Page 57 - Studio International - October 1970

unique tensions are to be fought out and
realized formally, and are to escape a literary
limbo. It is ultimately a matter of syntax, not
of the elimination of reference. The free flight
into the wordless can zoom as close to poetry
as it damned well likes. The pejorative use of
the term 'literature' in relation to painting
essentially has nothing to do with reference,
with the programmatic, poetic, metaphorical,
depictive or analogical. Analogy is the chief
ingredient in art's brightness of spirit. Its
elimination leads straight to the inane. (Look
at David Smith's work from all periods.) No,
what is rightly called 'literature' in painting is
not a matter of content, or of form, but of that
which welds the two together. It is a question
of the legibility, the accessibility of intent—
what channels of assimilation are evoked in
its perception? Does the painting's aesthetic
identity confront one on the level of informa-
tion—what one knows, or can decipher, about
its content? If so, that is 'literature'.
What is required, then, is a direct, unrhetori-
cal style, terse yet labile, animated by feeling,
and capable of registering the bright and
fleeting nature of intuitions and discoveries.
Again Debussy has defined this formal ideal.
Music, he said, 'should seem not to have been
written down. By blurring the sense of tone,
a wider range of expression is possible, and
seemingly unrelated harmonies can be ap-
proached without awkward detour.' The
equivalent of musical tonality in plastic art is See Darby Bannard's article 'Hofmann's Rectangles', Matisse's sense of 'decoration' to apply to his own
Artforum, Summer 1969, which develops this question in mural-scale works is sheer casuistry. Matisse equated
a sense of structural syntax based on spatial
relation to Hofmann's later work, to which I have not `the expressive' with 'the decorative', thus giving
convergence. An alternative to this form has
done justice here. `decorative' a special meaning in relation to his work.
already been achieved for sculpture by 2 'Notes on American Painting of the Sixties,' Artforum, Stella's work is decorative in a more restricted sense, in
Anthony Caro, the abstractness of whose January 1970. that the colour has a designatory function within a
work lies in the transition from and transposi- 3 Poons' reported comment that the function of the design. The use of fluorescent paint endeavours to
avant garde is now to produce economic shock by disguise an essentially spatially inert format.
tion of elements which are vectors of possible
changes in style is somewhat double-edged, in view of John Hoyland, taking a lead from Rothko, has at times
change in a complex of thought and feeling
the ambivalent position in relation to Op Art, which been well placed in his work to achieve some kind of
which does not resolve itself in objectness, but his first style held. In side-stepping Olitski's way, he rapprochement between the spatial openness of
in discovery—a mental act of which the relinquished the opportunity of dealing what would American painting and the acid keenness and vigour
sculpture stands not as record, but as distillate. have been a greater aesthetic shock had he move in the of European colour, for they are surely not irreconcil-
opposite direction. It would, no doubt, have had com- able, but as yet his feeling for colour has kept within too
We are fortunate in Britain to have his
mercial repercussions too. narrow a range.
example so close at hand.
Stella also holds a problematical relationship to Matisse-
type opticality. His recent attempt to appropriate