Page 30 - Studio International - November 1967

Jim Dine an incredible innocence, romanticism even. If one con-
Ties 1961 siders such recent yet arbitrarily chosen examples as
charcoal
John Chamberlain and Claes Oldenburg, the point
24¼ x 19+ in.
almost seems redundant.
Sidney Janis Gallery,
New York In a Chamberlain sculpture there is a baroque composi-
tion, blown up to an enormous 'public' scale, and bran-
dished with an unquenchable, bright, shiny exhilaration.
But one finds something mortified, perverse in the
expression. About these crushed and mangled auto-
mobiles, there is a sense of cheerful disaster. And with
his almost obscenely inflated cake, Oldenburg too,
embodies some of this larger-than-life ambivalence. To
see a roomful of these leviathan foodstuffs is to view an
alarmingly comic world of total obesity. Both artists sal-
vage from the grandiosity of American living a certain
terror, which, for them, constitutes beauty. For the un-
likely materials begin to dissolve into quasi-invisibility,
as the integrity of form asserts itself.
It is surely a short step from ambivalence to irony. The
remarkable thing in American art is that irony can co-
exist with a freshness of vision, and a directness of
painterly response that does not seem in conflict with a
conceptual obliqueness. In Jasper Johns and Jim Dine,
there is a lavish pictorial handling, and a dramatic or
erotic coloration that is osmotically blended with the
most commonplace or humble motif. It is as if all the
sensuality of the artist was but the trivial adornment of
the ordinary—a number, a cravat—or as if the artist were
Jasper Johns mocking his own skill and performance. But these works
0 through 9 1961 can just as conceivably imply that the ordinary moment,
oil on canvas the perfectly blank or nondescript image has gained a
54 x 45 in.
Leo Castelli Gallery, suddenly fabulous glow, an extraordinary presence. It is
New York the aristocracy of Pater and the populism of Bob Dylan
commingled in a beguiling cipher.
Some time ago, when describing my thoughts in pre-
paration for this essay to a famous critic, he concluded
that decadence, as I had described it, applied to all the
bad art of our time, by which he meant representational
art. But in retrospect, it now seems that abstract art is
precisely the greatest crystallization, and perhaps contri-
bution, of the decadent impulse. What greater self-absorb-
tion, and fixated concentration on pleasure can there be,
than that represented by the abstract tradition? It was
narrative, or representational painting and sculpture, on
the other hand, which was traditionally didactic, associ-
ated, and far more concerned with the moral faculties
and judgments than with the conservation of any one
moment. The capacity of visual art to refer to something
outside itself has always been one of its most anti-
decadent features. That is why the formalist critic of
whom I speak misunderstands his own background, the—
theoretical basis of which goes back to the aesthetic
movement in England, initiated by such as Pater, and
carried on by Wilde, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry.
Needless to say, abstract artists have frequently sought
to give overarching significance to a vision which phili-
stine society never thought justified in itself. That is why
sufficient unto themselves. Perhaps French boutique art one has Mondrian, for example, asserting the Utopian
is the exception to this rule because it wants to tickle the character of his style with an almost religious fervour. In
senses, rather than to discover new sensuous combina- his writings he expresses totally moralistic objectives, all
tions. It is much too professional to take play seriously. of which are subverted by `a-moral' pictorial means in
In contrast to this cynicism, American art is fraught with his paintings. For a half century abstract artists have