Page 62 - Studio International - October 1970

perception takes on the secondary status of sible to fulfil with absolute clarity the Euro- exclude every other emotion which was per-
relativity along with thing perception. Gestalt pean nostalgia for order and substance. haps to say that it was no emotion at all. The
psychology came about when it did because A recent exhibition which summarized a extensions are endless and I find them end-
man was able to see for the first time that large area of Modern American Art carried lessly entertaining but the transition to the
there were gaps in the circles. the title of 'The Art of the Real'. One work paintings is tenuous. They consist of can-
Impressionist and post-impressionist painting by sculptor Tony Smith, a 6-foot cube of vases five feet square, at first glance a uniform
were the work of amateurs living on private steel, may serve to indicate the nature of the black all over surrounded by a black frame.
incomes who symbolically failed to find a claim. A geometric figure as pure as the art of Only on closer inspection do the nicest dis-
respectable relationship to society. Things man can make it establishes the three dimen- tinctions of colour within the black become
lost their meaning for people who could see sions of a traditionally material world. As it perceptible and a symmetrical sub-division
only the light which passed through the lens stood in the grounds of the Tate Gallery in into nine 1-foot-8-inch squares. The dictum
of the eye. In that experience there was no the English London, I was impressed by the `Less equals more' guided Ad Reinhardt in
trace of the abstractions of geometry. The assertiveness of its presence in the context of his quest for an untainted art. Beyond him it
term abstraction as first systematically de- the more complex forms of classicizing archi- has echoes in the label 'Minimal Art'. Perhaps
veloped in an art context by Worringer,6 tecture in stone and red brick and cars of the meaning of Ad Reinhardt becomes clearest
implied not a loss of figurative content so every current style tethered to parking metres. if one simply examines what he was left with,
much as a retreat into inner form-creating The very railings of the enclosure and the an effectively blank canvas (in such symbolic
processes, as opposed to empathy which slight undulations of the lawn revealed un- context the change from white to black is
generalizes the responses of objective experi- expected complexities. One 6-foot cube must hardly significant) yet embodying an orderly,
ence. When Kandinsky produced almost the be much the same as another, but in its all- regular, balanced system of co-ordinates. He
first paintings free from representational con- pervading presence one attains a heightened is left too with the word 'Art'. Ad Reinhardt
tent, he did so because things had lost their awareness of the distinguishing idiosyn- insisted that Art had always been the same in
credibility in a world of atom-splitting science. cracies of other forms that are not all the same; all ages and that artists and their aims had
In his concrete art of coloured paints and above all one feels one's own physical reality always been the same. He held to this view at
canvas he discovered configurations which in relation to it. the expense of disclaiming virtually every
have more of the structure of landscapes than Another American artist who made a gigantic artist but himself. In Europe words were dis-
the actual landscapes he painted earlier. At a impact on England, was represented in this credited along with things and forms. His
later stage the abstractions of geometry exhibition too, though hardly given the affirmation of the absolute validity of so
appeared too. Paradoxically his art becomes a prominence an English audience might have emotionally-charged a word as Art is perhaps
concrete fantasy inventing deceptive stimuli expected. Ad Reinhardt evokes the most what strikes the most nostalgic note in Euro-
to accommodate a discredited process of emotionally charged of European nostalgias, pean ears, recalling a half-imaginary age of
knowledge. for a pure art devoid of all surplus external lost innocence.
If Europeans admire American art I suspect trappings. In an interview with a colleague of What makes Ad Reindhart so modern in spite
it is not at all because they agree with its mine from Leeds, John Jones, he attained the of this is that with his attainment of the final
ideological implications, but because in the ultimate definition 'Art is not everything that formulation of Art, it becomes impossible for
atmosphere of the desert metaphor, it is pos- is not Art.'7 Artistic emotion for him must him to do anything else. The ultimate art