Page 50 - Studio International - November 1970

`A very abstract modernist pantheon, gives his painting a con- Darby Bannard or Olitski is no discredit to
viction and strength which no other painter the real quality of American art, no disservice
context' under 50 can match. His paintings hold to- to the memory of Pollock. Indeed, to see
Olitski as heir to Pollock is to see how easily
gether in the way that Matisse's later works
hold together: not through a coherent spatial quality can be confused with conceptual
Charles Harrison narrative—a set of artificially dramatized for- exhaustion when the heritage of a tradition is
mal situations with a happy ending—but at stake. In the absence of legitimate off-
because the total image is convincing in terms spring there is always a temptation to recog-
`My thinking is always related to a very of the hierarchy of general aspirations and nize one's bastards, lest the property should
abstract context which I feel in my time has possibilities it represents. The painting is a pass outside the family's dominion. This is
become the postulate for a sense of the mean- source of associations entirely proper to itself not a uniquely American practice. There
ing of the word "art" ' — Joseph Kosuth.' and to the intentions of its creator, not a have been precedents in French painting of
stimulant to the powers of association of an the period mentioned, in British sculpture of
Real trouble has been brewing up for the art unpredictable audience. the fifties, and in the 'Bauhaus tradition' at
public for at least sixty years. It is perhaps now The best of Stella's recent paintings are any time.
coming to the boil. The more abstract, the irresistibly beautiful in a conventional sense, The vehemence of the attack upon the
more evidently anti-associative art has be- but in an unprecedented mode. Much of the Modernists' position made by Don Judd, Dan
come, the wider the potential discrepancy strength of his position derives from the Flavin, Joseph Kosuth8 and others less articu-
between the thing the artist believes he has nature of his opposition to certain concerns in late, was justified by the need to wrest control,
made and the truths the non-specialist spec- painting current during the later fifties and as it were, of a ship which was in danger of
tator believes it to embody. Metaphors, the sixties : specifically the mock heroics of the being steered on to the rocks. The situation
symbols etc. belong to the kind of art designed abstract-expressionist latecomers at one ex- demanded a change of direction. In rooting
to embroider a culture dependent upon treme and the arch modes of equivocation of for an art devoid of 'painterly feeling'9 Judd is
literature—its once most easily disseminated the post-painterly abstract painters at the not disqualifying the painting of the past; and
art form—for its central concepts. Illusionism other. Stella's art is rational, unequivocal and in declaring that painting and sculpture are
is a remnant of art's now redundant narrative highly intelligent. The leanness of his earlier no more than kinds of art Kosuth is not mak-
function. work invests his apparent acceptance of a ing it any harder for good painting or sculp-
The tendency is to see art in terms of what art grand decorative role for painting with every ture to be produced; he is merely recording
has been. Artists like Stella and Judd, whose promise of continued confidence and success; how unlikely it is that good art will be made
work has specific form but who intend that but in his own words, 'If something's used up, in the present art-historical situation from
these forms should be seen as non-associative something's done, something's over with, new work limited to the traditional concerns
and non-metaphorical, have had to defend what's the point of getting involved with it ?'5 of painting alone or of sculpture alone.
the factual nature of their work against those There is no evidence, except among art
who wish to impose upon it associations rele- students running the gamut, of any endeavour If, upon viewing a painted landscape, I am
vant only to illusionistic work. 'I always get in painting beyond Stella's.6 Indeed it would led by a certain configuration of trees and
into arguments with people who want to be hard now to allow ourselves to be pur- hills into recall of real places where I have
retain the old values in painting—the human- suaded into hedonism by any painter who walked, that memory may appear to lend
istic values that they always find on the was not able to offer as compensation the substance to my comprehension of the picture.
canvas. If you pin them down, they always same stringency as characterized Stella's But it is, of course, almost entirely irrelevant.
end up asserting that there is something there early art-critical canvases; and since then the It would not be reasonable to hold the painter
besides the paint on the canvas. My painting terms of reference have changed substantially. responsible for my picturesque pleasure, nor to
is based on the fact that only what can be seen It is hard enough, in all honesty, to find a real allow it any place in my evaluation of his in-
there is there. It really is an object. Any place in our lives for the objects which Stella tentions. Even before paintings like Cézanne's
painting is an object and anyone who gets himself has produced in the last five years. last landscapes it is possible to enjoy the
involved enough in this finally has to face up With so much contemporary painting the eye pleasures of association; but how far removed
to the objectness of whatever it is that he's may be delighted, but the mind tends to these are from Cézanne's realities. He was
doing. He is making a thing. All that should wander. Greenberg's typical answer to this working with his sensations, in the present
be taken for granted.... What you see is what complaint—that I am bored because I need tense as it were; and we can rarely do better
you see' —Frank Stella.2 novelty, not quality, to satisfy me7 — is shown than recall our own past.
The artists associated with the enterprise of for the confidence trick it is by the sheer lack A great part of the difficulty which most
Modemism3— for example Kenneth Noland of quality in the work of so many painters people seem to experience in confronting post-
at one end of the scale and Darby Bannard at associated with the enterprise of Modernism. object" or analytic art 11 is a difficulty which
the other—with blind optimism about the One's eyes are an organ of sense and as such has always been present in art: that of
communicability of their intentions, risk seri- one of the chief sources of information for the ignoring for a while our own unparalleled
ously compromising the identity of art, while brain; but they are no replacement for the powers of association in order to leave the
Modernist critics castigate as adulterators those brain, nor should their operation be allowed mind clear to comprehend, in terms proper
who seek to preserve it. The trouble is that automatically to suspend its use. One is to the endeavour, the structure which the
their intentions have become too specialized reminded by the recent work of painters such artist has set before us. Those who are unable
and refined in terms of métier, and too con- as Darby Bannard, Olitski, and even Noland, to confront the factual content—the 'eternal
servationist in terms of function, to be of the situation in Paris in the late forties and present'12—of Cézanne's paintings can at least
accessible in terms of more general experience early fifties, when artists like Manessier, console themselves that the physical object
to any audience with wider sympathies than Ubac, Estève and Soulages were able to com- presented to their view—a painted canvas—is
their own4. mand attention (and high prices) for their the same object that all men see. Secure in
Stella's acceptance of the literal quality of work because they were French and, as such, their acceptance of the recognizability of
colour and surface, which together with his to be naturally considered as heirs to all that physical things they may never know what
evident intelligence and articulateness per- was best, qualitatively, in twentieth-century they're missing. Duchamp's various gestures
haps accounts for his exclusion from the art. To suspend gullibility before the works of intended to reveal the 'irrelevance of the