Page 61 - Studio International - October 1970

were not considered. Formally they do not side of the Atlantic. The quantitative view of
exist. qualifications follows naturally. In England
Canadians I met on my first visit commented the class one attains in one's first degree is a
that in Britain every inch was accounted for. permanent stamp of one's measure of in-
What struck me in Canada was not the absence equality. In North America, the number of
of any material thing but the great quan- degrees and the number of courses are given
tity of indefinable nothingness in between. far more attention. Many university trans-
Not all the white in abstract expressionist scripts make no mention of grades at all.
painting is blank ground. With Bradley Jasper Johns was also asked by a critic
Tomlin whom Lawrence Gowing cites fre- whether he used the letter types in his paint-
quently, it is more often imposed as a final ings because he liked them or 'because that is
touch over a system of rectilinear brush- how the stencils come'. He replied, 'But that is
strokes which move towards a tight and final what I like about them, that they come that
integration. At the last, the white touches way.'5
express a yearning for the white that was at In Britain, perhaps in Europe generally,
the beginning. American art is regarded more highly than
The so-called open system of Guelph's the native product. The Abstract Expres-
academic programmes is not unlike this. sionists achieved serious attention from British
Coming from an English system I found the critics like Patrick Heron a fair time before
complexity of its structures terrifying. The the Americans began to take notice, and
code-numbering of subjects, levels and courses English Colleges of Art have adjusted their
was completely unfamiliar as was the system teaching so completely to what they conceive
There comes a great silence which materially of credits which standardized their value. to be the meaning of American art that visitors
represented is like a cold indestructible wall The fact that the student is allowed to choose to American schools are almost invariably
going on into the infinite. White therefore which of these boxes to sit in is only a com- shocked to find how old-fashioned it all is.
acts upon our psyche as a great, absolute parative freedom. The amount of time that What then does Europe see in American art?
silence, like the pauses in music that tempor- the student has completely to himself is very To fly back across the Atlantic is to substitute
arily break the melody. It is not a dead silence, much less than in any English programme of being lost in a desert for being lost in a maze.
but one pregnant with possibilities. White has which I have experience. The progressive alienation of man from his
the appeal of the nothingness that is before One of the best-known of Jasper John's environment which is the underlying force
birth, of the world in the ice age.' 3 paintings takes the form of a target above behind European Modern Art results from
The gaps of blank white canvas showing which is a row of boxes with half casts of heads difficulties of complexity, and even in its
through between the splashes of Pollock's in them. Asked by a critic why he cut the attempts to escape, European Art epitomizes
paint become, from the European standpoint, heads in half, he replied, 'Because they that complexity when compared with Ameri-
more important than the image they foil. An wouldn't have fitted into the boxes ...'4 can equivalents. The difference between a
English critic of Kandinsky's generation, Standardization is a concomitant of the maze and a desert is that it does not help to
Roger Fry, always insisted that the spaces notion of equality. I doubt if any Englishman draw lines in it, they lose their utility after the
between objects were as important as the really believes in quite the same literal sense first bend in the hedge. As European man re-
objects themselves, the artist should give at as Americans that all men are equal. I suspect coils into himself it is not only the information
least as much attention to them. The gaps that it is to give credibility to the American content of perception which melts into sensa-
between Pollock's paint evoke the American belief in equality that first-class marks are tion, the whole organizing process of experi-
ethos so powerfully precisely because they made so very much easier to attain on this ence becomes self-evidently subjective. Form