Page 28 - Studio International - April 1965

There is a desperation in them and it has swept aside
some of the most cherished assumptions of modern
painting'.*
We can understand the desire to create an art that
sticks in the cultivated gullet 'as real art should'—that
has been the desire of all artists in revolt against the
academic traditions of the past. That was certainly the
desire of the Dadaists and the Surrealists in our time,
and one of the most boring aspects of the art mis-
leadingly called pop-art is its repetition of gestures that
stuck in the cultivated gullet fifty years ago but that
were long ago swallowed and discarded because they
had served their purpose. There is nothing new in pop-
art, least of all its use of popular images taken from
cigarette packets and comic strips ; exactly the same
kind of debris was exploited by artists like Kurt
Schwitters, Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
But there is this difference : in their extreme revolt
against cultivated art the Dadaists remained artists—
that is to say, they retained their style. Even when, as in
the case of Marcel Duchamp, no style was involved, but
rather the selection and isolation of 'a certain kind of
object', the gesture was as ephemeral as it was witty. It
was not intended as a joke to be repeated.
It may be said that even a joke may have style, and that
is true. Every human gesture, so long as it is expressive,
has style, which is the justification of action painting.
But the gesture must have some emphatic purpose, it
must send the ball into that part of the tennis court
where we least expect it, where it wins a point. A
monotonous gesture has no style : it is the epitome of
boredom.
An absence of style leads to the apotheosis of brutality.
That this quality should be offered as a substitute for
style is perhaps not surprising in an age distinguished
for its vandalism and criminal violence. It is probably
motivated and to some extent justified as a revolt
against sophistication and refinement, and it is signi-
ficant that it is more prevalent in architecture than in
the other arts (though it has analogues in literature). In
architecture it has some obvious advantages : it saves
money and therefore appeals to the insensitive business
man. Its visual aspect is clumsiness, and a brutal
gesture in art is just as ugly as a brutal gesture in
behaviour.
A brutal gesture may be used to inspire terror, and
there are legitimate effects in art when terror, or
terribilità, is the means. Beauty and terror, for some
mysterious reason, lie very close together, but where
we find them associated in a work of art, the significant
fact is their association, not the presence of one or the
other element. Terror is introduced, in a Greek or Eliza-
bethan drama, to produce catharsis, to leave a stillness
that seems all the more intense after the passage of the
storm. But this is not the aim of our contemporary
brutalists, who are not able to effect a synthesis of
terror and beauty, but leave their public in a state of
displeasure and distress.
What I have with some hesitation called privacy is a
very ubiquitous characteristic of modern art and one
which deserves more consideration than it has hitherto
been given. We speak of a private joke, meaning 8 joke
that cannot be generally understood or appreciated, a
joke that is perhaps only funny to the joker. More and
more of our younger artists perpetrate jokes of this kind