Page 20 - Studio International - October1968

In the last analysis

Dore Ashton

Imagine you are X, an artist of international which you wrote it are presented. Whether an œuvre. But this becomes more and more
reputation, born sometime between 1900 you had had a conversation with Y the day unlikely, since the nature of the analytic
and 1915. You probably don't read art maga- before; whether you had known the similar endeavour is to avoid speaking about the
zines, but they find their way into your studio statements of Z; whether it was before or experience of works of art, and to speak
and you fitfully pick them up and put them after a certain exhibition, and from whom rather of how to speak about speaking of
down. From time to time, you spot your own your very words were taken. If you become works of art.
name, usually in some scholarly article where morbidly curious and follow up this reading, This is not an era friendly to metaphysics,
the footnotes greedily eat up the white space you will probably find in subsequent articles not since Kant anyway. Metaphysics, which
and the text is brusque and meagre. You are great scholastic disputes about when, why is concerned always with the totality of
naturally curious, though always suspicious. and how you came to write it, and even who existence, is a mode of reflection which
In any written commentary, no matter how your collaborators were. You recognize that naturally seeks the meaning of the œuvre as
factual it purports to be, or how objective, you are reading facts, some of which are a whole, rather than the description of its
you know the writer had brought to it his accurate but were long since forgotten by parts. When men are given to the meta-
own vision or he isn't worth his salt. And you you since they were, in terms of your oeuvre, physical approach, they don't necessarily
know that it can never coincide with your irrelevant. You may realize, also, that you are ignore the facts, but facts become part of
own. Graciously or ungraciously, you accept witnessing a shift in values which threatens their ongoing process of reflection and in-
that fact. All criticism, whether historical and the survival of your œuvre as experienced quiry'. What they inquire after is how this
'objective', structuralist and non-interpre- meaning. man or that came to have a stunning insight,
tive, or romantic and fanciful, is finally the This insight, as melancholy as it is, will be and how he then experiences it and tests it
result of some attentive individual's selection confirmed by other kinds of reading in the as he creates his oeuvre. If our artist X had
of relevant matter, and therefore interpretive, same journal. For instance, you might chance once hoped that his œuvre in the last analysis
and beside your point. But still you hope. upon one of the many effusions of the new would signify more than his own gloss upon
Supposing you had been solicited for exegetes, the merchandizers of canned wis- it, he may find that there will be no last
written statements at one time and had ac- dom. Here, nicely turned and often laid out analysis. For a last analysis insists upon a
ceded. Supposing you had once or twice 'visually' are the compendia of quotations metaphysical process—one that assumes
even sought an opportunity to present some which serve for articles. This out-of-context that an image of the totality of being can
pressing conviction—of that moment—to the instant wisdom has its purpose: it relieves shine forth in a whole life's work.
public. All the while, of course, being of two the author of the necessity of personal ex- Such an image is rarely paraphrasable, and
minds about the written word, and suspect- perience. It does not require the ardent requires a sensibility which is speculative
ing that your work would speak more elo- commitment of affectionate reading, and the rather than analytical, respondent rather than
quently in the last analysis. arduous travail of conveying an insight with critical, to recognize it. There is a mode of
Now, supposing that you are lured by the conviction. The detachment of the compiler, reflection which strikes men as reasonable
business-like tone of the article you noticed which -he obviously values, makes the in- from time to time—certainly not this time
while you leafed through a current art journal. sight of another a thing among things, however—which may yet appear again and
You are astonished and probably pro- neither more nor less significant, and cer- which will salvage X's œuvre as experienced
foundly depressed to discover that your tainly not more interesting than any other truth rather than analyzed fact. This mode
every word has been weighed and judged ; written thing. If you are an artist who has was well characterized by Nicholas of Cusa,
that something you may have written one said or written something, you will grasp the who used, as a tool in his intense specula-
fine morning when you couldn't get started indifferent yet pedantic nature of the attent- tion, the notion of learned ignorance.
on a canvas and when you were in a certain ion your thing receives in the contemporary He who regards as truth that which is con-
outside-yourself mood, is taken as an ex- art press. ceivable is removed from true infinite
plication of your work, then and forever. You There is a good chance that you would wisdom, he believed. 'Those .whose judg-
will probably shudder to find that not only is accept the microscopic examination of the ments are based only on analysis, who speak
the text studied for meanings you never knew 'facts' around your œuvre, if you were con- only in words and not out of inner experience'
you had, but the exact circumstances under vinced that the oeuvre itself could be seen as are not truly wise. The truly wise, according

Contributors to this issue William Tucker, the sculptor, was recently Avinash Chandra, the Indian painter, now lives
appointed Gregory Fellow in Sculpture at Leeds and works in New York, where his one-man show
University. at Rose Fried Gallery opens on October 22.
Dore Ashton, the American critic, is a regular
contributor to Studio International. Ronald Hunt is Librarian at the University of New- Dr Aaron Scharf is head of the department of the
castle upon Tyne and Is currently arranging an ex- history of art and complementary studies at St
Alan Gouk is a painter and was a prize-winner in hibition for the Moderna Museet in Sweden, Martin's School of Art. His comprehensive study of
the '1967 John Moore's Liverpool Exhibition. He the relationship between art and photography,
teaches in the sculpture department at St Martin's David Thompson, formerly art critic for The Times, entitled Art and Photography, will be published at the
School of Art. writes regularly for Queen and Studio International. end of this year by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.