Page 65 - Studio International - June 1966

Historicism and respect for tradition

New York commentary by Dore Ashton

Vertiginous discussions of technology, 'media', hallucina- naive but not disarming. For these backward assumptions
tory drugs, electronics, and new art forms are breaking which are really the leftovers of the Victorian avant-
out everywhere and are symptomatic of profound un- garde are precisely what must now be questioned. Beyond
easiness. The promiscuous borrowings from one field to the area of safety and freedom of movement lies the
another (MacLuhan's message: the electronic media are need for a conception of what constitutes a valid human
extensions of the nervous system) bode ill for the clear life, and how much of life will be left if we go on ever
exposition of contemporary thought, particularly in the more rapidly in the present direction? What has to be
realm of aesthetics. challenged is an economy that is based not on organic
But there are still a few sage voices. One of the most needs, historic experience, human aptitudes, ecological
compelling is that of Lewis Mumford. In a review of the complexity and variety, but upon a system of empty
recent exposure of the extreme danger of the contem- abstractions : money, power, speed, quantity, progress,
porary motor-car, Mumford scores several supremely vanguardism, expansion...'

important points. He remarks, for instance, that the Mumford's challenging contention that vanguardism
corporate hucksters have lately truckled to the least safe per se is an empty abstraction, and that it is naive to accept
group of drivers, the newly-licensed adolescents, selling the Victorian progressist assumptions will probably not
them 'hell-bent power and aggressiveness' in the form of meet with any serious debate, although it is surely one of
unprecedented speed. Speed, marijuana, heroin, and the most crucial subjects today.
lysergic acid, he writes, 'are all attempts to use a scienti- Years ago, Mircea Eliade thought he detected a shift
fic technology to overcome the existential nausea that in modern thought away from the historicism which gives
the lopsided development of this very technology is the rise to the empty abstractions Mumford enumerates.
cause of.' `From Hegel on,' he wrote in Cosmos and History, 'every
Stephen Greene Who wants speed at that price? he asks: effort is directed toward saving and conferring value on
One-One-Three 1965 `Buckminster Fuller and Jacques Ellul will doubtless the historical event as such, the event in itself and for
Oil on canvas
36 x 32 in. answer, Everyone: or at all events, that is what is itself. In his study of the German Constitution, Hegel
Staempfli Gallery coming, whether anyone wants it or not. This answer is wrote that if we recognize that things are necessarily as
they are, that is, that they are not arbitrary and not the
result of chance, we shall at the same time recognize that
they must be as they are. . Eliade felt, in 1954, that
there were signs that the Hegelian historical necessity
theory was being shaken by new attempts to find 'trans-
historical' explanations of events.
His optimism has proved unwarranted, at least as far
as popularized philosophy goes. We are still besieged with
tracts urging us to live the new age unquestioningly, to
accept each vanguard experiment, each technological
twist as what is coming and what must be, and to cease
asking Mumford's important question: What constitutes
a valid human life?
In the realm of aesthetics—if such a realm can be said to
exist today—these questions are buried under a barrage
of speedy theories that describe and diagnose but rarely
evaluate the day-by-day inventions exposed to public
view.
Such frenetic theory-manufacture leaves little space for
the ruminations of those painters who have not ceased
asking the prime questions; who have tried, through their
work, to find the 'trans-historical' explanations of exist-
ence that would release them from the tyranny of history.
Stephen Greene is one of those painters. His basic
vocabulary, although nearly abstract, is rooted in a
vision of symbolic continuity. His myths are sustained
from painting to painting, circulating in different cli-
mates and taking new forms, but always identifiable to
those who have taken the trouble to ponder his work over
a period of years.
His symbols transform themselves now and then : for
instance, what was once a ladder used consciously in its
legendary context (crucifixions, ladders to infinity,
Jacob's ladder, etc.) becomes, in his new paintings at
STAEMPFLI GALLERY, a measuring stick. Innocent as it
may be in one painting or another, that measuring stick
takes on symbolic value once it is seen in relation to