Page 67 - Studio International - April 1968

Cross currents

Andrew Forge

From Impressionism onwards painting was increasingly an art of elisions, abstractions, new and more strenuous harmonizations, or
relationship. Representation was sustained by the part each piece of discords, against the more explicit and less demanding norm. Any
paint played in an ensemble. In a Monet Nympheas of the last years, a particular representation was educated and could be defined as an
lily-pad achieves meaning as lily-pad by virtue of its status as a stroke episode in a wider cultural dialogue. This is what Realism could not
of paint within a total paint surface—not the other way round. With accommodate.
Cezanne even volume, the keystone of his whole view of colour and But, fallacies and all, realist theory provided the spring-board from
spatial organization, is broached and becomes a matter of open which modern art took off, as is proved by its persistence in a
relationships within which the distortion of the object is an accepted corrupted form in almost all the anti-naturalistic art of the early
loss. During the pyrrhic campaigns of Analytical Cubism, the repre- years of this century—the claims of Klee, for instance, to work
sented object is altogether dispersed within a network of qualifying beneath Nature's surface, to engage with Nature's laws and so on.. .
relationships. And the restoration—Synthetic Cubism—was muffed. Seen from this point of view, Rauschenberg's position (and that of
The compensating reality—the tableau-objet—became, as far as the Jasper Johns too) is one of remarkable freedom. In his work, the
world outside it was concerned, a cul de sac. Within its framework the object, and the world that it stands for is restored to a central posi-
breath of objects was snuffed out. tion. But it is there neither as target/arbiter— as it is in realist art;
Expressionism, it might be argued, offered an alternative. A Soutine nor as a restrictive and retrograde authority—as it has been so
still-life is not relational in the sense in which a still-life by Braque is. effectively in the abstract tradition. 'Nature' and 'Art' are neither
It commands the object with a spasm of identification—the dead in thrall to each other nor pitted against each other. They exist side
turkey, the six tomatoes—it takes them over omnipotently, claims by side for what they are and for what we can understand of them at
them in exactly the way that Abstract Expressionism was to do with a given moment. Hence Rauschenberg's extraordinary fluency, his
the pure of paint during the late 'forties. The restoration of reality— creative mobility, the air of concrete possibility (rather than specula-
for Expressionism will settle for no less—takes place in an atmosphere tion or longing) that sparkles out of everything he does. His aesthetic
of total subjectivity and a corresponding indifference to a pictorial is generated by his subject-matter, and his subject-matter is every-
culture. 'The Great Works of the past and the Good life of the future where.
became equally nil', Harold Rosenberg wrote in his famous essay His starting point is the object itself, canvas, fire hose or goat. There
which, for all its stormy pathos, rings absolutely true as an evocation is no question of bridging a relationship by representation, which
of the zeitgeist of the time; 'The Lone artist did not want the world must imply a stance opposing whatever is represented. No relation-
to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world. Liberation from ship is precipitated finally. It is there as an open possibility for as long
the object meant liberation from Nature, Society and art already as the work exists.
there. It was a movement to leave behind the self that wished to Realism foundered on its singleness of viewpoint, on the fact that
choose his future and to nullify its promissory notes to the past.' its vision of reality, its grasp, had inevitably to be structured, shaped,
What does this phrase mean, 'Liberation from the object' ? Who by a single stylistic process. All it could offer, ever, was a version.
had been captured by it and where, in the words of Saul Bellow's The cry of anguish that we know from those who pressed representa-
hero, were we standing when it happened? The phrase has meaning tion to its furthest limits—Monet, Cezanne, Giacometti—is one of
only if we interpret recent painting in relation to the nineteenth- despair at the inadequacy of a single, exclusive version. What
century belief in the aesthetic authority of the natural world. Rauschenberg suggests is an opening, a space, neither preserved
Beauty, Courbet told the dissaffected students of the Ecole des Beaux by cultural privilege nor hacked out in some blood-stained, lose-all
Arts who wanted to study under him, is to be found in nature not in campaign, but still, extensive and with clear air.
the conventions of art, and in as far as it is real and visible it contains A goat is a goat, a can, a can. Our first response to it is as pure
the indications of its expression. Only the individual artist can dis- appearance. His goat, his can, in its original form, is not raw material
cover it and when he does, he must be true to it: `L'artist n'a pas le like paint or plaster. He does not fashion its form and semblance but
droit d'amplifier cette expression. Il ne peut y toucher qu'en risquant rather releases form and semblance through his handling of the
de la dénaturer thousand contingencies that qualify it in 'life'. Hence perhaps the air
The decay of realist theory lay in its inability to understand that of tonic freedom that his work seems to breathe. We are freed abso-
representation is a convention, a language with a history of its own, lutely from the obligation to read it as version, to see its cans or goats
which nature is not. It was no risk that to 'touch' nature was to in relation to real cans or goats, or previous versions of cans or goats
denature it—it was a certainty, because for semblance to be sustained or possible ideal cans or goats, or in relation to an historical tradition
it was necessary repeatedly to outstrip established modes of repre- of cans and goats nor to a systematic view in which cans and goats
sentation. Whatever the 'norm' of likeness, the achievement of play an appointed part. We relate to them without prejudice, and
aesthetic likeness had to be in advance of it, braced against it, setting never in the same way. q
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