Page 24 - Studio International - October1968

what is given in perception. To say that we are not chosen an impossible technical process with which unfluctuating relationship within the overall structure
given allusive references to visual space outside the to arrive there. The process which Louis adopted is of the form. In other words, the tendency for colour
painting is untrue. A child does not have to be taught not as important as the various formal arrangements areas to fluctuate ambivalently in spatial location in
that photographs represent; it sees automatically he was led to, and it did not condition these. It is in flat painting, is counteracted by the further cues of
that they do. To see Olitski's paintings as having the choice of these that his greatness lies. Why Fried shape. Integrity of the picture plane is not at issue, for
their own self-contained space is to project ourselves has to go on to talk about Louis' respect for the con- the picture plane is itself shaped by three-dimensional
into an imaginary perceptual realm by instruction. tinuity of the canvas surface escapes me. It seems to geometry in controlled perspective. Here space and
We have of course been so instructed, by school of me that Louis used cotton duck in the way that a colour form a single unified identity which does not
Greenberg critics, but I personally do not accept water-colourist uses stretched Whatman, for its refer beyond itself.
such a procedure as valid for art. luminosity as a field on which to draw with or lay Painting is, as criticism must be also, the expression
It is significant that Matisse does not ask us to take down colour, and this is the same way Matisse used of a desire, longing, or love, for certain types of
such a step. For him, the perception of the painting as paper in The negress, The siren and the parakeet, experience. For me the best painting is the expression
object and as image serves as a stepping-stone to and other paintings; as a field of light, not as a of a desire for a kind of experience which is not
awareness of the painting as symbol. This he achieves surface. given in experience of the sensible world. It stands
by a whole-hearted acceptance of figuration. He The problem which many painters face at this at the threshold of the visible. It can only be so if it
constructs his painting as an actual or disguised moment with regard to the formal organization and succeeds in carrying itself beyond rational criticism
collage, an organization of elements given in percep- spatial structuring of their work is exemplified by the in analysis of structure and content. It must there-
tion. The snail derives its unique piquancy from the many and fluctuating attitudes to shape. On the one fore t e both faultless as such, and totally palpable
fact that it is almost an exception to this. hand artists like Olitski and Noland, while concerned as experience. It must have greater body and inten-
Olitski's paintings do not begin to get off the ground to maintain pictorial space (that is, a spatial organiza- sity tan any other experience of the world. It must
as symbol, because they are so full of textural and tion which operates on the propensity in perception proceed to shatter the world asunder, reduce it to
microscopic incident, and drawing self-conscious as to see delineation of a flat surface as illusion of naught in comparison, while at the same time in
process, all asserting the physicality of the presenta- depth) and at the same time maintaining integrity of doing so it takes the world to its zenith in reality. The
tion. The techniques and the physical properties of the picture plane (drawing attention to the continuity first haw of life is that reality exists to be transcended.
Matisse's painting are unselfconscious and irrele- of the surface of the ground of the painting), are There is a germ in all of us which urges us to deny
vant; witness their variety and transposability. He nevertheless also aware that the shape of the outer life in whatever form it is given in favour of the un-
always pursued the secret of what is especially limits of the pictorial surface functions composition- known. To this end, extremisms of all kinds (short
exclusive to painting as opposed to other art forms. ally and as a further aspect of the drawing or design of ou': and out inhumanity) are to be encouraged. I
The sculptural pleasure he derived from cutting the of the painting. However they fear that too great an have 'perhaps sounded as if I feel the limits of what
paper for the late collages has been misinterpreted by emphasis on shape would serve to undermine the can be 'seen' to be prescribed and known. This is of
sculptors. pictorial nature of their work. So tight is the con- course not so, either with regard to content or form.
The last few paragraphs apply equally to the recent ceptual strait-jacket at work here, that the merest 'Ineluctable modality of the visible'? Yes—but the
work of Larry Poons. No amount of critical subter- nuance of variation in an artist's work is heralded as modality is not static. It breathes at the dictates of the
fuge can blind us to the fact that Poons' paintings a major breakthrough in the art of painting. If it were will.
represent coloured wafer-thin discs, or, traces of the once accepted that any one of the conceptual factors
presence of discs floating in space, and to crown it which condition the fabric of the work was, as in
all, with after-images painted in too, as if things fact every one is, unnecessary to the making of good
aren't confused enough already. This wilful con- painting, the whole edifice of the dilemma would
fusion of and simultaneous existence of differing crumble ! If the strait-jacket is consciously imposed,
categories of experience is intolerable to me. it is not making for an art of development, but for one
The conscious presentation of alternative modes of of variation only.
reading either within a painting or with respect to the Shape here is a secondary element, cautiously
total configuration of the painting is perhaps the accredited a role in the forming of a painting. In the
chief cliché bequeathed to us from Synthetic Cubism, case of Olitski. if it is accepted that his paintings are
along with its companion, that other hoary cliché, not abstract, the role of shape is the same as the
integrity of the picture plane, and their spectres still cropping device used in modern photographic
haunt the bulk of painting being done today. It is printing, to dramatize focus, as has been pointed out
characteristic of Matisse, as it was of Van Gogh and by someone elsewhere I think.
others before Matisse, to be free to use or to abandon In another direction, Dick Smith has entered whole-
both of these devices as part of a looser pictorial heartedly into the use of aggressively three-dimen-
organization. They were never a conceptual fetish and sional shapes, but here too a certain indecisiveness
a red-herring, as they have become for later artists. has been in evidence, at least to begin with, though
'Ambiguity-type' painting must surely be experi- it can also be seen as much as a persistent habit of
encing its death-throes now. Absolute clarity of technique lagging behind ideas about structure.
spatial structure is the sine qua non for major paint- Smith continued, as in his flat paintings, to use paint
ing in the future. Clarity is the highest form of to suggest that colour was projected onto the surface
ambiguity. Matisse's The snail, like the greatest of of the shape from an outside or inside source rather
Mondrian's paintings, combines absolute clarity of than to reside in the surface itself, or to deny the
formal organization with the kind of total clarity as an object quality of the shape by painting it in illusion 75 years ago
existing thing which leads to a breaking through the to appear like a further dimension of an illusion, an In art... the critics are of two kinds—the literary man
limits of the visible world, so that the painting seems intensification of certain drawing elements of an with an artistic taste and the artist with a literary taste.
to exist in a realm beyond vision. It is at this level that illusionistic painting. (A series of boxes painted in The first class is very wide, extending from those
painting attains a true ambiguity. This is very differ- illusion looming out to merge with the box structure gentlemen who make a speciality of art criticism, to
ent from a depiction of another realm, which could of the support.) These hybrid paintings were carried those who combine it with the records of race meetngs
perhaps be said to be Poons's intention (a sort of through to some measure of resolution simply by and police-courts. The art specialist is he who, not being
Impressionism of the para-perceptual). native technical assurance and an exquisite colour so born, is desirous of making himself an art critic out
Morris Louis's ghost sits like Poe's raven on the sense. This is not to disparage what was the begin- of the ordinary material of man, and to that end he
shoulders of the artists of the sixties. His elusive and ning of an important conception of the possibility of frequents the art clubs and coteries, and nourishes him-
seraphic art is even more open to misinterpretation the extension of shape in painting. The final step in self upon the brains of artists, rendering their frequently
than that of Matisse. The importance of Louis lies in the development of what is now amongst the best bald but weighty utterances into subtle and elaborate
his ability to use and orchestrate colour throughout painting being made, was the increasing use of three- phrases whose meaning is oftentimes as obscure as it
the whole spectral range, while at the same time dimensional frontal depth perspective, which allowed seems to be authoritative. I do not object to their
miraculously avoiding any graspable reference. As the colour to take its place in the surface, which method of self-education in art, indeed it seems the
Michael Fried has pointed out, it is as if the Veil could be shaped and bent in perspective and geome- only possible course; my sole sorrow is that it does not
paintings depict some unknown substance, some try. This permitted the whole painting as object to go far enough—with so authoritative a voice one feels
substance unknown in the physical world, the iden- lend itself to the propensity in perception to see the somet mes there ought to be a little more knowledge.
tity of which we can never pin down. It is perhaps total configuration of an object as an immaterial from ' The Art Critic and the Critical Artist' by Norman.
this which Olitski also hopes to achieve, but he has image of form, while precisely locating colour in an Garsti n
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