Frameworks for Modern Art 9780300102284

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Frameworks for Modern Art Edited by Jason Gaiger

ART OF THE 20™ CENTURY

Frameworks for Modern Art

ART OF THE 20th CENTURY

Frameworks for Modern Art Edited by Jason Gaiger

Yale University Press, New Haven and London in association with The Open University

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This publication forms part of an Open University course: AA3 I 8 Art of the Twentieth Century. The complete list of texts which make up this course can be found in the Preface. Details of this and other Open University courses can be obtained from the Course Information and Advice Centre, PO Box 724, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6ZS, United Kingdom: tel. +44 (0)1908 653231, e-mail [email protected] Alternatively, you may visit the Open University website at http://www.open.ac.uk where you can learn more about the wide range of courses and packs offered at all levels by the Open University. To purchase a selection of Open University course materials, visit the webshop at www.ouw.co.uk or contact Open University Worldwide, Michael Young Building, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom for a brochure, tel. +44 (0)1908 858785; fax +44 (0)1908 858787; e-mail [email protected] Yale University Press 47 Bedford Square London WCIB3DP

The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA

First published 2003 by Yale University Press in association with The Open University. Copyright-^ 2003 The Open University. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIT 4LP. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright owners, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Frameworks for modern art / edited by Jason Gaiger. p. cm. - (Art of the twentieth century ; v. I) Includes discussion of: Marcel Duchamp’s Bottlerack, Barnett Newman’s Eve, Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, and Yarla by the Indigenous Australian Yuendumu community. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-10140-6 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-300-10228-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Art, Modern - 20th century. I. Gaiger, Jason. II. Art of the twentieth century (Yale University Press) ; v. I. N6490.F678 2003 709'.04-dc21 2003014470 ISBN 0—300—10140—6 (cloth) ISBN 0-300—10228—3 (paper) Edited, designed and typeset by The Open University. Printed and bound by CS Graphics, Singapore

Contents Preface

Introduction

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Jason Gaiger

Chapter I Art of the twentieth century

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Paul Wood

Chapter 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp’s Bottlerack

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Jason Gaiger

Chapter 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman’s Eve

I 05

Charles Harrison

Chapter 4 The expanding field: Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series

153

Gill Perry

Chapter 5 Exhibiting the ‘other’: Yuendumu community’s Yarla

207

Niru Ratnam

Further reading

253

Index

255

Preface This is the first of four books in the series Art of the Twentieth Century. Although the books can be read independently and are accessible to the general reader, as a series they form the main texts of an Open University third-level course of the same name. Frameworks for Modern Art provides a general introduction to the art of the twentieth century. The opening chapter discusses key concepts, such as modernity, modernism, autonomy, spectatorship and globalisation. It is followed by four case studies, each of which is devoted to a specific artwork chosen from across the span of the century. These artworks have been selected not only for their intrinsic interest, but for the way in which they open up wider questions of meaning and interpretation that are central to understanding twentieth-century art. The following three books in the series are organised chronologically, each covering approximately one-third of the twentieth century. All the books in the series include teaching elements. To encourage the reader to reflect on the material presented, most chapters contain short exercises in the form of questions printed in bold type. These are followed by discursive sections, the end of which is marked by a small black square. In addition, cross-references to topics covered in the other books in the series are provided throughout. The four books in the series are: Frameworks for Modern Art, edited by Jason Gaiger Art of the Avant-Gardes, edited by Steve Edwards and Paul Wood Varieties of Modernism, edited by Paul Wood Themes in Contemporary Art, edited by Gill Perry and Paul Wood There is also a companion reader: Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader, edited by Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood Open University courses are the result of a genuinely collaborative process and the book editor would like to thank the following people for their invaluable contributions: Julie Bennett, Kate Clements, Andrew Coleman and Alan Finch, course editors; Pam Bracewell, tutor assessor; Glen Darby, graphic designer; Nicola Durbridge, learning and teaching advisor; Janet Fennell, course assistant; Heather Kelly, course manager; Jane Lea, picture researcher. Special thanks are due to Professor Alex Potts, Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan, who as external assessor for the course read and commented on all the materials throughout the production process.

Introduction Jason Gaiger This volume is the first of four books in a series entitled Art of the Twentieth Century. It is a book that can stand alone, offering discussions of key issues ranging across the spectrum of twentieth-century art. At the same time it is intended to sen/e as an introduction to the more historically specific volumes that follow, each of which covers approximately one-third of the period. Its main function is to introduce the reader to the central issues and debates that have informed artistic practice in the twentieth century. However, rather than constructing a continuous chronological narrative, with all the attendant problems of selectivity and omission, the authors have elected to focus on individual artworks taken from different decades of the century. The aim is not to canonise these works, or to hold them up as somehow representative of all that follows, but rather, through engagement with the specific interpretative problems presented by individual works of art, to open up wider questions of meaning and analysis - questions that lie at the heart of any attempt to understand twentieth-century art. In entitling this volume Frameworks for Modern Art we draw attention to the rapidly changing historical and theoretical contexts in which art was made and understood in the course of the twentieth century. It is only when located within these larger cultural and conceptual frameworks that even the most familiar artworks of the last century can be properly understood and appreciated. However, the pace and extent of the transformations that have taken place, and the sheer diversity of the art that has been produced, mean that no single interpretative model can do justice to the whole. The contested nature of twentieth-century art and the competing claims for its significance have resulted in a plurality of interpretative approaches that rarely coincide either in their evaluative conclusions or in their underlying theoretical assumptions. It is for this reason that we have chosen to stress the existence of frameworks for the interpretation of modern art. Although these frameworks do not necessarily contradict one another, they are not always fully compatible. Different interests and commitments can lead to strongly divergent conclusions, even regarding the same artist or body of work. Rather than imposing a false unity on a field that is characterised by the vigour of its disputes, we have allowed different voices and approaches to make themselves heard. The first, introductory chapter does not seek to offer a synoptic overview of one hundred years of artistic activity; instead, it addresses the profound transformations that separate the art of the twentieth century from the art that preceded it. By mapping out key concepts such as modernity, modernism, autonomy, spectatorship, hybridity and globalisation, Chapter I provides a set of conceptual signposts that can help us to find our way across the changing landscape of twentieth-century art. The four remaining chapters consider individual artworks. In each of these case studies, close discussion of a specific work of art opens out onto questions and issues that are relevant to a wider

Frameworks for Modern Art

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set of practices and debates, including the status of the art object, the significance of non-figurative art, the expanded field of artistic activity and the globalisation of art practice. The four artworks have been selected from across the entire span of the century. They range from Bottlerack, the first of Marcel Duchamp s ‘unassisted readymades, designated as such in 1916 but installed in his studio two years earlier, through to Yarla, a work by the Indigenous Australian Yuendumu community, made specifically for the ‘Magiciens de la Terre' exhibition in Paris in 1989. The two other works are Eve, a large-scale fully abstract painting by the American artist Barnett Newman made in 1950, and the Silueta series produced by the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta between 1973 and 1981, in which she marked a silhouette or mould other body on the ground using a range of different media. The four works that have been chosen are highly diverse, both in the materials employed and in their mode of address to the viewing public. They also differ in their ambition as artworks and in the range of responses and reactions they solicit from the viewer. By starting out from particulars, it is possible to gain at least a provisional sense of the whole and of the complex relation between its parts. It is hoped that through coming to terms with the arguments and ideas discussed in this volume the reader will reach a position from which to make sense of the bewildering variety of modern art. A merely chronological sequence of works and events can all too easily be experienced simply as ‘one thing after another', without any insight into the underlying connections and reversals that animate the unfolding history of twentieth-century art. The four case studies presented here offer only selected moments in that history. However, the different frameworks of interpretation that have been generated by and around these artworks allow us insight into the changing constellation of practices and ideas in twentieth-century art. By emphasising the existence of a plurality of ‘frameworks for modern art’, this book seeks to promote a critical and reflective approach to modern art practice and to the conflicting theories and interpretations that have become inseparable from the art itself.

CHAPTER 1

Art of the twentieth century Paul Wood

Writing art history Two snapshots: 1900 and 2000 During the twentieth century, the practice of art became transformed out of all recognition. In 1900, exhibitions were held in major European cities as part of celebrations for the new century, and art was accorded a prominent place. The largest was in Paris, part of the 'Exposition Universelle’ (‘Universal Exhibition’), where thousands of works of art from twenty-nine countries were displayed, alongside a myriad of other installations ranging from celebrations of imperialism to the ‘Palace of Electricity’. The exhibition was eclectic, even including a few works by some of the more established figures of the ‘avant-garde’ that had emerged to challenge traditional academic values in the second half of the nineteenth century. But despite this, and despite the extent of the technological changes that had taken place during the course of the nineteenth century, most of the art in the official displays would not have looked completely out of place a hundred years before, and even that which would have jarred was still unquestionably art. Some of it might have been poor art from an academic point of view, technically careless or with offensive subject matter. But, whether troublingiy modern or competently academic, these were plainly works of art in a hallowed European tradition of ‘fine art’, which extended back to the Renaissance, and beyond that, so it was believed, to Antiquity. At the dawn of the twentieth century, displays like that at the ‘Exposition Universelle’ reviewed the heirs to the western canon as they might the latest batch of graduates from an ancient university. The traditional genres of art - ranging from classical and biblical ‘history-painting’ and its derivative, the nude, through portraiture, down to landscape and still life - had been established at the foundation of the French Royal Academy in the seventeenth century.1 These genres were subsequently entrenched and codified during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and remained solidly in place. The 'Exposition Universelle’ included large, multi-figure ‘historypaintings’ in oil, some tending to allegory, some overtly religious, others of more modern subjects; there were portraits of the eminent, landscapes, scenes of daily life and - of course - the nude (Plate 1.2). Three-dimensional work consisted of sculptures of human figures and animals in dramatic pose, either drawn from life or from mythology; many were in plaster, some were carved in marble, some cast in bronze (Plate 1.3). A series of increasingly radical challenges to the sway of the Academy had been mounted throughout the nineteenth century. Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and latterly Symbolism had ail in their various ways contributed

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(facing page) Gerhard Richter, detail of Christa and Wolfi (Plate 1.27).

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plate 1.2

Paul Chabas, Joyous Frolics, 1899, oil on canvas, 202 x 312 cm. (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. Photo: © RMN - Gerard Blot.)

to an erosion of academic values, in favour of interests as distinct as the painting of modern life or an embrace of art for art’s sake. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the avant-garde had achieved a level of independence from the Academy, with its own burgeoning market, its own aesthetic values and, to a degree, its own history. For all that, to separate a sense of the developing avant-garde from its implication in an established academic-classicist discourse of art would be to give a one-sided picture of art at the beginning of the twentieth century. For much of the twentieth century, though, something along those lines was indeed the received wisdom of art history: that the avant-garde was alive and the Academy dead. But recent art history has increasingly revised our view of the avant-garde, by paying more attention to the way it modified and transformed ground established by the long tradition of the Academy. The 'Exposition Universelle’ in no way represents the wilder extremes of art at the beginning of the twentieth century. How could it? It was an official, state-sponsored affair, more to do with national self-image and the projection of cultural power than a dedication to the aesthetic. But it tells us something about art at the time. It tells us that, although we can see with hindsight that art was about to burst at the seams in 1900, for most of those at the time the centre ground of art was a known quantity. Despite the challenge of the avant-garde, art remained a place for the rehearsal of values central to the ideology of European civilisation.

CHAPTER ] Art of the twentieth century

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Central nave of the Grand Pavilion, 'Exposition Universelle', from Figaro 11 lustre, June 1900. (Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library, London.)

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At the end of the twentieth century, in England, a culture not hitherto known for its hospitality to cutting-edge art, the Tate Gallery in London opened one of the largest exhibition spaces in the world, entirely devoted to the display of art since 1900. This exhibition space rapidly became one of the success stories of the wave of so-called 'millennium' celebrations, which collectively sought to define a suitably contemporary sense of national identity. Contemporary art became yoked to a constellation of ideas conjoining youthfulness, openness, plurality and multiculturalism, which together came increasingly to define the self-image of the age. This was due in no small part to the international success of a new generation of British artists during the 1990s. The new gallery, branded as Tate Modern, went on to play host to no fewer than four million visitors in its first twelve months, a figure that had touched ten million by the spring of 2002. The core permanent collection did, of course, revolve around a canon of paintings and sculptures. But the contemporary installations included a range of exhibits that no viewer in 1900 would have recognised as belonging to the category of art: miscellaneous objects strewn on the floor, a completely darkened room illuminated only by flashing sequences of numbers, a labyrinthine environment and many multi-screen video installations (Plate 1.4). In 2001, the Turner Prize, the

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Gary Hill, Between Cinema and a Hard Place, 1991, colour and black anad white, sound, twelve modified 13-inch colour video monitors, six modified 5-inch black and white video monitors, five modified 9-inch black and white video monitors, four in by twenty-three out computer-controlled video switcher, computer, three speakers, two amplifiers, graphic equalizer, three 3/4-inch U-matic videocassette players, dimensions variable. (© Tate, London 2002. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone.)

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

Tate's controversial annual award for the most telling contribution to art during the previous year (named without apparent irony after Britain's most eminent painter of the nineteenth century) was won by Martin Creed, an artist whose exhibited work consisted of an empty gallery in which the light switched on and off every five seconds. Previous years’ exhibitions had included a reconstruction of an unmade bed, by Tracy Emin; a thirty-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde, by Damien Hirst; and the concrete cast of a house, by Rachel Whiteread (Plate 1.5). (Further underlining the expansion of the category of 'art', this house stood in East London, several miles from the Tate, and was destroyed shortly after the award of the prize.) That is to take account only of the situation in the UK. American artists have exhibited everything from vacuum cleaners and discarded dolls to light installations and LED texts in public spaces in the city. In 1997, the last 'Documenta' exhibition of the twentieth century, the five-yearly ‘Olympics’ of the international art world held at Kassel in Germany, included hundreds of installations and performances, both actual and recorded, multimedia works, indoors and out, photographs, a parody of a museum, an art library presented as an artwork, chairs and tables fashioned out of canvases with writing on, a cd-rom based on a Chinese artist’s biography during and after the Cultural Revolution, but nothing that could be called conventional painting or sculpture. Clearly, something has happened to art. It is simultaneously a more prominent feature than it has ever been in the wider culture of developed western societies - in the way it is represented in the mass media, in the numbers of people-attracted to look at it and in terms of the money involved - and deeply unstable, puzzling and incomprehensible to many. It is as if the mainstream of art has overflowed its banks.

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Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993-4, concrete cast (destroyed 1994). (Courtesy of Artangel. Photo: © John Davies, 1993.)

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History and histories Merely on the evidence considered so far, to write a history of the art of the twentieth century is no straightforward task. If one is dealing not so much with a stream as with an inundation, one of the first problems is what to leave out. Where does one draw the boundaries of art? And what does one draw those boundaries between? One thing is clear. To write an account of the art of the twentieth century that foregrounded the traditional ‘high’ art media of painting and sculpture - albeit in their modern (or ‘modernist’) forms of abstract paintings and objects - to the exclusion of the heterogeneous range of other media and processes that also came to constitute ‘art’ activity, would be hopelessly conservative. By the same token, not to give an account of what has happened to modernist painting and sculpture, and of how work in traditional media continues to survive despite the incursions of various electronic and directly performative elements, would be to lose a kind of touchstone. Until recently at least, much of what was not painting and sculpture continued to achieve its identity as art by force of contrast. Indeed, it is precisely the progressive loss of that contrast with a modernist core, or ‘mainstream’, that has seemed to cut loose much contemporary, or ‘postmodernist’, art practice from the history of what went before. (The concept of modernism and its relation to postmodernism is discussed in the following section on 'Modernity and modernism’.) Throughout his long career, the pre-eminent modernist Pablo Picasso painted paintings and made sculptures that were recognisable as such, however much they departed in a variety of technically radical ways from the conventions of previous academic painting and sculpture (Plate 1.6). But from as early as the First World War, Dadaist anti-art manifestations consisted of artworks made of rubbish, or out of the random operations of chance. At around the same time, the artist Marcel Duchamp, now widely credited as the ‘father’ of postmodernism, speculated about what would happen if an ordinary utilitarian object were to be considered as art (Plate 1.7) (see the discussion of Duchamp’s work in Chapter 2). In the 1930s, Surrealist installations, again designed by Duchamp, consisting of miles of string or used coal sacks posed a continuing avant-gardist challenge to the emerging modernist canon of abstract art. Yet these ‘vanguard’ interventions existed in a kind of symbiosis with more conventional, albeit 'modernist', practices to produce a multifarious discourse of art, made up of magazines, galleries, objects and ways of looking at them that could accommodate extreme radicalism by a form of family relationship. After the crisis of the Second World War, this process expanded exponentially. Modernist abstract painting reached new levels of scale and compositional unity, even as a renascent avant-garde broke with mediumspecificity to produce hybrid 'combine paintings’ as well as a wide range of performances and 'happenings'. Moreover, with gathering force during the 1960s and 1970s, art expanded, not just by including more kinds of thing, but also by including the responses to a range of questions that had begun to arise about what kind of enterprise the work of art was. Conceptual Art represented a foundational critique of the institutionalised modernism that had come to hold sway in the international art world in the decades after the Second World War. In the later twentieth century, art practice began to incorporate an increasingly pressing set of reflections, not just on what the

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

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Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925, oil on canvas, 215 x 142 cm. (© Tate, London 2002. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2003.)

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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1964 replica, readymade: porcelain urinal, 36 x 48 x 61 cm (1917 'original' lost). (© Tate, London 2002. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

characteristics of a painting might be, conceived as a work of art, but on what constituted art as such, and hence on what it was to be an artist, as well as on that individual’s relation to a culture and society outside of art. However, the problem that bore down on much of this so-called 'postmodernist' art towards the end of the twentieth century was: what were the consequences of its becoming hegemonic? What happened when the ‘anti-aesthetic’ turned into official culture? It has been argued by some historians that art in the modern period has moved negatively, by progressively shedding its conventions as they became worn out or cliched. Many of the challenges to convention by artists were technical in nature: for example, in painting, the rejection of’modelling’, that is, the production of credible three-dimensional images upon a flat surface. Or the rejection of reliance on naturalistic colour, so that grass no longer has to be green, or the sky blue. Rather than a faithful representation of nature, many came to conceive art as the expression of inner feeling (Plate 1.8). This amounted to a revolution in painting. Yet the rejection of other conventions has had even more far-reaching effects: for example, the

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

plate 1.8

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Japanese Theatre, 1909-10, oil on canvas, I 14 x I 14 cm. (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © (for works by E.L. Kirchner) by Ingeborg and Dr Wolfgang Henze-Ketterer, Wichtrach/Bern.)

questioning of whether art should be based in the exercise of manual, or artisanal, craft skills at all, and whether the achievement of a personal 'style' is what an artist should aim at. These were, so to speak, 'deep conventions’, which modernist art shared with tradition even though the external forms of art underwent change. Once even deep conventions such as these are jettisoned, however, the work of art easily starts to look less like many of the kinds of thing that used to count as art, and more like many of the other kinds of thing that did not: theatrical performances, for example, or sociological documentation, or just things, at large in the world, particularly overlooked, discarded or apparently worthless objects (Plate 1.9).

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Yoko Ono, Dispos-A-Glove, 1973, plastic glove attached to a sheet of paper, 29 x 24 cm. (David Mayor Archive, TGA 815. Hyman Kreitman Research Centre for the Tate Library and Archive. © Yoko Ono and the estate of John Lennon.)

In such a situation, the audience for art is liable to fracture. In the one camp, there are those who concur, and move with the frontier, so to speak. In the other, there are those for whom the conventions have not become wornout cliches, for whom the production of believable illusions, say, or the search for an authentically original personal voice, do not represent a fragile consensus but apparently natural criteria determining the kind of thing a work of art is. Moreover, these two positions have their consequences. The former can be a good or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. From one perspective, holding such a position can signify that you are alive, that you are keeping up with the times, that you maintain a sceptical view of 'normality'. From a more conservative perspective, this position can just as easily be read as evidence of gullibility, of having the wool pulled over your eyes and failing to spot the nature of‘the Emperor’s new clothes’. The same holds for the alternative position. What I have characterised as a relatively conservative position can, for those who subscribe to it, represent the maintenance of standards, keeping one’s feet on the ground, refusing to be

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

swept away by mass media thriving on fashion and novelty for their own sakes. From another perspective, the same position will appear blind prejudice incarnate, one step on the road to an ultimately fascist rejection of modern art in all its guises as 'degenerate'. The extremes, should it need saying, are represented by, on the one hand, a vapid acceptance that anything goes, that nothing is any better than anything else, that value depends on just whatever you personally happen to like, and, on the other hand, the blowing up of statues, the burning of books, the destruction of any and every art that your politics or religion forbids.

Art in the wider history In the present series of books, it is not our intention to discuss the art of the twentieth century in isolation from the century itself. Yet we do want to bring out the specificity of art in the period. Art in the twentieth century has been a relatively independent practice. Although it has sometimes borrowed heavily from the fields of literature, film, music, design, architecture and advertising, it has sometimes sought to abjure them altogether. It is perhaps worth underlining at the outset that although a wider sense of history may shed light on art, art does not have to explain itself before history. A reader who expects to have art ‘explained’ without doing any work on his or her assumptions about art and other forms of representation and identity, is likely to be disappointed. If art has a critical function, in present circumstances, one of the more important aspects of this is to subject the categories and assumptions of the dominant culture to sustained interrogation. In the nature of the case, that will disturb orthodox assumptions, about both art and the world. No challenge to 'common sense’ can be accessed from within a wholesale subscription to the conventions of that ‘common sense’. It is entirely appropriate to observe, as so many commentators do, that much contemporary art makes little sense. That is the point. Some art exists to challenge conventional sense. Some, of course, does not. David Hockney’s portraits of his pet dachshunds, whatever you may think of them as 'art', just are a different kind of thing from Tracey Emin’s bed or Ann-Sofi Siden's multi-screen video documentation of prostitution in the Czech Republic, both of which have recently been exhibited in prestigious London art museums (and whatever you may think of them as art). There is no irreducible core of twentieth-century art. Without recourse to authority, the question of what to include in a history of twentieth-century art remains open. This is not to say, however, that the matter remains completely arbitrary, even if, from our present perspective at least, there is no completeness. We are faced by a series of more or less interesting practices with more or less complicated relationships to each other and to different kinds of representational practice (for example, film, theatre, literature), as well as to a social world whose principal business is acting in history rather than representing it. In forming an understanding of this art, we certainly need to draw on a wider sense of twentieth-century history. But there is little to be gained from an understanding of art if it, in turn, does not furnish us with a critical purchase on that wider history.

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Modernity and modernism One important relationship that has to be considered early in any discussion of the art of the twentieth century is that between modern art and modern life. Yet put as blandly as that, there is little of any significance that can be said, precisely because there is too much to be said: too many different types of art, too many different aspects of modern life to encapsulate their relationship in manageable form. The point has to be sharpened. The most promising way to do this is to look at the relationship between the concepts of 'modernity' and 'modernism'. Later, I shall go on to discuss some related terms, in particular'avant-garde' and 'postmodernism'. Understood in relation to each other, these concepts offer a kind of matrix or field in terms of which to position many of the developments we shall be considering.

Modernity ‘Modernity’ was a term first employed by the nineteenth-century French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire to denote the experience of living in the new modern world. It was not intended to describe the physical or technological attributes of that world, such as railway engines or new kinds of building and city, but what it felt like to live in the new conditions. That is to say, it embodied an aspect of social psychology, a shared structure of feeling, which distinguished the experience of the modern world from the kinds of experience that people had had of their world in the past. Of course, some things remain largely constant. People are born, live and die, just as they always have; they enter into similar kinds of sexual and social relationships, ranging from marriage and child-rearing to highly structured work relationships, as well as more informal relations ranging from friendship to active dislike; relatively speaking, they are of approximately the same physical size; and it would seem that they share comparable emotional responses to the happenings of their various worlds: grief at the absence or death of a loved one, fear of threats from a stronger force, happiness, anger and so on. This congregation within certain parameters is one of the reasons why we can understand and even sympathise with some aspects of cultures as remote as those of the ancient Greeks or the Aztecs (even as we abhor others), or why people in the West can understand the ideas of people from China, and vice versa. Human understanding can range across historical, geographical, temporal and spatial difference. Of course, the differences are significant too, but across the various barriers and contradictions of age, class, race and gender, we are not aliens. All of that notwithstanding, many of those who have analysed the modern condition - from Baudelaire and others in the nineteenth century to contemporary feminists concerned with gender relations in society, and anthropologists investigating ethnicity - have emphasised 'difference' in its various forms as a key element of what made the modern ‘modern’. For Baudelaire, the key difference between modernity and life in the past lay in what he called its ‘ephemeral’, 'fugitive' and ‘contingent’ aspects2 To put it crudely, life seemed to have speeded up. Many of the characteristics of

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Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897, oil on canvas, 53 x 65 cm. (© The National Gallery, London.)

Impressionist painting, for example the dabbed brushstrokes, the comparatively bright colours and the blurred edges of forms, can be interpreted as attempts to capture the sensation of moving around a constantly changing urban world (Plate 1. 10). That sense of constant change could be extremely destabilising. The philosopher Karl Marx famously wrote of the nineteenth century as a time when ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away’, such that, under modern capitalism ‘All that is solid melts into air.’3 Similarly, the painter Eugene Delacroix commented that ‘This new world, good or bad, which is trying to reach the light across our ruins, is like a volcano under our feet.’4 In the early twentieth century, updated versions of these ideas, such as notions of ‘dynamism’ and ‘simultaneity’, influenced the art of the Futurists and the fractured forms painted by Cubists like Robert Delaunay and Fernand Leger (Plate I. I I). (Cubism is discussed in Chapters 5-7 of Art of the Avant-Gardes.) Leger wrote in 1914:

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If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has necessitated it ... When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented ... The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist.5 The other side of this exhilaration was a profound sense of social alienation. Because of the increasing mechanisation of production, many 'avant-gardists’ in the early twentieth century came to feel they were living between the cogs of a huge machine: feelings that received compelling visual representation in films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The sociologist Max Weber wrote of the ‘modern economic order’ as ‘bound to the technical and economic conditions

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Robert Delaunay, Sun, Tower, Airplane, 1913, oil on canvas, unframed, 132 x 131 cm. (Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. A. Conger Goodyear Fund, 1964. © L. & M. Sen/ices B.V. Amsterdam 20030104.)

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

of machine production’, which had come to ‘determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition'. Modernity had become 'an iron cage’.6 Faced with such a reality, artists could frame any number of responses. They could embrace it (as did the Futurists before the First World War); they could reject it for its materialism (as did the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, at the same time); or they could attempt to reform it (as did many who worked at the interface of art, design and architecture in the years between the wars: for example, at the Bauhaus in Germany). These examples are all drawn from the first half of the twentieth century, but equivalent responses to the changing condition of modernity continued to be demanded of artists in the second half of the century. The so-called 'Pop Art’ of Andy Warhol, with its replication of the processes of mechanical reproduction, as well as its overt imagery, is clearly a response to the American capitalism of the long postwar boom and the resulting consumer society (Plate 1.12, overleaf). But certain forms of abstract art also took cognisance of modernity. In the 1960s, the sculptor Robert Morris connected the production of mute, apparently expressionless ‘minimalist’ objects, as well as an interest in materials for their own sake, to the unfamiliarity of modern production processes (Plate 1.13):

plate

1.13

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967, aluminium I-beams, 160 x 360 x 360 cm. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection, 1991. Photo: David Heald, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

19

Frameworks for Modern Art

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CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

Centers for production are increasingly located outside the urban environment in what are euphemistically termed ‘industrial parks’. In these grim, remote areas the objects of daily use are produced by increasingly obscure processes and the matter transformed is increasingly synthetic and unidentifiable. As a consequence our immediate surroundings tend to be read as ‘forms’ that have been punched out of unidentifiable, indestructible plastic or unfamiliar metal alloys.7 It was precisely this state of affairs that, for Morris, rendered traditional forms of artistic depiction ’antique’, even if the depiction had been modernised in various ways, such as by the employment of intensified, non-naturalistic colour, or distorted, ‘expressive’ form. For Morris, and others of his generation, what was demanded of an adequately updated modern art was a more direct engagement with the forms and processes of modernity in its industrialised, consumerist phase: an engagement with real objects in real space rather than the play of illusion offered by more traditional modes such as painting. (For further discussion of Minimal Art and Pop Art, see Chapters 7 and 9-1 I of Varieties of Modernism.)

Modernism Modem art can thus be related to the changing forms of modern life even when it does not depict modernity. In fact, almost no modern art has consisted of straightforward depictions of the characteristic phenomena of modern life: of cars, say, or aeroplanes, or skyscrapers, let alone mobile telephones or computers. Indeed, the art that would for most people stand as the most characteristic type of modern art, namely abstract art, does not depict anything at all, as discussed in Chapter 3. There is a paradox here, or if not a paradox exactly, then certainly a notable state of affairs. Western art since the Renaissance has importantly been about picturing. The need for a wholesale new approach to art in the nineteenth century arose as the traditional forms of art were borne down on by new conditions and experiences, and found wanting. Yet the art that ultimately arose to answer this need did not picture modernity at all. Indeed, it may be said to have been adequately modern precisely to the extent that it did not offer secondary imitations or reflections of modern reality, but came to achieve its own independent reality within the overarching sphere of the modern condition. The term most commonly employed to denote this independent, largely abstract art was ‘modernism’, and it is easy to see how there is a tension between the related concepts of ’modernism’ and ‘modernity’. ‘Modernism’ has been a contested term, but in its most influential sense it has been used to emphasise not modern art’s thoroughgoing implication in modern life, but its distinctness within it. In brief, the term ‘modernism’ foregrounded the claim for art’s autonomy with respect to the wider modern condition. It is a corollary of that argument for the autonomy of art that modernist critical theory showed little interest in what art may depict of the world at large and much more interest in the forms -the shapes and colours - of the work of art itself. Intimately connected to that preoccupation with artistic form is modernist criticism’s disregard for any knowledge of the world,

21

22

Frameworks for Modern Art

any information, an artwork may convey. This is replaced by a concern solely with the artwork’s aesthetic effects on the viewer: with its power to affect the emotions. This is to put the matter schematically. However, those are three of the defining characteristics of artistic modernism: an emphasis on the independence of artworks from anything outside of art, an emphasis on the forms of artworks and an emphasis on their aesthetic effects. Depending on one's sympathy with the stance, it is thus open to representation as being arid and narrow or as affirming the centrality of the aesthetic dimension and hence of art - to human experience as such. Modernism considered as an art-critical approach was particularly identified with the writing of the American critic Clement Greenberg, who more than anyone was responsible for introducing the term -into the language of art. Part of the problem about modernism, in fact, lies precisely in this: that although the tradition was long, the term that named it became identified with an American point of view, and emanated from a period of American dominance. As a result, when the critical balance eventually shifted away from modernism in the late 1960s, specifically artistic questions of autonomy, or of form or of the aesthetic were thoroughly entangled with political criticism of American global power in general. Another complicating factor is that the term came into currency quite late in the history of modern art, and was then mapped back over earlier art work and art criticism. Greenberg’s influential essay 'Modernist Painting’ was originally composed in I960, and published in its definitive form in 1965.8 In it, Greenberg traced what he identified as the modernist tradition in art from the abstract painting of his own day back into the middle of the nineteenth century. Greenberg picked out the nineteenth-century French artist Edouard Manet as his earliest example of a modernist painter, but in many ways his arguments better fit the mature work of Paul Cezanne in the late nineteenth century. Cezanne had an epochal impact on artists in the early twentieth century, but it was not because of what he painted. In the main, this was trees and apples, nude figures and one particular mountain, over and over again (Plate 1.14). Cezanne’s chosen genres, that is to say, were entirely conventional and, for the most part, lowly in academic terms. His importance lay in how he painted. Cezanne's art exemplifies the modernist emphasis on the formal aspects of art, rather than its figurative content or subject matter. By no stretch of the imagination could Cezanne’s mature art be considered a witness to the social conditions of his epoch. But for all that, there was a hard edge of the modern to his work that seemed to require a specifically modern consciousness to make sense of it. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of the sheer mental effort involved in coming to terms with Cezanne, when he encountered his painting at the ‘Salon d’Automne' in Paris in 1907. In Rilke’s words, ‘it all takes a long, long time ... I remember the puzzlement and insecurity of one’s first confrontation with his work, along with his name, which was just as new. And then for a long time nothing, and suddenly one has the right eyes.’9 Rilke’s point seems to be that the spectator needed to develop ‘new’ eyes, that is, new forms of receptivity, a new form of consciousness even, with which to see the new work; moreover, that once the bridge had been crossed, the effect was to make everything left on the

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

plate 1.14

Paul Cezanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1887, oil on canvas, 67 x 92 cm. (Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset House, London/Bridgeman Art Library, London.)

other side look conservative, and signally inadequate to an expression of the modern state of being. Despite his close identification with the term ‘modernism’, Greenberg was not, of course, the first to formulate generically ‘modernist’ ideas. These had been evolving in parallel with art since the late nineteenth century. The young French artist and writer Maurice Denis argued as early as I 890 that before it was a picture of 'a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story’, a painting was 'essentially a flat surface covered with colours’.10 In the early twentieth century, the English critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry brought such ideas - which were rooted primarily in French practice - into Englishlanguage criticism. Fry wrote of‘a new conception of the purpose and methods of painting’ and identified this with a shift away from imitation to what he called the ‘direct expression of imagined states of consciousness’.11 The painter Henri Matisse himself articulated a similar point of view when he wrote of searching for 'the essential character’ of his subject, of purging 'superfluous detail’ in the pursuit of an overall harmony, which he defined as ‘an art of balance, of purity and serenity’ (Plate 1.15).12 Bell argued that pictorial form, which he called ‘significant form’ and Fry called 'expressive form’, was the defining feature of art; its possession was what distinguished works of art from other objects in the world. But equally to the point, 'significant form' is

23

Frameworks for Modern Art

24

plate

1.15

Henri Matisse, Came of Bowls, 1908, oil on canvas, I 14 x 145 cm. (Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photo: Scala, Florence. © Succession H. Matisse/DACS, London 2003.)

not an isolated factor, but one half of a crucial theoretical pair. 'Significant form’ in a work of art will, it is claimed, generate an emotional response in the adequately sensitive spectator. The ‘aesthetic emotion’ is, so to speak, the inseparable companion of'form'. This relationship is central to the theory of modernism in the visual arts: the work of art conceived as a formal configuration which effects an aesthetic response in the viewer.13 Traditional illusionistic skills going back to the Renaissance, and the provision of narrative or documentary information about the world, are abrogated. As Fry wrote in 19 I 2 of the French Post-Impressionists: ‘It is not the object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge.’ What Fry believed they were interested in was ‘the direct expression of feeling’ through 'pictorial and plastic form’, that is, not through the imitation of forms in the world, but through the medium of art itself.14 To that extent, although the culminating definition of modernism does not appear until Greenberg's mature writing in the 1960s, a defensibly modernist conception of art, rooted in French practice, was established in the English-speaking world before 1914. Subsequently, a fully ‘abstract’ art emerged in the European avant-garde during and immediately afterthe First World War, realised in its most thoroughgoing form in the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian (Plate 1.16). (See the discussion of abstraction in Chapter 8 of Art of the Avant-Gardes.)

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

plate

1.16

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Grid 5: Lozenge Composition with Colours, 1919, oil on canvas, 84.5 cm diagonal. (Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo. © 2003 Mondrian/Holtzmann Trust do HCR International - [email protected])

A second wave of abstract art, based on more informal, or gestural, procedures appeared after the Second World War. This was practised on both sides of the Atlantic, being associated with a widespread Existentialist temper in Europe, particularly France, but achieving maximum impact in its American manifestation. Abstract Expressionism, or‘action painting’ as it was also known, marked a fundamental shift in the centre of gravity of the modern movement from Europe to the USA (Plate 1.17). (See Chapters 3-5 on Abstract Expressionism in Varieties of Modernism.) Greenberg’s principal stress in his account of modernism was on art’s increasing autonomy in the modern period. Taking his cue from Greenberg, another modernist critic writing in the 1960s, Michael Fried, wrote:

25

26

plate

Frameworks for Modern Art

1.17 Jackson Pollock, Number IA 1948, 1948, oil and enamel on unprimed canvas, 173 x 264 cm. (digital image © 2002 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

Roughly speaking, the history of painting from Manet through Synthetic Cubism and Matisse [and by implication from then up to the 1960s] may be characterized in terms of the gradual withdrawal of painting from the task of representing reality - or of reality from the power of painting to represent it - in favor of an increasing preoccupation with problems intrinsic to painting itself.15 To say of art that it is ‘autonomous’ in this way is not, however, to claim that it is somehow entirely cut loose from the matrix of modernity. Not even the most hardline modernist is likely to claim that at some level modern art is not caused by modern circumstance, Even Fry spoke of ‘modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook’.16 Later, the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock himself remarked: Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in ... It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique.17 The constellation of conditions which frame the modern practice of art, indeed which frame modern social practice of any kind, ranging from physical well-being to the intellectual furniture of the mind, are all going to be in

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

varying degrees themselves modern. The modernist autonomy claim is more concerned with the singularity of modern art’s effects. Greenberg noted the way in which the modern movement seemed to abandon art’s traditional representational tasks and focus with increasing intensity on the visual effects particular to painting itself: 'Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself, and went on to claim that this concentration on what he called the ‘proper area of competence of each art’ coincided with ‘all that was unique to the nature of its medium’.18 For Greenberg, the essence of this in the case of painting concerned the flatness of the two-dimensional support. As modernist painting oriented so strongly on the picture plane in the search for a greater unity of aesthetic effect, traditional deep pictorial space was evacuated. Modernist pictures became shallower: eventually too shallow to incorporate convincingly modelled illusions of bodies in three-dimensional space. Medium-specificity was a central tenet of modernism. Indeed, Fried went so far as to claim in 1967 that concepts of quality and value were intelligible 'only within the individual arts’, for example painting. For Fried, types of art that mixed different media were 'at war’ with the modernist sensibility and, further, in so far as modernism lay claim to the inheritance of the western tradition in visual art, they were at war 'with art as such'.19 What is at stake in these arguments is a concern for art’s self-definition, its 'purification'. As long ago as the 1930s, an earlier modernist, the American curator Alfred H. Barr, had acknowledged that the development of abstraction marked a significant reduction in the scope of art - he called it an ‘impoverishment’. But for Barr and other modernists, the loss of art's traditional purchase on political, sexual and religious subject matter was counterbalanced by Its distillation. The experience of art was narrowed, but it was simultaneously intensified.20 To put this in modernist terms, the work of art is capable of standing on its own, without political, ethical or religious support. The work of art itself is a modern type of object or, perhaps more accurately, a modern configuration, and the experience of it is a modern type of experience. The paradox of modernism is that the experience that, as Fried put it, 'compel[s] conviction’21 of the authenticity and integrity of the work generating it, can only be given by a work of art that has no coherent space left for images of the very modern world that called it into being. Modernity may well be in the work somehow, but for the convinced modernist it will not be by conventional picturing. The ability to compel conviction follows from the achievement of aesthetic independence. And the price of that in the modernist art of the twentieth century was the loss of overt and explicit reference to the three dimensions of the world outside the work of art. Not all modernist art was completely abstract (indeed, Greenberg reckoned Matisse ‘the greatest master of the twentieth century’22), but none of it was mimetically realistic. This was not an accident not the result of technical incompetence, but an effect of the pursuit of aesthetic independence, which was itself art’s survival strategy for the modern world. In Greenberg’s view, 'FHaving been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously ... the arts could save themselves from leveling down [to entertainment’ or 'therapy'] only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.’23

27

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Frameworks for Modern Art

Barbarians at the gate Modernism and the avant-gardes Modernism died some time in the late 1960s, although nobody seems to be completely sure whether the funeral is over yet. Greenberg's earliest writings had been published in the New York Trotskyist journal Partisan Review on the eve of the Second World War. This was part of a milieu of considerable intellectual vitality, populated by figures such as the historian Meyer Schapiro and the critic Harold Rosenberg, in which the notion of an artistic 'avantgarde' was explicitly joined to the prospects of revolutionary socialism. In ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ of 1939, Greenberg was-particularly concerned to establish the modern movement in art as the sole site of what was vital in modern culture: an independent space for critical reflection in which, in however attenuated a form, the freedoms that were being assailed by both Fascism and capitalism could be sustained. In orderto grasp the forces driving a defence of the autonomy of art, what needs to be understood is the darkness of the time in which this text was written. Paris, the capital of modern art, arguably the capital of modern culture as such, was on the verge of invasion. As Rosenberg put it a year later, The laboratory of the twentieth century has been shut down.’24 Europe, from the English Channel to the Urals, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, was in the thrall of dictatorships united in their hostility to modernism. It was in response to this kind of pressure, from both totalitarian politics and the culture industries of an increasingly administered capitalism, that Greenberg argued in 1940 that the arts had been ‘hunted back to their mediums'. Yet, for him, this was a positive thing. He felt that this apparent turning inwards, this increased concentration on its own means, saved art from dilution and loss of power. For Greenberg, ideas threatened to 'infect ... the arts with the ideological struggles of society’, whereas each art's individual medium represented a safe haven.25 As he put it in the same essay, thus confined the arts ‘lie safe now’. In Greenberg's view, only the pursuit of 'purity and self sufficiency’ could protect the core values of the culture as enshrined in art, pending the advent of better times. But in this early version of his theory, this assertion of art’s autonomy was by no means a straightforward celebration of art for art’s sake. For Greenberg in 1939, the survival of modern art was closely linked to socialism, and to the defeat of the corrupt values he saw both in the totalitarian dictatorships of the period in Germany, Russia and Italy, and in the crisis-ridden capitalism of the USA and Western Europe. As Greenberg cryptically put it: Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture - as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now.’26 The price for 'the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now’, that is to say, of avant-garde culture, was the downgrading of everything else, from academic 'high' art to the newer forms of mass popular culture: popular music, journalism and - one assumes, although it is never mentioned - film. This, incidentally, despite the fact that Greenberg personally was an avid movie-goer, dancer and sports fan. For him, these were strictly escapist leisure activities, in the end symptoms of capitalist manipulation rather than

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

potential sites of genuinely popular resistance or nascent self-consciousness. 'Art' was categorically distinct. For Greenberg, the academic and the popular alike formed part of the invisible ideological web that bound people to the status quo. Although Greenberg continued to use the term 'avant-garde' to describe modern art, his main focus in his subsequent writing was not upon those radical movements that strove to maintain a revolutionary dialogue with the times, but on a rigorously conceived autonomous ‘modernist mainstream'. The felt imperative to sustain aesthetic value inviolate meant condemning even many ostensibly 'avant-gardist' movements to the status of mere novelty, or kitsch. These included anything with an element of the literary (such as most Surrealism) (Plate 1.18), and anything that transgressed

plate

1.18

Max Ernst, illustration from the collage novel Une semaine de bonte, ou les sept elements capitaux, Paris, 1934. (British Library, London, Shelfmark X.4I5/2I 17. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

29

Frameworks for Modern Art

:.V.

30

plate

1.19

Rudolf Schlichter, Portrait of Bertolt Brecht, 1928, oil on canvas, 76 x 46 cm (Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.)

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

plate

1.20 Alexander Deineka, Outskirts of Moscow, 1941, oil on canvas, 58 x 80 cm. (Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Scala, Florence. © DACS, London 2003.)

medium-specificity (such as Dada, with its disruptive use of collage and montage techniques),27 let alone any re-engagement with traditional pictorial space (such as the German Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) (Plate 1.19), the Italian Pittura Metafisica (‘Metaphysical Painting’) or Soviet Socialist Realism (Plate 1.20)). In the transformed conditions after the Second World War, American modernist painting attained a position of international supremacy, due to the impact of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, and in no small measure to the theoretical perspective accompanying the art provided by Greenberg and others. The negative side of this rigorously formalist criticism, however, was that a re-emergent avant-garde tendency, often referred to as the ‘neo-avant-garde’, associated with figures such as the musician John Cage and the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, was condemned as a 'counter-current' which Greenberg found ‘tame’ and ‘easy’, 'nowhere nearly as good’ as a range of earlier American artists, and ‘minor compared to the best of Abstract Expressionism’.28 A similarly negative judgement was applied to most postwar European painting. Thus, the ‘vision’ of Abstract Expressionism was ‘tamed in Paris - not, as the French themselves may think, disciplined', making it ‘more agreeable to standard taste’.29 From the Greenbergian point of view, European modernism had lost its nerve, while the neo-avant-garde represented novelty for novelty’s sake, driven by commerce and fashion rather than a genuine quest for originality dedicated to the maintenance of standards of aesthetic value. By the 1960s, further newly emergent avant-gardes, such as Pop Art, Minimal Art and Conceptual

31

32

Frameworks for Modern Art

Art, were for Greenberg quite beyond the pale. We might say that modernism in its Greenbergian sense suffered a kind of hardening of the arteries. In the early 1960s, most radical artists and intellectuals tended to support abstract art as a marker of freedom from the more conservative forces that still dominated postwar society. But the emergence of Pop Art in particular leavened the neo-avant-garde's technical radicalism with a new openness to the forms of popular culture, proscribed as mere ‘kitsch’ by modernist theory. As the 1960s went on, and people, particularly young people, became increasingly radicalised both politically and culturally, the same kinds of artist and intellectual were being made uneasy, not only by modernist art’s apparent lack of engagement with the surrounding world, but also by the ease with which abstract art could be assimilated by the corporate imperatives of the status quo - resistance to which had always lain at the ethical heart of avantgardism. Art decorating the foyers and boardrooms of the very corporations that were prosecuting the war in Vietnam, for example, was scarcely calculated to win support among an increasingly anarchic younger generation. The resulting schism in critical debate not only marked an apparently terminal crisis in modernism and the emergence to international prominence of a very different kind of art thereafter, but also hastened a fundamental rereading of the entire history of art in the twentieth century.

Towards postmodernism One of the most telling images of modernism was not a work of art at all, but a diagram (Plate 1.21). This was Alfred H. Barr’s famous ‘map’ of the evolution of abstract art, drawn up for a large survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Barr’s flow-diagram only went up to the mid1930s, but it would have been a comparatively simple matter to add on modernism s postwar development in the USA. If Abstract Expressionism and its successors had been added, the result would have been an unbroken evolutionary chain from Cezanne to Rothko, and on to the ‘post-painterly’ abstraction of Kenneth Noland (Plate 1.22). The critic and historian Rosalind Krauss put the matter vividly when she wrote in 1972: The history we saw ... was like a series of rooms en filade [in a row]. Within each room the individual artist explored, to the limits of his experience and his formal intelligence, the separate constituents of his medium. The effect of his pictorial act was to open simultaneously the door to the next space and close out access to the one behind him.30 The point is, of course, that Krauss was only able to describe such a conception of art history by having stepped beyond it. By 1972, according to her own account, Krauss was beginning to believe that, when the formalist modernism to which she had subscribed expelled narrative and perspectival space from painting, it substituted another perspective through which meaning was accorded. This perspective was not so much spatial as temporal: meaning was conferred through a canonical art history. Noland's coloured bands were meaningful as art, and not mere interior decor, in so far as they could be seen to continue the research programme initiated by the Post-Impressionists into the expressive effects of form and colour. The thrust of Krauss’s criticism

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

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34

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Frameworks for Modern Art

1.22 Kenneth Noland, Up Cadmium, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 184 x 540 cm. (Louisiana Museum of Modem Art, Humlebsk, Denmark. © Kenneth NolandA/AGA, New York/DACS, London 2003.)

was that one particular history was being objectified as true for all. She now argued to the contrary that historical perspective was conferred through being in a particular place in the present, and that that place was contingent, not necessary and objectively given. In 1972, Krauss was beginning to talk of a larger modernist sensibility' than that recognised by hegemonic formalist modernism, one which not only ‘include[d] a great deal more than', but which was poised 'ultimately to criticize’ the Greenbergian modernist canon.31 By the end of the decade, she had become an intellectual standard-bearer for a full-blown postmodernism. The concept of the 'postmodern' had actually been introduced into debate about art by the critic Leo Steinberg, whose book Other Criteria was received on its publication in 1972 as a powerful critique of formalist orthodoxy. As well as pointing out that the self-referential qualities deemed specific to modernism had actually been a recurrent preoccupation of many artists ever since the Renaissance, Steinberg retrospectively identified Rauschenberg’s combine paintings’ of the mid-1950s as marking a definitive break with modernist sensibility, and the inception of what he dubbed a ‘post-Modernist’ painting (Plate 1.23). For Steinberg, the key point was that Rauschenberg had invented ... a pictorial surface that let the world in again’.32 Rauschenberg had famously remarked that 'Painting relates to both art and life ... (I try to act in that gap between the two.)’33 To this end, he had begun to make works of art out of 'combinations' of disparate materials: some associated with art, such as paint and canvas; others not, such as stuffed animals and road signs. Rauschenberg was not alone: as mentioned briefly above he was involved with Johns and Cage among others. As well as their own work, one of these artists most influential achievements was to redirect attention again onto marginalised aspects of the modern tradition. In particular, they contributed

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

plate

1.23

35

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-9, combine painting: oil and collage on canvas with objects, 107 x 159 x 162 cm. (Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2003.)

to the inscription of Marcel Duchamp, not as a somewhat peripheral figure around the edges of Dada and Surrealism, but as the avatar of the entire spectrum of postmodernist art activity. In Johns’s words, it had been Duchamp’s achievement to shift art from the preoccupation with the ‘retinal’, which had marked modernism since the Impressionists and culminated in Greenberg's and Fried’s sense of an art that appealed to eyesight alone’,34 into 'a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another’.35 For Johns, ‘He has changed the condition of being here.’36 In sum, if Picasso had been the father of modernism, Duchamp was installed in the same role for the postmodern (see Chapter 2 for further discussion of this development). No less significant was the international nature of this neo-avant-garde. Modernist painting in its post-Second World War phase had essentially been an American phenomenon. Fried’s Three American Painters’ catalogue essay of 1965 had opened with the flat statement, ‘For twenty years or more almost all the best new painting and sculpture has been done in America.’37 Rauschenberg and Johns were American, but large numbers of other artists of the neo-avant-garde were not. By the mid-1960s, artists from France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Japan and South America were increasingly figuring in a growing range of international exhibitions and penodicals, producing types of work that have, with the benefit of hindsight, been seen to mark the turn into a postmodernist situation, through their transgression in practice of many of the constituent principles of modernism.

Frameworks for Modern Art

36

Of these, the modernist autonomy claim was countered by the observation of Allan Kaprow, the impresario of 'happenings’, that The young artist of today need no longer say "I am a painter" or "a poet" or "a dancer". He is simply an "artist".'38 Likewise, Pop Art strategically opened itself to the forbidden realm of‘kitsch’, the sculptor Claes Oldenburg commenting that ‘I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.’39 For its part, medium-specificity was deliberately abrogated in the opening statement of the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s manifesto essay 'Specific Objects’ of 1965: ‘Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture’ (Plate 1,24).40 No one was more sweeping in his condemnation of mainstream modern art than the Fluxus spokesman George Maciunas: ‘Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, "intellectual", professional & commercialized culture, Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art.’ Far from the autonomy of art, Maciunas recommended: ‘fuse the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into [a] united front.'41 By the late 1960s, modernist painting and its critical supporters appeared to be on the defensive. In contrast to the image of a modernist mainstream, the international avant-garde gave the appearance of a miscellany of practices that flowed away from the unified aesthetic object, as its artists mixed images with verbal language, and embraced types of installation and performance, as well as sometimes moving beyond the confines of the gallery (Plates 1.25 and 1.26). These radical practices were in turn accompanied by new ideas, embracing many different and even mutually competing strands of a new intellectual conjuncture. In other words, quite suddenly after the high-water mark of its definitive theorisation by critics such as Greenberg and Fried, modernism was eclipsed in terms of both practice and theory.

plate

1.24

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966, galvanised iron and painted aluminium, overall 102 x 483 x 102 cm; each 102 x 102 x 102 cm. (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. Gift of Mr and Mrs Robert A. Rowan, 1966. Art © Donald Judd Foundation/ VAGA, New York/ DACS, London 2003.)

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37

1.25 Robert Smithson, Spiral Hill, 1971, earth, black topsoil, white sand, approx. 23 m at base, Emmen, The Netherlands. (Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson/ VAGA, New Yo^/ DACS, London 2003.) PLATE

1.26 Robert Smithson, Broken Circle, 1971, green water, white and yellow sand flats, diameter approx. 43 m, Emmen, The Netherlands. (Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson/ VAGA, New York/ DACS, London 2003.) PLATE

38

Frameworks for Modem Art

A postmodern condition? ‘Postmodernism’ was a term that came increasingly into vogue across a broad front of cultural theory in the late 1970s, epitomised by the publication in 1979 ofJean-Franqois Lyotard’s influential book The Postmodern Condition.42 Many more publications were to follow, eventually purporting to ‘reread’ virtually every imaginable sector of human enquiry from politics to art, history to geography. By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that no stone had been left unturned in the interrogation not only of modernism itself, but of the entire western tradition. The meaning and scope of a concept of the 'postmodern' is impossible to encapsulate in any thumbnail definition, but the ubiquity of the term does indicate that something had changed in the 1960s. This was so not just in art, but across the spectrum of modern culture, as the modernist classics became domesticated, and increasing commodification in all walks of life, art included, made a nonsense of solitary heroic quests for authenticity. Moreover, the political failure of the radical moment of 1968, when a 'New Left' alliance of students and workers briefly threatened the Establishment in Western Europe and North America, led to a far-reaching reconsideration of the idea of a wholesale overthrow of capitalism. Some variant of this aim had informed generation after generation of avant-garde activity - rooted in the self-emancipation of the working class and abetted by radical artists — even after the 1950s had witnessed a decline in support for the official communist parties. From the 1960s onwards, however, the specific problems associated with variously oppressed social groups, such as students, women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals and others, resulted in a proliferation of languages of resistance, and a substantial crisis for the more traditional Left. In fact, 1968 marked something of a shift in the balance of political and cultural opposition to the status quo. FHenceforth, although cultural transformation gathered pace, political development seemed to stop altogether. Even upheavals like the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s seemed to issue in more of the same (or considerably worse, if you happened to live in the wrong place), rather than a new type of egalitarian social order, whose vision had inspired radicals since the dawn of modernity itself. The final quarter of the twentieth century was marked by a meltdown of assumptions about social relations, psychic identities, the constitution of knowledge and the relationship of humankind to nature itself, on a scale that could not but affect the practice of art.

New wave The beginnings of this manifold reconsideration of how things stood are to be found in places where the clashes of 1968 were most intense. A generation of French theorists, including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, engaged with a variety of issues, ranging from the structures of power in society to the constitution of individual subjectivity, with an elan that had a widespread influence upon English-language cultural debate43 Terms like ‘deconstruction’ and ‘signifier’, indeed, made the transition from specialised technical analysis to the lingua franca of would-be sophisticated conveisation. This banalisation of intellectual communication

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

notwithstanding, the reorientation was considerable. Thus, one effect of the re-examination of subjectivity was a critique of the concept of the expressive author, itself so central to modernism. Modernism’s deep investment in the concepts of authenticity and originality had led to the privileging of tragic author figures (Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock being turned into virtual stereotypes of the kind). Yet developments in psychoanalysis and related fields appeared to cast doubt on the notion of an integral, centred subjectivity. Instead, the individual was seen as the product of systems of conventions, rules, norms, grammars and so forth; in brief, language came to be regarded as ‘speaking’ the individual rather than the other way round. Barthes's criticism of the concept of the expressive author, conveyed in his polemical announcement of the 'death of the author’ in an essay of that title first published in 1968, was not a silly denial of the existence of flesh and blood individuals, but a response to a revision of critical priorities that significantly ‘de-centred’ subjectivity, the subjectivity of the artist included. France was not the only site for the emergence of new perspectives. At a point when the modernist ‘avant-garde’ appeared to have become synonymous with the Establishment, the German critic Peter Burger launched a root-and-branch reconsideration of the very concept of the avant-garde. In complete contrast to Greenberg’s identification of the avant-garde with the pursuit of autonomy, Burger restricted the use of the term specifically to those movements which had sought to overcome the autonomy of art in bourgeois society, principally Constructivism and Surrealism. (For further discussion of these movements, see Chapters I 2 and 14 of Art of the AvantGardes.) For Burger, far from the goal of the historic avant-garde being an assertion of art’s independence, it had been a fusion of art and life. As he put it, the ‘basic tendency’ of the historic avant-garde movement was ‘the sublation of art in the praxis of life’.44 In the UK, the art historian T.J. Clark argued that the modernist view of the avant-garde had become ‘a bore’, and stood in need of significant revision by a history that read art in relation to the wider currents of society, not its separation from them.45 Clark’s work at, and in response to, the end of modernism took the form of an engagement with its beginnings in the nineteenth century, principally in the art of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. Burger’s study was likewise historical and did not really address developments since the Second World War, except to downgrade them as relatively empty repetitions of the revolutionary avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. historians, not surprisingly, tend to concentrate on the past. Others, however, did engage with the various counter-currents to canonical modernism that had begun to emerge again in the 1950s and 1960s. The result was a kind of ‘compacting’ of theory and practice. Despite the fact that many modern artists, from Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian to Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, had written incisively about art, there was a palpable division of labour in the modernist constellation: artists made art and critics wrote about it. To put it bluntly, thinking was bad for artists; it got in the way of feeling. As for criticism - the generation of ideas and theories - that was seen as an essentially afterthe-fact articulation of an intuitive response. By the 1960s, this was no longer the case. On the one hand, certain artists began more assertively to address philosophical and political problems thrown up by the new situation of art.

39

40

Frameworks for Modern Art

On the other, critics and historians generated a widespread discourse, with all the attendant props of publications and professionalisation, that made ‘theory’ a material force in the world of cultural enquiry. In short, the bounds of art were being redrawn. The French author Pierre Bourdieu commented that ‘the new definition of the artist and of artistic work brings the artist’s work closer to that of the ‘‘intellectual’”. Indeed, he went on to claim that 'discourse about a work is not a mere accompaniment .,. but a stage in the production of the work, of its meaning and value’.46

Reconfigurations: the pure and the hybrid New ideas are one thing, of course, but a new art cannot be wished into being. It has to be made out of available resources, and these are both intellectual and practical in nature. The art that emerged in the 1960s clearly set itself against many of the cardinal principles of modernism: in particular, the categorical distinction of art from popular culture, the specificity of the medium and the absolute centrality of the aesthetic (at least as this last had been conceived by modernist critics). However, the often heterodox new forms of work - mixing images and language, for example, or mixing painting with photographic sources (Plates 1.1 and 1.27), or mixing objects with performance, or performances with their photographic documentation had a history. The recovery of this relatively hidden history was a result of the suppressed internal contradictions of modernism rising to the surface. For the modernist logic of purification had always been shadowed by another. Part of the fecundity of Cubism, for example, was that it established the possibility of an autonomous art and more than any other movement gave a technical stimulus to abstraction. But Cubism had another face. Quite to the contrary of a logic of purification, the Cubist artists did something else. They began to stick things together (Plate 1.28). When they attached bits of wallpaper to a drawing, or joined bits of wood and metal together to make a three-dimensional construction, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were clearly not embarked on a logic of punfication. Indeed, mixing things together has a no less redoubtable pedigree in the modem movement than purification itself. But it was neglected and marginalised while modernist essentialism held sway. The hybrid work of postmodernism can trace its roots in the early twentiethcentury avant-garde: in Cubist collage and Constructivist photomontage; in the Futurist soirees, Dada cabarets and Surrealist events in which visual art was mixed with poetry, music and performance. When purification and the conception of aesthetic effect related to it began to appear exhausted, there were plenty of examples around of how to go about things differently - if, to transplant Rilke’s remark, you had the eyes to recognise them. It took an ability not just to see, but to see through, to be able to do that: to see the ideology and the history of modernism as contingent, and to envisage the possibilities of fruitful work among apparently discarded remnants. That which Rosalind Krauss dubbed the 'expanded field’ of postmodernist practice had many antecedents in the margins of modernism.47 In the wider modern tradition, the disposition to self-definition — to which the centripetal logic of purification had been so closely tied - had been balanced by a more centrifugal impulse to address modernity directly. At the origin of the modern in art,

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

41

plate 1.27 Gerhard Richter, Christa and Wolf, 1964, oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm. (The Joseph Winterbotham

Collection, 1987.276, image © The Art Institute of Chicago. © Gerhard Richter.)

42

plate

Frameworks for Modern Art

1.28 Pablo Picasso, Guitar, December 1912, cardboard cut-out, pasted paper, cloth, string, oil and crayon, 33 x 18 x 10 cm. (Musee Picasso, Paris. Photo: © RMN - B. Hatala. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2003.)

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

this impulse had informed Baudelaire’s arguments about the need for a 'painting of modern life'. Its most forceful descendants in the early twentieth century had been the critical avant-gardes - Dada, Surrealism and Soviet Constructivism - all of which had, in the words of Burger, aimed ‘to reintegrate art into the praxis of life' (Plate 1.29).48 After a period of apparent occlusion - partly attributable to social and political conditions, partly attributable to formalism’s hegemony within the western avant-garde - these impulses were again gathering force.

plate

1.29 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, 1919-20, black and white photograph of model. (Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © DACS, London 2003.)

43

Frameworks for Modern Art

44

Moreover, it was not only certain artistic strategies that were being brought into the light once more, but critical approaches too. Prominent among these were the writings of the German critic Walter Benjamin, in particular his 1936 essay on the implications for art of mass reproduction. Benjamin was among the first to realise how profoundly values of originality and authenticity were being undermined by new technologies of reproduction, especially photography and film: ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art'. The result was a ‘tremendous shattering of tradition', amounting to nothing less than ‘the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’49 For the most part, these seeds of criticism fell on stony ground in the 1930s, and Benjamin himself was a victim of the ‘contemporary crisis’ about which he wrote. But from the late 1960s onwards, they flourished so vigorously that the hitherto almost unknown Benjamin became posthumously elevated into the pantheon of great precursors of the postmodern. In a cultural context Increasingly dominated by photography, film, journalism and above all television, all of which impacted on the more traditional practices of art, Benjamin’s writings, and the marginalised, dissident left-wing tradition to which they belonged, came to form part of the centre ground of that wholesale revision of priorities to which the term ‘postmodernism’ points. This is not to imply that ‘postmodernism’ is a stable or secure term. Indeed, as the sense of formalist modernism on whose supercession the ‘post-’ itself is predicated recedes from its one-time pre-eminence, there is a strong case for regarding the art of the twentieth century not as a simple succession (from a unitary and now largely negatively conceived modernism to a more open postmodernism), but rather as the permanent site of complex and mutually contending modem isms. Be that as it may, with increasing force from the 1960s onwards, new configurations and reconnections with old ones were recasting the imaginary map of possibilities for art practice. What was underway amounted to a transformation along all three of art’s principal dimensions, as the identities of producers (artists), products (artworks) and consumers (spectators) alike were changing. As the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto subsequently remarked, 'the 1960s were the beginning of 2000'.50

Objects, subjects and spectators For modernist theory, as indeed for academic theory before that, the identity of the art object, in the sense of the product of the artist’s labour, was a relatively stable thing. It was a painting or a sculpture, and its ‘primordial condition’, in Michael Fried’s words, was that it be beheld. The overthrow of modernist protocols, the emergence of Conceptual Art, performance art, installation art and so on, brought about a reconsideration of the ‘object of art' (a phrase that was subsequently used as the title of a retrospective exhibition surveying this episode). ‘Object’, of course, has two meanings. On the one hand, the eclipse of modernism had thrown open the question of what it was that artists made. But in addition to that there was the question of what was the object of it all, in the sense of art’s purpose in the wider network of the 'signifying practices’ of modernity - in particular, the hitherto downgraded popular forms of the mass media, such as photography, film and

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

television. Was the production of objects for aesthetic contemplation still what artists did? If anything could be art, where did the work of art lie? Bruce Nauman, whose work has come to be regarded as among the most influential of the period (Plate 1.30), spoke of the fine line the artist walked. On the one hand, there were the conventional skills of art and ‘artists who function entirely within the discipline'. For Nauman, these artists, their talents and skills were ‘uninteresting’. But, as he went on, ‘On the other hand, if you don’t have any skill at all, then you can't communicate, either, so it’s an interesting edge between - the edge is interesting for those reasons.’51 It could be said with some justification that, in the wake of modernism, the practice of art consisted precisely in finding such an edge, as it were between exhausted convention and everything else, and seeing if being there remained 'interesting' - to someone, at least. Questioning the object of art was accompanied by a similar questioning of the artistic subject. The modernist author had been conceived as a centred expressive subject: an individual who characteristically delved down into

PLATE

1.30 Bruce Nauman, Self-portrait as a Fountain, from the series Photograph Suite, 1966—7/1970 chromogenic colour print, 51 x 61 cm. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 70.50.9. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

45

Frameworks for Modern Art

46

himself (note: himself), bursting through all mere conventions of social being (in particular the conventions of language) to a bedrock essence of human feeling, which it was then his work to express. Such expression was, ideally, capable of being universally felt across all temporal and spatial distinction by anyone likewise possessed of the desire and capacity for originality. As we have seen, however, a new wave of critical theory subjected this notion of an integral, expressive self to fundamental criticism. The structuralism of Althusser, the cultural criticism of Barthes and the psychoanalysis of Lacan, particularly as this was reworked by feminist critics, all variously revealed the self to be less the marker of an eternal human essence than one of the key props of a patriarchal social order.52 If expression had replaced imitation as modernist art’s signifying principle, then both the theory of expression and its human fount, the expressive artist, were prime targets for anti-modernist critics. The result was a wave of both critical theory and artistic practice dedicated in equal measure to the critique of expressive originality as a 'modernist myth’, and to the exposure of gender stereotypes (Plate 1.3 I). Since these latter were as apparent in avant-garde art as in any other walk of life in the liberal capitalist cultures of modernity (once you had the eyes to see it again), the ideologically familiar identification of modern art with untrammelled

plate

1.31

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #17, 1978, reprinted 1988, photograph on paper. (Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures. © Tate, London 2002.)

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freedom began to ring hollow. Directly citing Barthes’s description of the writer as ‘standing at the crossroads of all other discourses', the American art critic Hal Foster claimed that contemporary art was now 'situated at such a crossing - of institutions of art and political economy, of representations of sexual identity and social life'. A more studied contrast to the modernist critic’s defence of artistic autonomy is hard to imagine, and - taking Foster as representative of a pewasive critical outlook - the implications were clear. To the extent that art was now so different, so too were artists and spectators. The former became 'a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects’, the latter 'an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic’.53 The identification of'contemplation' with ‘passivity’ is, of course, tendentious. But, as an attitude, what it testifies to is the desire for both the practice of art and the encounter with it in galleries and museums to take on the aspect of activity: of intervention in and engagement with a wider culture, which actually promotes isolation and passivity among its consuming subjects. Modernism had expunged narrative from the work of art and aspired to do its work on allegedly more basic terrain: beneath the linguistic structures perforce underpinning narrative, on the plane of feeling. The point of boiling everything down to significant form, after all, was to stimulate an aesthetic emotion. When modernism is being weighed in the balance, much depends on how the 'aesthetic' is conceived. It could be argued in defence of a modernist perspective, for example, that an intuition of aesthetic value is predicated on an intuition of the worthlessness of kitsch, that is to say, of the cultural products of the status quo. But when the institution of modernism had itself acceded to the status of official culture (whatever one's feeling about particular works of art), an exclusive fixation on the aesthetic response was more likely to be regarded as a potentially disastrous evacuation of critical intelligence from the sphere of art. It will be evident that many of the critical charges levelled at the expressive author could also be transferred to the modernist spectator (Plate 1.32). The universalising assumptions of modernist spectatorship were subjected to a contextualising critique rooted in conceptions of difference, in particular of gender difference, but also, in the last decades of the century, of ethnic difference, in the light of this rethinking of the kinds of identity that subtended cultural practice, it is small wonder that cultural practice itself changed in the later twentieth century. Works of art characteristically invite their viewers to perform some imaginative work. The modernist spectator was, in theory, a presuppositionless universal, apprehending the resolved aesthetic totality of the artwork in an instant. One of the most uncompromising statements of this point of view was Fried's claim that, whereas V7e are all literalists most or all of our lives’ (that is, we all exist, live and die in a world of physical objects and above all in time), the experience of art lifts one into a state of what he calls 'Presentness’, akin to a religious state of grace.54 But in contrast to that elevated view, it has to be conceded that there is also a sense in which pictures, or works of art generally, also speak to a flesh and blood being. The point scarcely needs belabouring that works of art of all

47

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48

plate

1.32 Barbara Kruger, What Are You Looking At?, 1994, installation. (Serpentine Gallery, London. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Photo: Paul Wood.)

genres - portraits, landscapes, and perhaps above all the nude - address viewers who are both classed and gendered, not to mention ethnically positioned in a world culture. Along with the critique of expressive originality, the exploration of difference opened up a very wide field indeed for contemporary art.

Globalisation The art of the West has long had a relationship to the visual cultures of the rest of the world. This has had its more positive moments, for example the eighteenth-century appreciation of the decorative qualities of chinoiserie. But while ‘art’ was identified with the achievement of mimesis, non-western artefacts were commonly regarded as evidence for western art’s superiority: tokens of barbarism against which to set the achievements of Christian civilisation. As the writer John Ruskin put it around I860: 'in Europe alone, pure and precious ancient art exists, for there is none in America, none in Asia, none in Africa’.55 ‘Art’ signified the western canon back to Periclean Athens, and nothing else. This state of affairs changed with modernism. In an extraordinary conceptual reversal, many avant-gardists abandoned enthusiasm forthe 'heroism of modern life', and turned instead to its opposite. Authenticity, for Paul Gauguin, forthe early twentieth-century Expressionist Brucke group and many others active around the turn of the century, came to be sought in the West’s marginalised ‘other’. This was a transvaluation of values with a vengeance. While the remnant of the classical canon - the Academy - was

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

evacuated of significance, critics like Roger Fry extolled the formal adventurousness and expressive power of African sculptures.56 The keystone of this arch between the advanced and the modern and the distant and the past, was the concept of the 'primitive'. Primitivism was much more than an artistic style, being intimately connected to the notion of expression itself, which in turn underwrote much of the technical radicalism - the distortion and abstraction - so characteristic of modernist art. Primitivism's mystic communion with the timeless and the authentic depended, however, on altogether more contemporary and material relations: above all, the unequal power relations of imperialism (see Chapter 5). Millions of men and women, living real and unspeakably oppressed lives In the margins of the western empires, represented a standing reproach to the modernist myth of the primitive. To their credit, a minority of avant-gardists leavened their critique of modernist mysticism with an awareness of the ethnographic reality behind the myths of universal authenticity, in France, the Surrealists supported a communist anti-colonial exhibition and drew up a map of the world in which the revolutionary USSR and many supposedly 'primitive' societies eclipsed the cosmopolitan nations of the West. The Weimar collage artist Hannah Hoch distanced her use of tribal images from that of the German Expressionists. Whereas they tended to employ signifiers of the primitive to suggest a ‘natural’ freedom from bourgeois convention, Hoch employed them to highlight contemporary constructions of femininity; moreover, as Maud Lavin has shown,57 she was careful to use the primitive imagery not as if it represented a reservoir of universal humanity, but rather as an exotic ‘other’ encountered in the showcases and on the plinths of a modern ethnographic museum (Plate 1.33). Many avant-gardists, however, principally those associated with the varieties of Expressionism, simply used the primitive as a lever against the prevailing taste of the western bourgeoisie. By the time of the Cold War, though, the myth of the primitive had become evidently untenable, as national liberation movements across the globe sought to free subject peoples from western domination. The anti-colonialist writer and militant Frantz Fanon went so far as to argue that the notion of the ‘inner truth' of an authentic culture, even when adopted by the colonised themselves in resistance to the culture of the colonising power, was ‘already outworn and denied, called in question by the epoch through which the people are treading out their path towards history’.58 Far from unchanging sources of spiritual balm, the erstwhile colonies were themselves a volatile site of modernity. Another component of the contemporary critique of reigning assumptions has been an emphasis on cultural and ethnic difference, at the expense of the universalising ethos that underpinned so much earlier modern art. The one-way traffic of modernist primitivism seems now to have been replaced by more reciprocal types of interchange: the cultural dimension, as it were, of economic and political globalisation. This goes far beyond what Lyotard called the ‘degree zero’ of contemporary cultural eclecticism ('one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner’).59 The curator Olu Oguibe has argued that The underlying necessity to consign the rest of humanity to antiquity and atrophy so as to cast the West in the light of progress and civilisation has been sufficiently

49

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plate

1.33

Hannah Hoch, Monument II: Vanity, from the series From an Ethnographic Museum, 1926, collage, 26 x 17 cm. (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. © DACS, London 2003.)

explored by scholars. It is, in effect, time to move on. ‘To counter perpetually a centre is to recognise it’, when the point should be to dismiss it: ‘not by moving it, that is, to somewhere else, 'but in superseding it’.60 Globalisation in political and economic terms has turned out to be a synonym for the extension of managerial protocols into any and every walk of life, in a word, the extension of empire. In the cultural sphere, a more reciprocal international interchange, shorn of covertly imperialist twentieth-century myths like that of the primitive, may yet hold out the prospect of resistance (Plate 1.34).

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plate

1.34 Judy Watson, Our Bones In Your Collections, 1997, etching and chine colle on hautemulle paper, 30x21 cm. (Image courtesy The Museum of Modem Art, Oxford. © DACS, London 2003.)

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52

Conclusion In conclusion, however, a note of caution is warranted. With increasing momentum since the 1960s, modern art has become thoroughly institutionalised, feeding what Bourdieu called ‘the sad eternity of academic debate’.61 Art is taught in colleges and universities, both as a form of practice and as history. It is the focus of debate in commercial magazines and academic periodicals. It is exhibited in galleries and, increasingly, in dedicated museums of modern art, which proliferated around the globe in the last decade of the twentieth century. Art is made for the market and for those same museums. An entire system of production, distribution and consumption is in place. As well as the artists themselves, a panoply of intellectuals serves the same system: art teachers, art critics and art historians in addition to conservationists, curators, librarians. In short, in the developed western nations at least, modern art has become part of a wider culture industry: critical in some manifestations, conformist in others, but all alike commodified, part of an emerging, globalised cultural economy. In this situation, the boundaries between Academy and avant-garde, between corporate and critical, are often hard to establish. Much as with the Internet, it remains an open question whether the globalised system of art promises a liberation from corporate control or an extension of the powers of management. Looked at in that way, one thing the postmodern situation has done is to reopen some very old questions indeed, such as the balance to be sought between the not always commensurable claims on art of'the True, the Good and the Beautiful’. Historical questions about the constitution and purpose of an adequately modern art - about its ethical dimension, about the role of the aesthetic, and about the relation of art to both the cognitive practices of science and the instrumental practices of politics - have not gone away. In particular, the question of what, if anything, confers on art a specific critical identity rather than an officially approved form of leisure activity within the structures of advanced capitalism, bears down with undiminished force.

Notes 1

On the French Royal Academy, see The Academy: Systems and Principles’, in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648-1815, IB, pp.67-143. For further information on the founding of the Royal Academy in England, see Reynolds, from Discourses on Art, III, VI and XI (1770-82), in ibid., IVA7, pp.651-9, and Discourse IX (1780), in ibid., IVA8, pp.659-63. For one of the fundamental statements of academic doctrine, see Felibien, 'Preface to Seven Conferences (1667), in ibid., IB 10, pp. 108— 18 (further references to related statements are given in the editorial introduction to Felibien’s text p. 108).

2

Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859-63), in Harrison Wood and Gaiger, Art in Theory 1815-1900, IIID8, p.497.

3

Marx and Engels, on the Bourgeoisie, extract from The Communist Manifesto (1848), in ibid., IIAI I, p. 178.

4

Delacroix, on Modernity, extract from The Journals of Euyene Delacroix (1849-57), in ibid., IIIA4, p.33 I.

5

Leger, Contemporary Achievements in Painting' (1914), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IIAI I, p. I 60.

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6

Weber, 'Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (1904-5), in ibid., IIA2, p. 137.

7

Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects' (1969), in ibid., VIIB4, p.885.

8

Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting' (1960-5), in ibid., VIB5, pp.773-9.

9

Rilke, from Letters on Cezanne (1907), in ibid., IA7, p.37.

I 0 Denis, 'Definition of Neo-Traditionism' (1890), in Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, Art in Theory 1815-1900, VC 10, p.863. I I Fry, ‘Introductory Note' (1910) to Denis, ‘Cezanne’ (1907), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IA8, p.40. I 2 Matisse, 'Notes of a Painter' (1908), in ibid., IB6, pp.71, 70, 73, I 3 See, in particular, Fry, 'An Essay in Aesthetics' (1909), in ibid., IB7, pp.75-82, and Bell, The Aesthetic Hypothesis’ (1914), in ibid., IB I 6, pp. 107-10. 14 Fry, 'The French Post-Impressionists’ (1912), in Vision and Design, pp. 166-70. I 5 Fried, from Three American Painters (1965), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIB9, p.788. I 6 Fry, 'The French Post-Impressionists' (1912), in Vision and Design, p. I 67. 1 7 Pollock, Interview with William Wright (1950), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VAI3, pp.583-4. 18 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960-5), in ibid., VIB5, pp.774-5. 19 Fried, Art and Objecthood' (1967), in ibid., VIIA7, pp.844, 843. 20 Barr, from Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), in ibid., IVA7, pp.381-3. 2 I Fried, Art and Objecthood' (1967), in ibid., VIIA7, p.837. It should, however, be noted that the idea of a work of art compelling] conviction’ is a motif that crops up throughout Fried's writing. 22 Greenberg, The Decline of Cubism’ (1948), in O’Brian, Clement Greenberg, vol.2, p.21 2. 23 Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960-5), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIB5, p.774. 24 Rosenberg, 'The Fall of Paris' (1940), in ibid., IVDI2, p.550. 25 Greenberg, 'Towards a Newer Laocoon’ (1940), in ibid., VAI, pp.566, 564. 26 Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch' (1939), in ibid., IVD I I, p.549. 27 Note, however, that Greenberg responded positively to Cubist collage. The distinction for him was that whereas Dada collage traded in 'stunts of illustration’ for their 'shock value', Cubist collage transcended the fragmentation of its elements, which was 'transfigured in a monumental unity’; see Greenberg, 'The Pasted-Paper Revolution' (1958), in O'Brian, Clement Greenberg, vol.4, pp.61-6. 28 The quotations are drawn from a selection of Greenberg's art criticism of the 1960s: respectively, 'America Takes the Lead' (1965), in O’Brian, Clement Greenberg, vol.4, p.214; Interview by Lily Leino (1969), in ibid., p.306; 'AvantGarde Attitudes' (1969), in ibid., p.302. Although he seems to have 'enjoyed' Johns’s work to an extent, he regarded it as ‘less than major' ('Louis and Noland' (I960), in ibid., p.95) and as confined within ‘a certain narrowness' ('After Abstract Expressionism’ (1962), in ibid., p. 127). He did not mention either Rauschenberg or Johns until I960, and only ever discussed their work in passing in more general essays. 29 Greenberg, contribution to the symposium 'Is the French Avant-Garde Overrated?' (1953), in O'Brian, Clement Greenberg, vol.3, pp, 155, 156. 3 0 Krauss, ‘A View of Modernism’ (1972), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIID8, p.978. 3 I Ibid.

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32 Steinberg, from Other Criteria (1968-72), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIID7, p.975. 3 3 Quoted in Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and his Work’ (1961), in ibid., VIA 13, p.736. 3 4 The phrase is used by Michael Fried in ‘Michael Fried in conversation with T.J. Clark’, video for the Open University course A3 I 6, Modern Art: Practices and Debates, 1992. He is referring to the critical position developed in the 1960s by Clement Greenberg and Fried himself. For further discussion of the theory of ‘high modernism’, see Chapter 6 of Varieties of Modernism. 3 5 Johns, Obituary of Marcel Duchamp (1968), in Harrison and Wood, Aid in Theory 1900-2000, VIA23, p.761. 3 6 Ibid. 37 Fried, 'Three American Painters' (1965), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000. VIB9, p.787. 3 8 Kaprow, quoted from the 'legacy of Jackson Pollock' (1958), cited in the editorial introduction to Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (1959-65), in ibid., VIA7, p.717. 39 Oldenburg, from Documents from The Store (1961), in ibid., VIA I 6, p.744. 40 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’ (1965), in ibid., VIIA5, p.824. 4 I Maciunas, quoted from a Fluxus manifesto (1963), cited in the editorial introduction to Maciunas, ‘Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art’ (1962), in ibid., VIA I I, pp.727-9. 42 Lyotard, ‘Introduction to The Postmodern Condition' (1979; English trans. 1984), in ibid., VIIIC4, pp. I 122-3. 43 Relevant extracts include: Lacan, The Mirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the I’ (1949), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VB8, pp.620-4; Barthes, from 'Myth Today' (1956), in ibid., VIA I, pp.693-8; Derrida, from Of Grammatology (1967), in ibid., VIIDI, pp.944-9; Foucault, 'What is an Author?' (1969), in ibid., VIID2, pp.949-53; Althusser, from 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970), in ibid., VIID3, pp.953-60; Barthes, 'From Work to Text’ (1971), in ibid., VIID5, pp.965-70; Baudrillard, ‘Ethic of Labour, Aesthetic of Play’ (1973), in ibid., VIID9, pp.979-82; Foucault, A Lecture (1976), in ibid., VIIDI I, pp.989-94; Baudrillard, The Hyper-realism of Simulation’ (1976), in ibid., VIIIAI, pp. 101 8-20. 44 Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde, p. 109 n.4. BGrger's primary focus for his concept of the historic avant-garde is on Dada, early Surrealism and Soviet Constructivism. He also implies that the concept may apply to Italian Futurism and German Expressionism. Notably, despite not sharing their ‘basic tendency’ he also includes Cubism among his historic avant-gardes. 45 Clark, Image of the People, p. 18. 46 Bourdieu, ‘Being Different’ (1977), in Harrison and Wood, Art In Theory 1900-2000, VIIIA2, pp. I 023-4. 47 See Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. 48 Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde, p.22. 49 Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IVD6, p.52l. 50 Michelangelo Pistoletto, interview with Paul Wood in ‘Arte Povera. Michelangelo Pistoletto and Alighieri Boetti’, video for the Open University course AA304 France and Italy, 2000. 5 I Nauman, Interview with Michele De Angelus (1980), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIIBI4, p.9 I 2. 52 For relevant extracts, see: Vergine, from The Body as Language’ (1974) in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIIBI3, pp.906-10; Mulvey,

CHAPTER 1 Art of the twentieth century

from Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1973/5), in ibid., VIIDIO, pp.982-9; Kelly, 'Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism' (1981), in ibid., VIIIB2, pp. 1059-64; Rose, 'Sexuality in the Field of Vision’ (1984/5), in ibid., VIIIB6, pp. I 072-6. 53 Foster, from 'Subversive Signs’ (1982), in ibid., VIA5, p. 1038. 54 Fried, 'Art and Objecthood' (1967), in ibid., VIIA7, p.845. 55 Quoted in Schapiro, Modern Art, p. 186. 5 6 See Fry, The Art of the Bushmen' (1910), in Vision and Design, pp.60-9, and 'Negro Sculpture' (1920), in ibid., pp.70-3. See also Einstein, ‘Negro Sculpture' (1915), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, !B 17, pp. I 10-16. 57 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife. 5 8 Fanon, ‘On National Culture' (1959), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIA5, p.715. 59 Lyotard, ‘What is Postmodernism?’ (1982), in ibid., VIIIC4, p. I 133. 60 Oguibe, ‘In the “Heart of Darkness’" (1993), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIIICI 3, p. I 171. 6 1 Bourdieu, ‘Being Different’ (1977), in ibid., VIIIA2, p. 1025.

References Burger, P„ Theory of the Avant Garde, trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 (first published 1974). Clark, T.J., Image of the People, London: Thames & Hudson, 1982 (first published 1973). Edwards, S. and Wood, P. (eds), Art of the Avant-Gardes, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, forthcoming. Fry, R., Vision and Design, ed. J.B. Bullen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 (first published 1920). Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Harrison, C., Wood, P. and Gaiger, J. (eds), Art in Theory 1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, Harrison, C., Wood, P. and Gaiger, J, (eds), Art in Theory 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Krauss, R., 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985, pp.276-90. Lavin, M., Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. O’Brian, J. (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.2: Arrogant Purpose 1945-1949, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. O'Brian, J. (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.3: Affirmations and Refusals 1950-1956, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. O'Brian, J. (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.4: Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-1969, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Schapiro, M., Modern Art: Selected Papers, New York: George Braziller, 1978. Wood, P. (ed.), Varieties of Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, forthcoming.

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CHAPTER 2

Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bofflerack Jason Gaiger

Introduction In January 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp wrote a letter to his sister in Paris asking her to locate two objects that had been left behind in his studio when he moved to New York the previous year. One was a completely unaltered bottlerack (Plate 2.2) that he had purchased in a department store and installed in his studio as a sculpture already made’.1 The other was a bicycle wheel attached by its forks to a stool (Plate 2.3). Only now, it seems, was Duchamp fully aware of the significance he attached to these objects. He explained that he had begun buying various items in New York, which he then signed and presented as works of art. An example was a snow shovel that he had purchased in a hardware store. The shovel was left unaltered apart from the addition of an enigmatic title, which he wrote on its base: In Advance of the Broken Arm’ (Plate 2.4). Duchamp assured his sister that she had sufficiently good English to understand the meaning of the term ’readymade’ that he gave to these objects. She was to take the bottlerack and to write on the inside of the bottom circle an inscription he had provided, and then, in the same handwriting, to sign it with his name. The department-store bottlerack would thereby become Bottlerack, a readymade artwork ‘made remotely’ by the artist, Marcel Duchamp. Unfortunately, by the time Duchamp’s letter arrived his sister had already cleared out his studio. Not knowing their importance, she had disposed of both the bicycle wheel and the bottlerack as so much studio clutter. The ’originals’ of both works have been lost and there is no surviving photograph or other visual evidence that records their exact appearance. The works you see reproduced in Plate 2.2 and Plate 2.3 are versions or ’replicas’ that date from a later period. (The status of these replicas and their relation to the ‘original’ readymade objects form part of the complex history of these works. I will take up these issues later in this chapter.) In yet a further twist, the page of the letter containing the inscnption for Bottlerack was also lost and Duchamp was unable to recall the words that he had intended to use. Like the onginal object, the inscription for Bottlerack has disappeared without trace. There are many artefacts that have been lost or destroyed that continue to sustain our interest as works of art. These range from the monumental sculpture of Athena Parthenos created by the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias for the Parthenon in Athens, and now known only from written descriptions and pictures on coins, to more recent artworks such as Gustave Courbet’s The Stonebreakers (1849), destroyed in the Allied bombing of Dresden but plate 2.1

(facing page) Marcel Duchamp, detail of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Plate 2.1 6).

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documented for posterity in a faded colour photograph (Plate 2.5). In the case of Duchamp’s Bottlerack, however, not only has the original sculpture been lost, but there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to when and how it actually became a work of art in the first place. It was only retrospectively that Duchamp conceived the idea of conferring on it the status of a ‘readymade’. By then, however, it was too late to inscribe it either with its title or with the signature of the artist. Moreover, we are entitled to ask in what sense Bottlerack can be said to have been lost’ when it was still possible

plate

2.2

Marcel Duchamp. Bottlerack, 1964 replica, readymade: galvanised iron bottlerack, 64 x 37 cm (1914 ‘original’ lost). (The Vera, Silvia, and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo: Avshalom Avital. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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PLATE

2.3

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1964 replica, assisted readymade: bicycle wheel and fork mounted on white stool, 127 x 64 x 32 cm (1913 'original' lost). (The Vera, Silvia, and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo: Avshalom Avital. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

PLATE

2.4

Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1945, readymade: wood and galvanised iron snow shovel, inscribed back of lower edge, in white paint ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm Marcel Duchamp [1915] replica 1945’, height 121 cm (1915 'original' lost). (Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Katherine S. Dreierto the Collection Societe Anonyme. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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plate

2.5

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849, oil on canvas, 159 x 259 cm (destroyed 1945). (Dresden: Gemaldegalerie Neue Meister, 2522. Photo: Deutsche Fotothek Dresden.)

as late as 1987 to walk into the same department store in Paris, the Bazar de I’Hotel de Ville, and to purchase a bottlerack similar to the one Duchamp installed unaltered in his studio back in 1914. The photograph reproduced in Plate 2.6 shows two such bottleracks on display and available for purchase. In later years, Duchamp signed a number of bottleracks that were brought to him by other people, freely conferring on them the status of readymade works of art and further problematising the notion of a lost 'original’. Despite these obscure and somewhat confused beginnings, Bottlerack is now considered one of the canonical artworks of the twentieth century. Not only are replicas or ‘duplicates’ to be seen prominently displayed in museums of modern art, but a vast critical literature has developed in which historians and theorists of art have sought to comprehend the significance of Bottlerack from a bewildering variety of standpoints. More significantly, perhaps, Duchamp s provocative idea of a ‘readymade’ artwork has been a major influence on the work of subsequent generations of artists and it continues to play an important role in contemporary art practice. Indeed, such is Duchamp s standing that he is now seen by some to have overtaken Picasso as the most influential artist of the twentieth century. In large part this is due to a changed conception of the nature of art and of the role or function that art is expected to fulfil - a change that Duchamp himself did much to bring about. By both his admirers and his detractors alike, Duchamp is held responsible for many of the more innovative and challenging developments in recent art. Here, for example, is how the American art critic Clement Greenberg, a staunch opponent of what he termed 'far-out' art, discussed Duchamps influence in an article written in 1971:

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

plate

2.6

Dieter Daniels, two versions of bottleracks in the department store Bazar de I’Hotel de Ville, Paris, 1987, black and white photograph. (© Dieter Daniels.)

In a few short years after 1912 [he] laid down the precedents for everything that advanced-advanced art has done in the fifty-odd years since. Avant-gardism owes a lot to the Futurist vision, but it was Duchamp alone who worked out, as it now looks, every implication of that vision and locked advanced-advanced art into what has amounted to hardly more than elaborations, variations on, and recapitulations of his original ideas.2 Duchamp’s influence has continued to grow and the impact of his work is arguably even greater now than it was when Greenberg wrote these words. The elegantly simple gesture of presenting an industrially produced object as a work of art has had repercussions far beyond anything Duchamp could have intended when he first presented his ‘readymade’ artworks to a sceptical and uncomprehending public. Although the idea of the readymade forms only one component in a complex and multi-layered body of work, Duchamp later came to recognise it as perhaps his most important achievement. In this chapter I want to consider some of the key problems and issues surrounding Bottlerack, the first of Duchamp’s ‘unassisted’ readymades. (Although some readymades were physically modified or presented in such a way as to alter our perception of them - for example, by being suspended from the ceiling - the ‘unassisted’ readymades were presented just as the

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artist found them without any changes being made.) Plate 2.7 is a photograph taken by the American photographer Man Ray of a version of Bottlerack that Duchamp provided for an exhibition of Surrealist objects held at the Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris in 1936. In this photograph the object appears curiously expressive. Six circles of metal, held together by rivets along two vertical strips, are arranged one above the other in a succession of tiers. All except the base are ringed by spikes that are bent upwards into the air. The jagged

2.7 Marcel Duchamp, Bottlerack black and white photograph by Man Ray of 1936 version as used in Duchamp's Box-in-aValise (1941). (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.) plate

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

angularity of the protruding spikes contrasts forcefully with the more graceful curves of the frame. You may be tempted to see this contrast as intended, or to identify the object’s disturbingly anthropomorphic qualities, perhaps as an evocation of a rib-cage. An interpretation that identifies the visual features of the object as somehow ‘expressive’ of the ideas and intentions of its creator assumes that the artist was guided by aesthetic considerations. We know from Duchamp’s letter, however, that this object was bought ‘as a sculpture already made’. Though unfamiliar to us today, it is a mass-produced object that was once a common sight in people’s houses. Even the title Herisson, or Hedgehog, by which Bottlerack is sometimes known, derives from a popular name given to these household objects. The arrangement of the spikes in circled tiers was intended to fulfil a functional purpose, enabling used bottles to be dried upside down before being returned for refilling. Duchamp later insisted that his choice of readymades was not determined by ‘aesthetic delectation’.3 The bottlerack was left just as he found it when he purchased it in a shop in Paris. It is, quite simply, a found object presented as a work of art. What led Duchamp to take this unprecedented step? How seriously are we to take the idea that an unaltered object can become an artwork? What type of response does a work such as this demand? And what role are we expected to adopt as its viewers? Even a provisional answer to such questions requires a close study not only of Duchamp’s practice as an artist, but also of the subsequent impact that his work has had on the art of the twentieth century. The significance accorded to Bottlerack has changed over time and the meaning of the work is, at least in part, constituted by the different ways in which it has been received and interpreted. While one path of investigation will take us backwards in time in order to uncover the circumstances that led up to the ‘invention’ of the readymade, a second path must take us forwards to the changing circumstances of its reception. It is only from the vantage point of Bottleracks subsequent history, with all its unforeseen leaps and reversals, that we can comprehend how Duchamp’s avant-garde gesture came to acquire more than momentary or passing significance. To understand the canonical status of Bottlerack is thus to understand something of the history of twentieth-century art itself.

Duchamp and the Puteaux Cubists Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 in the village of Blainvllle-Crevon in Normandy, The son of a notary, he later wryly acknowledged that he grew up in a provincial milieu not dissimilar to that described by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Madame Bovary (1856). Of the six children who survived infancy, four were to become artists. His two elder brothers both became successful figures in the early twentieth-century avant-garde. (Gaston Duchamp changed his name to Jacques Villon in honour of the vagabond fifteenth-century French poet Frangois Villon, and Raymond Duchamp followed suit by becoming Raymond Duchamp-Villon.) Marcel’s younger sister Suzanne also pursued a career as an artist. For a short period between 1919 and 1920 she participated in the Dada ‘anti-art’ movement in Paris together with her husband Jean Crotti, who helped Duchamp to produce one of his more arcane assisted readymades, the Unhappy Readymade. Duchamp instructed Crotti to hang a

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geometry book from strings on the balcony of his apartment in the rue Condamine so that the wind could ‘go through the book, chose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages’.4 Either Crotti or Suzanne took a photograph of the readymade (Plate 2.8), which they sent to Duchamp, and Suzanne made a painting of the work, which she entitled Le Ready-made malheureux de Marcel (Marcel's Unhappy Readymade). In the present context, however, it is Marcel's two elder brothers that must occupy our attention, for it was in dialogue with, and in reaction against, their work that he developed his own distinctive understanding of the tasks facing the aspiring artist. Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon were core members of the Puteaux group, a loose collectivity of artists based in the suburb of Puteaux on the outskirts of Paris, where several artists kept studios. This group sought to establish Cubism, the most advanced art of the day, as the official style of the avant-garde. Cubism was originally developed in relative isolation by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Together, the two artists embarked on a process of enquiry into the very problem of representation itself, submitting the forms of objects to geometric simplification and incorporating shifting or multiple viewpoints that broke up the unity of the depicted object. (Cubism is discussed in Chapters 5-7 of Art of the AvantGardes.) In Braque's Candlestick of 1911 (Plate 2.9) the picture surface is

PLATE 2.8 Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crotti, Unhappy Readymade, 1919, gelatin silver print, II x 7 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of William and Virginia Camfield, 1983. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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built up from layers of overlapping planes, and although individual objects still remain legible they no longer inhabit a coherent illusionistic space. Interlocking planes of densely worked paint are distributed across the entire picture surface such that we can no longer clearly distinguish between foreground and background or between the depicted objects and the space they inhabit. Braque and Picasso were more concerned with extending their own investigations in the privacy of their studios than with developing a wider following. By 19 10-1 I, however, other artists began to label themselves ‘Cubists’ and to paint in a recognisably Cubist style. It is notable that the first organised group exhibition of Cubist work, held in Room 41 of the ‘Salon des Independants’ in Paris in 1911, contained work by artists such as Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes and jean Metzinger, but nothing by Braque and Picasso themselves. It is also noteworthy that it was two artists who were closely associated with the Puteaux group, Gleizes and Metzinger, who in 1912 published the first theoretical treatise on Cubism, Du ‘Cublsme’, whereas Braque and Picasso refrained from offering any public interpretation of the meaning of their work until well after the dissolution of their collective activity with the onset of the First World War.

2.9 Georges Braque,

PLATE

Candlestick, 1911, oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm. (Scottish National Gallery of Modem Art, Edinburgh. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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Through his two elder brothers Duchamp was thus exposed to some of the most advanced tendencies in the visual arts. He seems to have been uncomfortably aware, however, that he had arrived on the scene too late to achieve anything of real significance in this style, and he showed an early disinclination to align himself with what was becoming a new orthodoxy in art, with its own established codes and procedures. His first paintings, which he started producing as early as the age of fifteen, were views of his native Rouen and portraits of his friends and family. These were painted in a simplified ‘Impressionist’ manner with broad brushstrokes and characteristic attention to effects of light and shade (Plate 2.10). By Duchamp's own admission, his exposure to Impressionist art was restricted to reproductions in books and he claims to have understood little of the technical achievements of Impressionist painting. By 19 10, he was emulating the style of Paul Cezanne, whose work was increasingly recognised as central to the development of easel painting beyond the atmospheric concerns of Impressionism. If we compare Duchamp’s The Artist's Father (Plate 2.1 I), with Cezanne’s portrait entitled Smoker of 1891-2 (Plate 2.12), the stylistic similarities immediately become apparent, and the painting can be seen as a double homage, both to his father and to the older artist. Duchamp’s rapid progression through the advanced styles of his day did not stop with the work of Cezanne, however.

2. I 0 Marcel Duchamp, Church at Blainville, 1902, oil on canvas, 61 x 43 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.) PLATE

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PLATE 2. ! I

Marcel Duchamp, The Artist’s Father, 1910, oi! on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

2.I 2 Paul Cezanne, Smoker, c. 1891-2,

PLATE

oil on canvas, 93 x 74 cm. (Stadtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim. Photo: Margita Wickenhauser.)

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His first 'Cubist' work dates from early 1911. Between January and October he painted Sonata (Plate 2.13), which depicts the artist's mother and his three sisters engaged in domestic music-making. Despite the employment of a shallow picture space and the use of broken planes to build up the figures, the soft tonalities and ordered composition of this painting pull it away from the more rigorous and demanding contemporary work of Braque and Picasso. Within a matter of months, however, Duchamp was to identify a set of concerns that he would make his own and that, for the first time, enabled him to produce paintings that were more than mere essays in the style of other artists. In December 191 I, he painted Sad Young Man on a Train (Plate 2.14) and the first version of Nude Descending a Staircase (Plate 2.15).

1

plate 2. 3

Marcel Duchamp, Sonata, 1911, oil on canvas, 145 x 113 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2003.)

69

'

.

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

plate

2.14 Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train, 191 1-12, oil on textured cardboard mounted on board, 100 x 73 cm. (The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York). Photo: David Heald. Photo: © 2002 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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PLATE

2.15

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. I, 1911, oil on cardboard, 97 x 61 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

With their restricted palette and dense conjunction of interfoided planes, these paintings risk inaccessibility in a way that had hitherto been absent from his work. Both paintings are concerned with the problem of representing movement through the static medium of pictorial representation. Duchamp came to see this as an important breakthrough. In an interview given towards the end of his life he linked the Nude Descending a Staircase to the more cerebral concerns of his subsequent work: In the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase. Fundamentally, movement is in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the painting.5 Duchamp suggests that already at this early stage he was concerned with the role of the spectator in constituting the work and that it was the problem of articulating the abstract idea of movement that particularly interested him. What most seemed to unsettle viewers at the time, however, was the title that he gave to the work (Nu descendant un escalier) and the fact that it was inscribed onto the surface of the canvas. There was something simultaneously provocative and comical about the idea of a nude descending a staircase, and the conjunction of title and subject matter set Duchamp's work apart from the strictly pictorial concerns of the Puteaux Cubists. In Du ‘Cubisme’ of 1912, Gleizes and Metzinger had argued for the visual autonomy of the artwork, claiming that ‘a picture bears its pretext, the reason for its existence, within it’.6 Such an account can no longer accommodate Duchamp's painting, whose effectiveness derives at least in part from the contrast between the suggestive title and the quasi-mechanical appearance of the figure. By presenting us with an automaton rather than a nude, Duchamp gives the painting an absurdist quality that defeats the attempt to read it in purely formal terms. In January 1912, Duchamp produced a second and more visually complex version of Nude Descending a Staircase (Plate 2.1 6) with the title rendered even more boldly in capital letters in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas. Although the painting retains the same muted palette of greens and browns, the treatment of the figure is more hard-edged and mechanical, and its movements are conveyed through an extravagant profusion of fused and multiplied planes. This work made Duchamp’s reputation as an artist when it was exhibited in New York in 19 I 3 at the Armory Show, the first major survey of modern European art to be held in the USA. The painting was singled out by the press as representative of everything that was ambitious or risible in modern art, depending on the perspective of the critic. The 'Rude Descending a Staircase’, as it was dubbed in one newspaper, became a cause celebre of the first order, and its success paved the way for Duchamp's move to New York the following year. Although Duchamp remained sceptical of the reasons for the work’s notoriety, he was happy to benefit from the attendant publicity and for many years he was known simply as the painter of the famous ‘nude’.

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Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas, 146 x 89 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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The Armory Show lay in the future, however, and on the other side of the Atlantic. In the years leading up to the First World War, Paris was at the forefront of advanced artistic practice. Although Duchamp had privileged access to the work and the ideas of the artists who surrounded his two elder brothers, he found himself increasingly at odds with other members of the Puteaux group. In one of the formative events of his early career, the hanging committee of the Cubist room of the ‘Salon des Independants’ obliged him to withdraw from display the second version of Nude Descending a Staircase the day before the exhibition was due to open on 20 March 1912. The ‘Salon des Independants’ had been established in I 884 as an alternative exhibiting space to the state-sponsored Salon. It provided a quasi-official forum for presenting the latest advances In avant-garde art to a wider public. Duchamp’s painting was to have been shown together with work by members of the Puteaux group, but Gleizes and Metzinger, who now led the group, believed that its scandalous subject matter and provocative title would undermine their efforts to establish Cubism’s credentials as a serious art form. They persuaded Duchamp’s brothers to visit him in his studio and to inform him that for the painting to be exhibited he must first change its title, which, of course, he refused to do. Duchamp thus found himself in the unusual position of being rejected by members of a supposedly oppositional avantgarde group, including members of his own family, whose identity as a group was at least in part formed by their exclusion from ‘official’ art. For a period at least, Duchamp continued his efforts to achieve recognition as a painter, successfully exhibiting the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 at the ‘Exposicion d’Arte Cubista’ in Barcelona in April 1912 and again at the ‘Salon de la Section d’Or’ in Paris in October. However, he no longer identified with the aims and ambitions of the Cubist movement. The very idea of participating in an ‘avant-garde’ that simply waited its turn to establish itself as a new orthodoxy with its own system of exclusion appeared self-defeating, though it may well be that Duchamp simply did not believe that he could rival the other Cubists on their home ground. His disillusionment with the Parisian art scene was underscored by his decision to leave Paris for Munich. Little is known of his activities during the time he spent abroad from June to October 1912, but it is clear that by the time he returned to Paris he had submitted his ideas and aspirations as an artist to a comprehensive transformation. It was in Munich that he produced what is widely considered the most successful painting of his ‘Cubist’ period, The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride (Plate 2.17). But it was also in Munich that he conceived the idea of ‘abandoning’ painting and of searching instead for new artistic strategies that could enable him to address directly the historical and institutional conditions of advanced artistic practice that had become so problematic to him in Paris. The ‘passage’ in the title of The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride can thus be read as marking a transition in Duchamp’s own work, a transition that would eventually lead to his abandonment of painting and to the ‘invention’ of the readymade. Although Duchamp actually produced his last work on canvas in 19 I 8, it was in Munich that he started to look for other ways of articulating his ideas and of presenting them to a wider public.

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Marcel Duchamp, The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, 1912, oil on canvas, 59 x 54 cm. (digital image © 2002 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

The 'abandonment' of painting The Belgian art theorist Thierry De Duve has argued that the readymades represent ‘the other side of Duchamp's abandonment of painting’ and that they are his way of getting it on the record’.7 To understand this claim, we first need to consider what is meant by the idea that Duchamp ‘abandoned’ painting and how this differs from simply giving up on something at which he was not very good. We also need to reflect on the way in which his aims and intentions at this time have been reinterpreted in the light of his subsequent activities as an artist and how contemporary views of his work have been informed by his own retrospective account of the prewaryears. In an interview given in 1946, that is to say, some thirty-five years after completing the first version of the painting, Duchamp explained that already with the Nude Descending a Staircase he had ‘wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting ... I was interested in ideas - not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.'8 Duchamp's promotion of the idea that there is a fundamental opposition between the physical act of painting and the more cerebral concerns of the artist allowed his abandonment of painting to be seen as an act of emancipation that removed unnecessary restrictions on the artist’s critical and imaginative potential: the task of putting art ‘at the service of the mind’ could be achieved only by relinquishing the physical preoccupations of painting in favour of a

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

radically different conception of artistic activity. In other words, the readymades not only freed the artist of any dependence on manuapskill, but also demonstrated that the creation of an artwork is something that can be achieved through the mind rather than the hand. However we interpret Duchamp’s motives at the time, it is clear that the extreme physicality of The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, with its dense entwining of biological and mechanical forms, marks an end point in his development as a painter. Once again, the title (Le Passage de la vierge a la mariee) plays a central role in guiding the viewer’s interpretation of the work, and like that of the Nude Descending a Staircase it is written onto the canvas itself. After completing The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, the last of his Munich canvases, in August 1912, Duchamp began to explore the theme ofthe mechanisation of desire and of arrested or ‘delayed’ eroticism through a large and ambitious work that was laboriously constructed on glass ratherthan on canvas. Entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, and commonly known as The Large Glass (Plate 2.1 8), this project absorbed his attention until 1923 when he ceased work on it and declared it ‘definitively unfinished’.9 I shall not attempt to decipher the complex iconography or the subject matter of this work, which depicts the endlessly deferred attempt of nine ‘bachelors’ to bring an abstractly represented ‘bride’ to a state of ‘blossoming’.10 Rather, I shall focus on the new methods that were employed in its construction and the way in which it relates to the almost contemporaneous ‘invention’ of the readymades. Many of the ideas behind Duchamp’s abandonment of painting were incorporated into The Large Glass and it must be considered alongside the readymades as one of the principal means by which he sought to work through the consequences of his rejection of conventional artistic practice. The procedure of working on glass possessed several advantages. It enabled him to distance himself from what he termed ‘the traditional idea of the painter, with his brush, his palette, his turpentine’." The construction of The Large Glass was slow and arduous, and Duchamp deliberately chose to employ methods that were highly labour intensive. Thus, for example, the ‘Oculist Witnesses’ section, situated on the far right-hand side of the lower of the two panels, was produced by first applying and then laboriously scraping away a coat of mercury. By working on glass he could avoid many of the demands imposed by the construction of pictorial space and by the need to establish a coherent relation between the objects depicted and their supporting ground. The ‘background’ of The Large Glass would be whatever could be seen through it, and this would change depending on its location. Duchamp also incorporated techniques derived from technical drawing in order to subvert the idea of artistic ‘expression’. This can be seen most clearly in the ‘Chocolate Grinder’ section in the centre of the lower panel, for which he produced numerous preliminary studies. In Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (Plate 2.19), for example, he not only developed an intentionally dry and meticulous manner of painting, but also emphasised the perspectlval accuracy of the straight lines on the rollers by constructing them out of thread sewn on the canvas. Many years later he explained: ‘In French there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his “paw”. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.’12 Duchamp used the term ‘retina! painting’ to describe any artwork that was

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2.18 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire and dust on two glass panels, 278 x 177 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder, No. 2, 1914, oil, graphite and thread on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

primarily concerned to give visual satisfaction rather than to stimulate the mind. In interviews he spoke disparagingly of the loss of intellectual content in art and criticised the belief that its principal purpose was to give pleasure to the eye. By drawing on objective and ‘depersonalised’ forms of representation that seemed to bear little relation to the artist’s private or inner world he self-consciously set about breaking with the idea of an artist’s ‘style’ as a highly personalised manifestation of his or her individual vision. The contrast could not be starker to the contemporaneous movement of German Expressionism, which interpreted the working of pigment on canvas as a direct ‘expression’ of the artist’s inner life. (German Expressionism is discussed in more detail in Chapter I of Art of the Avant-Gardes.) At the same time that Duchamp was confronting the possibility of ‘abandoning’ painting in Munich in 1912, members of the Blauer Reiter (‘Blue Rider’) group, who were based in the same city, were seeking to find ways of representing feelings and emotions through the medium of paint. Forsaking the mimetic

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representation of visual appearances in favour of a heightened use of colour and a simplification of forms, they sought to articulate their own subjective responses to the world around them. Writing in 1912, Franz Marc, one of the key figures in the group, declared that painting was a ‘bridge into the realm of spirit’ and claimed that he and his colleagues were seeking to penetrate beneath the 'veil of appearances’ in orderto discover things 'hidden in nature’.13 Although the iconography of The Large Glass, with its obscure interplay of linguistic and visual frames of reference, contains its own form of mysticism, Duchamp breaks with the idea that the trace of the artist's hand might be linked to the revelation of subjective thoughts and feelings. By employing techniques derived from mechanical drawing, he signalled his distance from the 'expressive’ dimension of art, cultivating instead the objectivity and precision of the designer’s blueprint. This apparent objectivity, however, is undercut in turn by Duchamp’s displacement of mechanical laws onto human emotional and sexual relations. His fascination with mechanical processes was combined with a sense of the absurdity of the workings of machines when conceived as a metaphor for human interaction. There are two further aspects of The Large Glass that we need to consider in relation to the readymades. The first is the incorporation of chance elements into the construction of the work itself; the second is the use of explanatory notes as a necessary supplement or corrective to any strictly visual appreciation. Duchamp began by using chance as a means to undermine further the vaunted claims made for the artist's personal touch. Thus, for example, the nine ‘Shots’ on the right-hand side of the upper section of the glass were formed by firing matchsticks dipped in paint from a toy canon. However, he later found that chance could produce effects that repaid attention in their own right. When The Large Glass was stored flat on sawhorses in his studio in New York in 1920, he asked the photographer Man Ray to photograph the accumulation of dust on the lower panel, and gave the work the suggestive title Dust Breeding (Plate 2.20). Some of the dust was then fixed to The Large Glass where it became part of the artwork, an unforeseen addition that Duchamp was pleased to accept as something ‘given’ from without. The second aspect of The Large Glass that I would like to address here concerns Duchamp’s use of written texts as an integral part of the work itself. His first set of notes to The Large Glass was published in a limited edition of just five copies in 19 14. It thus predates the physical work of building The Large Glass, which did not begin until 1915. Duchamp later told an interviewer: I wanted that album to go with the 'Glass’, and to be consulted when seeing the ‘Glass’ because, as I see it, it must not be ‘looked at’ in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect that I don’t like.14 Duchamp published a further, and much more substantial, collection of notes in 1934, also entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (but without the punctuating comma). He was insistent that the artwork consisted in both the notes and the physical object, and that the one could not be

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2.20 Man Ray/Marcel Duchamp, Dust Breeding, 1920/1964, gelatin silver print from original negative, 7x11 cm. (Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo: David Harris. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

separated from the other. If viewers of The Large Glass were to follow Duchamp’s instructions, they could not simply look at the glass and trust to their visual responses. They must also engage in the intellectual activity of reading and interpreting the notes. These, however, do not offer any fixed interpretation of the meaning of The Large Glass, but are an ensemble of fragmentary speculations on mathematical and scientific ideas, plays with words and suggestions for projects yet to be carried out.15

The commodification of the artwork Once Duchamp realised that he was unable to pursue the conventional path of developing a sufficiently innovative and recognisable style that would ensure the exhibition and sale of his canvases, he began to reflect on the very system of recognition and self-promotion through which artists sought to establish their reputation. The artistic strategies that he adopted from his Munich period onwards can be seen as a way of thematising and problematising the conditions under which art was produced, distributed and received in modern, capitalist societies. Like other artists of his generation,

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Duchamp found himself in a position of having to develop a new style or approach in order to capture the attention of potential buyers. This situation was exacerbated among members of the avant-garde, for whom the criterion of success was no longer to be found solely in the technical execution of the work but also in the degree of novelty or originality that it displayed in relation to work of the recent past. It is important to recognise that this was a relatively new historical situation. The development of an independent art market in which artists had to find buyers for their goods was the result of a significant transformation in the larger role of art in society. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the making and appreciation of art was gradually separated from the interests of ruling bodies such as the church and the aristocracy, giving artists greater licence to pursue their own ideas and inclinations. Within the wider social sphere, art thus attained a degree of relative independence or autonomy. One cost of this new-found independence, however, was the increasing restriction of art to a private domain of purely aesthetic appreciation. The danger was that art had bought its freedom at the price of its own marginalisation, and that it might become little more than a form of enjoyable distraction for those wealthy enough to be able to afford it. Duchamp recognised the need to 'avoid all formal lyricism’, as if the achievement of beautiful effects in a work of art would vitiate its critical potential.16 The provision of aesthetic pleasure was viewed with suspicion because it too readily met the expectations of the cultivated connoisseur. Duchamp’s hostility to merely ‘retinal painting' was at least in part an attempt to short-circuit complacent assumptions concerning artistic genius and the appropriately attentive viewer, assumptions that supported the purchase and exchange of artworks as precious commodities. While the construction of The Large Glass enabled him to explore new forms of artistic making, his work on the project was largely restricted to the privacy of his own studio. (Duchamp worked on The Large Glass for years without showing the least inclination to reveal his labours to the wider public. He made little money from selling his own work, but was able to support himself by acting as an advisor and broker in the art markets of Europe and the USA.) In contrast to the 'privacy' of The Large Glass, the readymades were conceived from the outset as a means of confounding the expectations of even the most forwardlooking devotees of art. By confronting the presuppositions behind the very concept of an 'artwork', Duchamp went to the heart of the modern system of art with its attendant notions of intrinsic value, individual genius and subjective truth. His refusal to satisfy the requirement of providing a unique and irreplaceable art object, and his provocative suggestion that the artist’s decision was enough to transform an industrially manufactured commodity into a work of art, served to make explicit prevailing assumptions about art’s special value. Whereas The Large Glass required years of painstaking manual labour, an unassisted readymade required no physical intervention whatsoever and could be 'created' in an instant. For the readymade to achieve its desired effect, however, it first had to be presented in circumstances in which its critical and deflationary potential could be unleashed.

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Exhibiting the readymade Duchamp installed the first of his readymades, Bicycle Wheel (Plate 2.3), in his studio in Paris some time in 1913, The following year it was joined by Bottlerack (Plate 2.2), the first ‘unassisted readymade’, and Pharmacy a colour lithograph of trees by a riverbank, to which he added dots of gouache, in red and in green, which he intended to stand for the jars of coloured liquid displayed in pharmacists’ windows. He originally made three exemplars of this readymade, in which he modified copies of a mass-produced commercial print. (The version reproduced in Plate 2.21 is from a later edition of 100 exemplars made in 1945.) These three works date from after his stay in Munich and were produced at the same time as he was working out detailed plans for the construction of The Large Glass. As we have seen, however, Duchamp did not fully articulate the idea of a ‘readymade’ artwork until after his departure for New York in 19 15. In retrospect he said of Bicycle Wheel that, although it ‘was the first expression of the thing that would be called the readymades two years later’, ‘It was not intended to be shown; it was just for my own use.’17 In another interview, given in the 1960s, he declared that he simply ‘liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at flames dancing in a fireplace.’18 Initially, these objects seem to have possessed a curious transitional status: they were neither functional objects nor artworks, but something in-between. Once installed in his studio, the bottlerack purchased at the Bazar de I’Hotei de Viile was no longer used to dry bottles, just as the landscape print that formed the basis for Pharmacy was no longer to be enjoyed simply for its depicted content. Duchamp claims that he selected these objects - and, in the case of Bicycle Wheel and Pharmacy introduced subtle alterations - for the pleasure that they gave him as things in their own right. However, for them to be raised to the status of artworks, he first had to work out the ramifications of the expanded conception of art that he had begun to develop in Munich. Through his work on The Large Glass he had already started to distinguish between the physical labour of making something and the intellectual or conceptual content that an artwork was intended to articulate. With the idea of the unassisted readymade he finally split the two apart: henceforth the artist’s contribution could consist entirely in the new meaning or interpretation that was bestowed on an object independently of whether or not the artist had constructed the object in the first place. Duchamp arrived in New York in June 1915 and, despite his uncertain command of English, he found immediate access to a circle of like-minded artists and collectors. He had been invited to New York by Walter Pach, an American painter and writer on art, and one of the organisers of the Armory Show. Soon after his arrival, Pach introduced him to the collector Walter Arensberg, who became his major patron in the years to come. As the painter of the infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp was much in demand and he was invited to give interviews to several magazines and newspapers. While his responses are marked by a tone of confidence and self-irony, he sought clearly to distinguish himself from any specific artistic movement, above all from Cubism. Once established in New York, he rented a studio and finally commenced the task of physically building The Large Glass. It

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Marcel Duchamp, Pharmacy, 1914/1945, assisted readymade: gouache on a commercial print, 26 x 19 cm. (Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo: Avshalom Avital. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

was also at this time, in the winter of 1915, that he produced the first of his American readymades, In Advance of the Broken Arm (Plate 2.4). After buying a snow shovel in a hardware store, he painted the words 'In Advance of the Broken Arm / (from) Marcel Duchamp’ along its lower rim - to show that it was chosen and not made by the artist - and hung it from the ceiling of his studio with a length of wire. A little later, in February 19 I 6, he produced a small readymade entitled Comb (Plate 2.22), a metal dog’s comb with the cryptic words '3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n’ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie’

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(Three or four drops of height [or haughtiness] have nothing to do with savagery’) written along the edge in white paint. At one end are Duchamp's initials, ‘M.D.’, and at the other the date and time of its inscription: ‘Feb. 17 1916 i I a.m.’ As we have seen, Duchamp used titles to add an extra dimension of meaning to his work, and throughout his life he was fascinated by puns and other forms of word play. Whereas the humorous intent of In Advance of the Broken Arm is readily understandable, the title of Comb may well contain a more complex play with words. Thierry De Duve has pointed out that the French word for comb, peigne, is identical to the first and third person forms of the subjunctive of the verb peindre ('to paint’), FHe suggests that the force of the subjunctive ‘que je peigne!’ is best translated as something between 1 ought to paint!’ and ‘If only I could paint!’19 if De Duve’s interpretation is correct then Comb serves as a means of articulating Duchamp’s sense of the impossibility of continuing painting as a meaningful practice. It may also be intended as a wry comment on the fact that in some of their Cubist canvases Braque and Picasso employed the decorator’s technique of dragging a comb through paint or varnish to achieve a faux bois, or illusionistic wood-grain, effect. Whereas Braque and Picasso carried out their investigation of the relationship between 'truth' and ‘appearances’ within the visual dimension of the artwork, Duchamp's Comb depends on the resonance that is established between the title and its subject. If a work such as Comb was to be more than a cryptic device whose meaning was accessible only to those in the know, Duchamp had to find a way of presenting the idea of a readymade artwork to a wider public. It is noteworthy, however, that on the first two occasions when he exhibited examples of readymades they aroused no particular interest or comment whatsoever. Two objects - listed in the catalogue as ‘sculptures' and tentatively identified by Arturo Schwarz as In Advance of the Broken Arm (Plate 2.4) and Traveller's Folding Item (Plate 2.23), a shop-bought typewriter dust cover - were exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries in New York early in 1916. In April 1916, Duchamp exhibited Pharmacy (Plate 2.21) alongside three of his paintings and a drawing in a group show with Gleizes, Metzinger and Crotti at the Montross Gallery in New York. From these first exposures he learned that the mere exhibition of a readymade was not enough to provoke the kind of response he wanted. Indeed, in the absence of an appropriate context it is difficult to envisage what visitors to these exhibitions must have made of Duchamp’s contribution. From what we know, the readymades seem simply to have been ignored. For the exhibition of a readymade to have the impact that Duchamp intended, he needed to make sure that its polemical Intent was understood. Drawing on these experiences, and on the lessons that he had already learnt from the reception of his work both at the 'Salon des Independants' and at the Armory Show, he made sure that the next public appearance of a readymade was accompanied by maximum publicity. If the readymade was, Indeed, Duchamp’s way of putting his abandonment of painting on the record, then the scandal he engineered just before the opening of the first Independent’s exhibition in New York in April 1917 served to ensure that the press and the public took appropriate notice.

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PLATE 2.22

plate 2.23

Marcel Duchamp, Comb, 1916, readymade: grey steel dog’s comb, 17 x 3 x 0.3 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

Marcel Duchamp, Traveller’s Folding Item, readymade: replica made by Ulf Linde for Duchamp retrospective, Stockholm 1963, inscribed ‘Marcel Duchamp, 1964’, 26 x 32 x 42 cm (1916 ‘original’ lost). (Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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The Independent Artists' exhibition The American Society of Independent Artists, to give it its full name, was modelled afterthe French Societe des Artistes Independants. It was established in December 1916 with the express intention of providing a forum ‘where artists of all schools can exhibit together - certain that whatever they send will be hung’. In its founding statement, from which these words are taken, its directors declared their allegiance to the principle that the Societe des Artistes Independants had adopted on its formation in 1884: ‘No jury, no prizes.’20 In order to show in the annual exhibition, an artist had only to pay the $6 administration fee and to send in his or her work at the appointed time and place. The first annual exhibition, which opened on 9 April 1917, contained some 2,500 works and extended over three kilometres of panels. As head of the hanging committee, Duchamp proposed the democratic and nonhierarchical solution of ordering the works alphabetically rather than according to subject matter, medium or style. Unknown to other members of the committee, however, he also submitted an artwork to the exhibition, using the pseudonym R. Mutt. The work in question, which seemed deliberately chosen to provoke, was a urinal, rotated through 90°, signed in large black letters with the name of the pseudonymous artist and given the title Fountain (Plate 2.24). Its arrival caused considerable consternation and a meeting of the directors was hastily called on the eve of the show. By a small margin, the decision was taken to refuse Fountain even though this contravened the

PLATE 2.24 Alfred Stieglitz, studio photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, from The Blind Man, no.2, May 1917. RY 709.04063 R46 no.427. (Photo: Greg Williams. Image © The Art Institute of Chicago.)

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society’s founding principles. The accompanying furore is vividly captured in the memoirs of Beatrice Wood, a close friend of Duchamp at the time, who describes - and no doubt embellishes - a discussion she claims to have overheard between Walter Arensberg and George Bellows, two of the Society’s directors: 'We cannot exhibit it,' Bellows said hotly, taking out a handkerchief and wiping his forehead. ‘We cannot refuse it, the entrance fee has been paid,’ gently answered Walter. ‘It is indecent!’ roared Bellows. That depends on your point of view,' added Walter, suppressing a gnn. ‘Someone must have sent it as a joke. It is signed R. Mutt; sounds fishy to me,’ grumbled Bellows with disgust. Walter approached the object in question and touched its glossy surface. Then with the dignity of a don addressing men at Harvard, he expounded: ‘A lovely form has been revealed, freed from its functional purpose, therefore a man has clearly made an aesthetic contribution.’ ... Bellows stepped away, then returned in rage as if he were going to pull it down. 'We can't show it, that is all there is to it.' Walter lightly touched his arm, This is what the whole exhibit is about; an opportunity to allow an artist to send in anything he chooses, for the artist to decide what is art, not someone else.' Bellows shook his arm away, protesting. 'You mean to say, if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas that we would have to accept it!’ 'I’m afraid we would,’ said Walter, with a touch of undertaker’s sadness. 'If this is an artist’s expression of beauty, we can do nothing but accept his choice ...’ It is gross, offensive! There is such a thing as decency!’ 'Only in the eye of the beholder. You forget our bylaws.’21 Both Duchamp and Arensberg resigned from the Society’s board of directors in protest at the Society's refusal to exhibit Fountain, and the whole event received a great deal of media coverage. Although the real identity of R. Mutt remained unknown, the press were quick to pick up on Fountain's subversive qualities and relished the discomfort, into which it had thrown the board of directors. With a single gesture, Duchamp had put the Society’s ‘no jury’ policy to the test and shown that hidden assumptions concerning what could and could not count as art continued to operate. The following month the flames of the dispute were fanned once again by an anonymous editorial entitled The Richard Mutt Case’, published in a small magazine, The Blind Man, dedicated to the Independent’s exhibition. The magazine was put together by Duchamp along with two collaborators, Henri Roche and Louise Norton. Duchamp arranged for Fountain to be photographed for the magazine by the American photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, whose gallery, 29 I, on Fifth Avenue was known for its support of the most advanced European art. It is

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade; Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

this photograph that is reproduced in Plate 2.24. Although Duchamp’s authorship of the editorial remains uncertain, it was undoubtedly written with his consent and it remains a key statement for understanding his practice at this time.

Read carefully the following excerpt from The Blind Man editorial. How does the author suggest we should interpret Fountain and what is unusual or distinctive about this conception of the role of the artist? Also, think about this question in relation to the other readymades by Duchamp that have been discussed in this chapter. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.22 We can distinguish three key ideas in this passage. The first is the dissociation of artistic creativity from its traditional reliance on craft or technical skill. For the author it is irrelevant that the urinal was not actually made by the artist. Like the bottlerack, it is an everyday mass-produced item that could be purchased from a catalogue or a shop. The artist does not need physically to have made the object to present it as an artwork. This is the other side of the recognition that not everything that is hand-crafted is necessarily a work of art. The important thing, we are told, is that the artist ‘chose’ the object. This is closely linked to the second idea contained in the passage, the idea that by taking an everyday object out of its normal, functional context the artist can reveal it in a different light. In the case of Fountain, this is achieved by giving the object a new name or title and by presenting it in the context of an art exhibition. An object that is presented as a work of art is no longer seen in the same way as when it is encountered in day-to-day life. Not only is our attention directed towards different aspects that we may have otherwise overlooked, but we are obliged to consider our own relation to the object and the strange phenomenon of its ’transfiguration’ into an artwork. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the author suggests that the artist’s real achievement is to have created a new thought’ for the object. Here we are at the opposite pole from the belief that an artist is primarily a maker of beautiful things. The real achievement of the artist is seen to reside in the creation of ideas. A successful artwork will prompt new ways of thinking and encourage us to conceive things in different and unexpected ways. By the same token, the viewer’s response will be as much intellectual as visual. Rather than taking pleasure in the physical features of the artwork, the viewer is required to establish new connections between existing things or to see something familiar from a changed perspective. ■

Modern aesthetic judgement Soon after it was photographed for The Blind Man, Fountain mysteriously disappeared. As in the case of Bottlerack, the ’original’ work was lost or destroyed. It is now only known from its appearance in Stieglitz’s photograph and from the ‘replicas’ that Duchamp authorised many years later. (One of these replicas is reproduced in Plate 1.7.) Both works live on, however, in

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what Andre Malraux termed the 'imaginary museum’, a collection of artworks that is held together in our minds even though many of the works no longer exist or are scattered throughout the globe in different galleries and museums.23 Looking back from the standpoint of the present day, both Bottlerack and Fountain can be seen to have emerged victorious from the dispute as to whether a ‘mere real thing' can be categorised as a work of art if it is presented as such by the artist. Duchamp’s readymades are firmly on the record as artworks and they indisputably belong to any history of art in the twentieth century. However, the straightforward assimilation of the unassisted readymade into the narrative of art history represents a pyrrhic victory, for this ultimately serves to render harmless the provocation contained in the idea of a urinal or a bottlerack presented as a work of art. If we are to respond to the challenge posed by these works, we cannot take on trust their acknowledged status as art objects. Rather, in each and every case, we must ask for ourselves-, is this successful as a work of art? Bottlerack still requires an aesthetic judgement on our part, even if this judgement does not rest upon the formal properties of the artwork. This recognition forms one of the key insights of Thierry De Duve's book Kant after Duchamp (1996), in which he argues that Duchamp successfully brought about a transformation in the way in which we judge or evaluate works of art. Whereas for the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, writing in the late eighteenth century, an aesthetic judgement essentially took the form: 'Is it beautiful?', De Duve suggests that ‘after Duchamp’ the first and most basic question we need to ask is: 'Is it art?’ De Duve’s argument is not simply that the identification of something as a work of art has become more problematic, but that reflection upon what is meant by art has been incorporated into the very meaning and significance of art itself. Although it would clearly be absurd to judge the success or failure of a work such as Bottlerack by estimating the beauty of the object chosen, there must be other criteria of success if the category of art is not to lose all descriptive and evaluative significance. If we were completely to abandon the notion of aesthetic judgement, then the successful identification of something as a work of art could simply be bestowed by artists or by museums. De Duve is insistent, however, that 'From institutional legitimation - or art status - it does not follow that aesthetic legitimacy - or art quality - is secured once and for all.’24 According to De Duve, each of us is still required to make our own decision on the basis of our own judgement and experience. In the case of Fountain or Bottlerack this requires that we interrogate some of our most deeply held values and assumptions. To what extent is craft or skill an indispensable component of an artwork? Can we answer the question Is this art? solely by reference to how something looks? Is it enough simply that the artist intends something to be art? Can anything be a work of art? And what role does the presentation of an object in the exhibiting space of a gallery or a museum play in establishing its status as an artwork? It is important to recognise that v/orks such as Bottlerack and Fountain do not permit any definitive resolution of these questions. As one recent study has put it, 'Duchamp leaves us firmly with the problem, not with a solution.’25 The effectiveness of the readymades resides in the way in which they hold open the space between artworks and mere real things. By articulating this distinction

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

they encourage us to reflect on what it is that makes something a work of art. They thereby invite rather than foreclose judgement. Duchamp himself was insistent that his choice of objects for readymade artworks was based on a principle of complete visual indifference. In an interview given in 1961 he observed: The great problem was the selection of the read/made. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me, that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero. It is extremely difficult to choose an object in which one has no interest whatsoever, not only on the day it is chosen but forever, and which has no chance of ever becoming beautiful, pretty, pleasurable to look at, or ugly.26 Once again, we need to bear in mind that this is a retrospective account and that Duchamp is offering an interpretation of his work that is addressed as much to the present as the past. He not only was speaking under changed historical circumstances, but, as an interested observer, was aware that his views could influence the contemporary reception of the readymades, which were beginning to be rediscovered by a new generation of artists. Duchamp’s apparently neutral proclamations can be seen as a subtle attempt to guide the way in which his own earlier work should be understood. Moreover, he already had some fifty years of the readymades’ reception history behind him and he was looking back on his own aims and ambitions with all the benefit of hindsight.

Resonances of the readymade Duchamp’s assertion of aesthetic indifference notwithstanding, his choice of objects for readymade artworks resonates in interesting ways with other aspects of his practice as an artist. Indeed, from our present-day perspective the readymades can be seen to belong to the period of their making as distinctively as any other artwork. A number of commentators have noted similarities between Fountain and the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The gleaming surfaces and overt eroticism of Brancusi's Princess X of 1915-16 (Plate 2.25) may well have influenced Duchamp's decision to elevate a porcelain urinal to the status of art, and the establishment of such a connection would have rendered more difficult the decision of the board of directors to reject it from the Independent’s exhibition. (In an interesting inversion, a consignment of Brancusi sculptures that Duchamp sent for exhibition in the USA in 1926 was stopped at customs, where officials refused to recognise the sculptures as works of art, insisting instead that they should be subject to the 40 per cent tariff imposed on imports of metal.) Another area of overlap is to be found in the fascination shared by a number of artists in the forms and shapes of modern industrial machinery. By expressing their admiration for mass-produced objects that possessed a purely functional character, they sought to challenge long-held assumptions concerning the lowly status of manufacture in relation to high art. Duchamp himself was

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PLATE

2.25 Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1915-16, polished bronze, 62 x 41 x 22 cm. (Centre Pompidou-MNAM-CCI, Paris. © Photo: CNAC/MNAM Dist. R.MN. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

highly sensitive to the combination of elegance, grandeur and absurdity to be found in machines and to the rich associations that such objects could generate. Describing a visit to the 1912 'Salon de la Locomotion Aerienne’ in Paris together with Duchamp and Brancusi, the French painter Fernand Leger recalled that Duchamp ‘walked among the motors, the propellers without saying a word. Then suddenly he spoke to Brancusi: "Painting is finished. Who can do better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?"’27 Duchamp’s interest in readymade objects can thus be situated in a wider context in which admiration for industrial forms was beginning to issue in a new aesthetic based upon the machine. Although Duchamp always resisted being identified with any artists' group, there are important continuities between his practice as an artist and the

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movement known as Dada that flourished in Zurich, Berlin and New York from around 1915 to 1925. Fuelled by a sense of outrage at the futility and violence of the First World War, Dada artists sought to expose what they saw as the fundamental meaninglessness and stupidity of bourgeois society. Their development of an anti-art aesthetic was part of an attempt to shock and scandalise their fellow citizens. (Dada is discussed in detail in Chapter I I of Art of the Avant-Gardes.) In Zurich, where the movement began, this originally took the form of irreverent performances, recitals and demonstrations at a series of‘cabaret’ evenings, but it also issued in poems, paintings and musical compositions that incorporated nonsense and chance or random effects into their very construction. Comparison may be drawn between a work such as FHans Arp’s Arrangement According to the Laws of Chance (Plate 2.26), which was made by allowing the torn pieces of a drawing

plate 2.26

Flans Arp, Arrangement According to the Laws of Chance (Collage with Squares), 1916-17, torn and pasted papers, ink and bronze paint, 49 x 35 cm. (digital image © 2002 The Museum of Modem Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © DACS, London 2003.)

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to fall to the ground and affixing them where they landed, and Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade (Plate 2.8) with its similar utilisation of chance effects. Although Duchamp does not seem to have shared the sense of moral purpose that animated Dadaism, cultivating instead an attitude of studied indifference to the wider social and political world, his subversion of the established conventions of art and his attempt to undermine the complacent assumptions of the art market was consistent with Dada’s attack on the role of art in modern society. Finally, we can identify a number of PORTRAIT D’UNE JEUNE FILLE AMERICAINE DANS L’ ETAT DE NUDITE

F Picabia 5

*9*5 New York

2.27 Francis Picabia, Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity 1915, ink on paper. Reproduced in Alfred Stieglitz’s review 291, nos 5/6, July/August 1915. (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.) PLATE

connections between Duchamp’s choice of objects to be presented as readymades and his ongoing exploration of issues of gender, authorship and sexuality both in his early paintings and in The Large Glass. Duchamp associated the endless circular motions of the chocolate grinder (Plate 2.19) with masturbation and he was alert to the numerous potential parallels between mechanical and sexual processes. A similar fascination with the sexual connotations of anonymously produced objects also informed the work of Francis Picabia, a key member of the Dada movement who was strongly influenced by Duchamp at this time. In Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (Plate 2.27) of 1915, Picabia offered a precisely rendered depiction of a spark plug. As in a number of pieces by Duchamp, the effectiveness of this work depends on the confrontation between what we read in the title (Portrait d'une jeune fille americaine dans letat de nudite) and what we see in the work. In this context, it is surely not contingent that both Bottlerack and Fountain utilise objects that possess physical and sexual resonances. The ‘phallic’ spikes of the bottlerack await bottles for drying and the urinal is renamed Fountain to suggest that it no longer receives but produces a flow of water. In the 1920s, Duchamp went on to explore the complication of masculine and feminine identities by adopting a female alter-ego, Rrose Selavy. He had himself photographed by Man Ray in this new persona (Plate 2.28) and signed many of his works with this name (which, in French, is homophonic with the words 'eros, c’est la vie’ (‘eros, that’s life’)). These aspects of his practice

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plate

2.28 Man Ray, Rrose Selavy, 1921, gelatin silver print, 22 x 17 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Samuel S. White, III, and Vera White Collection. © Man Ray Trust/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

as an artist have become the subject of increasing interest in recent years, and they cast new light on his choice of readymade objects. Today Duchamp is feted as much for his debunking of the strident masculism of the artistic ‘genius’ as for his interrogation of the status of the art object. (Related questions of gender and authorship are taken up and explored in greater depth in Chapter 4.)

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The delayed reception of the readymade I now want to turn to the reception of Duchamp’s work in the late 1950s and the 1960s when the development of new forms of artistic practice resulted in the ‘rediscovery’ of the readymade by a later generation of artists. It is a curious fact of art history that after their initial exposure in the 1910s the readymades virtually disappeared from view, only to re-emerge with heightened relevance and urgency nearly half a century later. From being acknowledged as an important but somewhat marginal figure in twentiethcentury art, Duchamp was hailed as the progenitor of an alternative tradition that would come to rival and eventually to overthrow the modernist mainstream. As we shall see, this ‘delayed reception’ was in part determined by the renewed accessibility of Duchamp's work. Of decisive importance, however, was a shift in artistic climate that made his central preoccupations directly relevant to the concerns of younger artists who were looking for ways to move beyond the restrictions of a now dominant modernism. Having ‘abandoned’ painting in Munich in 1913, Duchamp let it be known in 1923 that he was abandoning art altogether. To anyone who was interested, he replied that he was henceforth devoting his energies to chess, which he learned to play at master level. Although he did produce occasional works after this date, he ceased to present himself as a practising artist. His major contribution in the 1930s was a 'portable museum’ containing replicas or copies in miniature of his earlier work. The Box-in-a-Valise (Plate 2.29) was produced serially in a limited edition of 24 de luxe and 300 standard copies over a period of some thirty years. As with The Large Glass, the work was extremely laborious. The first edition took nearly six years to make and was finally completed in 1941. It contained miniature facsimiles of 69 of his works, ingeniously mounted so that they could be packed away in a small leather suitcase and thus rendered ‘portable’. In a deliberate inversion of the original readymade gesture, whereby the artist elevated an object to the status of an artwork merely by designating it as such, the 'copies’ of readymades such as Fountain and Traveller's Folding Item that were revealed on opening the suitcase had to be patiently constructed by hand. From being dismissed as a retrospective exercise or as a means to make money (though it may also have been both of these things), the Box-ln-aValise has come to be seen as Duchamp’s way of confronting the process of museumification and the highly mediated character of our encounter with works of art. The deployment of multiple copies problematises the notion of an original artwork and is continuous with his earlier project of questioning the status of art as a privileged locus of value and meaning. At the same time, however, the Box-m-a-Valise enabled him to make present once again works that had been lost or destroyed and to give his early readymades a degree of visibility that they had not previously enjoyed. It is important to note that the form in which many of the readymades are now known is derived from their presentation in the Box. Thus, for example, the photograph of Bottlerack that Duchamp selected (Plate 2.7) is the one that is most frequently reprinted in books and articles. As we have seen, however, this photograph does not

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plate

2.29

Marcel Duchamp, Box-in-a-Valise, 1941, leather and cloth covered box containing various supports, 41 x 39 x 10 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

record the original work but a later version that was purchased in 1936. Moreover, when Duchamp incorporated this photograph into the Box, he retouched it, emphasising the artificial shadow (which is formed from the silhouette of the bottlerack itself). Martha Buskirk has argued persuasively that the construction of the Box-in-aValise was prompted, at least in part, by Duchamp's concern that the lack of an appropriate context for the readymades might lead to their oblivion. According to Buskirk, ‘Duchamp’s power of designation was not always strong enough to keep them from slipping back and resuming their earlier life as common objects to be used and then discarded ... the fundamental simpleness of the readymade gesture required, in turn, a much more elaborate structure of contextualisation and interpretation.'28 It was this concern both to sustain and to control the impact of the readymades that led Duchamp to collaborate in the production of ‘limited edition’ replicas by Arturo Schwarz for sale in his gallery in Milan in the 1960s. Schwarz sought to establish the ‘authenticity’ of these replicas by drawing up blueprints based on the original works or, in the case of those that had been lost or destroyed, by drawing on surviving documentary evidence. Since there is no visual record whatsoever of the 1914 Bottlerack, Schwarts replica (reproduced in Plate 2.2)

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was based on Man Ray's photograph of the 1936 version. By signing these replicas and authenticating them with the name of the artist, Duchamp was helping to reconstruct his oeuvre and to present it in a particular way to the public. As we have seen, he also gave interviews in which he sought to establish the validity of his own interpretation of the readymades. A number of significant events took place in the 1950s and 1960s that served to publicise Duchamp’s work and to render it more accessible. In 1954, Walter Arensberg, Duchamp’s principal collector, bequeathed his substantial collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was installed under Duchamp’s instructions. In 1959, again with Duchamp’s assistance, the first monograph on his work, by Robert Lebel, was published both in French and in English translation.29 A year later, in I960, the artist Richard Hamilton published a typographic version of Duchamp’s notes to The Large Glass, thereby allowing them to be consulted in book form for the first time. Finally, in 1963, the first major retrospective of Duchamp’s work was held at the Pasadena Art Museum. The opening was attended by Duchamp and the exhibition attracted considerable attention. Although the increased exposure of his work certainly contributed to his growing influence on younger artists, the extraordinary impact of his work on a whole generation of artists cannot be explained by these events alone. The decisive factor seems to have been the very dominance of modernism and the success achieved by the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, including artists such as Jackson Pollock (Plate 2.30) and Willem de Kooning. Younger artists who were seeking to counter what they saw as a new orthodoxy discovered in Duchamp’s work a model of artistic freedom that could be used to legitimate their own search for alternative forms of artistic practice. In the context of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Abstract Expressionism was at the height of its influence, Duchamp's rejection of'painterly' modes of proceeding, and his concern with art as idea ratherthan as a source of visual pleasure, helped to support a powerful critique of modernist values as these had been formulated in the writings of figures such as Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg. In contrast to modernist ideals such as ‘significant form’ or ‘pure opticality', and the increasing identification of high art with an autonomous sphere of specifically aesthetic effects, Duchamp’s hybrid art practice offered a more open and pluralistic model of what art could be. Whereas Abstract Expressionism was underpinned by a heroic model of the artist as a unique individual whose dedication to art offered a locus of resistance to the conformism of mass culture, Duchamp’s work was marked by irony, diffidence and the purported elimination of the unique trace of the artist's hand. Moreover, Duchamp’s adoption of a female alter ego, Rrose Selavy, and his deflation of the notion of artistic genius, offered a pointed contrast to the assertive masculinity projected by artists such as Pollock and de Kooning. To the new Beat generation, with its gay counter-culture and interest in eastern philosophy, Duchamp presented a more sympathetic role model than the macho artists of the New York School. For further discussion of these issues, see Varieties of Modernism, Chapters 5 and 10. Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg seized on Duchamp’s rejection of 'high art’ conventions and materials by electing to work in a

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plate

2.30 Jackson Pollock, Reflection of the Big Dipper, 1947, oil on canvas, III x 92 cm. (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

variety of different media and by including in their work objects and images taken from the wider domain of popular culture (Plate 2.31). Rather than refining the conventions of‘high art’ in pursuit of ever more powerful effects, Duchamp’s work challenged art’s very claim to autonomy and raised important questions concerning its institutional support. The readymade, in particular, was seen as having initiated a powerful critique of the system of exchange

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plate

2.31

Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive /, 1963, oil and silkscreen and ink on canvas, 213 x 152 cm. (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Gift of Susan Morse Hilles. © Robert Rauschenberg/DACS London/VAGA, New York 2003.)

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and commodification through which artworks were purchased and circulated. (It is not without irony that in the 1960s Duchamp effectively re-commodified the readymades through his collaboration with Schwarz, and was happy to profit from the object of his own critique.) Artists were increasingly sceptical of the role of galleries and museums in sustaining the status quo and sought to find ways of confounding the expectations of the art market. Duchamp’s insistence on the active role of the spectator in actually constituting something as a work of art thus coincided with a renewed attempt to break down the barrier between the artist and the public. The delayed reception of Duchamp’s work acted as a catalyst for a wide range of artistic movements, including neo-Dada, Fluxus, ‘happenings’, Minimalism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and performance art. FHowever, the language of direct ‘influence’ or of simple cause and effect is not particularly helpful here. Whereas the strength of interest accorded to Duchamp's work undoubtedly contributed to the development of new forms of artistic practice, these practices, in turn, provided a meaningful context in which his work could be interpreted and understood. Moreover, although some artists explicitly acknowledged Duchamp as an influence, others seem to have been unaware of his role as a forerunner or precursor. Let us consider just two examples. The American artist Jasper Johns was introduced to Duchamp by the musician and composer John Cage in 1959. His Painted Bronze (Savarin Can with Brushes) of 1960 (Plate 2.32) plays a sophisticated game with the idea of a readymade. Though cast from bronze, the brushes and can are painted to look ‘real’, inverting our expectations and offering an ironic commentary on the painter's purported task of imitating reality. In an appreciation written after Duchamp's death in 1968, Johns praised Duchamp - in highly Duchampian language - for having taken art beyond 'retinal boundaries ... into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another’.30 The same year as Johns produced Painted Bronze, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni exhibited The Artist’s Breath, a balloon inflated with air from the artist’s lungs, followed a year later by Artist's Shit, a series of small, round tins each supposedly containing the artist’s excrement and sold according to their equivalent weight in gold at current trading prices. At the same time as he was producing these satirical takes on the theory of artistic expression, Manzoni also signed and dated human bodies to create 'living sculptures’. In 1961, he produced Base of the World (Plate 2.33), perhaps the ultimate ‘readymade’ artwork. By placing a steel block on the ground and writing the words ‘Socle du Monde’ on it upside down, he suggested that the entire world could be viewed as an artwork. In contrast to Johns, however, Manzoni seems to have produced these provocatively Duchampian pieces without explicit knowledge of, or reference to, Duchamp’s prior example. A great deal of myth-making has surrounded Duchamp's retrospective canonisation as the ‘founding father’ of an alternative tradition to modernism. As feminist critics such as Amelia Jones have pointed out, there is a certain irony in the attempt to establish Duchamp as the paternal ‘origin’ of an oppositionally conceived ‘post-modernism’.The desire to validate practices outside the modernist mainstream has led to the construction of an alternative lineage that can be traced through the rediscovery of Duchamp’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For Clement Greenberg, whom I quoted at

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2.32

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Savarin Can with Brushes), I960, painted bronze, 34 x 20 cm diameter. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Long-term loan by Jasper Johns. © Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2003.)

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the start of this chapter, Duchamp is responsible for substituting the act or gesture of originality for originality itself, and for making the extra-aesthetic context more important than features proper to the work itself. For others, Duchamp is a revolutionary figure, who liberated art from its undue dependence on ‘retinal’ effects. It is important to recognise, however, that these judgements were made more than half a century after the ‘invention’ of the readymade and that they are as much a response to the perceived influence of Duchamp’s work as to the works themselves. As we have seen, Duchamp’s staging of his own work not only prevented the readymades from disappearing from view but also influenced decisively the way in which they were understood and interpreted by later generations. In the case of Bottlerack, which was lost without trace in 1914, we can only access the work through written accounts and by looking at versions or replicas, all of which were produced in different contexts and under different historical circumstances. Rather than searching for some pristine original, miraculously stripped free of subsequent layers of interpretation, we should recognise that Bottlerack consists in both the work and its reception and that it is through their reciprocal influence that the history of the readymade is to be told.

plate

2.33

Piero Manzoni, The Base of the World (Hommage a Galileo), 1961, corten steel, 82 x 100 x 100 cm. (Heming Kunstmuseum. © DACS, London 2003.)

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Notes 1

The letter is dated 15 January 1916 and written in French. Duchamp informs his sister Suzanne that she will find the bicycle wheel and the bottlerack in his studio, and explains that 'J'avais achete cela comme une sculpture toute faite' (1 bought this as a sculpture already made’). The original letter together with a translation is reproduced in Naumann and Obalk, The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, pp.43-4.

2

Greenberg, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’, pp. I 23-4.

3

Jouffroy, 'Conversations avec Marcel Duchamp (1954-1961)’, p. II 8. I discuss this remark in greater depth below in the section of this chapter entitled 'Modern aesthetic judgement'.

4

Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p.61. Cabanne carried out an extended series of interviews with Marcel Duchamp in 1966, two years before Duchamp’s death at the age of eighty-one.

5

Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p.30.

6

Quoted in Ades, Cox and Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, p.49.

7

De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, p. 150.

8

From an interview with James Johnson Sweeney, first published as 'The Great Trouble with Art in this Country’ (1946); reprinted in Sanouillet and Peterson, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, pp. 123-6; quotation p. 125.

9

Duchamp described The Large Glass as ‘definitively unfinished’ in an interview with Calvin Tomkins. See Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p.250.

I 0 A comprehensive discussion of the ‘iconography’ of The Large Glass is given in Golding, Marcel Duchamp: 'The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even'; accessible accounts are also to be found in Ades, Cox and Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, pp.84-121, and Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, pp. 1-14. I I Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, p.67. I 2 Quoted in Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, p.24. I 3 Marc, 'Die neue Malerei' (The New Painting'), p. 102; my translation. I 4 Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, pp.42-3. I 5 Duchamp’s notes to The Large Glass are reprinted in Sanouillet and Peterson, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, pp.22-101. I 6 Quoted in Ades, Cox and Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, p.75. I 7 Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 135. Duchamp made this claim in an interview with Tomkins. No date is given. I 8 Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p.588. The interview with Schwarz took place between 1959 and 1968. 1 9 De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, p. 170. 20 Quoted in Camfield, ’Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain', pp.66-7. 2 I Wood, / Shock Myself, pp.29-30. 22 The full text of the editorial is reprinted in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IIIB2, p.252. 23 Andre Malraux’s book Le Musee imaginaire ('The Imaginary Museum’) was published in 1947. It forms the first part of a tnlogy on the psychology of art. Although Malraux was principally concerned with sculpture, his idea of a 'museum without walls has been taken up and developed by a number of subsequent writers. For a discussion of the concept of the ‘imaginary museum' in relation to Duchamp’s readymades, see De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, pp.416-21. 24 De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, p. 135. For a detailed discussion of De Duve’s arguments, see Gaiger, ‘Art after Beauty’. 25 Ades, Cox and Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 152.

CHAPTER 2 Interpreting the readymade: Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack

26 Jouffroy, ‘Conversations avec Marcel Duchamp’, pp. I 18-19; my translation. 27 Quoted in Camfield, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, p.8l. 28 Buskirk, Thoroughly Modern Marcel', pp. 197, 200. 29 Lebel, Sur Marcel Duchamp, published in English as Marcel Duchamp. 3 0 Johns, Obituary of Marcel Duchamp (1968), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIA23, pp.760-1. 3 I See Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, pp.xi-xiv.

References Ades, D„ Cox, N. and Hopkins, D„ Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Buskirk, M., Thoroughly Modern Marcel’, in M. Buskirk and M. Nixon (eds), The Duchamp Effect, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 191-203. Cabanne, P„ Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R. Padgett, New York: Da Capo Press, 1987 (original French edition 1967; English translation first published 1971). Camfield, W.A., 'Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917’, in R. Kuenzli and F.M. Naumann (eds), Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, pp.64-93. De Duve, T., Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Edwards, S. and Wood, P. (eds), Art of the Avant-Gardes, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, forthcoming. Gaiger, J„ 'Art after Beauty: Retrieving Aesthetic Judgement’, Art History, vol.20, no.4, 1997, pp.6 I 1-15. Golding J„ Marcel Duchamp: ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even', London: Allen Lane, 1973. Greenberg, C„ ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’, in J. Mashek (ed.), Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975, pp. 122-33. Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Jones, A., Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jouffroy, A., ‘Conversations avec Marcel Duchamp (1954-1961)’, in Une revolution du regard: a propos de quelques peintres et sculpteurs contemporatns, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, pp. 107-24. Lebel, R„ Sur Marcel Duchamp, Paris: Trianon, 1959 (English translation by G.H. Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Grove Press, 1959). Marc, F„ 'Die neue Malerei’ (The New Painting’) (1912), in K. Lankheit (ed.), Franz Marc Schriften, Cologne: DuMont, 1978, pp. 101-8. Naumann, F.M. and Obalk, H. (eds), Affed Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. J. Taylor, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Sanouillet, M. and Peterson, E. (eds), The Wntings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo Press, 1989 (French edition 1959; English translation first published 1973). Schwarz, A., The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, revised and expanded paperback edition, New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000. Tomkins, C„ The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant Garde, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Tomkins, C„ Duchamp: A Biography, London: Pimlico, 1996. Wood, B„ / Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood, Ojai, CA: Dillingham Press, 1985. Wood, P. (ed.), Varieties of Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, forthcoming.

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Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve Charles Harrison

Introduction This chapter is concerned specifically with a painting called Eve (Plate 3.2) made in 1950 by the American artist Barnett Newman, who was born in 1905, lived and worked in New York, and died there in 1970. But the chapter is also concerned more generally with abstract painting as a distinct phenomenon in the twentieth-century art of Europe and the USA, and with the problems of its reception and interpretation. Eve has been chosen because it is a work painted at a crucial moment in the history of the modern tradition. It is arguable that the abstract art of the middle of the twentieth century marked a high point in the development of painting as a whole. It is also arguable, however, that beyond that point interest in painting as a specific medium rapidly lost its centrality to the general development of art. Newman’s work has been chosen because It raises significant problems concerning the relationship between work of art and spectator. These various issues are linked. They are linked by a complex and absorbing question: what kind of experience is an experience of art? Can we say that there are certain constants by which that experience is defined, or is it altogether relative to changing conditions and to differences in media? Eve may not seem an easy work to come to terms with, but I believe that it repays close attention. It was first exhibited in 195 I. On that occasion it was untitled. Newman gave it the title Eve some time before I960, when it was first sold. Look at Plate 3.2 and, noting the details of its size and medium, try to imagine for yourself how Eve might appear as an object hanging on the gallery wall. Think about the properties of the work that viewing the original might make more evident and the differences of effect there would be as a result. Note any characteristics that you think would be particularly remarkable and any specific aspects or features of the work that you might find intriguing or difficult. In comparing a reproduction to an actual painting there are always two points to bear in mind. The first is that a reproduction is usually continuous with the flat surface of the printed page, whereas a painting hanging on a wall is normally defined by its literal edge as a separate and self-contained surface. The second point, connected to this, is that it is through the specific character of that marked surface that a painting typically seeks to engage our attention. In the case of a relatively small painting, there may be little difference of scale between an original and its illustration, so that its effect is easier to imagine, particularly where the frame is included in the reproduction, providing some

plate

3.1

(facing page) Barnett Newman, detail of Genesis — The Break (Plate 3.18).

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plate

3.2

Barnett Newman, Eve, 1950, oil on canvas, 239 x 172 cm. (© Tate, London 2002. © ARS New York and DACS, London 2003.)

CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

sense of the work’s literal edge. And where a painting depends largely for its effect on the depiction of familiar scenes and objects, we can the more easily recover this effect from a reproduction. We may even be able to gain a fair impression of surface texture from a good photograph. On all these counts, however, the effect of a large abstract painting is likely to be very different from that of an illustration in a book. Newman's painting is taller than the tallest standing person, it is hung unframed, according to the preference of the artist, it is not a picture of anything, and significant differences of surface texture are likely to be very hard to make out in reproduction. Standing before the work you would have a much stronger sense of its presence as a physical object, you would certainly be affected one way or another by its size in relation to yourself, and if you examined it carefully you would notice considerable differences in the application of paint over different areas, particularly between the relatively dense painting of the larger bright red area and the more liquid covering of the thin band at the right. These are all factors crucial to the effect of the actual painting. I would expect you to be curious about what it is that lies behind the features you have observed: about the reasons for the size of the painting, for the division of its surface into just two seemingly flat areas of colour and for its sheer lack of detail. Someone - the artist for instance - might say that the reason for these features is just to provide the specific effect that the painting offers. That is all very well, but it is unlikely to help very much if the painting leaves you cold. You may then feel that you want some way in to its possible meaning - some means to experience its effect as significant. ■ This chapter is written as an attempt to satisfy that demand. While I cannot guarantee that anyone indifferent to the appearance of the painting will end up convinced of its significance, I will at least try to offer some explanation for the way it looks. My aim Is to provide some background to the general development of abstraction in painting, to distinguish different phases in that development and to consider some problems of description and terminology. By this means I hope to provide a context for consideration of Newman’s own ideas and aims as they bear on the specific work in question. It will be some time before we return to Eve.

Abstract painting The emergence of abstract art is a major distinguishing feature of western art in the twentieth century, and the analysis of its development a central concern of writing in the modernist critical tradition. Yet for much of the century the term ‘abstract’ was virtually synonymous in common usage with ‘incomprehensible’ or ‘meaningless’. Until quite recently, exhibitions of abstract art tended to draw relatively low attendances, and if students of modern art were offered a range of subjects to address, few would choose to write about abstract art. Nearly a hundred years after the first abstract paintings were made, however, there are signs that abstract art may finally be losing the stigma of difficulty and unpopularity with which it was for so long associated. The American painter Jackson Pollock was responsible for a radical development in abstract painting in the late 1940s (Plate 3.3). In 1998-9, a

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plate

3.3

Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with nails, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches etc., 129 x 76 cm. (digital image © 2002 The Museum of Modem Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

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109

large exhibition of his work drew considerable crowds at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Tate Gallery in London. A Hollywood film has been made on his life and early death. The work of another American, Mark Rothko, drew comparable crowds to exhibitions in Washington and Paris, also in 1998-9, while both the chapel dedicated to his work in Houston, Texas, and the room containing his Seagram Murals at Tate Modern in London (Plate 3.4) have almost become places of pilgrimage for those curious about the sublime’ experience they are supposed to provide. (The ’sublime’ is an aesthetic category traditionally distinguished from the ‘beautiful’. In the aesthetic theories of the eighteenth century, whereas ’beauty’ was conventionally defined by reference to classical harmony and proportion, ‘sublimity’ was associated with sensations of wonder, awe and even terror aroused by the spectacles of nature and, by extension, of art.) Should we conclude that the difficulty of abstract art was an illusion, or that it was real enough but has somehow finally been overcome, or that work such as Pollock's and Rothko’s has become relatively popular despite a difficulty that persists? It is not easy to know quite how such questions should be answered, but we can try to achieve an adequate reading of one relevant work, and consider what is involved in the process.

plate

3.4

Mark Rothko, Seagram Murals, installation view. (© Tate, London 2002. © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS, London 1998.)

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Barnett Newman belonged with Pollock and Rothko in the loose grouping of several American artists who formed a ‘New York School’ in the 1940s. The style of their work is most commonly known as Abstract Expressionism. (Pollock’s work is discussed in Chapters 3-5 of Varieties of Modernism.) They and their other contemporaries are sometimes also referred to as the ‘American First Generation’. This is not because there were no significant American artists before the Abstract Expressionists, but rather because their work initiated a period of specifically American domination over the development of modern art that lasted from the late 1940s at least until the early 1970s, involving several successive waves of avant-garde activity. In 1964, Newman was described as ‘one of the world's best artists’ by Donald Judd, who was at that time establishing himself as a leading figure in the American vanguard movement known as Minimalism. (See Plate 3.5; Judd’s work is discussed in Chapter 7 of Varieties of Modernism.) The Abstract Expressionists were certainly not the first generation of painters to achieve prominence with abstract work. The three names most widely associated with the early development of abstract painting are those of the Russians Wassily Kandinsky (Plate 3.6) and Kasimir Malevich (Plate 3.7), and the Dutchman Piet Mondnan (Plate 3.8) (each of whom is discussed in Chapter 8 of Art of the Avant-Gardes). In the decade between 1910 and 1920, each of

plate

3.5

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1964, chartreuse oil on wood and yellow enamel on iron, 50 x 122 x 86 cm. (The Helman Collection, New York. Art © Donald Judd Foundation/ VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

I I I

these artists explored the idea that it might be possible to produce something deserving of the titles ‘painting’ and ‘work of art’ without requiring that it contain any pictorial resemblance to the visible world. We should be clear about just what it was that this possibility involved. The artists were not suggesting that an abstract pattern or geometrical design would in itself be a self-sufficient work of art. On the contrary, such concepts as ‘pattern’ and ‘design’ represented kinds of limit beyond which their painted surfaces would somehow have to be pursued if they were to measure up to the demands of ‘art’. What was required for some finished object to qualify as a painting was that it should be possessed of individual significance; in other words, that it was instilled with a degree of content or meaning sufficient to satisfy the expectations that paintings - rather than ‘mere designs’ - had traditionally aroused. Kandinsky was the first to use the concept of ’abstract expressionism’ to describe the kind of painting he had in mind. Malevich described his work as ‘non-objective’, implying that it was derived from internal sources rather than from the appearances of external objects.1 Mondrian used the term ’Neo-Plastic’ (‘new plastic’) to convey the idea that the plastic or formal effects of his works were prototypal, that is to say not dependent on the arrangement of actual forms in three-dimensional space.2 The problem, of course, was that spectators of paintings had traditionally understood them largely by matching the appearance of their painted surfaces against the appearance of those objects in the world to which they evidently

plate

3.6

Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Composition 7 (sketch 3), 1913, oil and tempera on canvas, 90 x 125 cm. (Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Inv. Nr: 68. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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3.7 Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1914-15, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm. (Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.) PLATE

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CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

refer. At the very least, it seemed that the type of motif depicted might be taken as a guide to the kind of emotional or intellectual content a given painting had to offer. For instance, Paul Cezanne’s late painting of Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves (Plate 3.9) might appear at first as a rich and dynamic surface of coloured patches. But as one looks more carefully, interest in that surface becomes inseparable from the imagery of foreground trees, rearing mountain and broad valley saturated with Mediterranean light which it both captures and produces. If we ask ourselves how we know what the painting 'means’, as befits a painting that has a clear landscape motif we can hold on to the idea that, in responding to this imagery, we may be feeling something of that powerful ‘sensation’ of nature that Cezanne aimed to capture and to express. From the seventeenth century until well into the twentieth, western painting was generally divided into distinct categories or genres according to the types of motif referred to: history painting, portraiture, scenes of low’ life, landscape and still life. Yet the significance of a landscape or a still life was not necessarily restricted to the literal value of what it depicted. The one might serve to evoke an idealist golden age or to celebrate property and status, the other to invite contemplation of the transitoriness of sensual pleasure

plate 3.9

Paul Cezanne, Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves, 1904/6, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 cm. (Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum (accession no. 2285). Photo: Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Martin Buhler.)

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and the inevitability of death. Either might cater to the sheer fascination that original and assiduous modes of representing may attract. But at least those viewers who could match a given picture against its model in the world were engaged in a process relevant to the recovery of meaning - if only because they were following the practical procedures by which that picture must have been composed. The images that the painter Rembrandt made of his own features during the seventeenth century are among the most highly valued works in the entire history of western art (Plate 3.10). To respond to these works is to exercise in imagination something of that combination of concentrated self-absorption with technical inventiveness that must have been involved in their production. Yet, although Rembrandt was no beauty, an understanding that the appearance of the man significantly decided the appearance of the picture seems crucial to the sense of its meaning and value.

PLATE

3.10

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait at the Age of 63, 1669, oil on wood, 86 x 70 cm. (© The National Gallery, London.)

CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

Arguments for abstract art While the paintings of Rembrandt and of other figurative artists retain their power to fascinate and to attract, the loss of an evident connection to the world in abstract art may sometimes seem hard to bear. For much of the twentieth century, admirers of Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer or Constable could be heard bemoaning the fact that 'modern' painters seemed not to be equipped with comparable technical skills: that they resorted instead to distortion of form, to exaggeration of colour, to abstraction and to goodness knows what else. But the art of the celebrated figurative painters was never simply a matter of craft skills being exercised at a very high level. Those skills were useful and necessary - modern in their own time - as a means to express an inquisitive approach to the natural world and to give visual expression to knowledge and belief in the face of a reality conceived of as offering material that needed to be pictured. One reason why the skills in question were valued in their day was that there was a significant place for such hand-made pictures to occupy at the critical margins of language and of science. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, that place had been largely usurped. On the one hand, developments in photography had sewed to automate the crucial process of capturing likenesses. On the other, the universe now addressed by theoretical advances in the natural sciences was not one that could any longer be conceived of as picturable. For over a century now it has been the case that at a certain point in the study of physics, pictures and diagrams have to give way to mathematics as the indispensable means of representation and communication. I do not intend to suggest that the makers of the first abstract paintings were familiar with contemporary developments in the physical sciences. Nor should we look for any very precise correlation between developments in the arts and in the sciences. But if we conceive of modernity as at once a pen/asive condition and a kind of knowledge and experience, then we should expect that within any modern society certain technical developments and certain powerful modes of representation - central among them the representations of the natural sciences - will sooner or later come to exert a decisive pressure on others. The evidence is that painting has had progressively to relinquish the task of first-hand depiction in order to survive as an art. The making of pictures does continue, but principally as a kind of craft or as an adjunct to other critical purposes - usually by some recourse to photographic techniques. As such, picture-making is a useful means of conserving certain skills and a widespread source of pleasure to its producers and consumers alike. But it is hard to imagine that paintings that are hand-made depictions will ever regain the prestigious role in the development of artistic culture that they enjoyed until the beginning of the twentieth century. In her essay ‘A View of Modernism’, written in 1972, the American writer Rosalind Krauss tells a story about the modernist critic Michael Fried, faced in a museum by a student baffled by a striped abstract painting by Frank Stella. (The work in question was painted in the early 1960s; see Plate 3.1 I for an example of Stella’s work from this approximate period.)

I 15

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plate

3.1 I

Frank Stella, Avicenna, I960, aluminium paint on canvas, 189 x 183 cm. (The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

With an arm raised and his finger pointing to the Stella, he confronted Michael Fried. 'What’s so good about that?' he demanded. Fried looked back at him. ‘Look’, he said slowly, ‘there are days when Stella goes to the Metropolitan Museum. And he sits for hours looking at the Velazquez, utterly knocked out by them and then he goes back to his studio. What he would like more than anything else is to paint like Velazquez. But what he knows is that that is an option that is not open to him. So he paints stripes.’ Fried’s voice had risen. ‘He wants to be Velazquez so he paints stripes.'3 It is perhaps not so hard to understand the long unpopularity of abstract art. According to Krauss, Fried seems to be suggesting that the lack of detail and reference in Stella's work is justified by no more than his disappointment at being unable to paint like Velazquez. How were viewers of abstract art to make any better sense of the objects they were presented with if they were not already conversant with the long chain of interpretation, reaction and transformation by which the one kind of work was supposed by Fried to be art-historically linked to the other? What he meant to convey, I think, was that the ambition lying behind the abstract work was that it should have as

CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

much to offer the viewer in terms of aesthetic content or value as the picture it replaced. But where was the viewer to start in the attempt to recover that content or value, if it was indeed there to be recovered? If there was no graspable reality or model in the world by which the painting could be seen as significantly motivated or determined, how could it not appear arbitrary, doodle-like, and thus meaningless? And if there was no evident genre to which the work belonged, how was the possible range of any symbolic meaning to be established? During the first phase of abstract art, there were two principal ways in which these questions were answered and the development of abstract art justified. Though they were inclined to overlap at points and were not always distinguishable, one tended to look outward as it were, for motivating conditions, and to discover them in the natural universe, the other inward to a ‘spiritual necessity’ driving human expression. Each was largely suggested by different previous developments in avant-garde painting. The first form of justification, though not really consistent with the spirit of Cubism as practised by Picasso or Braque, may be connected to an idealist tendency within the Cubist movement. It is particularly relevant to the work of Piet Mondrian, for whom the experience of Cubism was crucial (Plate 3.12). In this form of answer, the abstract work is conceived as the end product of a gradual process of‘abstraction’ (literally meaning taking away, the elements thus abstracted being regarded as inessential). This process might start, notionally, with a scene or object represented in some naturalistic detail. But through gradual stages - each of which may be a painting in itself - the incidental aspects of the motif are reduced until what remains is an apparently abstract final composition, no longer tied to the appearance of the visible world (Plate 3.13). According to the argument in play here, though the original scene or object might no longer be recognisable, its underlying and ‘essential’ properties are presewed in the final work, which thus, far from being an arbitrary production, is actually impelled by basic structural and creative principles. As thus envisaged, the individual painting expresses a fundamental rather than a merely incidental reality. By this means it becomes an ideal model upon which to base all constructive work and activity. If there is an underlying or essential creative principle or ‘truth’ to be discovered beneath the veil of everyday appearances, and if that principle is indeed such as might be represented through an increasing refinement of artistic form, then it might reasonably be claimed that the process of abstraction followed by Mondrian and others involves a significant critical gain. These are, of course, large ‘ifs’. Justifications of abstract art along these lines have been associated with ‘essentialism’ - the idea that objects have essences and that valid distinctions can be made between their essential and their contingent or accidental properties. Essentialist approaches to art have been widely criticised on the grounds that they promote the idea of a supervening ‘aesthetic’ reality at the expense of all practical considerations, such as those that concern the social character of artistic practice and the physical character of artistic objects. And yet it does seem that the abstract paintings of Mondrian exercise a continuing fascination which is hard to explain in terms of their physical properties alone. When attempting to describe their effects, writers tend inescapably to follow an ancient tradition, treating them as the visual

I 17

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I 18

plate

3.12

Piet Mondrian, The Trees, 1912, oil on canvas, 94 x 69.8 cm. (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Patrons Art Fund. © 2003 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust, do HCR [email protected])

CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

plate

3.13

Piet Mondrian, Compositie (Composition), 1916, oil on canvas with wood strip nailed to the bottom edge, I 19 x 75.1 cm. (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. © 2003 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust, c/o HCR International - [email protected])

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equivalents of finely tuned musical harmonies. People often say ‘It strikes a chord’ when they mean to acknowledge a sympathetic response they cannot easily put into words. The second form of justification of abstract art may be connected to a pronounced expressive tendency in the avant-garde art of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Claims for the priority of expression in art tend to be pursued where conventions are experienced as restrictions upon freedom and individuality, where rules of composition and decorum seem of a piece with other kinds of regulation, where restrictions placed on imagination appear consistent with the restriction of social behaviour and interaction, and where the loss of art's freedom to govern itself betokens a loss of political freedom. (It is important here not to confuse the defence of freedom of imagination and expression - which are politically significant rights - with pleas that merely self-centred eccentricity should be taken seriously.) Where the first type of justification for abstract work was based on the idea of underlying truths and principles hidden beneath the appearances of nature, the second was based on the idea of truth to individual feeling and imagination - the individual in question being the artist, conceived as the person whose feelings and imagination are paradigmatically free. As Kandinsky conceived it, the role of the artist was not to describe the outward appearance of the world, or even to reveal its underlying structure, but rather to find expressive form for 'inner necessity’.4 In theory, the abstract work that is conceived as ‘pure expression' has a somewhat different genesis from the one that is arrived at through a process of‘abstraction’ from nature. The former is perhaps more likely to have ‘freeflowing’ form and saturated colours - as a consequence of the conventional association of deep feeling with spontaneity and with strong colour. The latter is more likely to have a geometrical aspect - as a consequence of the long-standing if misleading belief that fundamental natural principles involve a purging of the accidental. But however it was justified, the pursuit of abstract art during the first third of the twentieth century was generally associated with the idea that there was a better world in prospect and that art had its part to play in bringing it about, whether by providing visible models of an ideal harmony or by stimulating the spiritual capacities of a public dulled by excessive ‘materialism’, or both. Some practical support for this idea was provided by the grand experiment of the Russian Revolution, and by its apparent if brief success in replacing an oppressive hereditary oligarchy with communism of a sort.

The modern, the primitive and the sublime For artists born after the turn of the twentieth century, however, matters must have seemed very different by the time they reached maturity. Newman was twenty-eight in 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and, like Rothko, he was a Jew. To many of those who identified with the modern movement in the arts, organised communism had seemed to offer the best

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prospect - at times the only prospect - of practical opposition to Fascism. But during the 1930s it became increasingly clear that Stalinism was communism only in name (or that the practice of Stalinism had effectively changed what communism’ could now mean). In 1936, a series of show trials in Moscow brought disillusion to many of those who had managed until then to retain their faith in the Soviet Union. Over the next dozen years, the idea of a better world might still have been worth pursuing, but in any realistic imagination of the possibility the discouraging evidence of past and present history would have somehow to be faced. From the perspective of the USA in the later 1930s and the 1940s, when each of the Abstract Expressionists was developing his individual manner, the prevailing European styles of abstract art were liable to seem compromised by their idealism by their apparent implication in that history and in the failure of its social ideals. The American artists tended to associate such work with a tradition of European rationalism, preferring the deliberately irrational or antirational painting of the Surrealists, particularly of Max Ernst (Plate 3.14) and

3.14 Max Ernst, The Blind Swimmer, 1934, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm. (Gift of Mrs Pierre Matisse and the Helena Rubinstein Fund. DIGITAL IMAGE © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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3.15 Joan Miro, Personages with Stars, 1933, oil on canvas, 198 x 246 cm. (Gift of Mr and Mrs Maurice

E. Culberg, 1952.512, The Art Institute of Chicago. © Succession Miro, DACS, London 2003.)

Joan Miro (Plate 3.15). Among Newman’s few surviving works from before 1946 there are some that are clearly indebted to the ‘biomorphic’ tendency in European Surrealism that both Ernst and Miro represented (Plate 3.1 6). In the tendency in question, pictorial form is conceived by reference to organic rather than constructive principles, thus allowing both for a higher degree of accident in its emergence and for a greater resource to notions of growth, of struggle and of sexuality in its interpretation. If such work could still be called abstract, however, this was not because its repertoire of forms had no pictorial aspect, but because that repertoire was intentionally drawn from a world excluded from everyday vision - a world of dreams and hallucinations, of microscopic organisms and illogical conjunctions. Before the Second World War the Surrealists in Europe had explicitly opposed the geometrical tendency in abstract art, and had aimed to trouble the bourgeois mind with its own repressed fantasies and unacknowledged terrors. A clear expression of this aim is to be found in Dalis essay The Stinking Ass, first published in 1930.5 However, writing in 1945, Newman declared:

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plate

3.16

Barnett Newman, The Song of Orpheus, 1944-5, oil, oil crayon and wax crayon on paper, 48 x 36 cm. (The Barnett Newman Foundation. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

But that time is over ... The war ... has robbed us of our hidden terror. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer in the face of a mystery. After all, wasnt it an American who did it? The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have now is a tragic rather than a terror situation ... No matter how heroic or innocent or moral our individual lives may be, this new fate hangs over us.6

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Under such circumstances, the painted dreams and nightmares of the Surrealists from the 1920s and 1930s seemed somehow reduced in scale and gravity, while neither the constructive nor the expressive tendencies of early abstract art offered appropriate models, grounded as they were in visions of an improved social world that more recent events had tended to disqualify. As to the prevailing figurative styles in the USA, where they were not straightfonwardly academic, they often appeared to Newman and his associates either as vehicles for the exploitation of regional themes and interests, or as vehicles for social concerns - however well-intentioned which were always in danger of lapsing into condescension or propaganda (Plate 3.17). In neither case were they compatible with the technical developments of a cosmopolitan modern art - not, at least, as these could be understood by looking at the most recent and notable works by European artists. As well as the Surrealist paintings of Ernst and Miro, these included paintings of figures in interiors by Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso’s large mural Guernica. (The latter was painted for the Spanish Republican pavilion at an international exhibition in 1937. It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York two years later and remained there until its return to Spain following the death of Franco. The work is discussed in Chapter I of Varieties of Modernism.) These were among the prominent European works that seemed most evidently to promise some continuing critical life for painting as a modern art - as an art, that is to say, that took cognisance of its own most advanced developments in face of, rather than in isolation from, the dominant ideology of the present. That one should strive to be modern in this sense was an item of faith in the small circle to which Newman belonged. Why should this have been so? The answer is clear enough from an early unpublished typescript in which Newman relates the prevailing 'isolationist' tendency in American art and culture to the nationalism of the National Socialists in Germany. It was written in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Isolationist painting, which they named the American Renaissance, is founded on politics and on an even worse aesthetic ... First, the isolationists preached their cardinal political principle of nationalistic dogma, that to have your own life you must repudiate the world. It followed that if you are to have your own life you must repudiate the art and artists of the world ... Isolationism, we have learned by now, is Hitlerism ... The art of the world ... as focused in the Ecole de Paris, is degenerate art, fine for Frenchmen, but not for us Americans ... What was this America that artists were to paint? ... To the isolationist artists, America was the geographic life around them. The crassest philistinism. A complete reversion to the exaltation of subject matter.7 The implication was that modern art stood for open borders and liberal commitments, and for the transcendence of local and literal subject matter, and that these were necessarily connected. Newman's analysis received confirmation from an event eight years after his text was written, when the

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3.17

George Tooker, Children and Spastics, 1946, egg tempera on gesso panel, 62 x 47 cm. (Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection. Photo: James Isberner. Photo © MCA, Chicago.)

name 'Institute of Modern Art’ in Boston was changed to ‘Institute of Contemporary Art’, on the grounds - according to a document signed by its director - that the adjective ‘modern’ signified a degenerate tendency.8 Evidence of the kinds of political pressure at work in the USA at the time may be found in the speeches by congressman George Dondero that were published in the Congressional Record in 1949: ‘I call the roll of infamy without claim that my list is all-inclusive: dadaism, futurism, constructionism, Suprematism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism and abstractionism. All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art.9

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It seems that during the later 1930s and the 1940s the safeguarding of independence in artistic expression came to be aligned with other kinds of freedom that were seen as threatened, In consequence, the broadly modernist belief that aesthetic value was necessarily independent of social or utilitarian interests itself became inescapably politicised. This point was made explicit by Robert Motherwell, another of the First Generation American painters, speaking in 1944 on the subject of The Modern Painter’s World’: ‘Modern art is related to the subject of the modern individual’s freedom. For this reason the history of modern art tends at certain moments to become the history of modern freedom.'10 To identify with the modern under circumstances such as these was not simply to side with open borders and liberal commitments. It was to do so as an act of resistance to the dominant institutions of the contemporary world, whether in the East or the West. To proclaim oneself a modern artist in the USA of the 1940s was not only to acknowledge the significance and vitality of the European art that the National Socialists had opposed, but to do so in face of a new opposition in whose eyes modernism was ‘un-American’. It was also, by implication, to distinguish a significantly critical aspect of art from the merely contemporary. These were the conditions under which Newman worked to find a style and a kind of subject that would not be compromised by its associations: ‘a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is its sense of tragedy’." Crucial to his enterprise was the sense of history that would inform it. This would be the means to ensure that the symbols in question could indeed be connected to some ‘basic truth of life’ - the ground, in other words, on which any claim to meaning would have to be embedded. Of what was that sense of history composed? On the one hand, in the short-term view, it involved an acute awareness of the conditions of the present and of the tendencies that had produced them - the rise of Fascism in Europe with its attendant forms of xenophobia and persecution, the hardening of the Russian Revolution into a Stalinist bureaucracy, and the growth of isolationism in the USA - leading to a suspicion that collective enterprises were both fallible and potentially dangerous and to a profound distrust of state-sponsored ideologies. Speaking of his contemporaries among the American First Generation painters, the critic Clement Greenberg remarked that ‘You couldn’t dissolve your own anxieties, your own aspirations and so forth, in larger ones ... Your own art was your own life.’12 It was as though everyone was thrown back upon their own individual resources. Newman wrote in 1948: The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?13 On the other hand, Newman set against the short-term view a far broader sense of the artist’s place in history: a conviction that individual self-assertion and self-expression were primordial human instincts; that the instinct to create was the primary factor in the historical development of the human species. This last assumption makes clear the partial relation that Newman’s ideas

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had with such earlier modernist positions as Clive Bell’s. In his book Art of 1914, Bell had characterised artists as people who ‘do not produce to live they live to produce’,14 thus apparently placing artists outside the definition of humans, viewed as a species with a history, that is foundational to Karl Marx’s (or anyone else’s) Historical Materialism. For Marx, it is the need of humans to produce the means of their own subsistence that explains the formation of societies and that thus defines what it is to be human in history. For Newman, The First Man Was an Artist’, which is the title of an essay he published in the periodical Tiger's Eye in 1947. Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void ... Man’s hand traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick as a javelin.15 Certainly, Newman’s was a thoroughly romanticised anthropology. Yet the theoretical position he established served to sustain a considerable ambition under the unfavourable conditions of the time. The avant-garde artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had turned to the art of socalled primitives in an act of identification with those excluded from a ‘civilisation’ from which they themselves felt alienated. (Paul Gauguin's migration to Tahiti in the 1890s had established a pattern in this respect.) Now Newman and his colleagues similarly asserted their sense of unity with a timeless and transcultural 'creative instinct' in the face of what they saw as the destructiveness of present political activity and the impoverishment of social existence. 'Spontaneous and emerging from several points’, Newman wrote in 1947, 'there has arisen during the war years a new force in American painting that is the modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse.'16 Newman paid much attention to tribal art and published an article on The Art of the South Seas’ as a review of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946. He wrote: The reason primitive art is so close to the modern mind is that we, living in times of the greatest terror the world has known, are in a position to appreciate the acute sensibility primitive man had for it .,. The Oceanic artist, in his attempt at an explanation of his world, found himself involved in an epistemology of intangibles. By coping with them, he developed a pictorial art that contained an extravagant drama, one might say a theatre, of magic.17 Newman was also absorbed by the Book of Genesis. The subject matter of creation is chaos’, he wrote at the opening of The Plasmic Image, an essay on which he worked from about 1943 to 1945.18 For the artist to realise an image out of chaos was to make a world of meaning in the face of history. Among the titles of works that date from before Newman’s Eve there are several that refer directly or indirectly to the Book of Genesis: The Void, The Beginning, The Command ('Let there be Light’, presumably), Genesis The Break (Plate 3.18), Genetic Moment, Covenant, Abraham.

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plate

3.18 Barnett Newman, Genesis - The Break, 1946, oil on canvas, 61 x 69 cm. (DIA Center for the Arts, Houston. Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

For several of the other principal artists among the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - the years from 1946 to 1948 were crucial in the formation of their individual styles. The key moment for Newman came in January 1948 when he made the small work that he later called Onement I (Plate 3.19). Look now at the reproduction of Onement I (Plate 3.19) and write a brief description of it, paying attention to the details of dimension and medium. Try comparing the imagined effect of this work with your earlier conjectures about the effect of Eve. Onement I is much smaller than Eve - more the scale and format of a normal head-and-shoulders portrait than an over-life-size standing figure. In a normal hanging the centre of the canvas will be roughly at the eye level of a standing spectator of average height. Onement I consists of a painted Indian red ground, with a single thin stripe of cadmium red light down the centre, applied unevenly by palette knife over a band of masking tape. The symmetry of the work about its vertical axis is quite unlike the markedly asymmetrical effect of Eve. If you noticed the tape you may have wondered about the reason for its use. It was applied in order to reserve the central vertical band when Newman applied the dark red ground. It seems that he had been trying out the colour over the masking tape prior to removing it. ■

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plate

3.19 Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948, oil on canvas, 69 x 41 cm. (digital image © 2002 The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

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In the event, and after deliberating for some eight months - if his biographer Thomas Hess is to be believed - Newman decided that no further work was required: that what he had made was (already) a painting, and that the comparative roughness of the light red paint could not be improved on. Remember that this was the first of his works to be completed in such a radically pared-down format. He may have needed some time to assure himself that it would stand up to sustained viewing. As it was, few even of his fellow artists took his work seriously when it was first shown. By the end of 1948, however, Newman was equipped with an appropriate rationale. At about the time when he must have decided in favour of Onement /, he answered his own question concerning the means by which the painters of his generation might achieve a sublime art. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.19

Eve and Adam Eve is painted in oil on canvas. It is hung without a frame of any kind, so that the paint can be seen to run a couple of centimetres round the sides of the stretched canvas. This is another aspect of the work that will be undiscermble from a normal reproduction. At 244 cm high and 173 cm wide it is larger than any other paintings Newman had made before 1950, though not as large as works already painted by Pollock and by Clyfford Still (another of the First Generation American painters). The scale is significant. Donald Judd wrote in 1964: The large scale is involved with several important qualities, each of which forces the existence of the others. Obviously Newman’s paintings are open, as is much recent work, though not all in the same way. The areas are very broad and are not tightly delimited by either the stripes or the edges of the canvas, both of which are similar ... Newman's openness and freedom are credible now; the earlier closed and naturalistic form is not. Ordinary abstract painting and expressionistic painting are bound in the rectangle by their composition. Their space and colour are recessed by a residual naturalism. They are still pictures. If forms run off the edges to imply a continuum, the painting is a segment of that continuum, which isnt true of Newman’s paintings. They are whole and aren't part of another whole.20

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The contrast Judd has in mind is with the painting of Mondrian. He associated the Dutch painter, rightly or wrongly, with a ‘fixed platonic order (that is) no longer credible’.21 In his view, a painting now composed on such a supposedly ideal and mathematical basis wouid fail to resonate with the conditions of the moment, which seemed to require different models of openness and freedom’. The colours of Eve are close to those of Onement /, though the quantities and proportions are quite different. As we have seen, Eve is predominantly painted in bright red with a single vertical band of darker red or maroon extending a few centimetres in from its right-hand edge. This band runs continuously from top to bottom of the painting and exactly parallel to its literal vertical edge. It thus effects a division of the surface rather than marking a specific form within it. Another way to put this would be to say that Newman seems concerned to avoid traditional kinds of figure-ground relations. These are the means by which painters conventionally singled out certain objects of attention - whether pictured persons, landscape features or still-life motifs - within a surrounding spatial world. They had tended to involve some marked contrast between forms modelled in the foreground by light and shade and plainer backgrounds or extensive distances. All other things being equal where pictures are concerned, degree of vividness tends to be relative to degree of detail. If a painting with so little apparent detail is to engage our attention, it will require some compensating form of animation. The key to the animation of Eve, I believe, lies in the distinctive use Newman has made of its surface and its scale. The band of maroon is not painted over the bright red, as you might assume from a reproduction - or indeed from a casual glance at the work itself. The two coloured areas abut. In face of the work itself, the impression of its flatness tends to give way to an unusual impression of breadth and depth. As I mentioned previously, the bright red area is relatively thickly painted, making a slightly variegated and atmospheric surface. The maroon, on the other hand, is painted in a thin and liquid coat over a layer of white priming, so that it appears more translucent than the lighter red. (A thin and uneven seam of the white primer can be discerned in places along the division between the two colours (see Plate 3.20).) The paradoxical effect is to make the lighter colour look, or feel, denser and deeper than the darker. It is PLATE

3.20 Barnett Newman, Eve, 1950, detail showing meeting of two colours and segment of white primer. (© Tate, London 2002. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

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as though it were an area we could look into but not exactly place, except in so far as its depth is measurable against the thinner and sharper band of maroon. It seems I need slightly to modify my account of the maroon- band as marking a division of the surface. If the lighter red is not experienced as an exact locatable plane, the effect must be rather more like the defining or

plate

3.21

Paul Cezanne, Farmyard at Auvers, 1879-80, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. (Musee d’Orsay, Paris. © Photo: RMN - Hen/e Lewandowski.)

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delimiting of an area or of a space. It is as though it sen/es us as spectators to locate ourselves not so much in relation to the red field as virtually within it. (We may compare similar effects from the previous history of figurative painting. Both Cezanne and Degas used the device of a vertical band to position the spectator as someone who is not so much looking into the space of the picture as enclosed within its imagined world (see Plates 3.21 and 3.22).) To understand the strangeness of what Newman has done we need to take account of the normal colour effects that he has here reversed. In the natural order of things, bright red is usually seen as the colour of some tangible object. It is the very opposite of a ‘field colour’ - a colour that connotes

plate

3.22

Edgar Degas, Dancer in her Dressing Room, c. I 878-9, pastel and gouache on card, 60 x 40 cm. (Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Romerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland.)

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space. The typical field colour is blue. In staring up into a cloudless summer sky, we are not seeing a surface: in this case, sensations of colour, of transparency and of depth are inseparable and mutually enhancing. Red, on the other hand, tends to reflect light, to define surfaces, and to define them as opaque. Put a red square and a blue square side by side on an otherwise unmarked surface, and the blue will appear to recede relative to the red. (In 1941, at a time when he was making abstract reliefs, the English painter Ben Nicholson wrote, 'If you take a large ultramarine blue and a small cadmium red square and place them on a cool white surface along with a pencilled circle, you can create a most exciting tension between these forces.’22) For these reasons if for no others, painters anxious to avoid figurative associations will usually avoid using bright blue. Unless extreme measures are taken to counter its normal effects and associations, blue will tend to evoke a naturalistic space and atmosphere. The experience of looking into a field of red is thus somehow disturbing, particularly in a painting taller than a person. Red is - as it were - the conventional colour of 'no entry’. The natural properties and conventional associations of these respective colours were nicely brought out in a painting of 1975 by Erik Bulatov, a Russian artist then interested in western modes of conceptual art (Plate 3.23). Look now at Plate 3.23 and see if you can work out the relevance of the painting to the discussion above. Though you may not be able to read the text, you might be able to deduce what it says.

plate

3.23 Erik Bulatov, Entry/No Entry, 1975, oil on canvas, 1800 x 1800 cm. (Centre Pompidou-MNAM-CCI, Paris. © Photo: CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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Receding into depth down each side of a straightforw/ard centred perspective, blue cyrillic letters spell out the Russian word for ENTRY - signifying the possibility of optical penetration into an illusionistic pictorial space. The red letters, on the other hand, translate as the matching negative: NO ENTRY. Running from edge to edge of the picture surface they flatly declare the barrier of the picture plane. In laconic fashion, Bulatov here brings us face-toface with what theorists in the modernist critical tradition tend to identify as the central and defining dialectic of the art of painting: the tension between marking of the surface and establishment of illusory depth. This tension is presumed to lead to a compelling conjunction in the experience of the spectator: on the one hand, seeing the painting as an object with a surface; on the other, seeing something in that surface such that the painting's literal objecthood is transcended and its specifically artistic effect triggered. Cezanne's Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves (Plate 3.9) offers a good example of the kind of painting in which this tension can be seen at work, combining as it does a rich and variegated surface texture with a powerful illusion of physical and spatial volume. Significantly, Cezanne’s art was crucial to the development of modernist theories of painting. ■ Eve was completed late in 1950. Early in 1951, Newman completed another work that he later called Adam (Plate 3.24). In Hebrew the name also has the meanings ‘man’, ‘earth’ and ‘red’. Though the two works have different dates, Newman’s widow recalls that at a certain point the painter was working on the two canvases together. Both were exhibited in Newman's second one-man show, held at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in April-May 1951, though not with their present titles. Both are now in the collection of Tate Modern in London, though they were not acquired together. Adam was bought in 1968. At that time Eve was still in a private collection in London. Look now at Plate 3.24, the illustration of Adam, and try to imagine the effect the actual work might have when viewed in a gallery. Try to discern what you can of the different textures of the various formal elements. You might like to consider how far Eve and Adam might be seen as having ‘female’ and ‘male’ properties respectively, but I would counsel you against going too far down that particular road. Remember that these are not pictures of a woman and a man and that it was some time before the artist attached a name to either. Some relevant background to Newman’s titling of these pictures is provided by his short essay The First Man Was an Artist’.23 Adam is the same height as Eve but slightly wider. In its original form it was predominantly dark reddish-brown with a lighter red band abutting this colour at the left, thus reversing the composition of Eve, though Adam also has a narrow ‘zip’ of thinly painted crimson running parallel to its right-hand edge, at a position that mirrors the inner edge of the band at the left. 'Zip’ was Newman’s own term for these thin and predominantly vertical bands suggesting that he conceived of them not as stripes laid over continuous surfaces, but as functional motifs, with the potential both to divide and to join the areas on either side. Though it may not be clear from the

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plate

3.24 Barnett Newman, Adam, 1951-2, oil on canvas, 243 x 203 cm. (© Tate, London 2002. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

reproduction, the ‘zip’ in this case is not painted over the reddish-brown, but on bare primer where Newman left a narrow vertical channel in the surface of darker colour. It thus seems to run through the darker colour rather than over it. Adam also has a second wide band of cadmium red medium over the reddish brown at the left of centre, bent slightly towards the left near the bottom. (It was originally shown without this band, which Newman added in

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the year following the exhibition.) If the tendency of Eve is to absorb the spectator in its bright red penumbra, Adam appears rather as an upright facing presence. I do not mean to suggest that the tendencies in question should be seen as connoting ‘femininity1 and ‘masculinity’ respectively. What can be said, however, is that the differences in effect are attributable to differences in compositional character. ■ Taken together, Eve and Adam are certainly evocative titles. We should be careful, however. There are many reasons to be cautious about reading significance into titles, particularly where abstract works are concerned. To conceive of a title as an indication of intended content is to imagine that the artist in question must have set out somehow to illustrate that which the title represents. Yet if abstract artists use titles at all, they tend for the most part to apply them only once a given work is completed, and sometimes not until a work leaves the studio for exhibition. The title then acts as a mere aide-memoire or label, serving to distinguish that work from others by calling to mind a distinctive expressive property or association it may happen to have acquired. In fact, titles are often attached by people other than the artists concerned: by friends or dealers (who find pictures with attractive titles easier to sell) or even by their subsequent owners. When he was painting abstract pictures, Pollock generally preferred to identify them by number and date. Judd labelled all his works Untitled, simply to prevent anyone from attaching other titles that might encumber them with misleading associations. And yet, these cautions notwithstanding, it does seem that Newman was an exception to the rule, In his case, the adoption of a title appears to have been a significant part of the continuing enterprise that the work involved, and a reliable indication of some intentional aspect of the work concerned. It is as though the titling of each work was a final and integral stage in its composition. If we cannot positively see the formal properties of Eve and Adam as having, respectively, female and male connotations, we are nevertheless justified, I think, in connecting Adam - and by implication Eveto the conclusion of Newman’s essay ‘The First Man Was an Artist’. The earliest written history of human desires proves that the meaning of the world cannot be found in the social act. An examination of the first chapter of Genesis offers a better key to the human dream. It was inconceivable to the writer that original man, that Adam, was put on earth to be a toiler, to be a social animal. The writer's creative impulses told him that man’s origin was that of an artist and he set him up in the Garden of Eden close to the Tree of Knowledge, of right and wrong, in the highest sense of divine revelation. The fall of man was understood by the writer and his audience not as a fall from Utopia to struggle, as the sociologicians would have it, nor, as the religionists would have us believe, as a fall from Grace to Sin, but rather that man, by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, sought the creative life to be, like God, 'a creator of worlds,' to use Rashi’s phrase, and was reduced to the life of toil only as a result of a jealous punishment.

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In our inability to live the life of the creator can be found the meaning of the fall of man. It was a fall from the good, rather than from the abundant, life. And it is precisely here that the artist today is striving for a closer approach to the truth concerning original man than can be claimed by the palaeontologist, for it is the poet and the artist who are concerned with the function of original man and who are trying to arrive at his creative state. What is the raison d'etre, what is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man’s fall and an assertion that he return to the Adam of the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men.24 In the face of this text I think it is fair to assume that Newman did more than think up the titles Eve and Adam for two completed paintings. He may not have set out explicitly to paint two pictures to which those titles could appropriately be attached, but it seems reasonable to imagine that the relevant field of reference was in his mind as he worked on them. In 1962, Newman was asked by an interviewer ‘Can you clarify the meaning of your work in relation to society?' He replied with characteristic theatrical bravado, referring back to an earlier conversation with a left-wing critic and to the time, shortly before he painted Eve, when he had first developed his mature style of work. 'Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes.’25 Was he saying that his work could only be read properly in a world without oppressive state controls, or that reading it properly would make such controls unthinkable? In either event Newman showed a stubborn faith both in the inherent expressive power of his medium - painting - and in the potential response of the spectator. Of course, a lot hangs on the qualification, ‘if he and others could read it properly’. We can at least try to learn what that might entail. First, though, we need to clarify some terminology.

Abstraction, figuration and representation Debate about abstract art is often clouded by lack of agreement about just how certain related terms are to be applied. I have already referred to the use of'Non-objective' and 'Neo-Plastic' by Malevich and Mondrian respectively. More generally, abstract art may be described as 'non-figurative', sometimes - misleadingly, I believe - as 'non-representational'. We need to be clear about how these various terms are related. The more carefully we use them, the easier it will be to notice significant differences of aim and effect between different types of painting. I will use the term ‘abstract’ to refer to art in which any intentional correspondence that there may be between the appearance of the work and the appearance of things in the world is primarily literal

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rather than pictorial. As a species of object, that is to say, it will necessarily have some correspondence to other things that could be described in similar terms in a language stripped of metaphor or suggestion: other kinds of flat, rectangular objects, including other paintings. The artist may even court a degree of similarity in this respect, whether in order to stress the identity of the painting as a thing in its own right, or to mark that it belongs to a series. What we mean in calling a painting abstract is that it does not depict what it may resemble: it is not a picture of some other thing. Newman's Eve, for instance, is about the same size and shape as a large single door fixed to the wall (Plate 3.25). To that limited extent, it is literally a bit like a large door. As we shall see, the fact that the painting is door-sized may be of some relevance to its effect. But it does not follow that Eve is in any sense a picture of a door, or of anything else.

plate 3.25

Barnett Newman, Eve, installation shot with spectator. (© Tate, London 2002, © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

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So far as the practice of art is concerned, ‘figuration’ refers to those techniques by means of which solid forms in the world are given shape in pictures - and thus become 'figures’. Traditional techniques of figuration are modelling by light and shade, which creates the impression that a given form is being seen under specific lighting conditions and thus in a believable situation, and figureground effects, through which individual forms are contrasted against their backgrounds and distinguished from surrounding space. These techniques are normally associated with illusions of spatial depth in pictures. If a pictured form is to appear solid, it must be located in some imagined spatial world. A ‘non-figurative’ painting is one that does not depend on the use of such techniques for its effects. A wholly non-figurative painting — one with no shading and no figure-ground contrasts - would necessarily be abstract, since there would be no pictorial means by which the presence of things in the world could be evoked on its surface. The converse is not true, however. Abstract painting is not necessarily non-figurative. Illusionistic techniques may be used in abstract painting to engage the attention and the imagination of the spectator in the absence of any recognisable depicted form. Artists have made abstract compositions with strongly modelled and shaded forms which imply the presence of a light source (Plate 3.26), or with marked figureground effects which create the illusion of isolated planes standing out against varied backgrounds (Plate 3.27). We tend to think of such pictures as abstracted from natural appearances. Though it is entirely devoid of modelling,

plate

3.26 Jean Helion, lie de France, 1935, oil on canvas, 145 x 200 cm. (© Tate, London 2002. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2003.)

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even so radically abstract a painting as Malevich’s Black Square of 1914-15 (Plate 3.7) relies on the simplest of figure-ground effects: the contrast of the black square against its white background. There are clearly different degrees of abstraction. We might say that where an artist has relied heavily on figurative techniques and effects, less extreme forms of abstraction will result, all other things being equal. For instance, the typical paintings of the Surrealist Yves Tanguy (Plate 3.28) might be thought of - indeed once were thought of - as abstract, in so far as they do not picture recognisable things in the world. Yet they depend so highly on conventional figurative techniques - with clearly modelled forms in deep pictorial spaces - that we are prompted to imagine a world from which they might be derived. Tanguy’s painting is highly figurative and therefore not really very abstract. Certainly not by the standards of Malevich’s Black Square or even of Hofmann’s The Golden Wall. In fact, given the Surrealists' interest in the imagery of dreaming, we might think of Tanguy's picture as a thoroughly figurative painting of an imagined ‘dreamscape’ - and not as abstract at all.

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3.27 Plans Hofmann, The Golden Wall, 1961, oil on canvas, 151 x 182 cm. (Mr and Mrs Frank G. Logan Prize Fund, 1962.775. © The Art Institute of Chicago. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

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3.28 Yves Tanguy, The Invisibles, 1951, oil on canvas, 99 x 81 cm. (© Tate, London 2002. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

At the other extreme, Frank Stella’s aluminium-painted canvas of I960 (Plate 3.1 I) is so low in illusionistic properties, so nearly a literal flat-painted surface, that we cannot easily imagine it as a picture of anything, real or imagined. It is both highly non-figurative and highly abstract. Stella described his work as 'non-relational1. Though the two artists were working under very different conditions, we might say that Stella takes a risk that Tanguy does not: a risk that his work will be seen as too unlike other paintings to be accepted as art at all. In the twentieth century, however, the highest accolades of art criticism and art history tended often to go to those who seemed to be pushing art to its limits in just this way. Abstract art has often in the past been described as ‘non-representational’ or, more rarely, as ‘non-representative’. The idea that abstract art is nonrepresentational’ has its roots, I think, in a time when the normal expectation was that paintings would do their representing by depicting, and through the

CHAPiER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

use of figurative techniques. Paintings without evident descriptive content abstract paintings' — tended to be seen both as non-figurative and as nonrepresentational. On the other hand, to intend something as a representation is to suggest that it will somehow stand for something else - that when it is described literally there will still be some remainder, some content, that is unaccounted for. That their works were replete with meaning and content was a point that the abstract painters of Newman’s generation were often concerned to make. Labelling all abstract art as non-representational is liable to discourage the making of relevant technical distinctions between very different kinds of abstract art (such as those, like Hofmann’s The Golden Wall, that are figurative and those, like Stella's Avicenna, that are not). It may also inhibit consideration of the specific ways in which content may be instilled into abstract art, and of the distinctive techniques that are directed to this end. The danger is that the ’how’ of abstract art (techniques and the ends they serve) will be ignored in favour of the ’what’ (the sheer novelty of appearances). We can use the example of another painting to further explore the relations between the literal, the pictorial and the abstract. Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Big Painting (Plate 3.29) looks like a series of literal brushstrokes. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that in calling it a series of brushstrokes we had properly defined the kind of thing it is. It is actually a painting that uses a highly stylised picture of brushstrokes to refer somewhat ironically to other kinds of painting. That is to say, it also looks a bit like a certain type of abstract painting. But this resemblance is also pictorial rather than literal. Far from being abstract, Lichtenstein's work plays a thoroughly pictorial game on the relationship between abstract paintings and literal brushstrokes. What it represents, in fact, is a certain popular image of abstract art, corresponding with intentional irony to some such statement as, 'Abstract paintings don't represent anything; they're just brushstrokes.' That the Pop Artist Lichtenstein could make a kind of serious joke out of attitudes to abstract art was perhaps a sign that by 1965 abstract art had, in fact, become established. By the same token, it may also have been an indication that abstraction had ceased to be a critical issue forthe development of painting: that whether or not a painting was or was not abstract was no longer a factor of first importance in its characterisation and description. I do not mean to suggest that the traditional skills of picture-making had been restored to a central function in the development of painting. On the contrary. Where traditional painting derived its figurative materials largely from nature - or from other representations seen as representations of nature - the tendency of figurative painting in the twentieth century was to work with the already available materials of a largely urban culture. Though recognisable images certainly featured in the Pop Art of the 1960s, they were for the most part acquired in photographic or printed form from advertisements, comic strips or newspapers. While there was still plenty of work for artists to do on the selection, combination and manipulation of pictorial imagery, the images themselves now tended to come with their illusory properties already established, and with a representational aspect attached. It may be that abstract art had ceased to be a critical issue precisely because the

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Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Painting, 1965, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 173 x 203 cm. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchased with funds from the Friends of The Whitney Museum of American Art, 66.2. © estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS, London 2003.)

traditional association of painting with picture-making appeared also to have been finally dissolved, so that there was no longer any real tension in the contrast, Stella’s paintings of 1958-60 have often been seen as marking a kind of limit to the possibility of development in abstract art. The first abstract paintings were produced early in the second decade of the twentieth century. That would leave an approximate fifty-year period during which abstraction was a significant critical issue in and for painting. If this is a sustainable conjecture, it may be that abstract painting - in its modernist form at least - reached a zenith of some kind around the year 1950 in the work of Newman's generation. More controversially, it has been suggested that painting as a whole has been in terminal decline since that point. Two years after Lichtenstein painted his Little Big Painting, another American artist, Robert Morris, declared of painting, The mode has become antique.'26 Should we considerthe American abstract painting of the middle of the twentieth century as a final throw in

CHAPTER 3 Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve

the game to presen/e the possibility of painting as a public ‘high art’, somehow continuous with the great altarpieces, history pictures and single-figure studies of the past? It seems that some substantial questions bear down on our consideration of Newman's Eve and on the problems of'reading it properly'.

'Reading it properly' We cannot know precisely what Newman had in mind in 1950 in making a painting the size of We with the colours and surface qualities I have described. But it seems we can be reasonably sure about what he was not aiming to do. He did not mean to describe or even to suggest the presence of any object or figure within the painting's spatial ground. He was not aiming to evoke the kind of naturalistic atmosphere traditionally associated with landscape. And yet he did not want the painting to appear as a mere flat two-coloured slab hanging on the wall. He wanted some difference in perceived spatial levels, but without objects and without naturalistic atmosphere. This gives us somewhere to start. So far as Newman was concerned, it seems that some spatial effect was a necessary condition for representation to take place. In so far as the surface of the painting is perceived as more or as other than a literal flat surface, it may serve to invoke or to stand for some other, non-literal identity, concept or idea. In suggesting that Eve represents an identity of some kind, however, I do not mean to suggest that we should see it in any sense as a picture of the biblical Eve, or of any other possible Eve. How does it come to earn and to deserve its name? The answer, I think, is through its visual and emotional effect. What is it actually like to look at Eve? Much depends on where you stand. In a note pinned to the wall at his second one-man show, Newman exhorted visitors not to stand back from his paintings. There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.'27 His contemporary Rothko wrote that he painted large pictures ‘because I want to be very intimate and human'.28 The implication is that the appropriate viewing distance for the pictures they were painting is, as it were, a social distance - equivalent to the kind of place where it feels comfortable to stand relative to another person with whom you are in conversation. At this distance the painting will have your undivided attention: it will almost fill your visual field - so that you see all the painting and virtually only the painting. That Eve is approximately the size of a large single door relates it to architectural spaces designed for human scale. Given the illusion of depth produced by its red field, it invokes the imaginative possibility both that one might pass through or into the space it creates and that some answering presence might be contained within it. Where the majority even of large abstract paintings tend always to create the impression of a space we look into, it is a distinctive feature of Newman’s works of the period around 1950 that they also seem to generate a kind of spatial envelope within which painting and spectator are both included. When installed with adequate clear space around them they seem, as it were, to lay claim to the immediate area in front of them. In so far as we imagine any answering presence within this envelope, however, it is not imagined in the physical

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form of another person. The point is rather that the particular kind of absorption the painting produces - by virtue of its size, its intensity of colour and surface, and the uneven division of its spatial field where the two colours abut - is like being engaged by the personality or character of another. Why might this be so? After all, paintings are not people and cannot be. But they are 'intentional objects’ - things made so as to convey some sense of meaning and value on the part of their authors - and the knowledge that that is what they are conditions the expectations and responses of spectators. In attending to works of art, we tend to look for specifically human content and expression. In Newman's case it is as though he has deliberately emptied his work of everything by which such content was traditionally conveyed. Yet at the same time the spectator is so positioned by the scale and composition of his painting that the expectation of expressive content is intense. The sheer absence of detail is also relevant. In an interview recorded at the end of his life, Newman said, ‘When you see a person for the first time, you have an immediate impact. You don’t have to really start looking at details. It's a total reaction in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact.'29 Does this mean that if one senses a kind of identity investing a work such as Eve, it must necessarily be the identity of the artist - as though all works of art were in some sense self-portraits? There is some point to this suggestion. To recognise an artist’s style is to respond to the personal character of that artist’s means of expression - the extent to which it is an expression of his or her distinct identity as an artist. And Newman’s style is certainly highly distinctive. Yet each of his paintings is different, and each has a different title or name. If painting such as this is not mere self-expression, what is it that the artist invests in the emerging work, and what does he or she see in it, such that it can be accorded a distinct identity? This question can be answered by referring back to the precedent of earlier figurative painting. Rembrandt painted a lot of self-portraits, each of which is different - deliberately seeing and representing himself at different ages and in different roles and disguises. But he also painted many pictures of others, and in some of the most vivid of these what is conveyed is not simply the appearance of another, but a sense of that person’s character as the artist perceived it and as he related to it - or as he intended that the spectator should perceive it and relate to it (Plate 3.30). This last point is important. The artist is always the first spectator of the work as it emerges. It is the artist who first responds to its effects and measures their vividness. As Richard Wollheim has put it, 'the artist does what he does with the eyes', but he also ‘does what he does for the eyes’.30 And the eyes in question are not the artists alone. To the extent that the making of a painting is a social act, the artist will envisage a public in some form, some other spectator or spectators on whom the work is to have an emotional effect when it is seen as it is intended to be seen - which is to say when it is seen as it was seen by the artist. Given that the responses of others cannot ever be wholly predicted, this will never be the only effect or all the effect that a given work will have, but it is arguably a condition of adequacy and of relevance in any interpretation.

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Rembrandt van Rijn, Margaretha de Geer, c. 1661, oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm. (© The National Gallery, London.)

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In orderto produce a certain effect, a painter might make a picture of someone as though this individual were being looked at by a lover, who in this case becomes the imagined spectator both of the picture and of the person pictured. It does not follow that the artist must have been in love with the person in question. After all, the end result will be a painted surface, not an actual human individual. It is this surface, not the person depicted, that must elicit the desired response in the actual spectator. To make a painting in the presence of an imagined public is to play a kind of role before the audience of the canvas: to look at the emerging work through the eyes of an imagined other. It is through this indispensable process of reflection, I suggest, that selfcriticism has been maintained in the practice of painting as an art. It is really no different with an abstract painting. The artist must still regard the work in the process of its making and must measure its potential success in engaging the attention of an imagined spectator, and must thus be satisfied that her or his own emotional responses are adequately stimulated by that work as it emerges. The crucial difference is that there is now no pictured man or woman whose apparently realistic features might distract from the effect of the painted surface itself. If Eve is somehow to evoke a sense of human presence, it must do so not because that presence is somehow shown, but because there can be no other way for responding spectators to make sense of their own absorption than by relating it to the emotions aroused by other persons. And in this case, what is meant by 'other persons’ is itself a kind of abstraction: not the specific appearance of those one might recognise, but the value and meaning for which certain names stand as labels: Eve, Adam, Abraham, Ulysses and, tellingly, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (‘heroic, sublime man’, a large work painted by Newman in the same year as Eve). For Newman's sense of the human as a subject for art was quite deliberately and strategically detached from the specific social here and now. What he aimed to create through his work was a critically distinct here and now, defined by the moment of exchange between painting and spectator, a moment in which we can ‘return to the Adam [or Eve] of the Garden of Eden’. This was an unquestionably ambitious project. As Newman wrote in 1948, ‘We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.’31 At the time of writing (2002), Eve is exhibited at Tate Modern in London with an accompanying label, on which is printed the following quotation from Barnett Newman: ‘I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, and at the same time of his connection to others who are also separate.’ In the interview from which this quotation is taken, Newman added, ‘I think you can only feel others if you have some sense of your own being.’32 Whether knowingly or not, in this short passage Newman outlines what are for him the conditions under which state capitalism and totalitarianism would indeed be impossible: where all persons are endowed with a feeling of their own totality, and where each recognises the inevitability of separateness, yet cherishes the possibility of connection to others who are allowed also to be separate. What his painting gave him, he suggests, is a sense of what it would be like if these conditions were fulfilled. And this is what he believes it has to offer others - if only they can read it properly.

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Postscript Artists do not necessarily do what they mean to do. Indeed, they may mean to do what cannot actually be done. Furthermore, that a given work has had a certain effect on the person who made it is no guarantee that it will have the same effect on anyone else. Much depends on the critical power of the artist’s imagination - not simply on the capacity for realism and inventiveness in the face of history, but also on the artist’s capacity to look through the eyes of an imagined other and then to amend or to change what that other fails to see and to respond to. Of course, that imagined other will be differently characterised and qualified at different historical moments, by different artists, and often for different individual works. The artist of the Italian Renaissance typically painted for a congregation familiar with the Bible and with Christian doctrine, the classical history painter of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries for a cultured audience versed in Greek and Roman literature and mythology. Newman's imagined spectator was someone who could look at the image 'without the nostalgic glasses of history’,33 Rothko's someone 'free of the conventions of understanding’ who was possessed of'both need and spirit’.34 There are two requirements it is useful to bear in mind before committing oneself to an initial response to any work of art. The first is to resen/e any judgement that is not based on direct experience of the work in question, rather than on a reproduction of it, however faithful. The second is to try to act the part of the imagined other: to see what has actually been done and made, and to respond imaginatively to the question of why it might have been made in this specific form. It is a practical problem in the study of art that the fulfilment of the second requirement depends on the possibility of fulfilling the first, for one cannot see the work as the artist both saw it and imagined it being seen unless one can see the work itself. These requirements will not always be easily satisfied, but once they are, one has done as much as one can. After that, the work can be allowed to stand by its effects - or to fall through the lack of them.

Notes 1

Malevich, 'Non-Objective Art and Suprematism' (1919), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IIIC8, pp.292-3.

2

Mondrian, 'Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence’ (1920-1), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IIIC7, pp.28992.

3

Krauss, ‘A View of Modernism’ (1972), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIID8, p.977.

4

Kandinksy, 'The Cologne Lecture' (1914), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, IB9, pp.89-93.

5

Dali, The Stinking Ass’ (1930), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 19002000, IVCI4, pp.486-9.

6

Newman, The New Sense of Fate', unpublished typescript quoted in Hess, Barnett Newman, p.27.

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7

Newman,‘What About Isolationist Art?', unpublished typescript quoted in Hess, Barnett Newman, pp.20-1.

8

This episode is cited in Hess, Barnett Newman, p.54.

9

Dondero, from The Congressional Record (1949), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VC 15, pp.665-8; quotation p.668.

I 0 Motherwell, The Modern Painter’s World’ (1944), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VC3, pp.643-5; quotation p.644. I I Newman, The Plasmic Image, Part I’, unpublished typescript written c. 19435, quoted in Hess, Barnett Newman, p.22. I 2 Greenberg in discussion with T.J. Clark (1982) on audio cassette, 'Greenberg on Pollock’ for the Open University course AA3 18 Art of the Twentieth Century, 2003. I 3 Newman, The Sublime is Now’ (1948), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VAI I, pp.580-2; quotation p.58 I. I 4 Bell, Art, p.261. I 5 Newman, The First Man Was an Artist' (1947), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VA9, pp.574-7; quotation pp.576-7. I 6 Newman, The Ideographic Picture’ (1947), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VA8, pp.573-4. I 7 The Art of the South Seas’ was originally published in Spanish in Ambos Nundos, June 1946, and first published in English in Studio International, vol.179, no.9 19, February 1970, p.70. I 8 Quoted in Hess, Barnett Newman, p.22. 1 9 Newman, The Sublime is Now’ (1948), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VAI I, pp.580-2; quotation p.582. 20 Judd, 'Barnett Newman’, written in 1964, but first published in Studio International, vol. 179, no.9 19, February 1970, pp.67-9. 2 I Ibid. It is worth noting that Newman himself criticised Mondrian, claiming that The geometry (perfection) swallowed up his metaphysics (his exaltation)' (Newman, The Sublime is Now' (1948), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VAI I, pp.580-2; quotation p.58 I). 22 Nicholson, 'Notes on Abstract Art1 (1941), in Harrison and Wood, Ad in Theory 1900-2000, VAI4, p.400. 23 Newman, The First Man Was an Artist’ (1947), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VA9, pp.574-7. 24 Ibid., p.577. 25 Newman, inten/iew with Dorothy Gees Seckler (1962), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIB7, pp.784-5. 26 Morris, 'Notes on Sculpture 1-3’ (1966-7), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VIIA6, pp.828-35; quotation p.833. Morris continues, Specifically, what is antique about it is the divisiveness of experience that marks on a flat surface elicit ... Duality of experience is not direct enough. That which has ambiguity built into it is not acceptable to an empirical and pragmatic outlook.’ 27 Quoted in O’Neill, Barnett Newman, p. 178. 28 Quoted in Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, p.85. 29 Interview with Emile de Antonio, May 1970, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives, transcript p.22, cited in Temkin, Barnett Newman, p.97. 30 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, pp.43-4. 3 I Newman, The Sublime is Now’ (1948), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, VAI I, pp.580-2; quotation p.58 I.

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3 2 Newman in Conversation with David Sylvester', The Listener, vol.88, no.2263, 10 August 1972, pp. 169-70, from an interview recorded in 1965. 3 3 Ibid., p.582. 34 Letter to Katherine Kuh, 1954, reprinted in Marl< Rothko, 1903-1970, p.58.

References Bell, G, Art, London: Chatto & Windus, 1914. Edwards, S. and Wood, P. (eds), Art of the Avant-Gardes, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, forthcoming. Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Hess, T.B., Barnett Newman, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1972. Mark Rothko, 1903-1970, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1987. O'Neill, J.P. (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Temkin, A. (ed,), Barnett Newman, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Tate Publishing, 2002. Wollheim, R., Painting as an Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 1987. Wood, P. (ed.), Varieties of Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, forthcoming.

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The expanding field: Ana Mendieta's Silueta series Gill Perry

Introduction In the winter of 1977, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta used a plywood silhouette of her body to make an imprint in the snow in a remote part of Iowa. The impression revealed a symmetrical pose with raised arms and straight legs, reminiscent of an ancient goddess. A series of colour photographs documented the effects on the impression of time and changing weather (Plate 4.2). At first, the shape of the body appeared to deepen as the depression melted more quickly than the surrounding snow. As the winter temperatures rose, patches of green grass and leaves appeared within the imprint, until the (absent) body was marked as a dark silhouette outlined in thinning white. This transient work was one of a prolific series called Siluetas, largely executed and acted out in Iowa (where Mendieta was living at the time) and Mexico (where she often spent the summer) between 1973 and 1981. In the series, Mendieta used her own naked body, or a mould of her body, to mark her silhouette in the ground. The materials used included mud, sand, snow, grass, ice, wood, cloth, gunpowder and ashes; the bodily form was either moulded in low relief, or left as an imprint or shallow depression. In several Siluetas, Mendieta added objects such as flowers, rocks, wood, weeds, shells and berries to echo the shape of her body and to contribute to its literal and symbolic potential as part of a natural cycle. In her First Silueta, or Flowers on Body, executed in El Yagul, Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1973 (Plate 4.3), Mendieta placed her body amid the stones and dirt of an old Mexican tomb and covered herself with tiny white flowers. Later, in 1976, she traced her silhouette in the sand on a Mexican shore at Salina Cruz, filling it with red flowers, which were slowly washed away by the tide (Plate 4.4). The decaying and disappearing flowers, like the snow in the Iowa series, echoed the transitory and organic form of the body and its continuity with the natural world. Mendieta often pushed the theme of disappearance to one of active destruction. In 1978, for example, she poured gunpowder into the moulded body of her earth Silueta at Old Man’s Creek in Iowa and set it on fire (Plate 4.5). Only ashes remained as a trace of the original form. The female body - or its mark or mould - is a central theme of Mendieta’s Siluetas, as it is of her work as a whole. By referencing her own body to natural, organic processes she both evoked and (as I shall argue) rendered problematic some traditional associations of femininity and the supposedly

plate 4.1

(facing page) Ana Mendieta, detail of First Silueta (Plate 4.3).

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4.2

Ana Mendieta, untitled (Silueta series), 1977 and 1978, colour photographs of snow Silueta, Iowa. (Courtesy of the estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.)

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PLATE 4.3 Ana Mendieta, First Silueta or Flowers on Body, 1973, colour photographs of performance, El Yagul, Oaxaca, Mexico. (Courtesy of the estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.)

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4.4

Ana Mendieta, untitled (Silueta series), 1976, colour photographs of red-flowers Silueta on sand, Salina Cruz, Mexico. (Courtesy of the estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong New York.) 6’

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Ana Mendieta, untitled (Silueta series), 1978, colour photographs of gunpowder and earth Silueta, Old Man’s Creek, Iowa. (Courtesy of the estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.)

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'primordial' forces of nature. Issues of male and female sexuality are also implicated in her art, for a decaying or disappearing female body is unlikely to evoke male desire in the manner of a more naturalistic painted or sculpted ‘odalisque’ (Plate 4.6). Spectators of the Siluetas, which were sometimes performed to small audiences, witnessed the physical changes that transform the recognisable (sexual) form of a female body into unrecognisable decaying plants, residues of ashes, melted snow, shifting sand and so on. In this chapter, I will focus on this central concern with the female body, exploring the ways in which Mendieta's interests were related to those associated with the broad categories of'body art’ and ‘performance art’ that rose to prominence in the Americas, Europe, Australia and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. An audience today has access to the transformations that characterise the Silueta series only through the heavily mediated forms of photographic documentation. Mendieta recorded these performances in colour and black and white photographs, and in some cases on Super 8 film. An archive of Silueta slides remains, although only a few of these were printed as photographs before Mendieta died in 1985, at the age of 36.' Moments from the performances have thus been recorded for the art-consuming public, raising questions about the status, durability and ownership of the art object. Some of these questions were considered in the earlier chapter on Duchamp’s Bottlerack, but Mendieta takes the problematisation of the aesthetic object in some different directions from those raised by Duchamp’s work. On the one hand, the original performances of the Siluetas place the artwork outside the space of the modern gallery: they provoke the viewer both to explore the limits of what the art object might be and to consider an ‘expanding’ field of activities that might qualify as art. Refusing to fetishise the object, Mendieta staged its disappearance as a part of the work. On the other hand, it could be argued that the process of photographic fixing substitutes another 'art object’ for the bodily form which is destroyed. In the absence of the original performance, the photograph becomes the work. In this chapter, I am also concerned with the following questions: if the original art object or performance is only available to us through edited photographic highlights, what status do we attach to both the event itself and to the memory or trace of that performance? What is the relationship of the photographic process to the act of performance? Located in nature, or literally in the earth, this series has also been included within the postmodern categories of ‘earth art’ or 'land art’ - forms of art that were inevitably subject to natural decay or transformation. (I will explore these labels in a later section of the chapter.) Most of the Siluetas were constructed in remote rural sites in Iowa and Mexico, where they were witnessed by small (invited) audiences. Many were staged as outdoor performances, whereas others were acted out more privately by the artist. The transient, theatrical quality of these events, in which Mendieta moulds and/or destroys the form of her own body, has also encouraged critics to emphasise their performative aspects. Within recent art history and criticism the term performative’ has been used to describe practices of making art which deploy some kind of live, theatrical activity, and which may involve some exchange between an artist and her or his audience. This engagement may evolve and change through time, as the viewer witnesses or interacts with the artistic performance involved.

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4.6

Henri Matisse, Odalisque with Red Culottes, 1921, oil on canvas, 67 x 84 cm. (Centre Pompidou-MNAM-CCI, Paris. © photo: CN AC/M NAM Dist. RMN.)

Theories of the performative tend to identify meaning in the active engagements - the shifting feelings, desires, perceptions, pleasures and apprehensions - that are exchanged between performer and viewer. Such theories emphasise the intersubjective character of these activities, arguing that the identity of the protagonists is continually being negotiated and interpreted through the artistic process. The performative is thus understood as a process rather than as an ‘act with a final goal’.2 An important point to note here is that the performative nature of works such as the Siluetas is often seen to be at odds with more traditional conceptions of the relationship between the subject (the artist or the viewer of the work) and the object (the artwork). For example, many forms of modernist theory separate the subject from the object: the artist or viewer is said to perceive a discrete and separate artwork (whether that is a painting, sculpture, print etc.), which she or he then seeks to interpret.3 We could argue that the Siluetas prompt us to reflect on this distinction in two ways. First, the artist used her own body to enact the performances, undermining any clear sense of the artist/subject as somehow separate from the artwork/object. Secondly, the original performances took place through time and often involved a small number of viewers: the artist explored the forms and marks of her own body in some kind of interaction with her audience, thus challenging a clear separation between a viewing subject and an art object. However, the interactive nature of those early Silueta performances is difficult to retrieve, as Mendieta’s photographic prints (sometimes selected from a filmed sequence) generally

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represent only the changing bodily forms in nature; the audiences are conspicuously absent.4 Once again, we confront the problem that, as subsequent viewers of Mendieta’s work, we cannot participate in the initial performative process. We can only observe an edited sequence of highlights, prepared by the artist, which themselves become (substitute) artworks.5 As such, they could be seen to restore the separation of viewer and art object that the original performance helped to undermine. However, it can also be argued that although we have lost the participatory form of the original performance, meaning is always made through some kind of interactive process that takes place as we view an object and make sense of it. According to this view, the meaning of a work is both unstable (as different viewers’ interpretations will differ) and constituted through interaction (between the viewing subject and the object). These are the kinds of difficult and much debated issue that often cloud attempts to define a postmodern practice: I will revisit them later in this chapter. Mendieta’s central concerns with the female body in performance have engaged the interest of many feminist art historians, particularly in recent years. Along with several women artists working in the USA in the 1970s, she became actively involved with early feminist politics. For many of these artists, among them Judy Chicago and Carolee Schneemann (whose work I discuss later), this engagement often focused on the representation and exploration of female sexuality and subjectivity. In their work they often sought to challenge both gendered perceptions of women’s roles in society and traditional artistic representations of the female body (Plates 4.7 and 4.8). However, in recognising the way in which Mendieta’s work has been reclaimed for contemporary feminist theory, we must be careful not to dehistoricise the possible meanings and original artistic intentions associated with her early interests and political concerns in the 1970s. The first wave of what we now identify as modern feminism emerged in the 1960s, inspired by the Civil Rights, Anti-War and Anti-Colonial Movements, radical student rebellions and the growth of the Women’s Movement in Europe and the USA. An important concern of this early generation of feminist artists and art historians was the ‘reclaiming’ of work by women artists, which (it was argued) had been marginalised and undocumented by conventional histories. This concern also involved recognising and foregrounding the work of contemporary women artists who were seeking to reframe and to question the nature and status of art within a patriarchal culture,6 a preoccupation that informed Mendieta’s early work and self-image as an artist. But ‘feminism’ is itself a contested category, which has embraced a range of differing interests and political positions. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, feminist art history began to absorb the influence of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories, encouraging study of the ways in which female identities (or 'subjectivities’) are constructed through visual imagery. During this period, some of the concerns of the ‘first wave’ of feminist artists came to be seen as naive or outmoded. During the 1990s, many feminist theorists increasingly critiqued the hierarchical binary oppositions that underpin representations of masculine and feminine sexuality, arguing for a more flexible approach to the concept of gender. (I am using the term ‘gender’ here to signify the cultural construction of femininity and masculinity, rather than any given

CHAPTER 4 The expanding field: Ana Mendieta's Silueta series

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4.7

Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975. (Courtesy of the artist and PPOW, New York. Photo: Anthony McCall. © ARS, New York and DACS, London 2003.)

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