Page 45 - Studio International - January 1971

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Claes Oldenburg rounded view with an energy proportionate eyes and another and another. . . . There is
Lipstick Monument to its quality. not a thing that can be done about it, so long
Yale University
And yet : 'To think and to say that there were as the objects are there to be looked at and
no London mists before Turner is very pretty, taken in. Meanwhile there is the present.
very poetic; but it is outrageous. It is an What we need is a new word. Art-worker
attack on individual liberty. It is forcing for artist isn't bad. A new word for art-work-
another to have the same dream as you have. in-the-present would be better still. It would
It was thus that after having seen Cezanne I be a step towards ridding ourselves of the
became one of those mental prisoners who miserable need to pre-empt time's work, not
believe they see Mont St Victoire. . . . Art nowadays by emulating the past but by
twists things; it stops you seeing things as they grinding away at a historical view of the
are.'4 It is a statement of almost pathological present, drudgery at which both right and
insecurity, but in its extreme way it gives reactive left grow old and sterile.
perfect expression to the resentment of the We should learn Oldenburg's lesson. We
anti-art left. Brainwashed by criticism, utterly should cleave not to the vertical pyramid but
conditioned in their relationship to pictures, to art on a horizontal plane. 'Instead of
no wonder they cry 'Smash the museums ! nourishing the primordial swarm . . . from
Smash the system!' The pathetic thing is that which grow a thousand flowers, cultural pro-
they see things in the same light as their paganda sterilizes it; . . . it plants four hy-
adversaries. Both the art-sick left and the art- drangeas made of coloured paper of which it
fat right see art as identical with its apparatus. is very proud and at the same time carefully
Only one side hates it and the other likes it. uproots everything around them.' Cultural
Critical mystification and market inflation go propaganda (the quotation is from Mao) is
hand in hand. Both wrap up, distance, dena- hard at it at this minute, sterilizing away. It is
ture, generalize the objects they handle. A five- coming equally from right and from left.
figure price for the work of a contemporary is
no less and no more a mystification of its I am not against art criticism. Not at all. Art
content than an article about that artist which is launched into time by criticism. How can
pins a certain significance on to it, or deals out we assess our own convictions, how can our
a five-card hand of stylistic and historical con- experiences have any depth unless we can
nections. Art history, crudely reflected in communicate them to others and take in
criticism, has done more to denature art, to theirs in return? However, I dream of a criti-
wipe off its smile, than anything else. Above cism which is based on looking and is almost
all I am thinking of the idea of 'historical entirely descriptive. It would take as its
relevance' (that is stylistic historical relevance) starting point the fact that painting and
Burning of the Books. No doubt this indicates as applied to the present. Inevitably this writing, looking and reading, are two distinct
my conditioning and my allegiance to an old creates fewer and fewer openings. Like the modes, and it would continually return to this
literary culture. But where would I have to plant geneticists who are now in a panic point. Its standards would not be drawn from
stand to see the occasion simply within the because they realize that the new miracle some bird's-eye view of contemporary history
framework of conditions that he, at that strains of wheat and rice are on a 'genetic (although it would be informative), but from
moment, was subverting? I might as well ask tightrope', critics wonder — or dare not ask— the quality of the writer's encounter with the
where I would have to stand to see Nurenburg why there is something isolated, rarefied about work and the problem of writing about it. It
as a camp Dada event. Life flailed into by the art that they discuss. We don't know what would meet the objectivity of the work with
art's freedom amok, is neither free nor truth- is going to happen next. That is precisely the its own objectivity. It would have to be equal
ful. There can be no limit to the assault. Love, point. That is what the imagination is about. to the work's subjectivity, meeting its fantasy
in whose name Wilde wrote the Soul of Man Life is where it is. Nor do we know for sure in mid-stream. It would allow the encounter
under Socialism, is the first victim. what will come to be seen as 'relevant' in our to question every precondition. The critic's
time. To speak for the future creatively is an task would not be to locate the work within a
The contradictions inherent in the functioning act of faith that any artist accepts responsibi- system, nor to explore some no-man's-land
of art in our society are nearly intolerable. No lity for, along with everything else. But this is between his idea of art and what he takes to be
wonder there are desperate reactions. But it is not prescriptive. Nothing is closed by it. To the artist's idea of art, but to account for his
surprising that in the exchanges of blame and speak for the future prescriptively, to say this journey through the work, step by step, fully,
guilt, the part that criticism has played is is a valid path, that is not, is to shape time into without stint. What do people think when
little spoken about. Criticism has consistently a kind of pyramid with the broad base of the they are looking at pictures and sculpture,
glossed over the way things really are, or if it past supporting the sharp point of the present. assuming that they are not rehearsing generali-
has pointed to them it has done so fatalistically. Then of course the future is very blank. zations about art ? How do they find words for
An incredible smoke screen has been wrapped The left is quite justified in loathing this mono- their sensations?
round art, a cocoon of 'values' that thickens lithic structure that historicist criticism has Such writing would need to be hard, dis-
almost visibly. Meanings become institutiona- foisted. It is not justified in accepting it as a ciplined, daring. It would need to find words
lized. A view of what an artist or a movement true picture. It is an academic view in that it for all the senses. It would have to agree to
consists of is rolled around, shaped, rounded merges and muddles the past and the present. extreme irrelevances, aberrations of attention.
off, and finally settles into a form that can be In practice there is only one process by which Silence. It would be a daunting project for
loosely agreed and forgotten. In some extra- we can be sure of the quality of a painting, writers and readers—not to mention editors.
ordinary way, this well-chewed version whether it will go on running or not, and that What I have in mind, however, would be
'becomes' the artist—even though anyone who is the passage of time. Art is being defined all about something real rather than some meta-
looks at his pictures discovers that the reverse the time, with the ticking of the clock, the physical entity—art—of which this picture or
happens, and that the picture evades a shuffle of feet, the restless work of one pair of that sculpture was a passing example. I
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