only new meanings. An artist is engaged in the making of meaning, whether it's the cancellation of meaning or not. Hart Crane: “What do you want? getting weak on the links?

On the Art Market Joseph Kosuth, tape: I have no competitive feelings toward Lawrence [Weiner], We share a certain history from a period and in that sense it's that we're separated by that which we share, almost. I mean, we share history, too. [To Richard Serra] You were uncomfortable standing next to me in the portrait for Leo [Castelli’s] anniversary, remember? Richard Serra, tape: Only because I was pushed into the bathroom. Of course the personal is only trivial. Joseph Kosuth: “The other men—Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner—have watched their [own] work take on a ‘Conceptual Art’ association almost by accident. . . . Lawrence Weiner, who gave up painting in the spring of 1968,

[Purely conceptual art is first seen . . . around 1966] changed his notion of ‘place’ (in the [Carl] Andrean sense) from the context of the canvas (which could only be specific) to a context which was ‘general,’ yet all the while continuing his concern with specific materials and processes.” Hart Crane: Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!

fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change—IS THIS

Whose hideous laughter is a bellows mirth

FOURTEENTH? it’s half past six she said—if you don’t like my gate why did you swing on it, why didja swing on it anyhow—"

The Personal

Two Kinds of Language Last night I slept with and fell in love with a painter. Joseph Kosuth: "One initiates change by first clarifying and articulating, that is, raising one’s consciousness of the present in its particularity as the arena of one's cultural engagement.”

To destroy meaning. Where will I find my clue among those humans who

I was so nervous because it is the first time in a year I’m sleeping with someone I like, I can't talk.

refuse to speak, who don’t let go and move outward without meaning, among those who only judge?

Joseph Kosuth: “The project now for art can be seen as both sides of the

Hart Crane: And when they dragged your retching flesh, Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore— That last night on the ballot rounds, did you Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe? An art magazine in language defines. An art magazine mediates between the artist and/or the artwork and the reader who may or may not actually see the work by defining the meanings and the values of the work. By giving language. The purposes of these definitions, as with all media definitions, are at least partially economic and power control, in this case, in the realm of culture. Not to know where my language is going. To be unsure of my subject matter. Not to know my tools.

The Key Hart Crane: This answer lives like verdigris, like hair

hermeneutic circle: demystification and restoration of meaning.” Hart Crane:

Joseph Kosuth: "Philosophical (theoretical) language is (momentarily) a parole within the langue of art. Such an understanding, however, tells us at the same moment that the langue of art is itself a parole within that larger world of significance; that discourse which is both social and historical. The circularity of which one speaks is the circularity of language, a language, culture." I, eye, aye. The subject subjective is the one who perceives out through physical and mental senses. The personal, when not limited and rigidified but used to see, as in Joyce’s writings, is actual language that is taking place. Not to define absolutely, even if language is confusing, but to keep moving outward, Hart Crane: Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,

Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;

0 Hand of Fire gatherest—

The Lack of Anything Personal Joseph Kosuth, tape: Art issues can't be separated from the other issues. [For instance, an issue:] The market is one form of authority. A particular kind of

Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.

Personal sexual or any of the personal details of a life are not mentioned in an art magazine.

■

Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner are artists who live in New York. Kathy Acker is a writer whose most recent novel is

Great Expectations, she is also author of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula.

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LARRY BELL, Ferus Gallery: Bell, in this most recent group of glass boxes, has eliminated the seductive jewel-like elements of his previous work and focused his attention predominantly on the containment of light and the use of light as volume. The sparkling allure of the earlier work, the moving frag¬ mentation of surrounding space ac¬ complished by the juxtaposition of mirrored and transparent surfaces and the play of light from coatings that reflect one color and transmit another, is gone, as are the reflected variations on geometrical patterns. The poetic restructuring of space has here given way to a tougher more esoteric concern for the nature of sculptural space and the use of the light and atmosphere

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resolutely anti-C6zanne.) It’s a nice con¬ junction, for as an artist of pragmatic but searching intellect (however different they are in most other ways), Downes seems a natural heir to Porter. He is

MM

., V

clearly also ambitious to help raise the realist position to a status of intellectual respectability and influence, an effort that, with the impetus already given it by Linda Nochlin among others, seems a little less quixotic every day. Realists often have didactic inclinations, of course; it's an aspect of their commit¬ ment to the world. What’s rare is seeing that wished-for authority so thoroughly

Rackstraw Downes, The Natural History Museum, 1977, oil on canvas, 14 x 41 te"

can intuit about their temperaments, might have been expected to be natu¬

Indeed, like most of Martin's work these seem inducements to meditation,

rally antagonistic to it. The strongest examples of this tension were, perhaps, the strange, banked fires of AGNES MARTIN and Brice Marden, artists

all the more

whose appeal was and remains subtly but pervasively against-the-grain, sub¬ versive in nuance, feeling, mystique: not the exactness of the grid but the tremulousness of the pencilled line bumping over the tooth of the canvas,

effective for being inti¬

mately small. It has been said that they are inspired by the colors of the South¬ west, where Martin makes her home; this seems possible, but of no great moment. The sites to which Martin con¬ tinually directs us are decidedly of the mind. They open up, as it were, behind one’s eyes, consciousness of atranquil, melting realm.

and not the monochrome slab but the felt analogy of tender oil/wax medium to sensitive flesh. And, in both, colors that

—PETER SCHJELDAHL

dream of landscape. The abatement of the tension in recent years, with the ebbing of reductivism, has changed

RACKSTRAW DOWNES, Kornblee Gallery:

nothing in the orientation of either artist, but at least in Martin’s work it might be partly accountable for a newly relaxed, improvisatory air, plus further evidence of a "mystical” bent. Her new watercolors are quite the most exquisitely beautiful work of hers I've seen, and the most resonant. There were 51 watercolors in the show, all 9 inches square within gray linen mats. The ruled pencil and occa¬ sional red-ink drawing is strictly horizon¬ tal in all except two, but extremely var¬ ied as to the number and placement of the lines; there were few repeated de¬ signs. The colors, generally pale blues, pinks, salmons, yellows, are similarly varied, by numberless minute differ¬ ences of saturation and tone. The paper is rag tracing paper, puckered by the water. From a distance, the surface looks soft, like rumpled bedsheet; up close, its hard finish comes as some¬ thing of a shock. Several things— simplicity, the handmade look, the red ink, the wan intensity of the colors (though not at all the design)— contribute to an evocation of tantric diagrams.

RACKSTRAW DOWNES' new landand cityscapes are peculiarly riveting to the gaze and linger in the mind with a peculiar stubbornness. Talking with the artist helped me think about why. Downes, who paints on site, denied being in the least influenced by photography—specifically the use of the wide-angle lens, which the look of his smallish panoramas suggests. It seems that the wide-angle effect, of a space more capacious than even the paintings’ long horizontal format would appear to make possible, is arrived at by straight perceptual means. Indeed, though the space of the paintings does look subtly distorted, condensed, curved, it lacks the “belled," convex distortion of the wideangle photograph; if anything, it feels concave, enveloping. This is the way we truly experience space, Downes be¬ lieves. The trick, if that’s what it is, is in keeping in mind the scene to be painted as a surround; the peripheries are turned toward, rendered, as it were, head-on at an angle. (This is mostly my guesswork here, by the way, and not Downes talking.) Ordered on the flat canvas, the scene exerts a terrific mag¬

netism. From no distance is it possible to take in the picture as a whole thing; one is drawn almost kinesthetically, with a sense of being gently but firmly lo¬ cated, front and center. The effect is to make each scene—Central Park, River¬ side

Drive,

Maine

beach

or

countryside—a place. Downes' radical tinkering with spa¬ tial conventions of landscape contrasts oddly and pleasingly with the conserva¬ tive look of the paintings, whose re¬ miniscences of the Barbizon and Boudin have drawn comment. These reminiscences have most to do, perhaps, with the handling of the light, as a pallid radiance adjusted to the fiction of a particular weather and time of day (it takes Downes years to finish some pictures). Actually, the impulse in the work seems both older and newer than the 19th century, more Dutch or Flemish in its meticulous detailing and more modern in its vernacular ac¬ ceptance of a nature everywhere inter¬ penetrated with a settled industrial cul¬ ture. Downes’ pastorals are sternly undreamy, and for all their skill are rarely virtuosic (an exception being a stunning rain-slick Broadway). The pigment is bone dry, which undercuts the “painted” feel very much to the benefit of the realism. The emotional tone is restrained sometimes to the point of chilliness, even where the light is gol¬ den. The pleasure, for me astringent and intense, is in multiple felicities au¬ sterely marshalled in the service of fact. Looking and looking at Downes' new pictures, one feels continually that one has only begun to look. Downes is currently editing a selec-. tion of art criticism by the late Fairfield Porter, a painter whose idiosyncratic theories of art and culture were of a piece with his revitalization of neglected

backed up in the work itself. With his new paintings, Downes becomes a formidable presence in American art.

—PETER SCHJELDAHL

JOEL SHAPIRO, Paula Cooper Gal¬ lery: JOEL SHAPIRO is a master of small sculpture. In recent years he has done toylike figures that in effect stigmatized the stigma of preciousness. Sympathy is that kind of appropriation which the tiny chairs, tables, and houses of Sha¬ piro rebuked: all a coarse cast-iron, they denied our bourgeois delight in the master artisan and the pretty object; that is, they denied fetishism (in maker and owner) and reversed our ideas of smallness. They just did not seem that small: the cast-iron connoted an indus¬ trial giantism, and the reduction in scale compelled the reverse operation—an imaginative enlargement. Scale was also affected by the constancy of the gray-black cast-iron color and a coor¬ dinated (if not narrative or serial) dis¬ play. In general, Shapiro took the reti¬ cence out of Minimalism and kept the impersonality in; the pieces were emo¬ tive but not emotional. The latest sculptures are not replicas of known objects, so preciousness is not so much an issue now. However, the seven pieces in the show are small (one to two feet high, two to three feet long), a fact that is here mitigated by the ar¬ chitectural project of the work; angular and planar, the sculptures define the entire space of the gallery: the quality of extension counteracts that of compres¬ sion. As these are floor-pieces, they define that space as well; and the sculptures become abstract lines-on a two-dimensional plane. All the sculptures are angles of one sort or another, which makes them seem the detritus of one formal system; the works are both single and parts of a

ground, the continuous void from which these portraits arise. The work oozes emotionalism. In fact to call it “projec¬

patches of light and dark energy fields, again somewhat like an Abstract Ex¬

tion’’ is a double entendre pointing to an

pressionist work. Campus’ ritualistic technological trappings have fallen

important aspect of Campus’s con¬

away;

slides

and

simple

projectors

cerns: it refers to the form/medium as

seem nearly frail in the light of his earlier

well as the projection of psyche through

work. The tone of the installation is

faces; projected light and shade mingle with projected and withheld emotions.

primitive and spiritual. These giant por¬

chart of emotions. Using Polaroid"film,

traits recall the distinctly homocentric tone of the expressionist era—man in the center, in the dark.

Campus let the state of his subjects'

—EDIT DE AK

The human face is both reservoir and

emotions evolve from picture to picture, always showing the Polaroid to the per¬ formers he works with before taking the next one, thus “building up” the image. The slides are made from the final se¬ lection of Polaroids. Campus empha¬ sizes the performance quality of his images rather than their portraiture as¬ pect. This is significant. Video and Po¬ laroid, those instant tools of self-exami¬

former whole or nucleus. So it is not long before ideas of society and the indi¬ vidual crop up. Factionalism is felt; the sculptures are cool and antagonistic like border states. These pieces then work in many ways: abstractly, as axial markers, lines on a plane (floor) and planes in space; and emblematically, as individual states in a greater community. To Sha¬ piro “less is more” more than ever.

—HAL FOSTER

Because of the problems in tamper¬ ing with his systems, along with the fact that the era of the Nauman-SonnierOppenheim type of participatory body

1978-79

counterpart in most of the earth’s art. Gene Thornton has commented on these photographs disapprovingly, im¬ plying that there was something devi¬

ualizes the features of his subjects through his lighting, but he aims at a universal portrait of the inner state, us¬

recalls monumental Abstract Expres¬

ous about them since, although they purported to be documentary, they re¬ minded him of some of Walker Evans' and Harry Callahan’s work. There is a curious kind of truth in the latter percep¬ tion, but it has nothing to do with the

jected image for prerecorded tapes of heads, but there he still retained an aggressive high-tech hardware profile,

projects of the '30s and ’40s. Walking

astronauts’ knowing about fine photog¬ raphy, or even with their having picked

close to these images they dissolve into

up a vernacular style that may derive

His new show is a minimal-tech instal¬ lation. The totally darkened gallery

ming continuously, the machines pro¬ ject three colossal floor-to-ceiling im¬ ages of faces, one per wall. The fourth wall is without a picture, like the archi¬ tectonic component of the dark void, reserved for the viewer as some sort of psychological support, a reminder that she is there as the audience.

technologically complex participatory/

The larger-than-film-screen size of these high-contrast black and white

figurative installations become a highly interdependent system. For example,

photo projections and the highly dra¬ matic lighting on the faces are close to

sharpening the projected video picture means constricting the size of the im¬ age, which in turn changes the scale of

cinematic effects of the horror-movie kind. Sharply lit areas seem to com¬

participant. The viewer's physical situa¬ tion, which triggers the projection of her own image, is finally limited to a rigid standstill in a single privileged spot.

images of cardboard people from the mass media. Campus also de-individ-

purposes, but that what they show is so

sionist painting the scale of which was influenced, in part, by the many mural

The careful thoughtfulness that char¬ acterizes PETER CAMPUS'S work lies at the very base of the innate possibilities of his medium. Each successive Cam¬ pus exhibition can be seen as another

the spatial scheme, which in turn cur¬ tails the movement and position of the

exotic and extraordinary, and without a

The mural scale of these projections

holds three slide projectors in a barren and simple theatrical continuum. Hum¬

refining the elements of his electronic projections. Although each element is a richly laden term in itself, Campus's

non-artist or a machine. The slipperiest thing about reviewing NASA’s pictures,

a manner different from the portraiture of the recent past—those stock Pop

changed, Campus’s recent direction is not surprising. Last year at the Whitney

PETER CAMPUS, Paula Cooper Gal¬ lery:

step in the process of adjusting and

incite all the usual arguments about whether a work of art can be made by a

though, is not the fact that they were made for technical and documentary

ing the human visage as an abstract of emotions.

the video projectors with their compact military elegance.

Volume XVII

A gallery show of photographs made in space and on the moon will inevitably

nation, reintroduced the figure into art in

art with a technologically constructed angle seems to be bygone and

he abandoned the viewer and her pro¬

NASA Photographs, Light Gallery:

press a woman’s face to the likeness of a skull, while diagonal zones of shadow dissect the frontal portrait of a man. Bright photons light up fragments of skin, while the more expressive fea¬ tures, like eyes or lips, are drenched in shade, merging into the dark back¬

spring from the mind of a child of our TV generation,battered by images of aliens overtaking the world, 30-second sales raps and subliminal propagandizing. Fischer's message may or may not come through to every viewer stumbling upon the installation, but the strength of the selective vision behind each lamp comes through. Such subjective object¬ making is rare these days, when an artist may be known for his materials as much as for his statements. As for technique, the lamps owe their slapdash energy to the nuts-and-bolts school of sculpture. Each one seems assembled from found objects that were just biding time till they could get into a Fischer lamp. The tiny pleated shade perched on top of the curvy wrought-iron base of Dinner Lamp per¬ sonifies smug introspection, much as Wired, with its cylinder shade dispro¬ portionate to its chicken-wire wrap¬ around base, is comic in the juxtaposi¬ tion of shape and size. On a purely formal level, each lamp is carefully bal¬ anced and ordered so that angle con¬ NASA photograph ot the Apollo XII Mission, 1969 (Space Imagery Center, University of Arizona)

R. M. Fischer. Lobster Lamp, 1978, mixed media, 112 x 46 x 12"

from, say, Evans. Instead, one suspects that any good artist NASA could have afforded to send to the moon would have made very similar pictures. I imagine that the astro¬

series of photographs communicates plain, uninflected joy in a degree that little other art in our aged, cultured world

tion reversed—lamps parading as peo¬ ple. Each one in his installation has a personality all its own; the pseudo-fan¬

does. The pure glamour of machines that can sustain men on that barren

tasy of L.A. Lamp, the demure pretti¬ ness of Dinner Lamp, the furtive hunch

nauts must have sat through a lecture or two on the rudiments of clear photogra¬

planet is a surpassing poetry of its own. And whatever human story up there was

of Street Lamp.

phy: how to concentrate a picture on the most important thing happening, how to

filled with the layered meanings, the irony that we demand of art—the story, say, of the interactions of the space¬ men, their fear, adventure, and what must have been the disappointment of the one who could not land on the moon—was not the subject of these pictures to begin with. They are any¬ thing but pretentious (the single, mildly pretentious thing about the show was the implied connection it made between NASA's photographs and various new art that proffers a maplike, pseudo¬ scientific look). If anything about them is

exclude all the superfluous things that will get in, how to make sure the light is dramatic, etc. Next, I am sure that they were given a list of things not to forget to photograph, things that would satisfy both scientific and popular curiosity, as well as everyone’s sense of romance. And what the astronauts came back with is the most common-sense version of a moon trip possible. What Thornton wants beyond this is the intricate, lay¬ ered human poetry that good art pro¬ vides but that proceeds not just from a highly developed sensibility, but from the earth's having been pictured so

same name. In it a strange metamor¬ phosis takes place from one image to another. Harshly lit, a man cringes un¬ der an interrogation lamp in panel one; lobster dinner with all the trimmings is advertised in panel two; a man lies prone in panel three, arms bandaged and splinted. Panel four features a Fi¬ scher lamp, large, red and tubular, with

placed pieces that introduced “ab¬ stract” to the public; pieces devoid of inherent content, yet purveying a pointof-view from the attitude of each plane. Eccentricity doesn’t hide this quality in Fischer’s lamps—they combine under¬ statement with straight funk. For all their bizarre humor they hint of quite serious issues. There seems little danger that anyone could dismiss them as mere functional objects. Having them around for a while might do strange things to anyone's subconscious.

—DEBORAH PERLBERG

VALERIE JAUDON, Holly Solomon Gallery: Where Sarkisian is cold, VALERIE

two conical metal lamps extended out from the body on metal arms.

JAUDON is detached. Her paintings

hard to take, I suspect it is their pure

Lobster Lamp sums up the process. Not necessarily a specific illustration of one thing changing into the other, the

many times that even its most savage

adventure and delight, which we are unused to seeing recounted in a gallery of modern art.

parts are now human.

—LEO RUBINFIEN

attach themselves to you. The seven works in her recent show are command¬ ing, imperious. Emanating confidence and assured of close scrutiny, they radi¬ ate self-esteem. These words aren't used to describe the hauteur of an aristocrat, but the dignity of the didact who must remain separate in order to be

If NASA’s moon pictures lack great subtlety and complexity it is not be¬

325

But personality is only part of the problem Fischer confronts with his hu¬ manoid beacons. Served Up takes its title from a four-part photograph of the

veys attitude, stance declares mood. It harks back to the kind of carefully

cause the astronauts were inadequate artists, but because the moon is so foreign. It is also because the enterprise

R.M. FISCHER, Artists Space:

that these pictures describe is itself so magnificent that the emotion they evoke

lampshades on their heads. If there is, R.M. FISCHER is the one who knows the meaning behind this seemingly mean¬ ingless act. Fischer’s lamp objects have an eerie feeling of the same transforma¬

can only be simple and celebrative. The gold-shrouded, spidery Lunar Lander falling away toward the moon in one

There may be a reason why rational men parade around at parties with

photo hints at humans depersonalized, processed, packaged and "served up" as the ultimate object. Appearing in some strange new guise as victims of advertising hype and TV hard sell, Fischer’s objects give warning against the final onslaught of the media age. Partly caricature, partly social criticism, Served Up owes a debt to low-budget horror movies, McLuhanism, and Madi¬ son Avenue. Its vision of the dire conse¬ quences of media infiltration could only

don’t invite you into them, nor do they

instructive. The paintings can’t risk be¬ ing your friends, they won’t presume to be your betters. Named for towns in Mississippi (Jaudon’s birthplace)—Courtland, Waveland, Yocona, Capell, Leland, Mound Bayou, State Line—the canvases

(they're actually painted on cotton duck, less coarse a weave than canvas,

complexity of readings.

Dutch landscape, and it is true that he is

documented its own projects as well as

The decorative arts transform func¬

compulsive as regards that genre. But

but “ducks" is hardly synonymous with "canvases”) show filaments intertwin¬

perhaps it is more apropos, as far as the

Panoramas go, to recall Dutch carto¬

ing in improbable lattices and unlikely

tional objects into objects of beauty. The fine arts produce objects of con¬ templation. Jaudon angles for painting

the heyday of the automotive industry in Automerica, "a trip down U.S. High¬ ways from World War II to the Future.”

graphy. Relevant to both Dibbets and

lacings. Close up to a painting you get

that is contemplative and decorative; its

Chevrolet Training Film: The Remake

the early cartographers is the need to

that vertiginous feeling accompanying close examination of the weave of a

function: to provide networks, connec¬ tions and interstices to be completed by

occurs on a stage with video screen,

translate volumes to planes, the need to

desk, and in the corner a painted

reconcile known wholes (like the sphere

cable-knit sweater, a rug, or a tapestry.

the viewer, just as the use of a tool is to be determined by its user. (Duchamp:

plywood facsimile of the rear end of a

of the globe) with observed parts (like a

Bel Air Chevrolet. The performance be¬

coastline), which is to say, the need to

gins with a videotape showing a vintage

mediate rationalist and empirical meth¬

salesman's training film produced by

You try to follow the line of a filament, it gets away from you; a mystery of weav¬ ing that eludes and confounds the eye. Further away from the painting you’re overwhelmed by the overall orchestra¬ tion of its pattern. Its jeweled luminosity (five of the paintings have metallic pig¬ ment mixed with the oil paint) invokes the complexities of filigree. Like filigree, Jaudon’s paintings have no beginning or ending, only centers and excres¬ cences. As a decorative art, filigree flourished in Celtic and Islamic culture,

use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.) The paintings are visually intricate, tex-

odologies.

be

turally rich, and contentually nonpre-

Chevrolet. When the film cuts to a dem¬

imagination, and its vehicle, drawing

onstration, the live performance begins.

scriptive.

Each

painting

One

mediation

may

accommo¬

(one thinks of the way the old cartogra¬

dates the confluence and incongruity of connection and missed connection.

phers drew fear and desire into the lines

The mise-en-scene 1 revolves around Dick, played by Chip Lord, trying to

of the dimly known continents). It is the

Each filament is a road that might or

trade in his 1959 Chevrolet for a new

(co)operation

might not end precipitously. The stag¬ gering aspect of Jaudon's work is that

model. Bob, a local salesman played by

cism, and imagination or faith that ac¬

Phil Garner, is $42 higher than a com¬

counts, it seems, for the fineness of

petitive dealer, but through a series of

those old maps—to say nothing of the

deliberately confusing calculations,

the painting may end, but the suggest¬ ed pattern is infinite.

of

rationalism,

empiri¬

great Flemish Renaissance painting.

Bob convinces Dick to buy the car from

and Jaudon's invented patterns share

One sees a bit of that fineness in Dib¬ bets’ work.

him for $22 more than the competitor’s

stylistic similarities with the decorative work of those civilizations. But this is

—HAL FOSTER

1979 and Jaudon can't hope to validate her work by connecting it with the glory that was Kells and the grandeur that was Constantinople. She doesn’t.

—CARRIE RICKEY

the performance reverts back to the

JAN DIBBETS, Leo Castelli Gallery:

video, where the film narrator com¬ ments on the interaction.

JAN DIBBETS has pursued concerns whose parameters were set nearly a decade ago; perhaps they have come to fruition in his newest works, entitled

ANT FARM: ANT FARM, a San Francisco-based collective, has produced several works, featuring that American culture icon—

Jaudon’s patterning frees painting from the burden of cerebration placed

Structure Panoramas. In these works, photographs of contiguous pieces of

the automobile.

upon it by history. This isn’t to say her paintings aren’t intelligent, but name a

ground (mostly cobblestone streets)

created the Cadillac Ranch, 10 vintage

are composed in arcs, semi-circles or semi-ellipses, with the squares of the print format drawn together to be flush

Cadillacs (1948-1962) planted nose

painting that can pass a Stanford-Binet test. These paintings give us permis¬ sion to think they’re beautiful, give us permission to think, don’t think for us. Their complexity of form is obviously the result of Jaudon's painstaking design, but they demand of the viewer an equal

In

1974 Ant Farm

down alongside Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas. A less sedate project, Media

or "meet” with the curvilinear design.

Burn, consisted of a specially re¬

Underneath each arc is a recondite geometric system which either defines

vamped Cadillac crashing through a

the image or is derived from it.

the parking lot of San Francisco’s Cow

Dibbets’

work

is often

related

to

bid. With the agreement consummated,

barricade of burning television sets in Palace in 1975. Ant Farm has lovingly

Like Ant Farm’s other works, The Re¬ make has strong elements of satire and self-effacing comedy.

Running less

than 30 minutes, the characterizations are well developed, and the action, centering around the salesman’s ploys, proceeds at a rapid pace—the reason¬ ing and logic becoming more unrealis¬ tic as the performance draws to its climax. The selection of this particular film as the core involves not only its American automobilia content, but also the viewpoint that selling is art. For example, in the final video clip the narrator refers to the saleman as “a real artist,” and in analyzing the interaction, he identifies “the magnificent moment.” "The magnificent moment," it seems, is not too distant from the photographic decisive moment, and the "real artist” is the individual who can persist in pulling off a ruse by coercing another person to accept his point of view. The Remake uses the automobile icon and tradition not only as a statement about the con¬ sumer culture, but also about art and artists. The most provocative aspect of Ant Farm’s work is its ability to raise issues without

becoming

dogmatic.

The

"Farmers," mostly in their 30s, are nos¬ talgically linked to the late 1950s and early 1960s automobile era. But they understand that the wonderful exces¬ siveness of that period has no place now or in the future, and they com¬ Valerie Jaudon, Mound Bayou. 1978, oil and metallic pigment on canvas, 6' square

Jan Dibbets, Structure Panorama 360°. 1978, pencil and black and white photographs on paper, 36VS> x 40%".

memorate the ambiguous role of the car in American culture. Ant Farm conveys

sion of paper thin, pop-out card sur¬ faces. With his deep, angular composi¬

tive description of another medium or

tions,

“post modernist" work, Each element is a solid made of ply¬

rigorous

use

of

single-point

perspective, and knack for cutting on volume, Yasujiro Ozu would’ve beerva superb stereo filmmaker. Hitchcock’s major discovery is that the pronounced sense of separation between the planes of the 3-D image increases in inverse proportion to the busyness of the composition. Unlike those of conventional films, 3-D closeups are less claustrophobic than mid¬ dle-shots. This paradox is exploited best in the plotting-the-murder scene. A series of looming reverse-angle closeups expand the cramped set to Grand Canyon dimensions, with Milland and Dawson drawling at each other across a cosmic void. Having distended space like an accordian, Hitchcock snaps it back with a miniaturizing overhead shot

Ant Farm, Chevrolet Training Film: The Remake. 1978 performance at La Mamelle.

the ambivalent relationship we all have with the automobile with a polished sense of humor and craftsmanship.

—HAL FISCHER

1979-80

ALFRED HITCHCOCK, “Dial M For Murder” (in 3-D): The comically brief 3-D or stereo movie cycle was launched in late 1952 and peaked that summer. The craze

ment. When the camera dollies back a bit to smack your eye with an enormous, suddenly disclosed plateau, you’re as stunned by unused possibilities as you are by the coffee table.

is reserved for the murder sequence. As

TONY SMITH, Pace Gallery: Ten Elements is the title of a recent

original version has premiered at a low¬ er Manhattan revival theater as part of a pre-holographic, film-as-installation 3-

the camera with one shapely, supplicat¬

champion Ray Milland decides to do away with Grace Kelly, his wealthy, un¬ faithful wife, and blackmails an old schoolmate, Anthony Dawson, to do the job. Kelly unexpectedly dispatches her attacker with a pair of scissors; Milland

327

centrate one’s attention also prevents him from opening up any really deep space or choreographing much move¬

opus, Dial M For Murder, 1954, and the film was released flat. Belatedly, the

D retrospective. Taken from a hit Broadway play, Dial M is a genteel thriller. Ex-Wimbledon

let the format dramatize itself, my suspi¬ cion is that those most excited by the film's spacial metaphysics haven’t seen much 3-D recently.) Negative space is recorded on film to the same degree as positive, so 3-D “emptiness" has a tan¬ gible, almost viscous quality, as though

shifts gears to have her framed. (“In¬ genious and almost entertaining," Pau¬

the world were set inside an aquarium. (Jack Arnold made dialectical use of

line Kael called it.) A good 90 percent of

this in his 1954 Creature From the Black Lagoon, a 3-D film with extensive under¬

the action is confined to the incongru¬ ously cramped and dowdy Milland-Kelly living room. Hitchcock made no at¬

water

sequences.)

Moreover,

3-D

depth is a startlingly unnatural succes¬

the elements resist entropy or refuse to be “reduced” to a simple or “economic configuration (e.g. for three things, an equilateral triangle: for four, a square; etc.). The work is a study in disequilibri¬

that the gestalts of minimalist sculpture are not, with the result that the "experi¬

—J. HOBERMAN

ing arm. Such canny restraint allows the ste¬ reo image to assert its own characteris¬ tics. (Given Hitchcock’s willingness to

even field of things. Somehow Smith “catches" disorder and constructs a caprice that lasts. As far as that goes,

room and the clean diagonals of the

Hitchcock's problem is the same as his solution. The set which serves to con¬

she’s being throttled, Grace Kelly pelts

allow it. Nor will the disarray let one reorder the elements (visually) as an

Ten Elements could be seen in terms of what is not minimalist about it. For

visual obstacle course-cum-vortex to suck the viewer in, the lone use of the proscenium-breaking projectile effect

was long over by the time ALFRED HITCHCOCK finished his stereoscopic

can be so assembled. One wants to imagine it so, but the formal oddity won’t

that supposedly took a week to shoot) Hitchcock runs out of ideas. The film's last half is 45 minutes of sullen cross¬ cutting between the overstuffed living

derplay the stereo effects. Other 3-D productions assaulted au¬ diences with hurtling tomahawks or

of monumentalized bric-a-brac—tea cups, tennis trophies, jade Buddhas— in which a Victorian stereopticon wouldn’t seem out of place. With this

they are technically parts of one original whole, and Smith does claim that they

um (or "inefficiency”) in a context—

outside stairwell where the proof of Kel¬ ly’s innocence is stashed. Ultimately,

cedes his actors behind the Chippen¬ dales. His foreground is a fussy clutter

wood and painted black, and they are all bizarre; there are cubes that lean, wedges that barely stand—few resem¬ ble common forms. Yet, as elements,

to map out the crime in aerial relief. However, after the killing (a typically kinky montage of jutting, boxy forms

tempt to open the piece up—his strategy being to chamberize and un¬

Jane Russell’s bosom; Hitchcock re¬

Volume XVIII

term (here, architecture), like a lot of

work by TONY SMITH. It’s a fine sculp¬ ture but, as it looks like a model for a larger project, it’s hard to know how it should be discussed. The case itself is not so troublesome (it's likely that the present version is the only version we ll see); what is troublesome is that it leads one to consider what "sculpture" is

architecture —that values the opposite things.

example, each element is "composi¬ tional" (a part of another thing) in a way

ence" of the work is “within" each ele¬ ment and not, as with minimalist sculp¬ ture, “outside" the work in the space it inhabits. But to come at the work that way doesn't really get at it. Each element veers and recedes so sharply that the face nearest the viewer may narrow to a line or even a point. The solid becomes oddly immaterial, as if it didn’t displace space. Each face offers a kind of version, a (mis)representation, of the object as a whole; each in turn acts as the medium of the object, while the otherfaces act as its support. Some¬ how the thing itself gets lost or never quite appears: walking around it does not disclose one form. Ten Elements blithely eludes.

—HAL FOSTER

JAN GROOVER, Sonnabend Gallery: JAN GROOVER'S last series of photo¬ graphs met with lavish acclaim. Elusive

nowadays and how hard it is to come to terms even with conventional work. No

pictures, mostly of cutlery and glass and leaves, were posed in tableaux that

one wants a strict definition of sculpture; an operational idea or two would suf¬

defied visual logic, so heady were the reversals of surface and space, of ob¬

fice, and a few have come up. As it is, Ten Elements could be seen as either a “modernist” or a “post modernist", sculpture, as a more or less "pure” instance of the medium, as defined in "modernist" terms, or as a kind of nega¬

ject and reflection. Heirs to painting’s still life, they played havoc with the old convention. Classically, still life is a construct of ratios between depicted objects. (It is thus a form of representation different in

V.

Dennis Oppenheim. Impulse Reactor A Device lor Detecting. Entering and Converting Past Lies Traveling Underground and in the Air. installation view, 1980

premise from landscape, where the im¬ portant relation is the one between the

People loved them, perhaps too much so for Groover, For the new photo¬

perspectival construct, or the three grounds, and the viewer.) In still life the

graphs are dark; a sudden fall a day after spring; melancholic, even morose.

viewer, though still the point of refer¬ ence, is not the point at which referen¬

The objects, cutlery still, are less instru¬

tial^ begins. Somehow the construc¬ tive eye is made so internal to the work

unable to hide predatorial origin. Ag¬ gressiveness lurks here; barbarism

as to seem excluded from it; thus the coolness of still life, the self-sufficiency

hides under the bourgeois tableau. It is as if she has stepped from the pastoral

of nature mode. It suspends our will-topower (so invited by landscape); but, of

land of illusions to a grim hovel in East Berlin. Is she ashamed of her sensuous

course, other blandishments, sublimi¬ nal or fetishistic in nature, are offered.

still lifes and wary of her stylish collec¬ tors? It seems so. But the new photo¬

Classical

still

life

presupposes

a

ments of visual magic and more utensils

world of fixed objects and preexistent

graphs are comical as much as they are saturnine. Banal objects are made into

space (i e., space that exists before¬ hand like a table to be set). It believes in

dark talismans: from one twilight zone or another, the Durer of Melancholia II has

a reality that can be represented by

returned in the guise of Irving Penn.

means of binary structures like outside

—HAL FOSTER

and inside, container and contained. The Groover still lifes upset these conditions (though it may be that pho¬ tography accepts few of them to begin with). Truncated, cropped, they cross over container/contained lines. Objects are hard to locate; appearances are not fixed; surfaces are fluid (often foils for objects, or screens for outside color and light). And space is shown to be composed by the objects which it pre¬ sents. In these photographs Groover explores, not certainty and degrees of materiality, but doubt and “degrees of transparency." It is ironic that the arena here (where reality falls to lurid appear¬ ance) is the bourgeois kitchen; ironic too that the event is produced by the camera, the mechanism once consis¬ tent with the bourgeois belief in such a reality (and the reality of realism),

DENNIS OPPENHEIM, Sonnabend Gallery: In 1978 DENNIS OPPENHEIM made a videotape called Whipping into Shape in which he strode around what looked like a Barry Le Va distributional piece swearing at the wooden elements and lashing them with a bullwhip, until he realized finally that he,not the wood,was being punished. As imaginary slavedriver he was prepared to flog even dead wood in his passion for identity, structure, “truth," "connections"—the metaphors changed as the tape contin¬ ued. Oppenheim, as usual, was intent on cathartic activity so melodramatic that it can resemble-explosion or exor¬ cism. Only a return to the Sublime of Abstract Expressionist theory can do

justice to the obsessional nature of Oppenheim's preoccupation with pure spirit; his work has parallels with the Gothic aspects of Still or the methods of Pollock, especially as interpreted by Kaprow. Since his consuming theme is the distinction between soul and body, spirit and matter, the quick and the dead, there are also echoes of the late religiosity of Newman and Rothko. A desire for moral engagement is evident in his latest construction, Impulse Reac¬ tor. A Device for Detecting, Entering and Converting Past Lies Traveling Un¬ derground and in the Air. Last year, Oppenheim began a series of giant metal sculptures plotting the path of an unseen projectile. Their channels come to resemble the abstracted guts of Gia¬ cometti's Woman with her Throat Cut. But most remarkable is the debt to Duchamp’s Large Glass; the anti-laws governing the love-juice and the molds through which it must pass are relevant to Oppenheim’s whole endeavor, though there are serious divergences. One is the sexual nature of Duchamp's inquiry, quite alien to Oppenheim, whose art is simultaneously earthy and ethereal, never totally empirical. Im¬ pulse Reactor isolates, measures, sifts, redeems. Bulky, unworkable, hilarious, it is a study in impedance. Fanning, whirring and trying hard to look busy, it forgets to launch trays of raw material, restrained by thick rubber bands. It wants to send dishes around railroad tracks, to extract essences by magne¬ tism, to scatter-shoot through fraying meshes, to transmit smoke signals, to be a theater, station, bed, factory. . . . Formal analysis is footling. The Captain Ahab of '80s art, Oppenheim voyages in pursuit of some immeasurable alien force which annihilates the words we use, the derisory distinctions by which we choose to live. Be reasonable, you say. How can we ignore existing laws and rules? How indeed. Revocation de¬ mands invocation, contradiction pre¬ liminary statement. —STUART MORGAN

Volume XIX

1980-si

CINDY SHERMAN, Metro Pictures: Do you remember Diane McBain? No? Well, I'll give you some hints. In the early ‘60s, she was Warner Brothers’ answer to Grace Kelly. She had a fea¬ tured part in the television series, Surfside Six. Her best movie, Parrish (1961), was set in the tobacco fields of Con¬

necticut where she and Connie Stevens were rivals for the hand of Troy Dona¬ hue. She was tall, slim, blue-eyed and blonde; but her features were more pointy than chiseled and she had a flat, unaccented voice utterly lacking in nu¬ ance. When her career went down the tubes, it was as though she had never been there. Compared to Diane McBain, Tippi Hedren was a Major Mo¬ tion Picture Star. CINDY SHERMAN photographs re¬ mind me of Diane McBain. They all portray forgettable-looking women in ambiguous situations, doing vaguely dramatic things. Their poses are artifi¬ cial, their mouths are set, their eyes are dead. There is an uneasiness about the way they inhabit their bodies that her camera picks at like a scavenger bird. They are the starlets who'll never make it. Like Diane'McBain, they are forgetta¬ ble. Sherman costumes, directs and pho¬ tographs herself in a variety of mundane settings. The photographs from a year or so ago are black-and-white, 8-by 10inch glossies. The clothing, props and setups are hackneyed—all have been seen before, promoting girls from Little Rock, Sioux Falls and Topeka. In its heyday, Life magazine was filled with these hopefuls. As in Sherman’s photo¬ graphs, the women in Life were shown standing on ladders—chests pushed up, bottoms out—reaching for a book from the stacks. Or, wearing straw boat¬ ers and prim little suits, they stared wide-eyed at Manhattan skyscrapers. These pictures were usually accompa¬ nied by captions like: “Doris never ex¬ pected New York to be so big!” Sherman’s more recent photographs are large-format color prints. The color is curiously artificial, almost like old De¬ luxe Color in % fade. They are also more triste and refer less to genre than their predecessors. The subject is still Sher¬ man (bewigged and costumed), the setting still implies narrative (holiday resorts and hotel rooms), and the pose is still stiffly artificial. However, there is a difference. By photographing herself in front of rear-projected slides, Sherman introduces the same kind of foreshor¬ tening that Syberberg used in his films, Ludwig and Our Hitler. The slide back¬ ground throws the subject into relief, theatrically heightening the tension of the pose. Sherman's new personae are the kind of women you might catch out of the corner of your eye, hovering around the edge of experience; they are not trying

to be stars. They are older and less expectant. With one exception (a mar¬ velous Barbara Stanwyck-like medita¬ tion), the star-making machinery has run down. These women are caught in moments which suggest vulnerability and, just maybe, fear. They sip drinks in shabby rooms, stand paralyzed in pub¬ lic thoroughfares, and wander aimlessly through vacation spots. It is as if the starlets had been reduced to posing for public service posters with copy that reads: "Nine out of ten American wom¬ en living in residential hotels are alco¬ holics," or "Single women visiting re¬ sorts risk losing—everything!" Quiet desperation is the order of the day. Where the black-and-white photo¬ graphs were of women alone, the color ones are of lonely women. None of Sherman's photographs in¬

imitation rosebud, a comb, a lighter, a whistle. . . Most of the objects assem¬ bled on the floor are made of red plastic Only occasionally is something not red or not plastic. Cheap, broken, discard¬ ed items have been retrieved from gut¬ ters and trash cans. Some are dirty, as though long buried. They form a pat¬ tern. faintly distinguishable as a figure. On the far wall hangs a toy Red Indian and the title of the piece: Red Skin. TONY CRAGG’s new work focuses on the gestures of sorting and naming. Constituent parts correspond loosely to several conditions: “broken," “plastic," “old," "muddy," "monochrome.” The pattern sketched on the floor not only celebrates coincidence of modality but also suggests an essential structure: an object is traced and yet that object

these also-ran heroines. She doesn't

seems arbitrarily chosen. The toy red¬ skin, it turns out, exists on a different plane, less atomized, less interesting than the floorbound arrangement—it is

burlesque the women, but she is alert as

bypassed by language. Its title refers to

to how they were used. Like Jean Seberg (the prototypical small town dis¬ covery) in Breathless, Sherman's wom¬

it elliptically and summons up some¬ thing that has no visual manifestation. In

dulge in ridicule or go for cheap shots. There is a dignity in her portrayal of

en are affected, but the affectation is so sincere that it transcends the obvious¬ ness of its artifice. The work’s ultimate, touching irony is that these women's marginality—their apartness—is so ubiquitous.

—RICHARD FLOOD

Red Skin the pun feeds back into the work itself. As for Bluebottle, in which the defined object is a crushed bleach container, one half of the pun catapults the spectator outside the available structure. Yellow Fragment offers a ge¬ neric definition. (Here the object, which recurs within the arrangement, is part of a plastic banana.) Four relationships are crucial: be¬

TONY CRAGG, Lisson Gallery: Toy boats and trains, an ice-cream spoon, a flowerpot holder, caps from

tween the incomplete parts and the complete objects from which they are drawn; between elements on the floor

toothpaste tubes, the nipple from a baby’s bottle, a length of hose pipe, an

and the pattern they assume; between that pattern and its wallbound clue;

between that single key and its title. The brief stasis enjoyed by each work is the result of a pause in its passage from one state to another. Both the titles and the lost, "completed” units recall the aim¬ less multiplicity of a world outside. Yet both exist in an ideational realm which, it is suggested, is not far removed from idle speculation. In contrast, then, the works should make “sense." Instead, they appear to escape logic by a hair’s breadth. That escape matters. The mental procedures set in motion con¬ cern the relation of part to whole, genera

ERIC FISCHL shares Salle's ambition to make art that makes a difference. Art which acknowledges its debt to the past, but is not intimidated by it. Though he is not as angry as Salle, his work has its fair share of malice, sharpened with a mordant wit which gains immeasurably from the acuity of Fischl’s observations of ordinary behavior His mam area of concentration is suburban life, within the realist tradition most often thought

accidental, and since the works them¬ selves show collision, they too seem accidental. What persuades the viewer of the rightness of the correspondences

Office, a painting in which meanings and methods abut one another, by turns enhancing each other and cancelling each other out. The painting, of four women and a dog in water, is executed

is the remarkable effect of his style, and the almost gratuitous, but surprisingly beautiful color. It is an ultimate rhetori¬ cal flourish which marks the success of his fragile alignments. Yet, at the same time that flourish is the most easily regis¬ tered of Cragg's various acts of catego¬ rization. Whether these works are structuralist diagrams, domestic archeology or philosophical conundrums, they are badly needed. In Cragg’s earlier sculp¬ ture, stacking was a metaphor for other ordering processes. Now gravity and restricted vision have been abrogated in favor of weightlessness and accessi¬ bility, and an unexpected conceptual¬ ism is evident. British resistance to new approaches in sculpture have led to a mystique of craftsmanship, and a con¬ fusion of whittling woodsmen and con¬ garde experiment. Perhaps as the 70s continued, the prescriptive, once influ¬ ential views of William Tucker in The

Language of Sculpture, The Condition of Sculpture and “What Sculpture Is" were narrowed even further. For what¬ ever reasons, the resuscitation of a sim¬ plified version of middle-of-the-road modern abstraction went ahead, defen¬ sible only in terms of an esthetic which blended Ruskin and Herbert Read. Cragg's route to his present position is unclear. He may have taken hints from the American exile Joel Fisher. Perhaps his own absence from England has increased his desire to subvert a major tendency in British sculpture. Yet it

Tony Cragg, Red Skin, 1980. 22 x 17’

ERIC FISCHL, Edward Thorp Gallery:

to species, langue to parole. Cragg demonstrates that no easy intercourse is possible among the separate modes of thinking he practices. Collision is

servative carvers with genuine avant-

329

bund art.

—STUART MORGAN

would be false to regard him merely as an iconoclast; his aim seems to be to restore content to an increasingly mori¬

appropriate to depicting it. A typical work of his is Gals from the

in a style of careless realism which Fischl manages to locate at the exact point between pastiche and ineptitude. Just by looking at the surface of a painting like this, one becomes con¬ fused by its abrupt and unexplained disturbances. This unsettling is furth¬ ered by the strangeness of the compo¬ sition—an old-fashioned sounding is¬ sue made relevant again because of the apparent realism of the work. Three of the women are seated, part submerged in the clear, shallow water. They are ordinary looking. The fourth one, who has a more conventionally good figure, stands back, further into the water; she might be beautiful, but we cannot tell because the painting is cropped so that she appears headless. A range of nar¬ rative and psychological possibilities are set in motion, but left suspended And they are confounded as well by the specter of a hunting dog. with bird in mouth, splashing out of some very dark, stormy looking water at the top of the picture. Expectations are raised, but situations are left unresolved, so that we are left in a state of morbid anxiety. Like a good soap opera, the painting is loaded with possibilities, and execut¬ ed with an economy which invests little value in virtuosity. The comparison is important, for it indicates that Fischl is concerned with a great deal more than a couple of esthetic issues

—THOMAS LAWSON

A.R. PENCK, Michael Werner Gallery: A.R. PENCK not only paints, but also makes sculpture, books and music. He

concerns himself with cybernetics and

between symbols of East and West, and

the Ice Age. (The name "A.R. Penck" is derived from that of a nineteenth-cen¬

there is also a cheerful rollefskater—a

tury geologist who specialized in the Ice

(Penck, who referred to himself in the

Age;

the

artist’s

real

name

is

Ralf

sport which is very popular in Cologne. past

sometimes

as Ypsilon.

has

companied by his own publications:

changed into Alpha Ypsilon: a new be¬ ginning based on the past.)

texts which read like Tom Wolfe's “new journalism.” His various interests could

The paintings and watercolors dem¬ onstrate his transition from East to West,

all be grouped under the heading of

and are also carefully formulated com¬

"communication." Until August 1980,

mentaries on the art of painting. Penck

Penck lived and worked exclusively in

is trying to achieve a delicate balance

East Germany while his art was exhibit¬ ed in the West, especially in West Ger¬

common-denominator images. Oscar

Winkler.) His exhibitions are often ac¬

between highly individual emotions and

lands. Penck was never able to visit

Wilde wrote in 1889. in The Decay of Lying that art is "a veil rather than a

these exhibitions, and in his own coun¬ try was unable to show his work in

mirror.” Penck tries to unveil art without turning it into a mirror

public. He was not admitted to the offi¬

—MICKEY PILLER

cial artists' union, and as a result he

Translated from the Dutch by Fredeneke S Taylor

many,

Switzerland

and

the

Nether¬

remained in complete artistic isolation. Over the years, Penck has developed his own language of images, in which he refers to African culture and to the

Siah Armajani,

Newstand, 1980. installation with painted wood,

plexiglass, books, magazines, cards and posters

SIAH ARMAJANI, Contemporary Arts Center: Newstand [sic], even more than SIAH

in.

ARMAJANI’s other works, moves be¬ yond the traditional limits of sculpture

denly feels on stage, but no one is

generalized figures. When portraits do

watching and there is no script. The

If life were nobly spent, It would be no longer easy Or possible to distinguish The useful arts from the fine arts.

occur in the artist’s work, which hap¬

and carves out a place for itself some¬

environment

—JAYNE MERKEL

pens rarely, they can be recognized only by a small group of insiders.

where between architecture and stage

strangeness, compelling the viewer to

design. It looks like a stage set or a

come to terms with it, in the same way as

small,

Robert Irwin's work does. (Armajani is a fan of Irwin’s work.) But the kind of visual

earliest cave drawings. There, and in Penck's work, people are reduced to

Penck’s figures are surrounded by a

innocuous building that is in

The “customer" at the Newstand sud¬

stands

there

in

all

its

Volume XX

1981-82

number of variables: letters, signs, parts of buildings or very abstract ob¬

use—not merely usable, like his recent “Meeting Garden” and “Reading Gar¬

jects. He composes images of impo¬ tence and powerlessness that often make the spectator feel depressed. His

den" in Roanoke, Virginia, Omaha, Ne¬ braska and Artpark in New York. Muse¬

Irwin’s art is only partially successful in elucidating Armajani's work. Something

DONALD JUDD, Leo Castelli/Greene Street:

um-shop wares are sold from the

more—a text—is needed, because the

people seem unable to communicate to

Newstand's racks,and periodicals are

ideas behind the work are not ideas that

It is not so much a period of Manner¬ ism that we are seeing in the arts as one

each other or attain specific goals. Ob¬

strewn across its tables to entice visitors

can be communicated purely in visual

that bears some resemblance to the

structions and misunderstandings stand in their way. All the parts to the

to sit down on the benches and read. "Use” could have blurred the distinction

terms.

Reconstruction era, complete with car¬

Like other artists and writers today,

petbaggers, furious enterprise, fast

puzzle are there, but they do not fit, no

between architecture and sculpture but

matter what structure or system sup¬

instead it was clarified; the incongruities

Armajani has rejected the modernist notion that art should only be about art.

luck, and sudden switches—reason enough to question any sense of elation

and

His work is representational, and his

at seeing recent work by an imposing

roofless,

buildings serve as symbols of ideas. He

and steadfast Minimalist like Donald

depicts simple frame sheds, not great

analysis that serves the spectator well in

ports them. Penck has been classified

were noticeable,

as a neo-Expressionist, or a "spontane¬

obviously

ous” painter. However, this is incorrect:

doorless, two-walled “rooms" within rooms, with their high, rigid, Shaker-like

works of architecture so that his work

disconcerting,

intentional.

The

benches, made the visitor feel self-con¬

can be understood by a broad audi¬

Judd. But Judd’s giant new sculpture of plywood stacks was his most compre¬ hensive, fluent work to date, and one

Penck’s paintings do not refer only to

scious and intensively aware of the art¬

ence.

that demonstrated just about every

themselves. He questions the value his signs have in a larger context, and treats painting from an analytic point of

ist’s curiously constructed environment. The “customer” at the Newstand was left standing in front of a strange poly¬

vided verbal clues through his titles.

gon-shaped sales booth that looked normal enough from a distance. At the counter it became clear that the larger-

Thomas Jefferson’s House, West Wing, Bridge for Robert Venturi, Red School House for Thomas Paine and El Lissitzky’s Neighborhood Center House

seemed motivated or interested by.

view. When he places the emotionallyladen image of a small fleeing man in a arises. Penck doggedly investigates the schism between image and reality: his extremely elementary forms only in¬ tensify this rupture Since last August Penck has been living in the West. In an exhibition called

than-lifesize booth was in effect a threedimensional drawing. Its translucent

revealed his eclectic use of sources

thropic. His well-documented systems and variations were not to be deci¬

"The metamorphosis of a citizen of East Germany into a citizen of West Ger¬

his signs, or his "structures.” as he calls them, fit into a well-thought-out system.

formal

composition,

a

discrepancy

In Armajani's earlier works, he pro¬

and, by association, the variety of val¬

window-wall was illuminated by natural light—from a window located in the gallery wall right behind it.

ues embodied in the work. In the last year, he has begun to add longer, more

Illusion and reality constantly collide in Armajani’s work. In this piece, close-

from his mentors on the walls. The “Meeting Garden” at Artpark has one

many.” the theme of flight appears in

up, the surrounding tables, with their rough surfaces and big, constructivist

from Dewey. Newstand is inscribed with one from Emerson:

many forms. In other works a Penck

bolts, don’t look anything like traditional

type person—rigid with fear—stands

carpentry and the benches are boxed

explicit texts by stenciling quotations

If history were truly told,

structural theme he ever devised with a magnanimity that he has not before Judd’s sculpture has, over the years, suggested a secular hermeticism that sometimes

bordered

on the

misan¬

phered as keys to materials or process, nor did they allude to any abstracted sense of sound or smell or movement. Rather, each work effected a rigorous perceptual closed circuit around it¬ self—precisely Judd’s intention. Their identity as objects was indeed total, and, despite characteristically rich sur¬ faces, they could appear constrained

and feel constraining. This new work, however, while entirely germane to its predecessors, engaged every element

plitude, both spatially and acoustically, to such a degree that one almost ex¬

surrounding it, and the viewer's full senses and faculties.

pected them to start uttering diph¬ thongs. In a 1967 interview (Art in America,

Twelve feet high, four feet deep, it

July/August) Judd said that "the main

rippled along eighty feet of wall like an arpeggio. Its rhythm, set by a basic rectangular grid defining 30 eight-byfour-by-four-foot modules, was synco¬

virtue of geometric shapes is that they aren’t organic, as all art otherwise is. A form that’s neither geometric nor organ¬ ic would be a great discovery.” Part of

pated by horizontal "shelves,” some parallel, others diagonal to the grid. This rhythm was not contingent solely upon

the discovery of this work is the realiza¬ tion that it is both geometric and organ¬ ic. Most surprising, however, is its ele¬

the articulation of concrete materials

ment of performance. Set on a pedestal,

(the perfectly seamless use of plywood can be credited to Peter Ballantine, who executed the piece), but also on a re¬ sulting modulation of light and dark. From any oblique viewing angle, the

it seems to present itself not just to “the viewer," but to a projected audience; comparisons could, in fact, be made between it and Robert Wilson’s enor¬

narrow shelves between layers could

Beach. It was as though Judd, the as¬

be read as black dashes, or rest notes in music. The horizontality of the sculp¬ ture led to all manner of narrative asso¬

cetic gone virtuoso, had decided to let rip with every chord and scale he knew,

ciation, from opera score to comic strip; but whatever system Judd used to an¬

sound out to the furthest seat in the largest auditorium imaginable. An artist with Judd’s innate dignity can well af¬ ford to be grand.

chor its lengthwise movement was so attenuated as to appear ineffable, if not intuitive. Seen directly, the vertical, tri¬

mous dollhouse set for Einstein on the

and made an instrument big enough to

—LISA LIEBMANN

ple-tiered stacks assumed a more par¬ ticular tonal significance. The rectangu¬ lar modules, differentiated by the straight and slanted slats, looked like stereo speakers adjusted to various pitches. They denoted volume and am¬

RICHARD LONG, Art & Project: In his recent work, Richard Long un¬ expectedly appears as a kind of paint¬ er. On the white walls of the gallery are

huge monochrome circles, two in brownish gray and one in a warmer reddish-brown; within the circles the white wall is left visible at intervals, thusimplying not only a flat ornament but also structure and depth. Long painted with his hands, dipping his fingers in mud and clay with which he then cov¬ ered the walls in a tense, rhythmic mo¬ tion. Because of the supple and con¬ tinuous movement of his fingers, the paintings have an overall structure that is both dynamic and controlled. On the one hand, their patterns remind one of intricate latticework; on the other, they recall the organic feeling of old land¬ scape etchings. The connections with Long’s past work—especially with the book in which he used mud from the River Avon on the pages, enabling the viewer to “read” the river—are obvious. River Avon Mud

Circle and Red Clay Circle also relate to the circles of driftwood that Long has made for many years. What distin¬ guishes them from these earlier sculp¬ tures is the suppleness and sensuous¬ ness of the new medium, which enable Long to convey different moods and sensations. Making an abstract image of nature out of nature’s own materials, Long evokes the rhythms of flowing water and of moving earth in a river by using mud from the river itself. In this impressive show, in which Long made his largest mud circles so far (previous works were presented in London and Lyons), he created a com¬ plement to his landscape photography. Both strongly evoke nature, but in quite different ways. It is always fascinating to see an artist find new formulations while remaining true to his central concerns; this is the more welcome in a period when eclecticism seems to be the only avenue for most “new" painters.

—SASKIA BOS

GENERAL IDEA, 49th Parallel: Will 1984 be the year of Orwell's Big Brother or of the Miss General Idea Pageant—or are they somehow in ca¬ hoots? General Idea is a group of three Canadian artists—AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. General Idea, we are told, is for them the artist; Miss General Idea is their art and muse; a "Pavilion” (reconstructed from show to show) is their museum; a magazine they publish, called FILE, is their mass media; and the Pageant, which can mediate nearly any information, is their format. There have been several such projects; the Pageant itself is scheduled

for 1984. So much for the artist alone with his canvas—art as total spectacle is (again) here. But, whose totality is it? The latest edition of the Pageant in¬ cluded projects from 1975 to 1980. One is a long series of “showcards," each with illustration and text, that act as “sketch records"—scenarios or skits for the Pageant. According to one card, “General Idea is basically this: a fram¬ ing device within which we inhabit the role of the artist as we see the living legend. We can be expected to do what is expected within these bounds. . . ." Each card is an episode in this artist legend—the Quest for Miss General Idea, Grail and Guinevere in one. An¬ other card describes the search for her spirit as a "ritualized pageant": “Elevat¬ ed, she reigns; idealized, she contains; artfully, she maintains; dominantly, she sustains our interest.” General Idea, it is soon clear, is a frame without limit. Yet another card reads: "Wanted," “Impos¬ sible Situations,” and "It is always the impossible that comes true." One situation that has both come true and hasn't happened yet is described in a project called Reconstructing Fu¬

tures. This room of the Pavilion docu¬ ments the Pavilion’s destruction (a fullscale ruined Pavilion was executed in 1976). Two vessels of light mark a pas¬ sage; on either wall is a photo mural of the Pavilion in ruins: culture destroyed by war. On the floor are marble barbells (for cultural strength?) and two black chairs (bipolar seats of power?). Behind an iron screen (an “iron curtain") is a photograph of the three artists escap¬ ing from the Pavilion—as if it were a palace turned bunker in the next world war. Weary from futures impossible and otherwise, the victim/viewer comes at last to the Colour Bar Lounge (reminis¬ cent of the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange). The bar proposes cultural cocktails: art, an “elitist drink," is mixed with media elixirs, and sold to us, the public. One of the dangers (which is also one of the drinks) is fascism. What is basic, Oedipal, and mythically pure? we are asked. Milk, of course, and Na¬ zism. So the bar offers "Nazi milk," a “new cocktail to help us remember.” If milk is somehow contaminated, then everything, and everyone, is too. The general idea of General Idea seems to be paranoia turned to play. It is not so much "If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em" as it is "You are them, so play it to the hilt." General Idea presents a universe of capital and communication in which art becomes the paradigmatic spectacle.

use of velvet, antlers, and such is kitsch.

“Mom” moves from nurturer to devour-

chenberg’s stuffed birds, wings, and

er. Ultimately Anderson's “mother" is a

everyday objects. Like Schnabel, Kiefer is no painter in

country—one that effects a chilling, lull¬

the pure sense. Sometimes his handling

child. O Superman concludes with a matriarchal embrace as crushing as the

almost weathered, reminiscent of Rem¬ brandt. But when he executes historical

one Athena inflicted on Laocoon.

pieces, his paint is extremely thick and provocative, as is his version of German

overtly pop edge. Moving from a do¬ mestic quarrel which is temporarily

history and mythology. He dramatizes

stalled by the narrator's-decision "to go

his art not only through his use of materi¬

out and walk the dog,” the piece spins into a lacerating exploration of social

The German spirit-heroes of Valhalla are shown in a pantheon of heads that

inaccessibility), 1980, acrylic on velvet. 90 x 84".

But do these artists mimic the network of commodity, display, and consumption in order to defy it? Or is it, in fact, the “general idea” to which they aspire?

—HAL FOSTER

If Julian Schnabel represents real America, then it is Anselm Kiefer who represents real Europe—this was the impression given in this show, where the two were exhibited opposite each other. Schnabel's work confuses. One is reminded of the shock when, 20 years ago,

Robert

Rauschenberg

slashed

into the self-assured esthetics of the time. Junk and kitsch, all kinds of ob¬ jects, umbrellas, car reflectors, lace, strip cartoons, van Gogh reproduc¬

hardly conveys an impression of re¬ spect; it seems more like discourteous

laced and layered to climax in a nasty,

artistry, aimed at settling an old ac¬ count. In Nothung! Ein Schwert verhiess

hallucinatory party scene. The conclu¬

mir der Vater (Beware! My father has

but—and here is one of Anderson's major strengths—the force of that inter¬ trast between the lyrics and the intona¬ tion of the performer. Anderson’s voice

sand, toy tanks battle on a palette-or picture dotted with bits of a broken plate? How does one construe a paint¬ ing equipped with antlers and other

One sees here a striking contrast between the European Kiefer and the

not limit the number of characters the singer evokes. The glibly manipulative

American Schnabel. Kiefer’s position is

persona who emerges at the end of Walk the Dog turns a simple direction

sanctioned in the past, while Schnabel

into a devastating threat.

Such questions do not arise for

is seeking out new directions. If the banality of the methods and techniques used In the conflict is not always pleas¬

Schnabel himself. “Those plates,” he says in an interview in the Dutch maga¬

urable, the opposition remains fascinat¬ ing.

notic repetitiveness reminiscent, at their best, of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ele¬

zine NRC, “were certainly not essential.

—PAUL GROOT

gant merger of electronic, concrete,

Translated from the Dutch by Michael Latcham

and choral music. There are also lush, lyrical passages not unlike Isao Tomi-

Actually they make no difference, I used them then just like I use velvet now. It doesn't matter if you make a painting paint figuratively. Something abstract does not have to be abstract." One of Schnabel’s paintings consists of yellowish-white right-angled forms on

larly his electronic reworking of De¬

LAURIE ANDERSON, “O Superman/ Walk the Dog,” One Ten Records:

bussy’s “Preludes.” She also draws from mainstream American music (both

My one complaint about Laurie An¬ derson’s new record, O Superman/

and seductively populist edge. It is An¬

a red velvet background, surrounded

Walk the Dog, is its length: at only 15

by a heavy frame. Abstract painting

minutes, it’s way too short. I’m ready for a double album. O Superman and Walk

“Everyone and everything influences me. Everything can be traced back to memories. A poem influences me, or an

not this was good art. Similarly with

abstract painting or a sculpture, or something I have never seen. All the

the Dog are two selections from her projected, four-part concert cycle, Unit¬ ed States. As the cycle has yet to be completed, the double album will have to wait; but, in the meantime, Ander¬ son’s current release is a lot more than teaser excerpts. Each piece is a com¬

information is stored in a catalogue that

pelling, self-contained musical narra¬ tive.

I work from.” Schnabel’s work is popular because

O Superman begins as a domestic mantra sweetly Invoking "Mom and

it is vital, artistic, and kitschy. Vitality is

Dad.” Then, answering-machine voices are introduced: “Hello, this is your moth¬ er. Are you there? Are you coming home?" They grow increasingly omi¬

suggested in the fragments of broken plates strewn over the canvas in huge sweeps; the work is artistic in its use of color, sometimes daubed on, but with a skillful use of the brush; the extravagant

Like much of Anderson's work, the selections on the record have an hyp¬

ta's synthesizer experiments, particu¬

red or blue. I don’t necessarily have to

ing circles of dripping color, were ines¬ capable by followers of art; the question never seemed to arise as to whether or

evinces beauty, youth, and above all a courage to explore new ground. But what is the fascination of a com¬

pretation has much to do with the con¬

while in Bilderstrelt (Battle of the Paint¬ ings), a photo-painting worked up with

remains a remarkable instrument: there may be only one singer, but that does

(from a huge wall symbolizing Fate's inaccessibility), 1980 , reminds one of Alexander Rodchenko’s The Dissolving of Surface, 1920. Schnabel says:

that this resurgence need not be stag¬ nant or tied to tradition. His work

sion smacks of a cruel practical joke,

tree-trunk-shaped whorl.

tions—all went to make the controlled explosion Rauschenberg created in his antiart. The floods of paint, the broaden¬

Schnabel. Schnabel prods awake the con¬ science amidst the mass of current painting. The medium is experiencing a revival of appreciation; Schnabel shows

attitudes. A driving carnival beat, calyp¬

position in blue, a quickly executed

extrusions? How does one take in an attractive young deer prancing on a velvet background? Is it just kitsch7

SUMMER EXHIBITION, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen:

Walk the Dog has a more anecdotal,

so riffs, and sarcastically sanitized country-and-western rhythms are inter¬

promised me a sword), a sword is driv¬ en into the floor of a wooden cabin, Abstract painting (from a huge wall symbolizing Fate's

ing reconciliation with its disoriented

of paint is classic; he makes it look

als but also in his thematic substance.

Julian Schnabel.

cuts passive/aggressive messages;

Schnabel’s work is as banal as Raus¬

nous: “This is the hand, the hand that takes." A collage of word-images inter¬

pop and rock 'n’ roll) to achieve a satiric derson's knowledge of a wealth of newmusic sources that gives her work such structural authority. And most signifi¬ cantly, as the libretto for United States continues to emerge, there are Ander¬ son’s words. Her fractured, impression¬ istic narrative is a totally original, in¬ sightful reflection of American creativity and chaos I have a feeling that the completed United States may well be one of the pivotal artworks of the ’ 80s .

—RICHARD FLOOD

Volume XXI

1982-83

JANNIS KOUNELLIS, Whitechapel Art Gallery: Jannis Kounellls’ installation is an in-

spired use of this space as a total signifying structure. None of the works is new; but by a judicious choice of those whose common motif is primarily fire, and through a sensitive use of every dimension of the space, the artist has evoked a place of ritual appropriate to both the sense of the work and the gallery's cool, pillared interior. The centerpiece in the lower gallery is an assembly of lighted butane-gas burners whose long tubes snake across the floor, drawing the viewer into a space pervaded by sound and odorous fumes. Other works are placed at differ¬ ent viewing levels: high on the walls like temple sculptures, or in corner^ like hero shrines. The most obvious votive piece is a black board inscribed “Viva Marat Viva Robespierre,” before which is placed a lighted candle. This is paired with a pile of stone slabs from which a sooty trace sears up the wall and over an artists’ palette. Stone slabs are used again to wall up the interior of a cupboard/confessional. The disturbing quality of this work is echoed in Kounellis’ reconstructed chimneyed oven, with its ash and sooty remains, and in the Apollo Notturno, which occupies the upstairs space. Kounellis’ primary reference point is Classical Mediterranean culture, the root of Western civilization, whose myths are a celebration of patriarchal strength. Yet in these works the phallocentric order seems suspended in a state of unease: the roaring energy of the gas burners is dissipated into empty space; the row of shelves bearing sculptural fragments are capitals de¬ void of columns; the fire in the oven has burned out; the redundant palette is a memorial. Time has wrought transfor¬ mations on our world, leaving the resi¬ dues (soot, ashes, odors) of spent pas¬ sion and extinguished ambition. The vertical, phallic vigor of the flame is ceded to images with the ambiguous aspect of the androgyne: the oven/ chimney, the columnless capitals, the snake-burners, and above all, the Apol¬ lo Notturno. In this work cast fragments of a male classical sculpture litter a table top, in the center of which is a mask. To this is attached a vast wig of black female hair whose form, stretch¬ ing voluptuously across the wall, sug¬ gests a reclining woman or billowing smoke (symbol of the feminine aspect of fire in alchemy). Apollo Notturno,

333

night sun, is a chimera: a narcissistic, bisexual god who incorporates his ob¬ verse, Artemis the virgin, the moon, the darkly mysterious.

Of particular relevance in this installa¬ tion is the way that Kounellis uses the symbol of fire, in all its manifestations, to create a sense of the mythic. Within the context of the current resurgence of “mythic” content in painting, this aspect of his work has special critical signifi¬ cance. Structuralist and psychoanalyt¬ ical studies, in revealing its roots in ritual and its identity as language, have clari¬ fied myth as a conceptual model of how the individual creates social relation¬ ships. If myth is defined by its function in society rather than by its formal struc¬ ture, we see that its vitality lies not within narrative per se, but in what it embodies as a situation of profound psychic sig¬ nificance whose needs are satisfied by the repetition of its rituals. Classical mythology is the domain of the sexual. As symbolized in Apollo Notturno, it testifies to patriarchy’s absorption of femaleness into its phallocentric mean¬ ings. By its own reference to myth, feminism has sought to recuperate that femaleness. The way the language of myth is used is therefore revealing of where the individual now places him- or herself within the politics of socio-sexual exchange. From this perspective we may begin to distinguish art practices according to the ideological positions they assume. If we take as an example of the tradi¬ tional, anecdotal use of myth the work of the English painter Christopher Lebrun,

pigmented, On the right panel of Paint¬ ing for EH, for instance, the contorted

and sensual experience but which, in the incongruousness of its juxtaposi¬ tions, provokes unexpected meanings.

face and straining neck of a woman are

In our effort to create a unified meaning from the work’s disjunctive elements we become participants in a ritualistic act. In Kounellis’ installation all our senses

the left panel consists of a large daisy awkwardly chiseled into light wood, a concoction that is both bluntly simple

as well as body movements are activat¬ ed. The real time of our journey through the work is paralleled by a temporal passage symbolized by the transition of flame to ashes, and the classical frag¬ ments which unite memory of the past with our perception of the present. The meaning of the work, through its broad cultural visual and verbal associations, spills outside the boundaries of the gal¬ lery. In drawing us into a nexus of atavis¬ tic and psychic metaphors it engages us in symbolic discourse. Thus, Kounel¬ lis’ installation, while it is neither a sub¬ version nor an affirmation of patriarchal order, at least with considerable elo¬ quence reveals its contradictions and current, brooding anxieties.

—JEAN FISHER

DAVID SALLE, Mary Boone Gallery: David Salle's paintings look lusher than before. The painted grounds of his canvases remain cinematic—smooth, thin stains that resemble projections— but they are more richly, even luridly

drawn over a deep, indigo purple, while

and characteristically disingenuous. Post-existential eroticized angst and the emotional naivete of stylistic awkward¬ ness are Salle’s dominant motifs. The recent work in this show shows adventur¬ ousness and increased confidence with materials; it was, all in all, a break¬ through with mixed blessings. All but five of these thirteen works were executed in the first two months of 1983, suggesting (among other things) that Salle has been emphasizing the idea and pace of “production.” This program is peculiarly appropriate to his admitted pictorial ideology: to compress, decom¬ press, and thereby neutralize the connotative values in imagery. He has ex¬ punged the psychological quease that makes many of his previous female nudes disquieting, and is now bracket¬ ing, quoting, and categorizing his trou¬ bleshooting episodes. A year ago I sug¬ gested that Salle’s fascination was the issue of self-betrayal—of finding or los¬ ing the self—but this no longer seems to be the case. He seems for the moment to have chosen the role of rogue, and his

we find that his Xanthus confronts us with the image of a rearing winged horse, implying a narrative whose meaning owes as much to the exclu¬ sively male and Romantic mystique of the Artist as that of mythology depends on the Hero. This is a specular image, an object primarily to be “looked at,” whose traditional pictorial boundaries effect a closure from our world, and whose descriptive codes address us with all the authority of an omnipotent Other. This illusion of “wholeness" rein¬ forces that imaginary aspect of myth that seeks to dissolve contradictions between the self and society, and de¬ nies us an active relationship to the work. By contrast, Kounellis’ work, like that of Joseph Beuys, engages us in ritual. In many respects the two reflect the traditional duality of the European sen¬ sibility: the former Southern, pragmatic and logical; the latter Northern, enig¬ matic and arcane. Common to both, however, is a sculptural form whose language is constructed from a familiar vernacular of objects and materials which involve the viewer in immediate

David Salle,

Zeitgeist Painting #4,1982, oil and aery he on canvas, 156 x 117"

fascination has become more literary,

was its involvement with the architec¬

concerned with finding or losing the

ture, even that of these less than perfect,

moral of the story.

truncated walls. The piece, titled Black

A combine painting called Black Bra sports one dangling at the tip of a

and Gray Three-Inch-Wide Bands in Four Directions, was made up of straight

wooden pole, and lest the jest seem too

and diagonal stripes of alternating gray

Zero de Conduite, it has an art-historical

and black, and its impact was textural—

coda in the form of a depicted bowl of

almost like gesso. These were stripes

apples derived from a Cezanne still life.

out of nature, not off the drawing board,

Flelsch Art, 1982, is a nude, less in need

and they ran their course—stopping

of elaboration. The title of the latter work

where they stopped, paying no particu¬

is incorporated in the painting; Salle

lar heed to the dicta of corners and

uses words and objects more frequently

edges. Their relationship to surface and

and with greater aplomb here than be¬

support was one of cathexis; there was

fore, and while his puns, verbal satires,

no analogy as there was no remove.

and titles are now acute and speedy, the

LeWitt has loosened his grip on the

combines are the slickest yet most inert

cube, as though it has, for him, become

of these new works. Globes offer some of

something like an emotional truth, no

the world's best instant graphics and are

longer demanding analysis and dissec¬

thus a natural addition to Salle’s visual inventory, but the four little ones hanging

tion. The cube is there no matter what— even, as in this alcove, when it is not only

off the front of Deaf Ugly Face create stagnant congestion. Gratuitousness is

cube was not indentured to geometry

part of Salle’s strategy, but his actions

and was free of geometry’s usual burden

nonetheless require something of his in¬

of architectural mimesis: if the structure

tellectual, rather than just graphic, pres¬

is inchoate, put the idea of structure into surface—don’t be a shadow box instead

ence. The four “Zeitgeist Paintings,” 1982, are grand improvisations, each keyed by the opportunities to riff graphically pro¬ vided by the letters c, u, n, and t. Each

incomplete but also distracted. This

and try to fool people. Serene and guile¬ less, LeWitt’s geometries have taken on an aspect of the alive—like landscapes, and they exude from way back deep in

letter prompts intricate "stream of con¬

the wall.

sciousness” drawings on each of the

—LISA LIEBMANN

some of them in media instrumentation).

monumental object. Indeed, the stream¬

He takes pains in his text to deny the

lining of Pick-Axe’s surface so that ham¬

“authoritarian impression’’ of the

mer and handle fuse (which cannot hap¬

piece—“leaning the pick sidewise as

pen with an actual pick) gives it, with

well as forwards... as if [it] were about

every new glance, the look of a hallu¬

to fall” is supposed to prevent that. Yet

cination. This further contributes to its

paintings’ top panels (one of which bears

he also imagines it as having been

mythological status; we are in the land of

likenesses of Spencer Tracy and Bella Abzug), and slower-paced dissection

thrown by the statue of Hercules that

giants, of titanic strength and status: we

overlooks Kassel, and aligns it with that

are in the land of artists.

statue along one of the main axes of the

Tools of the Trade, Oldenburg's in¬

low. They are Salle’s most complex,

Increasingly one had the sense that

city. Pick-Axe is thus a mythological

door piece at Documenta 7, shows the

most spontaneous, least glib, and most

Claes Oldenburg was at a loss, strug¬

impressive paintings to date. The

gesture of dominance, and a sign of the artist's mythological strength.

same narcissistic absorption in personal

strongest element of his art is essentially

gling with technical and material prob¬ lems of execution rather than with in¬

narrative (or at any rate postnarrative),

novative concepts. Now, with Pick-Axe,

saturnine, sentimental, and psycholog¬

studies of nudes and self-portraits be¬

CLAES OLDENBURG, Documenta 7:

strength, and the same interest in mak¬

But in Oldenburg the mythological be¬

ing a point of it in the community—only

comes political and directly contempor¬

now the community is the artist's own,

a work whose siting on the banks of the

ary, and methodological rather than

and he aims more to competitively

ical. The art-historical spoofs such as Black Bra seem merely designed to

Fulda River in Kassel is carefully justi¬

thematic. An instrument of brute labor is

dominate it than ideologically to reflect

fied in an intelligent, articulate cata¬

transformed into a symbol of the artist’s

or represent it. A tiny model of a room in

offend some of the more easily offended

logue text, Oldenburg is again produc¬

“idealistic" labor. The identification with

sensibilities, and seem therefore time¬

ing important work. There is a new sense of his stripping down to essentials. The

the ordinary workman is confirmed by

the Fridericianum is skewered by a T-pin and sliced by a razor blade. It is sited in

the piece’s location on the shore oppo¬

a larger-scale model of the same room;

unembellished, straightforward look of

site a boat house; it becomes Labor

this room too shows a razor and T-pin,

tated. At times it is also a potent provoca¬ tion to visual thinking. The “Zeitgeist

Oldenburg's monumental pickax is cru¬

opposite Leisure—the leisure in which

now large enough to bear the same rela¬

cial in this respect; it signals a new

the laborer might contemplate the fruits

tionship to the model they pierce as do

Paintings” and a few others here recon¬ firm Salle's dual position as sharpest

sense of mastery. In its grand scale and

of his work, one of which is the work of art

the usual-sized, actual tools to the smal¬

in the heroic isolation of its existence in

that celebrates his labor, and which can

ler model. And finally the two rooms, one

thinker and Peck's Bad Boy among his peers.

the grounds by the river, the piece is a

thus become a rallying point around

inside the other, are located in the room

showstopper, as well as a "master¬

which the community can center itself.

in the Fridericianum on which they are

—LISA LIEBMANN

piece.” Indeed, it becomes emblematic

But there is also Oldenburg’s self-

based, which itself shows the same tools

of an assertion of will, which it not only

identification—he is a communal work¬

in the same positions, but now-grown

embodies, but embodies in aspectacular

er, but also a solitary worker concerned

gigantic. A small art world—a space

way which intervenes in the everyday

with self-renewal, which he finds not

made as minimal as possible—is

Sol LeWitt seems to be in a period of

while making an idol of one of its tokens.

through leisure but through making his

violated by objects that, while used in it,

productive splendor, a period that was

The pickax is a tool, and Oldenburg, in

work a meditation on itself. The circles of

belong to the larger world, which is why

trumpeted here by last fall's high-reverb,

returning to the tool as a subject, returns

they’re larger than the art world. They're

triumphant cubes. LeWitt's site-specific wall drawing for an alcove at Documenta

to the obsession with instrumentation

communal and individual self¬ recognition overlap in Pick-Axe, which

general for the original Pop artists (if

thus truly becomes monumental—a

larged as engorged and congested, as if

7 seemed nearly reckless, so thorough

obscured by the particular interest of

monumental

the objects had masturbated themselves

killing dalliances. Salle’s efficacy as an irritant is well established and anno¬

SOL LEWITT, Documenta 7:

idea, not simply a

also objects not so much arbitrarily en¬

into a state of tumescence. (I’ve always

sionally succeeds brilliantly) to set up a

ging hisworldly belongings into an alien

trust field that tests the inviolability of

art terrain, so as to remain as comfort¬

their shared persona. Much of the work

able as possible. Or is it an artist making

ultimately directs the observer to the re¬ lationship that binds and empowers the

a field trip into the world, bringing back specimens that he then blows out of all

performers, Such is the persuasiveness

proportion (emotional as well as physi¬ cal) through his meditation on them?)

of their mutual involvement that once

There is in this work an effect of ironic doubling, in which the model is incorpo¬ rated into and central to the piece and is simultaneously a kind of witch doctor’s doll stuck with needles, victimizing the space. The artist as witch doctor: here casting an evil spell, while with Pick-Axe

they have made themselves available to the voyeuristic scrutiny of their observers they are able to move to a more hieratic plateau, where questions of endurance and vulnerability give way to states of contemplation and the suggestion of transcendence. While their most recent work might be

“curing" the community of the hardship

seen as a logical development from their

of labor by idealizing its instruments. In

task-oriented performances, it has

this work Oldenburg de-idealizes ordin¬ ary instruments by using them violently;

evolved significantly, through a fascina¬ tion with therapeutic alchemy, into cere¬

the aggression always implicit in his en¬

monial meditation—into rituals that are

largements—aggression under the con¬

available to an audience but not depen¬

trol of the ideal of grandeur—now breaks loose, mocking that ultimate testing

they occupied the cupola of the

ground for the work of art, the exhibition space. The aggression is sustained rather than relaxed by curled planes that "litter" the actual space as well as the mock space, sometimes obviously ar¬ ticulated by it, at other times echoing its

dent on one. At Documenta, for example,

views of the manicured lawn and blue sky. Centered in the room, they sat at either end of a long polished table at

Maybe Babies, 1983, dye transfer print, 30 x 40"

and so simply, mesmerizingly achieved.

—RICHARD FLOOD

some remove from the spectators, who watched from behind a delicate rope

ateness of the instruments, the seeming¬

cordon. On the spectators' side of the

ly fluid extendedness of the planes, the

cordon was a water cooler in which float¬

whole air of instability despite the fixed

ed a sediment of gold leaf. A note invited one to drink because the gold, "if taken,

that might be exhibited in it untouched

Sandy Skoglund,

Orangerie, a lovely high-ceilinged octa¬ gon punctuated by French windows with

proportions. The out-of-proportion-

centrality of the model, creates an absurd space which leaves no object

purifies the body." Just beyond the cor¬ don, on the left, stood a bound sheaf of

SANDY SKOGLUND, Leo Castelli Gal¬ lery: With Maybe Babies, her latest photo¬ graph and installation, Sandy Skoglund moves another rung up the evolutionary ladder from her earlier Revenge of the

Goldfish and Radioactive Cats, both

gold rods. In the distance, at the table,

1981. In each of the three Skoglund has

vious surrealist installations, but notes a

Marina Abramovic and Ulay sat im¬ mobile and transfixed, facing each other

new importunity, which not only furthers the idea of the installation as the “final”

for a day (for a succession of days). As a tableau it was quite beautiful, a perfect

presented both a large Cibachrome photograph and the constructed en¬ vironment on which it is based; all have

art form, but shows the artist’s impulsive/

adaptation of the space; as a perform¬

compulsive desire to reach into and

ance, while it had a political dimension, it was lullingly tranquil. The self¬

and that is itself the “art.” One recog¬ nizes a historical continuity with pre¬

shake up the world. Oldenburg’s pieces confirm that modern artistic will is far from satisfied with the settled state of the self-contained object, but remains rest¬ less, ecological, and political, surviving through Antaean contact with the every¬ day environment.

—DONALD B. KUSPIT

MARINA ABRAMOVIC/ULAY ULAY/MARINA ABRAMOVIC Documenta 7: Marina Abramovic and Ulay are among the few body artists to have risen during, and somewhat gracefully sur¬ vived, the 70s. That they are fascinating to look at—with their almost identical hawkish profiles and whippet bodies—

335

their repeated endeavor (which occa¬

sensed in Oldenburg a camper drag¬

has helped lend a compellingness to

absorption of the performers was not ex¬ clusionary; their intensity allowed them to be objectified without becoming de¬ personalized, so that there was a com¬ municable purity in their action. Rather than seeming a barrier, the cordon echoed the stronger cordon being spun between the performers. Sitting for a while with the other spectators, drifting toward a collective respiration, I noted the lines posted at the entrance: “Presence. Being present, Over long stretches of time, Till presence rises and falls; from Material to immaterial, from Form to formless, from Instrumental to mental, from Time to timeless,..." Such a clear goal,

featured drab domestic settings (a bed¬ room in . . .Goldfish, a kitchen in . . . Cats, an outside corner of a house in . . .Babies) teeming with remarkably detailed, luridly colored epoxy casts of the title creatures. Skoglund’s settings are like the mad hallucinationsof a drunk with a bad case of the DTs. In her new piece Skoglund’s babies, thirty or so in number, crawl, toddle, or lie strewn across a black sand landscape outside a black clapboard house. Some of the babies clamber up the sides of the house, while others float in midair— hung, in the installation, from the walls and ceiling of the gallery. All are abnor¬ mally large—about twice life size—and painted in a dark rainbow of bilious, bruiselike purples and blues. Inter¬ spersed among these ominous infants are bizarrely twisted antennae painted in bands of fluorescent green and black. A yellow light glows faintly from a window in the black house; in the photograph a

middle-aged man stands at this window, gazing with baleful glumness at the bald, otherworldly babies outside. The basic elements of a classic horror film— Night of the Living Dead, say—are all there: the threatening monsters from the Id mindlessly swarming Out There, just beyond the lamp-lit security of a middleclass home. But the archetypal terror of Skoglund’s image has, of course, a more topical reference: the imagined holocaust of a nuclear war. The kitschy goldfish and cats she used in her earlier pieces looked as if they’d just come off the shelf of some Tiajuana junkshop, and so seemed as much as anything to express a fascinated disgust with these shoddy sentimental geegaws. The babies are as dumb, as intuitive and willfully irrational, as the earlier creatures, and thus can be seen as embodying a sort of essential life force. But the references to tourist tackiness are gone, and the focus is more squarely on perhaps the greatest horror of nuclear war: the destruction not just of ourselves, but, as Jonathan Schell has pointed out, of all successive gen¬ erations, of the future. The threat of nu¬ clear war is so immediate that it has generated its chroniclers before the actual conflict, and has already sparked many attempts by artists to imagine its nightmarish consequences. Skoglund’s piece reminded me particularly strongly of Robert Morris' recent work, both his skeleton angels of a couple of years ago and the midden heaps of bones and body parts shown earlier this season.

Some of Skoglund's babies are half-

two black, polished granite walls which

Memorial Fund, “a realistic depiction of

buried in the black sand, frozen in mid¬

seem both to rise from and recede into

Vietnam fighting men and a symbol of

gesture, like the cindered corpses at

the earth. Chronologically inscribed in

their devotion to country." Yet while the

Pompeii. Including the installation here

the granite are the names of 57,939 dead

statue, by Frederick Hart, earnestly rep¬

and missing, beginning, in the vertex of

resents the kind of tragic youth peculiar

seemed a necessary concession to "ex¬

the V, with the year 1959 and ending, in

to the Vietnam war, it is not realistic, nor

hibition values"—few dealers (or artists)

the same spot, with 1975. While each

is it even historical. It is social realist

would trust a single photograph to hold viewers’ attention in an otherwise empty

wall points toward a national monument

statuary and is thus merely political. In

(those of Washington and Lincoln), the

time, when the echo of the war has

gallery. But it was really in the photo¬

memorial as a whole seems to burrow

faded, the statue will come to represent

graph that Skoglund’s point was made.

away from the "testimonial to power"

more of a tortured response to Modern¬

The somber-faced man gazing out the

profile of much Washington architecture.

ism—and its fearful silence—than the

window is the central character in this drama. The installation, on the other

Often one finds people kneeling in the

politics of the moment. The timeless

soft grass along its length, looking for

symbols of devotion, it seems to me, are

hand, is like a movie set without the

names. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is

—JEFF KELLEY

actors. Seeing its edges, and noticing the details of its construction (babies

America's wailing wall—not so much a

were hung from the walls and ceiling by wires and eyelets screwed into their

thing as a place. It does not try to chisel

backs), emphasized the artifice of the

this war—into some marbleized mon-

one’s ambivalence about war—about

image, while the photograph, inherently

umentality; it is low-key, apolitical, and

illusionistic, hid these seams—with the

does not aggrandize or denigrate the

edges of the frame replacing those of the

experience of Vietnam. There are no

set, for example. Skoglund uses the same set of de¬ vices here as in her two previous works;

heroic social realist devices here, only the social realism etched in one's cathartic act of locating a place, and

they're so distinctive and effective that the repetition might make them seem too

thus one’s private moment, within a con¬

similar, as if she’d gotten stuck on a suc¬

war can be told simply, it is in the recita¬

cessful formula. But by changing the

tion of the names of the dead. In this way

central element to babies, whose con¬ notations are much more immediate,

the memorial becomes an elegant ritual site, a setting neutral enough to invoke

complex, and emotional than those of

the passions of savage experience with¬

her earlier subjects, she injects a pointed meaning into the work.

out political comment.

—CHARLES HAGEN

tinuum of history. For if the history of a

Against the heated current of neoExpressionist painting, a Minimalist siteobject may seem too dispassionate and serialized a response to the Vietnam ex¬

MAYA YING LIN, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Mall:

perience. But the Vietnam Veterans

Monuments are curious hybrids of art

coopts art—in this case, the reserved,

and architecture, public and private space, singular vision and official style.

serial logic of '60s sculpture (the Viet¬

They are not really about themselves as objects in the Modernist tradition, but are

a sense of national place, in the torrent of

Memorial is not about art. Instead it

nam era)—in order to create pause, and unresolved emotions about the war.

often shrouded in monumental ity as they

Yet for many the memorial represents

codify social rhetoric and mystify the his¬

the worst in high-art elitism, a Modernist

tory they pretend to report. To its lasting

conspiracy of language that mystifies the public and keeps history in the hands

credit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is a re¬ served, site-specific object that allows the sad narrative of Vietnam—as echoed

of the fluent. While some see the dark granite wall as an anti-Vietnam commen¬ tary, others see in its abstraction nothing

in the names of the dead—to tell itself. A slight fissure in a gentle green knoll,

at all. Consequently, within a year, a

the memorial is a place of refuge for an

dered footsoldiers will be located near

orphaned history. Cut into the site like a giant V, the memorial is composed of

the memorial’s entrance to provide, according to the Vietnam Veterans

bronze statue of three dazed and bewil¬

already etched in the granite wall.

STEVEN LISBERGER, “Tron”: Tron is another in the current crop of glossy tech movies. It is a cute and flashy piece of propaganda which argues for democratized access to computertechnology. This scenario places it amid the "us versus them-isms, ’ that never-ending litany of unbalanced dualities which results in the classic narrative-film conventions of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and the good and the bad On the side of "good" are Alan and Lora (Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Mor¬ gan). who are employees of a vast media conglomerate called Encom. and Flynn (the wonderfully heroic slob Jeff Bridges), a maverick whiz kid dismissed by the company after they handily appropriated his program for a success¬ ful video game. "Space Paranoids." The three join forces to challenge corporate tyranny and to retrieve the data that proves Flynn's authorship of the game. Their ignoble adversaries are Dillmger (David Warner), the diabolical boss, and the MCP (Master Control Plan), a throw¬ back to the cranky HAL of Stanley Kub¬ rick's 2001. Things become a bit more complicated when the MCP vengefully deports Flynn to the interiors of computer space, where he continues to fight the good fight along with Tron and Yori (humanoids modeled after Alan and Lora, their programmers in the "outside world"). Of course, after much visual raz¬ zle-dazzle and narrative confusion, they are triumphant in their quest to liberate computer access, making the system

available to the "users" and safe for democracy. Much has been made of Tron's tech¬ no-esthetic flourishes; it has been praised as the vehicle that unveils the visual power of computer "art." But for those who have been watching televi¬ sion for the past five years. Tron's choreography is not revelatory—just a vast improvement on an already familiar vocabulary. Computer graphics invaded the TV screen as a result of the major networks’ desires for more riveting, auratic presentations of their numerical logos. This spawned a bevy of luxurious¬ ly enhanced twos, fours, and sevens floating in space, positioned by furiously manipulative grids and winking occa¬ sional sparks of light. These corporate numerals loitering in a never-never land of questionable distances are Tron's visual turf, along with the aggressions of the video arcade and the techniques of conventional film animation. After all. this is a Walt Disney production. The change in scale from video to film multiplies the power of these graphic orchestrations, of course, but they are overexposed in Tron. What is dazzling in a 30-second TV spot becomes excru¬ ciatingly rote after nearly two hours of frantic exhibitionism. This is not to say there isn’t a place in contemporary film production for the stunning proclivities of computer art. but merely that these motifs should demand the same intelli¬ gent usage as astute dialogue and vir¬ tuoso live-action cinematography. And further misfortune couples these over¬ done "state-of-the-art’’ accomplish¬ ments with some of the most fool ish cos¬ tuming this side of Halloween. The re¬ sults look like an updated version of Buck Rogers, with the humanoids traips¬ ing around computer space in little leotards, like archaic cartoon remnants of an imperfect "real world." Neverthe¬ less, Tron's confused but sometimes in¬ teresting liberal-propaganda scenario does sport four or five lines of intelligent dialogue. Hopefully, Lisberger will take note: successful propaganda economi¬ cally extracts the heart of the matter from an embarrassment of riches. —BARBARA KRUGER

APPENDIX: tSSrial Editors

John Irwin Philip Leider John Coplans

Joseph Masheck

Ingrid Sischy

Associate Editors

Arthur Secunda Gerald Nordland Max Kozloff

James Monte Robert Pincus-Witten

Annette Michelson Lawrence Alloway Rosalind E. Krauss Peter Plagens

Contributing Editors

Barbara Rose Sidney Tillim Michael Fried Palmer D. French Jane Harrison Cone Jerrold Lanes

Managing Editors

.

1/4-11/12 September 1962-1963 (Founder Publisher l/1-ll/12June 1962-1964) III/1-X/4 September 1964-December 1971 (Managing Editor 1/5-11/10 Octo¬ ber 1962-June 1964) X/5-XV/6 January 1972-February 1977 (Editor-Publisher XV/2-XVI/6 October 1976-February 1977; Executive Editor X/1-3 September-November 1971; Associate Editor 1/4-12 September 1962-June 1963; V/10-IX/10 June 1967-1971; Editor at Large II/1-IV/1 September 1963-1965; Contributing Editor IV/2-V/9 October 1965-May 1967) XV/7-XVI11 March 1977-January 1980 (Associate Editor XIII/1 -XIV/4 Septem¬ ber 1974-December 1975; Contributing Editor XI/5-XI1/10 January 1973June 1974, XVIII/6-XXI/10 February 1980-June 1983) XVII1/6 February 19801/4-11/2 September 1962-August 1963 11/3-12 September 1963-June 1964 II/8-V/9 February 1964-May 1967, XI/1-XIII/4 September 1972-December 1974 (Executive Editor XII1/5 January 1975; Contributing Editor V/10-VIII/ 10 June 1967-1970, X/1-10 September 1971-June 1972) III/1-V/9 September 1965-May 1967 (Contributing Editor V/10-IX/10 June 1967-1971; Review Editor 11/9-12 March-June 1974) X/I-XI1/2 September 1971-October 1973, XIII/5-XIV/5 January 1975-1976 (Senior Editor XI1/3-XI11/4 November 1973-December 1974; Contribut¬ ing Editor VII/1-IX/10 September 1968-June 1971, XIV/6-7 FebruaryMarch 1976) XI/1 -XIV/4 September 1972-December 1975 (Contributing Editor V/4-X/10 December 1966-June 1972) XI/5-XIV/5 January 1973-1975 (Contributing Editor X/2-XI/4 October 1971December 1972, XIV/6-XV/2 February-October 1976) XI/6-XIV/4 February 1973-December 1975 (Contributing Editor VIII/3-XI/5 November 1969-January 1973) XIII/1 -XIV/4 September 1974-December 1975 (West Coast Editor XIV/5 Janu¬ ary 1976; Contributing Editor X/1-XII/10 September 1971-June 1974)

Jack Burnham John Elderfield Walter D, Bannard Nancy Marmer Germano Celant Thomas McEvilley Edit deAk

IV/2-XI/7 October 1965-March 1973 IV/2-IX/3 October 1965-November 1970 IV/7-VI1/6 March 1966-February 1974 VI/1-IX/10 September 1967-June 1971 VI/4-VI11/3 December 1967-November 1969 VII/1-10 September 1968-June 1969, VIII/3-XII/2 November 1969-OcL ober 1973 X/1-10 September 1971-June 1972 XI/2-XI1/10 October 1972-June 1974 XI/5-XI1/10 January 1972-June 1974 XIV/6-XV/10 February 1976-June 1977 XVI11/6 February 1979XXI/3 November 1982XXI/6 February 1983-

Sarah Ryan Black Angela W.Reaves (Westwater) Nancy Foote Richard Flood Elizabeth Hess Jeff Weinstein David Frankel

X/1-XI/1 September 1971-1972 XI/2-XI11/10 October 1972-June 1975 XIV/1 -XVI11/5 September 1975-January 1980 XVIII/8-XIX/3 April 1980-November 1980 XIX/5-8 January-April 1981 XIX/9-10 May-June 1981 XX/1-September 1981-

Abbott, Berenice 317; Ulus 317 Abramovic, Marina/Ulay 334, 335; i/lus 334 Acconci, Vito 306, 314, 315; Ulus 314 Ace Gallery (Los Angeles) 299 Acker, Kathy 243, 244, 247, 251-253 Acton, Arlo 101 Adams, Ansel 276, 308 Adrian, Dennis 278, 281 Albers, Josef 58, 138, 274, 276, 278, 280, 304 Alberti, Leon-Battista 202 Albright, Ivan Le Lorrain 162 Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY) 128 Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, CT) 315 Alex, William 132 Alexander, Peter 297 Alloway, Lawrence 83, 137-140, 166, 337 Altman, Robert 183-187 An American Place (New York) 276 Anastasi, William 193; i/lus 193 Anderson, Laurie 308, 332 Andre, Carl 59, 62, 64, 73, 93, 94, 104, 122-123, 140, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 167, 200-203, 252, 286, 287, 294, 295, 308; il/us 150, 156, 201, 286 Ant Farm,The 319, 326, 327; i/lus 327 Antisthenes 262 Antonakos, Stephen 46, 291 Antonioni, Michelangelo 292, 298, 299 Apollonaire, Guillaume 201 Aragon, Louis 144 Arakawa, Shusaku 192 Arbus, Diane 311 Archipenko,Alexander 280 Arenberg, Walter & Louise 24 Aristotle 259, 260, 261 Armajani, Siah 330; Ulus 330 Arnason, H. Harvard 163 Arp, Hans (Jean) 31,44,71,304 Art & Project (Amsterdam) 331 Artaud, Antonin 195 Artists Space (New York) 313, 318 319, 325 Artpark (New York) 330 Artschwager, Richard 283, 291; Ulus283 Art Students League (New York) 202 Ashbery, John 320 Atget, Eugene 317 Augstein, Rudolf 231 Auvier, Albert 69

Avedon, Richard 318; Ulus 318 Avery, Milton 276 Aycock, Alice 315; illus315 Babbit, Milton 74, 75 Babel, Isaac 319 Bach, Johann Sebastian 74 Bacon, Francis 291, 292; Ulus 291 Baer, Jo 77 Baker, Kenneth 302 Bakhchanyan, Vagrich 223; i/lus 221 Baldessari, John 293,294 Balzac, Honore 198 Bannard, Walter D. 337 Baracks, Barbara 319, 321 Barlow, Elizabeth 132, 133 Barnes, Clive 55 Barnes, Djuna 317 Barnes, Molly, Gallery (Los Angeles)293 Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia) 158 Barr, Alfred H.,Jr. 162, 163, 166, 167, 170 Barry, Robert 151, 252 Barthes, Roland 213 Baselitz, Georg 230, 233, 234; Ulus 230 Baskin, Leonard 291 Baudelaire, Charles 69 Bauer, Rudolph 162 Baumeister, Willi 291 Baur, John I. H. 293 Bayer, Herbert 300 Beal, Jack 83, 84, 85, 288, 289; il/us 85, 288 Beardsley, Monroe 261 Beaucamp, Eduard 230 Becher, Bernhard & Hilla 122-123;illus 122, 123 Bechtle, Robert 84 Becker, Jurgen 34 Beckett, Samuel 94, 152, 161 Beckmann, Max 291,318 Beethoven, Ludwig von 74 Bell, Larry 279, 280, 286, 297; Ulus 279 Benglis, Lynda 294, 307, 309;Ulus307 Benjamin, Walter 213,255 Benton, Fletcher 202, 291 Bergman, Ingmar 282; "Hour of the Wolf" 282 Berkeley, University Art Museum 276, 312 Berlant, Tony 291 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 201, 239 Berthot, Jake 313 Bettelheim, Bruno 146, 147

Beuys, Joseph 197, 223, 226, 235, 304, 305, 306,312,333 Beveridge, Karl 210,211 Bewick, Thomas 161 Biederman, Charles 304 Bielefeld, Kuntshalle 252 Bill, Max 117, 304 Birdwhistell, Ray L. 110 Bischof, Werner 276 Black, Sara Ryan 337 Bladen, Ronald 62, 64, 291 Blondel, Francois 4 Bloom, Hyman 162,163 Blum Helman Gallery (New York) 322 Blume, Bernhard, Johannes 234 Bochner, Mel 73-77, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 201, 294, 300, 301, 302, 303,308; Ulus 77, 151, 153 Boetti, Alighiero 227 Boghosian, Varujan 291 Boice, Bruce 306, 307 Bollinger, Thomas 81 Bontecou, Lee 15, 291 Boone, Mary, Gallery (New York) 333 Borden, Lizzie 140, 141, 301, 302, 305, 307 Borges, Jorge Luis 115 Bos, Saskia 331 Boston Museum of Fine Arts 172 Botkin, Henry 162 Boullee, Etienne Louis 4 Boulez, Pierre 75; Ulus 74 Bourgeois, Jean-Louis 295 Bourgeois, Louise 162,291; /Hus264-271 Brancusi, Constantin 104 Brant, Sharon 302 Braque, Georges 10, 13, 202 Brecht, Bertholt 194, 195, 213 Brecht, George 34,319 Breton, Andre 41, 144, 148, 195 Breuer, Marcel 210 Bridge Theatre (New York) 128 Brock, Brazon 230-235 Bronson, AA 331, 332 Broodthaers, Marcel 196-199; Ulus 196-199 Brooklyn Museum 172 Brown, Denise Scott 211,212,213 Brunelleschi, Filippo 234, 272 Bulatov, Eric 220, 221, 223 Bunel, Luis 145 Burden, Chris 182 Burden, William A. M. 163 Buren, Daniel 142, 208,212,321,322; Ulus 212

Burgin, Victor 305 Burke, Edmund 131 Burn, Ian 173-176, 210, 211 Burnham, Jack 105-109, 256, 258, 337 Burton, Scott 318,319 Bury, Pol 100 Butler, Eugenia, Gallery (Los Angeles) 295, 296 Butler, Reg 291 Byars, James 296, 297 Bykert Gallery (New York) 289, 300, 303, 309, 313 Cage, John 22-24,53,66,89,91,125, 194, 312; ill us 22-24 Cahn, Marcelle 304 Calas, Nicolas 196-199,257,258,260, 261, 262 Calcagno, Larry 302 Callahan, Harry 307, 308, 324 Callot, Jacques 162 Campbell, Joseph 257 Campus, Peter 324; i/lus 324 Canady, John 78 Cardozo, Judith 320 Carlsund, Otto 304 Carnegie Institute/Museum (Pittsburgh) 163 Caro, Anthony 61, 64, 65, 67, 118, 120, 172, 289; i/lus 66, 289 Carracci, Annibale 158 Carroll, Lewis 112 Carter, Bennett 66 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 316 Castelli, Leo, Gallery 26, 30, 193, 252, 279, 283, 294, 295, 302, 319, 321, 322, 326, 330, 335 Cavallon, Giorgio 162 Celant, Germano 272, 337 Celine, Louis Ferdinand 29 Celmin, Vija 295, 296 Centre National d'Art et de Culture (CNAC) (Paris) 197, 198; Baroness Museum 197 Cezanne, Paul 30, 70, 80, 132, 167, 171, 207, 212, 223, 234, 272, 309, 323,334 Chabrol, Claude 298 Chagall, Marc 162, 243 Chamberlain, John 118, 275, 284, 319; i/lus 275 Cheval, Ferdinand 3, 4 Chia, Sandro 227, 243, 244, 246, 247, 252 Chicago, Art Institute of 172

Childs, Lucinda 55,124-129; Ulus 124,

126, 129 Chomsky, Noam 235, 260 Chryssa, Varda 291 Chuikov, Ivan 219, 220, 221 Cioffi, Frank 257, 261 Clarke, John Clem 83, 85; Ulus 87 Clemente, Francesco 226-229, 247;

Ulus 226-229 Cocteau, Jean 195,317 Cohen, George 29 Collins, James 309 Cone, Jane Harrison 284, 337 Conner, Bruce 15,274 Connolly, Cyril 38 Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati) 330 Cooper, Paula, Gallery (NewYork) 289, 290, 307, 313, 323, 324 Copely, John Singleton 85 Coplans, John 103, 166, 275, 337 Cornell, Joseph 8, 9; Ulus 8 Corner, Philip 34, 128 Courbet, Gustave 107, 190, 191 Covarrubias, Miguel 162 Cragg, Tony 329; Ulus 329 Creeley, Robert 300 Croce, Benedetto 256 Cummings, E. E. 72 Cunningham, Merce 125 Curry, John Stewart 202

339

Dali, Salvador 38, 44, 70, 145, 148, 288 d'Amico, Victor 163 Dance Theatre (New York) 128 Danieli, Fidel A. 276, 278 Daniels, John, Gallery (New York) 59, 203 Darboven, Hanne 77 Datter, John 135 Daumier, Honore 107, 197, 198 David, Jacques Louis 107 Da Vinci, Leonardo 159, 207, 272 Davis, Douglas 256, 258, 259, 319 Davis, Gene 193; Ulus 192 Davis, Ron 302 Davis, Stuart 71, 162, 163, 277 DeAk, Edit 226-229, 324, 337 Dean, Laura 306,307; Ulus 307 DeAndrea, John 301 de Beauvoir, Simone 133, 194 de Carava, Roy 286 de Chirico, Giorgi 38,40,195, 306, 309 Deem, George 83 Degas, Edgar 306 de Kooning, Willem 15,19,72,73,84, 93, 152, 162, 163, 178, 259, 279, 296, 298, 314, 319, 320; Ulus 320 Delacroix, Eugene 107 Delap, Tony 296 Delaunay, Sonia 304 Delehanty, Suzanne 137,138 della Francesca, Piero 157 de Maria, Walter 225, 284; Ulus 224 Democritus 161 de Nagy, Tibor, Gallery (New York) 203, 281 Denis, Maurice 191 de Rivera, Jose 202, 291 Derrida, Jacques 262

Desargues, Girard 76 de Saussure, Ferdinand 88,89,90,257 Desnos, Robert 144 Devereux, George 108 DeYoung Museum (San Francisco) 276 d'Harnoncourt, Rene 163 Dia Art Foundation (New York) 225 Diamond, Stanley 108,109 Dibbets, Jan 303, 326; Ulus 326 Diebenkorn, Richard 86, 296; Ulus296 di Giorgio, Francesco 159 Dilexi Gallery (Los Angeles) 275 Diller, Burgoyne 71, 162, 304 Dine, Jim 20, 28, 29, 285, 286, 312, 313; Ulus 285 di Suvero, Mark 116-121, 135, 278, 279, 284; Ulus 117-121 Dobkin, John H. 162 Donatello, Donati 91, 201 ;illus90 Dore, Gustave 197 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 220 Downes, Rackstraw 323; Ulus 323 Doyle, Tom 291 Dreier, Katharaine 145 Drexler, Sherman 319 Dubuffet, Jean 9, 28, 29, 30, 31, 275 Duchamp, Marcel 8, 9, 22, 23, 27, 29, 46, 71, 73, 74, 89, 90, 91, 94, 96, 108, 118, 143, 144, 145, 151, 152, 158, 172, 180, 197, 199, 208, 251, 258, 262, 272, 278, 300, 301, 305, 317, 326, 328; Ulus 73, 89, 90, 143-

148 Duff, John 315 Dunn, Robert & Judith, Studio 128 Durer, Albrecht 76,161,162, 318; Ulus

75 Durkheim, Emile 108 DLisseldorf Art Academy 122 Dwan Gallery (New York/Los Angeles) 77, 193, 275, 277, 278, 281, 282, 283, 286, 298, 300 Eakins, Thomas 73, 76 Edman, Irwin 71 Ehrenzweig, Anton 89, 90 Einstein, Albert 161 Eisenstein, Sergei 144 Elderfield, John 337 Eliot, T. S. 112,132,263 Eluard, (Eugene Grindel) Paul 148 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 204, 205, 330 Emmerich, Andre, Gallery (New York) 289, 295 Engels, Friedrich 221, 304 Ernst, Max 38, 161, 317 Estes, Richard 83, 84, 86; Ulus 83 Evans, Walker 324 Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) 55 Factor, Donald 275, 280 Falconer, Jim 288 Fangor, Wolfgang 166 Faraday, Michael 207 Farber, Manny 80-82, 282, 285, 293 Farber, Stephen 183-187 Fashion Moda (New York) 255 Feeley, Paul 138 Feininger, Lyonel 162 Feldman, Ronald, Fine Arts (NewYork) 304,319

Feneon, Felix 69 Fenton, Terry 296 Ferber, Herbert 202, 291 Ferrara, Jackie 308; Ulus 308 Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles) 8,276, 278, 279 Feuchtwanger, Leon 221 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 131 Filarete, Antonio Averlino 4 Finch College 294 Fischbach Gallery (New York) 286 Fischer, Hal 327 Fischer, R. M. 325; Ulus 325 Fischl, Eric 329 Fisher, Jean 333 Fisher, Joel 329 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 130 Flanagan, Barry 202, 294 Flavin, Dan 45-47. 77, 149, 155, 200, 202, 203, 208, 280, 286; Ulus 45-

47, 209 Flood, Richard 329, 332, 335, 337 Follett, Jean 118 Fontana, Lucio 192, 309, 310;///us 309 Foote, Nancy 318, 337 Foreman, Richard 194 49th Parallel (New York) 331, 332 Foster, Hal 324, 326, 327, 328, 332 Foulkes, Llyn 297 Fourcade, Xavier, Gallery (New York) 320 Fox, Mike 102 Fox, Terry, 312; Ulus 312 Frampton, Hollis 112-115, 203 Francis, Sam 276, 297; Ulus 6, 7 Frankel, David 337 Frankenthaler, Helen 287, 295, 298;

Ulus 190 French, Palmer D. 337 Freud, Lucien 292 Freud, Sigmund 41, 90, 143, 148, 161, 163, 220, 228 Fried, Michael 61-68, 78, 79, 98, 193, 256, 257, 258, 259, 287, 337 Friedenn, Marv 260 Friedlander, Lee 316 Friedrich, Kaspar David 190, 233 Frumkin, Allan, Gallery (New York) 8, 280, 288, 310 Fry, Edward F. 109 Fuchs, Rudi 254, 255 Fuller, Buckminster 5; Ulus 5

Gabo, Naum 61, 117 Gachnang, Johannes 255 Galerie Denise Rene (New York) 304 Gallery 669 (Los Angeles) 293 Garver, Thomas H. 296 Gaudi, Antonio 5 Geldzahler, Henry 20-21 General Idea 331-332 Georges, Paul 86 Gericault, Theodore 107 Gerlovin, Rimma & Valerii 219, 222, 223 Getlein, Frank 78 Giacometti, Alberto 328 Gibson, John, Gallery (New York) 304, 305 Gibson, Ralph 36

Gilbert & George 301, 302, 303, 319;

Ulus 303 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 309, 310 Gilhooley, David 101 Gilpin, William 130 Giotto, di Bondone 234 Glarner, Fritz 159,162,304 Glaser, Bruce 29-32 Glass, Philip 243, 247 Glueck, Grace 133 Godard, Jean-Luc 80-82, 149, 155, 285 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 262,304 Goffman, Erving 314 Gogol, Nikolai 219, 319 Goings, Ralph 84; Ulus 86 Goldbach, Christian 114 Goldowsky, Noah, Gallery (NewYork) 284 Goldstein, Malcom 128 Goldwater, Robert 69-70 Gombrich, E. H. 139, 261 Gonzalez, Julio 118 Goodnough, Robert 48 Goodrich, Lloyd 163 Goosen, Eugene 180, 203 Gorin, Jean 304 Gorky, Arshile 12,71,93,162, 297, 298 Gottlieb, Adolph 162 Gottlieb, Harry 162 Gowing, Lawrence 292 Goya, Francisco 44 Graham, Dan 59, 77, 208-214, 291;

Ulus 209 Graham, John 162 Graham Gallery (New York) 283, 291 Gramercy Arts Theatre (NewYork) 128 Graves, Morris 162 Graves, Nancy 298; Ulus 298 Greco, El (Deomenikos Theotokopoulous) 234 Green, Art 288 Greenberg, Clement 12,62, 63, 65, 79, 83 107, 132, 138, 163, 175, 192, 195, 201, 246, 256-259, 261, 262, Greenberg, Joseph 75 Greene, Balcomb 71,162 Green Gallery (New York) 117, 202, 203, 275 Gregory, Horace 257 Gris, Juan 71,201 Grooms, Red 281 Groot, Paul 332 Groover, Jan 327, 328 Gropius, Walter 208,210 Grossman, Nancy 291 Grosvenor, Robert 64, 291 Groys, Boris 220,221,222,223 Guggenheim Museum 10-13, 72, 105109, 140, 159, 162, 163, 166, 240, 311 Gusso, Alan 133 Gussow, Bernard 291 Guston, Philip 162, 313, 324; Ulus 314 Haacke, Hans 105-109, 181; Ulus 105-

108, 182 Habermas, Jurgen 251 Hagen, Charles 336 Hague Gemeentemuseum 203 Hairy Who 288

Hall, Nigel 291 Halstead, Whitney 282, 288 Hammarskjold, Dag, Sculpture Plaza (New York) 319 Handke, Peter 195 Hansa Gallery (New York) 20, 21 Hansen, Al 34 Hansen, Duane 310; Ulus 310 Hare, David 162 Haring, Keith 243 Harris, 0. K., Gallery (New York) 301, 310 Hart, Frederick 336 Hatchett, Duayne 291 Hausmann, Raoul 161 Hay, Alex 128, 192, 291 Hay, Deborah 128 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 131, 144, 262 Heine, Heinrich 231 Heinemann, Susan 313, 315 Heizer, Michael 98, 99, 100, 155;///us

98 Held, Al 31 Helion, Jean 162 Heraclitus 161 Herbin, August 304 Hess, Elizabeth 337 Hess, Thomas B. 78,161-165 Hesse, Eva 77, 93-97, 139, 294, 300, 303, 309, 312; illus 93-97 Heurtaux, Andre 304 Higgins, Richard 34, 308 Hilton, Ralph 315, 316 Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC)

212 Hitchcock, Alfred 284, 285, 327 Hitchcock, Henry Russell 48, 210 Hoberman, J. 327 Hoch, Hannah 161 Hockney, David 303 Hoerle, Heinrich 318 Hoffman, Abbie 99, 98, 100, 103 Hoffman, Nancy, Gallery (New York) 321 Hofmann, Hans 19, 100, 162, 166, 280, 298, 299; illus 280 Hogarth, William 161 Holbein, Hans 161 Holland, B. C. Gallery (Los Angeles) 282 Holtzman, Harry 162 Homer, Winslow 292 Hopkins, Henry T. 274 Hopper, Dennis illus. 33, 35 Hopper, Edward 86 Hopps, Walter 25-28 Howard, Charles 291 Huebler, Douglas 151 Hughes, Langston 286 Hulme, T. E. 132 Hulten, Pontus 198 Humphrey, Ralph 289,313 Hunt, Bryan 322 Hunt, Richard 291 Husserl, Edmund 251 Hyde, Philip 276 Hyde Park Art Center (I L) 288 Immendorff, Jorg 233, 234; illus 234 Institute of Contemporary Arts (Phila¬ delphia) 128, 137

lolas, Alexander, Gallery (New York) 297,309 Ipousteguy, Jean Robert 108 Irwin, John 337 Irwin, Robert 281, 297, 319, 320, 330 Ives, Charles 134 Izenor, Steve 212,213 Jackson, Martha, Gallery (New York) 29 Jackson, William H. 276 Jacquette, Yvonne 305 James, William 207 Janis Gallery (New York) 277 Jaudon, Valerie 325, 326; illus 326 Jenney, Neil 229 Jensen, Alfred 73, 76, 204-207; illus

76, 205, 206, 207 Jewish Museum (New York) 25, 26, 48, 71, 72, 200, 202, 203, 286 Johannes, Bernhard 234; illus 234 Johns, Jasper 22, 23, 25-28, 29, 58, 73, 85, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94,150,1 78, 192, 279, 297, 302; illus 25, 26, 27,

28, 74, 91, 279 Johnson, Philip 48, 135, 210 Johnson, Timothy 308 Jonas, Joan 98, 99, 110-111; illus 110,

111 Joseph, Richard 84; illus 87 Joyce, James 161,163,228,229,241, 317 Judd, Donald 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 73, 77, 120, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 178, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 275, 276, 286, 287, 291, 330, 331;

illus 67, 149, 200, 202 Judson Dance Theatre (New York) 124, 125 Judson Memorial Church 128 Judson Street Gallery (New York) 30 Jung, Carl Gustav 163 Kael, Pauline 183, 185 Kahn, Wolf 86 Kandinsky, Wassily 10-13,

19, 162;

illus 11, 12, 13 Kant, Immanuel 131 Kapp, Ivan C. 14-15 Kaprow, Allan 20, 29, 30, 33-36, 76, 206,328 Karpel, Bernard 163 Kassak, Lajos 304 Katz, Alex 83, 84 Kauffman, Craig 297 Kauffman, R. 276, 277, 291 Kawara, On 151 Kaymer Gallery (New York) 203 Kelly, Ellsworth 14, 73, 138, 158, 261,276, 278; illus 159, 278 Kelly, Jeff 336 Kiefer, Anselm 230, 233, 234, 235, 332; illus 236, 237 Kienholz, Edward 274,297,311 Kingsley, April 305, 306 Kipp, Lyman 291 Kirby, Michael 34 Kirschenbaum, Bernard 77 Kitaj, R. D. 299, 300; illus 299 Kitchen, The (New York) 315 Klee, Paul 10, 300 Klein, Yves 258, 259, 262, 275

Kline, Franz 15, 93, 118, 279 Kluver, Billy 53-55 Knoedler Contemporary Art (New York) 316 Knowles, Alison 34 Knowles, Christopher 316 Koch, Thilo 230 Kohn, Gabriel 291 Kolakoski, William 77 Komar, Vitaly 219-223, 319 Kootz Gallery (New York) 280 Kornblee Gallery (New York) 323 Kosolapov, Sasha 219 Kosuth, Joseph 151, 242, 243-247, 250, 251, 252, 259, 262, 293, 294, 295; illus 293 Kounellis, Jannis 227, 306, 332, 333;

illus 306 Kozloff, Max 38, 139, 177-182, 200, 219, 281, 291,337 Kramer, Hilton 10-13, 318 Krasner, Lee 162 Krauss, Rosalind E. 149-156, 256, 261, 280, 289, 309, 337 Kruger, Barbara 243, 244, 245, 246, 251, 336 Kubler, George 88, 232, 293 Kuhn, Walt 305 Kuspit, Donald B. 204-208, 335 Lacan, Jacques 260 Lachaise, Gaston 115, 202 Laderman, Gabriel 83, 84; illus 85 Laing, Gerald 291 Landau, Felix, Gallery (Los Angeles) 276 Landsman, Stanley 291 Lanes, Jerrold 337 Langsner, Jules 3 Lassaw, Ibram 162, 202, 252 Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse 144 Lawrence, D. H. 273 Lawson, Thomas 329 Leaf, June 29 Lebel, Jacques 34 Lebel, Robert 145 Lebrun, Christopher 333 Le Courbusier, Charles Edouard 49, 64 208,239 Ledoux, Claude Nicholas 4 Leepa, Allen 262 Leger, Fernand 71, 172 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, Museum (Duisberg, Germany) 117, 120, 121 Leider, Philip 98-104, 286, 294, 295, 337 Lekakis, Michael 291 Leslie, Alfred 48, 83, 84; illus 87 Le Va, Barry 294, 328 Levi, Josef 291 Levine, Jack 163,291 Levi-Strauss, Claude 89, 256 257 301, 305 Lewis, Wyndham 71, 132 LeWitt, Sol 56-60, 62, 64, 73, 75, 77, 140, 151, 158, 179, 200, 201, 202, 203, 300, 334; illus 56-60, 77 Liberman, Alexander 138,291 Licht, Jenny 166,168 Lichtenstein, Roy 15, 29-32, 200, 210, 212, 277, 291, 298.illus 14,29, 211

Liebmann, Lisa 273, 331, 334 Light Gallery (New York) 307, 316, 324 Lin, Maya Ying 336 Lindner, Richard 15 Linkner, Kate 254-255 Linville, Kasha 298, 300 Lippard, Lucy R. 56-60, 137, 140, 151,201,276 Lipton, Seymour 202, 291 Lisberger, Steven 336; "Tron" 336 Lissitzky, El 118, 159, 210 Lisson Gallery (London) 329 Livingston, Jane 283, 294 Loeb Student Center (New York) 312 Lo Guidice Gallery (Chicago) 120, 306 Long, Richard 331; illus 331 Loos, Adolf 233, 234, 241 Los Angeles County Museum 18, 274, 286, 297 Louis, Morris 14, 69, 202, 259, 287, 300 Lucas, George 185 Lijpertz, Markus 233, 234; illus 233 Lustig, Al 300 Lynn, David 100, 101, 103 MacDonald-Wright, Stanton 204, 205 Machu Picchu 88 Maciunas, George 34 Madoff, Steven 321 Maclver, Loren 162 Magritte, Rene 38-40, 58, 99, 196, 198, 297, 303, 306; illus 39, 40 Malevich, Kasimir 71, 159, 180, 220, 223, 259, 262 Mallarme, Stephane 39, 196, 197, 199 Mallary, Robert 291 Manet, Edouard 107, 150, 156, 167, 171 Mangold, Robert 157, 275, 305; illus

157, 159, 305 Mann, Margery 276, 277, 286 Mannheim, Karl 78 Man Ray 146 Manzoni, Piero 306 Manzu, Giacomo 108 Mapplethorpe, Robert 248, 255; illus

242, 248, 253 Marcuse, Herbert 304 Marden, Brice 226, 262, 287, 302, 303, 309, 313, 323 Marey, Etienne Jules 73, 74; illus 73 Margolis, Joseph 262 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 300 Marlborough Gallery (New York) 291, 318 Marmer, Nancy 279, 337 Martin, Agnes 137-140, 141,262,278, 303, 322, 323] illus 137-139 Martin, John 132 Marx, Karl 221 Masaccio, Tommaso di SerGiovanni 165 Masheck, Joseph 157-159, 299, 304, 337 Masson, Andre 162,309 Matisse, Henri 11, 71, 83, 99, 158, 171, 191, 192, 296, 309 Matta, Roberto 71, 162 Matta-Clark, Gordon 322 May, Rolla 133 McAgy, Douglas 163 McCausland, Elizabeth 317

McCracken, John 64, 291, 297 McEvilley. Thomas 256-263, 337 McKee, David, Gallery (NewYork) 313McLaughlin, John 138,297 McShine, Kynaston 168,202 Meadmore, Clement 291 Melamid, Alexander 219-223, 319 Melchert, Jim 291 Merkel, Jayne 330 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 117, 153 Merz, Mario 227,310,311 Messer, Thomas M. 10, 13, 105, 106, 108, 109 Metro Pictures 328 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) 135, 162, 163, 166, 167, 275, 280, 284, 285 Metzinger, Jean 201 Meunier, Constantin 107 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilievitch 240 Michelangelo 49, 60, 91, 201; Ulus 91 Michelson, Annette 143-148, 337 Miller, Dorothy 163, 165, 186 Miller, Richard 86 Millet, Franpois 198 Milton, John 132 Miro, Juan 12, 41, 42, 44, 171, 192, 196, 289 Mizuno Gallery (Los Angeles) 295 Moholy-Nagy, Lazio 280, 300, 308 Mondrian, Piet 10, 19, 31, 71, 100, 108, 138, 162, 257, 258, 278, 304 Monet, Claude 71, 191; illus 189 Monte, James 337 Moore, Alan 313 Moore, Charles 213 Moore, Henry 44, 108, 259 More, Hermon 163 Morgan, Stuart 328, 329 Morley, Malcom 83, 86 Morris, George L. K. 162 Morris, Robert 58, 59, 61-64, 67,73, 80, 88-92, 149, 151,153,154,155,167, 200-203, 286, 287, 291, 294, 300, 309, 335; illus 63, 301 Morrison, C. L. 320, 322 Morse, Samuel F. B. 189;///us 188 Morton, Ree 319 Morton, Rogers 134 Moss, Mel 101 Motherwell, Robert 72, 165, 293, 298;

illus 293

341

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 306 Muller, Jan 86 Mumford, Lewis 134 Miinter, Gabriele 10, 13 Murphy, Gerald 171 Murray, Elizabeth 313; illus 313 Murray, Robert 291 Musee Rodin (Paris) 202 Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (Rot¬ terdam) 332 Museum Fridericianum (Kessel, Ger¬ many) 254,334 Museum of Contemporary Art (Chica¬ go) 319,322 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 9, 12, 34, 38, 40, 71, 72, 112, 161, 163, 165, 166, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 180, 191, 202, 275, 280, 284, 285, 311, 316, 320

Muybridge, Edward 58, 73 Myers, Bernard 163 Nadelman, Elie 202 Nakian, Reuben 202 Nannen, Henri 230 NASA photographs 273,

324, 325;

illus 273, 324, 325 Nauman, Bruce 294, 312, 324; illus 294 Neel, Alice 283, 284 Neiman, LeRoy 247 Neizvestny, Ernst 222 Nelson Art Gallery (Kansas City) 202 Nemser, Cindy 93-97 Nesbitt, Lowell 83, 85 Nevelson, Louise 274 Newman, Barnett 19, 48, 100, 150, 165, 166, 178, 258, 259, 261, 262, 273, 278, 284, 298, 314, 328 New Paltz State Teachers College 128 New York Cultural Center 166 Nilsson, Gladys 288 Nochlin, Linda 323 Nodelman, Sheldon 256, 259 Noland, Kenneth 14, 31, 61, 67, 81, 85, 166, 180, 200, 202, 256, 263, 278, 287, 298; illus 181 Nordland, Gerald 337 Norton, Charles Eliot 134 Nouge, Paul 39 Novalis, Friedrich 304 Novros, David 287, 302, 303 Nutt James 288, 308; illus 288 O'Doherty, Brian 188-193 O'Hara, Frank 257 O'Keeffe, Georgia 71, 162 Oldenburg, Claes 20, 29-32, 53, 93, 277, 278, 283, 287, 291, 299, 300, 313, 334, 335 Olitski, Jules 61, 65, 67, 256, 262, 263, 284, 291, 298, 303 Oliva, Achille Bonito 304 Olmsted, Frederick Law 130-136 112 Green Street (New York) 315, 330,331 Ono, Yoko 34 Ontological Hysteric Theater 194 Oppenheim, Dennis 291, 324, 328;

illus 328 Oppenheim, Meret 288 Orangerie (Kessel, Germany) 335 Orozco, Jose Clemente 50 Ossorio, Alfonso 291 Oxford Museum (England) 197 Ozenfant, Amedee J. 158 Pace Gallery (New York) 281, 287, 322, 327 Palladio, Andrea 157, 234, 238, 239, 272 Panofsky, Erwin 232, 256, 260 Paolozzio, Eduardo 299, 300 Paris, Harold 291 Park Place Gallery (New York) 117, 118, 120, 121 Parker, Ray 48 Parmenides 258 Parsons, Betty, Gallery (New York) 26, 138, 287 Partz, Felix 331, 332

Pasadena Art Museum 137,297 Pascal, Blaise 205 Passloff, Aileen 128 Patsyukov, V 222 Patterson, Ben 34 Patton, Phil 316 Pavia, Philip 162 Paxton, Steve 125,128 Peale, Charles Wilson 29 Pearlstein, Philip 83, 84, 85, 86, 310: illus 84, 310 Peckham, Morse 88-90, 92, 321 Pei, I. M. 58 Peirce, Waldo 162 Penck, A. R. 233, 234, 235, 329, 330;

illus 232 Penn, Irving 328 Perkins, Constance 274 Perlberg, Deborah 325 Perrault, John 107 Perrone, Jeff 322 Petlin, Irving B. 276 Pevsner, Antoine 61 Philadelphia Museum of Art 112, 158, 172 Picabia, Francis 144 Picasso, Pablo 11, 13, 19, 31, 41-44, 71, 78, 79, 83, 171, 191,202, 234, 254; illus 41-44 Piche, Roland 291 Piller, Mickey 330 Pincus-Witten, Robert 137, 158,279, 282, 283, 284, 288, 289, 292, 300, 301,303, 304, 313, 337 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 241 Pissarro, Camille 107 Plagens, Peter 296, 298, 311, 312, 337 Plato 108, 109, 196, 258, 262 Pocket Theatre (New York) 128 Poindexter Gallery (New York) 296 Polanski, Roman 81 Pollock, Jackson 12, 15, 19, 31, 48, 72, 88, 89, 91, 93, 152, 162, 165, 167, 168, 243, 257, 258, 294, 298, 314,328 Pomodoro, Arnaldo 100, 108 Poons, Larry 73, 77, 200, 290, 298;

Reaves (Westwater), Angela W. 337 Rebay, Baroness Hilla 10, 162 Reese Palley Gallery (New York) 298 Reich, Steve 306, 312; illus 312 Reinhardt, Ad 71, 72, 138, 140, 160165, 166, 244, 258, 259, 262, 275, 278 292; illus 160, 162-165 Reis, Barbara 297 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 233, 326 Remington, Frederic 29 Rexroth, Kenneth 300 Rickey, Carrie 326 Rickey, George 202 Riegl, Alois 70 Rietveld, Gerrit 240 Rifka, Judith 313; illus 313 Riis, Jacob 317 Riley, Bridget 166 Rilke, Rainer Maria 221 Ritchie, Andrew 163 Rivera, Diego 161 Rivers, Larry 48, 86, 291 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 301, 311 Rocca, Suellen 288 Rockburne, Dorothea 151, 153, 155, 300, 302, 303; illus 300 Rockwell, Norman 161 Rodchenko, Alexander 61, 117, 180, 332 Rodia, Simon (Sam) 3, 4, 5; Watts Tower 3, 4; illus 2,3 Rodin, Auguste 117,201 Rodin, Musee (Paris) 202 Rolland, Romain 221 Rosati, James 291 Rose, Barbara 78-79, 98, 200, 201, 286, 293, 337 Rose Art Museum (Brandeis Un.) 40 Rosenberg, Harold 18-19, 78, 79, 107, 163, 258, 259 Rosenblum, Robert 41-44, 79, 200, 257 Rosenquist, James 15, 30, 277; illus

15, 277

Popova, Liubov 240 Porter, Eliot 276, 277, 323 Porter, Fairfield 86 Pound, Ezra 112, 132 Pozzo, Fra Andrea 272 Pratt Graphic Center (New York) 308,

Rosenthal, Bernard 291 Ross, Charles 291 Rosseau, Douanier 206 Roszak, Theodore 291 Rot, Diter 308 Rothko, Mark 48, 162, 163, 166, 256, 298, 302, 314, 328 Roussel, Raymond 146 Rubin, William 79, 166-172, 309; illus

309 Price, Ken 300; illus 300 Price, Uvedale 130, 131, 291 Pythagoras 262

Rubinfien, Leo 317, 325 Rubinstein, Lev 223 Ruscha, Edward 297, 308; illus 37,

illus 76

168-172

297 Rainer, Yvonne 81, 94, 125, 128 Rand,Paul 300 Raphael, Raffaello Sanzio 158 Ratcliff, Carter 116-121, 319 Rauch, John 211, 213; also see Ven¬ turi & Rauch Rauschenberg, Robert 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 54, 66, 73, 99, 118, 126, 151, 179, 262, 277, 279, 298, 332;

illus 74 Raysse, Martial 282, 283; illus 283 Read, Herbert 329

Ruskin, John 134,329 Russell, Bertrand 262 Ryman, Robert 179, 226; illus 179 Sachs, A. M. Gallery (New York) 308 Saendredam, Pieter Zansz 76 Said, Edward 261 Salle, David 243, 244, 247, 251, 329, 333, 334; illus 333 Samaras, Lucas 15, 287, 288, 291,319 Sandback, Fred 291 Sander, August 317, 318; illus 317

Sandler, Irving 200, 256, 275 San Francisco Actor's Workshop 285 San Francisco Museum of Art 277 Saret, Alan 291 Sarkisian, Paul 325 Sartre, Jean-Paul 94 Schapiro, Meyer 71, 163 Schier, Galka 24 Schiller, Friedrich 231, 304 Schjeldahl, Peter 323 Schlemmer, Oscar 303 Schliemann, Heinrich 232 Schmit, Tomas 34 Schnabel, Julian 247, 332; Ulus 332 Schnackenberg, Flenry Ernest 291 Schneede, Uwe 233 Schoelkopf, Robert, Gallery (New York) 317 Schoenberg, Arnold 13, 24, 74 Scholem, Gershom 258 Schopenhauer, Arthur 304 Schwitters, Kurt S. 5, 161, 241; illus 4 Secunda, Arthur 274, 337 Segal, George 20, 21, 291; illus 20, 21 Seitz, William 191, 202, 203, 280 Seley, Jason 291 Selz, Peter 100 Serra, Richard 98 , 99, 100, 103, 110, 111 151, 155, 230, 243, 246, 251, 252, 284, 294, 295; illus 110 7 7 7,

,

,

154, 155, 284, 295 Seuphor, Michel 13 Seurat, Georges 172, 181, 191, 207, 281 Shablavin, Sergei 221, 222 Shapiro, Joel 323, 324; illus 324 Sharp, Willoughby 305 Shattuck, Roger 38-40 Shaw, Bernard 221 Sheeler, Charles 157 Shelkovsky, Igor 219 Shepard, Paul 131, 133, 134 Sherman, Cindy 328, 329 Shields, Alan 289, 290 Simmons, Steven 194-195 Simon, Michel 284 Simonds, Charles 320, 321 Sischy, Ingrid 235, 272, 337 69th Regiment Armory (New York) 128 Skoggard, Ross 322 Skoglund, Sandy 335, 336 Sloan, John 72 Smith, David 13, 61, 64, 65, 67, 118, 280, 299, 316, 317 Smith, Leon Polk 138 Smith, Roberta 311, 314, 315, 317, 318 Smith, Tony 48-52, 63, 64, 67, 286, 287, 308, 327; illus 49-52 Smithson, Robert 62, 77, 100, 103, 104, 130-136, 155, 158, 167, 169, 281, 282, 291, 298, 299, 301; illus

104, 281 Smithsonian Institution 276 Snelson, Kenneth 302; illus 302 Snow, Michael 293; illus 292 Snyder, Susan R. 278, 309 Soby, Jim 163, 166

Socrates 108 Soleri, Paolo 321 Solomon, Alan 297 Solomon, Holly, Gallery (New York) 325 Sonnabend Gallery (New York) 301, 302, 305, 306, 312, 314, 327, 328 Sonnier, Keith 299, 300, 324 Sontag, Susan 194, 256, 260 Soutine, Chaim 21 Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery (New York) 203 Spoerri, Daniel 234, 308 Stable Gallery (New York) 163 Stadtische Galerie (Munich) 13 Stalin, Joseph 220 Stankiewicz, Richard 118 Stanley, Bob 85 Stazewski, Flenry 304 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) 197 Stedelijk van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven)

117, 120 Stein, Gertrude 191 Steinberg, Leo 70, 79 Steinberg, Saul 282; illus 282 Steiner, Michael 62 Steinitz, Kate Trauman 3-5 Stella, Frank 58, 61, 73, 85, 89, 91, 92, 149, 150, 152, 153, 158, 159, 166, 171, 177, 179, 193, 200, 201, 202, 259, 274, 275, 278, 287, 298, 302; illus 152 Stern, Robert A. M. 233, 256 Stevens, Wallace 256,261,263 Stieglitz, Alfred 112,113,114,276 Stieglitz Gallery (New York) 8 Stierlin 234 Still, Clyfford 16-17, 19, 48, 100,284, 298, 328; illus 17 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 73, 332 Stone, Sylvia 291 Storck, Gerhard 255 Strand, Paul 112-115; illus 113 Strindberg Museum 255 Stubbs, George 318 Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie 252 Sugarman, George 291 Sullivan, Louis 233 Sweeney, James Johnson 3,163 Swenson, Gene 210 Swift, Jonathan 321 Syberberg, Flans Jurgen 230, 231, 235,

328: illus 231 Sylvester, David 259 Tarshis, Jerome 300 Tatlin, Valdimir 4, 5, 61, 66, 118, 180 Taut, Bruno 4, 5 Taylor, Francis Flenry 162 Tewkesbury, Joan 184,185 Thass-Thienemann, Theodore 133 Thibaut Gallery (New York) 275 Thiebaud, Wayne 83, 84, 85, 86 Thompson, D’Arcy 48 Thomson, James 130 Thoreau, Flenry 130 Thornton, Gene 324, 325 Thorp, Edward, Gallery (New York) 329

Tillim, Sidney 83-87,310, 337;illus84 Tinguely, Jean 62 Tintoretto, il (Jacopo di Robusti) 234 Tobey, Mark 138,206 Tobias, Julius 291 Todd, Michael 291 Toler, Sydney 284 Tomey, Alan 256 Tomlin, Bradley Walker 298 Toronto, Art Gallery of 44, 292 Trenton State Museum (New Jersey) 290 Truitt, Anne 62, 291 Tschumi, Bernard 238-241 Tuchman, Phyllis 200-203 Tucker, Marcia 207 Tucker, William 329 Tuttle, Richard 151, 179, 287, 290;

illus 178, 287 Twombley, Cy 26, 192, 302, 313 Tworkov, Jack 26, 321; illus 321 Tzara, Tristan 144 Ucello, Paolo 76, 272 UCLA Graphics Gallery 299 Uecker, Gunter 166 Ulay/Marina Abramovic 334,335:illus

334 University Art Gallery, UC, Berkeley 276,312 Valentine, Dewain 290, 297 van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk (Eindho¬ ven) 117, 120 van Bruggen, Coosje 255 van der Rohe, Mies 209, 210, 212 van Gogh, Vincent 199, 261, 291, 312, 332 Vantongerloo, Georges 61 Varian, Elayne 294 Vasarely, Victor 166 Vasari, Giorgio 88 Vaux, Calvert 130 Venturi, Robert 211, 213; also see Venturi & Rauch Venturi & Rauch 211, 212, 213, 214;

illus 211, 213, 214 Vertov, Dziga 132 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washing¬ ton DC) 336 Vitruvius, Marais 156 von Jawlensky, Alexej 10,13 von Rintelen 234 von Schlegell, David 291 vonWerefkin, Marianne 10, 13 Vostell, Wolf 34 Wadsworth Atheneum (Flartford, CT) 128 Wagstaff, Samuel, Jr. 48-52 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) 128, 163 Wally, Seymour illus 311 Warburg, Otto 232 Warhol, Andy 15, 19, 29-32, 73, 81, 85, 93, 100, 181, 200, 210, 220, 243, 274, 277, 298, 303, 318; illus

15,32 Waring, James 128

Washburn, Gordon 163 Washington Square Art Gallery (New York) 128 Wasserman, Emily 286, 287, 290, 293, 297 Watkins, Franklin 162 Watts Tower (Los Angeles) 3, 4; illus

2,3 Weaver, Raymond 71 Weber, John, Gallery (New York) 302, 310, 321, 322 Wegman, William 305, 306; illus 305 Weiner, Lawrence 243, 245, 247, 249252, 294 Weinrib, David 291 Weinstein, Jeff 337 Welles, Orson 316 Werkman, Ftendrik 197 Werner, Michael, Gallery (Cologne) 329 Wesselman, Tom 15, 291; illus 14 Westermann, H. C. 280, 281, 291 Weston, Edward 112 Whistler, James Abbott MacNeill 190 Whitechapel Art Gallery (London) 332 Whitman, Robert 20 Whitman, Walt 273 Whitney, David, Gallery (New York) 300 Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) 72, 96, 132, 163, 166, 200, 290, 291, 293, 298, 300, 319, 324 Wilde, Oscar 226, 330 Wilder, Nicholas, Gallery (LosAngeles) 100, 278 Wiley, William 296; illus 296 Willard Gallery (New York) 315 Wilson, Ann 140 Wilson, Robert 194,315,316,331 Wilson, William 257, 258, 277 Wimsatt, William 261 Winogrand, Garry 316 Wirsum, Karl 288 Wise, Fioward 107 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 39, 75, 152, 153, 195, 240, 301 Wolfe, Tom 330 Wolff, Kurt 251 Wolff, Robert J. 165 Wolfflin, Heinrich 79 Wolfson, Sidney 138 Wood, Grant 202 Woolf, S. J. 162 Wooster, Ann Sargeant 316,317 Worringer, Wilhelm 132 Wotruba, Fritz 108 Wright, Frank Lloyd 48, 51, 240 Wright, Macdonald 72 Wyeth, Andrew 247 Wunderlich, Paul 99; illus 99 Young, La Monte 34 Youngerman, Jack 31 Zeno 262 Zinik, Zinovii 220 Zogbaum, Wilfred M. 202 Zola, Emile 69 Zontal, Jorge 331,332

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