Page 33 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

Adam, Sr, would step down; Adam, Jr, other words which are magic-in-reverse and Guggenheim Museum in 1969 (Viking Compass
would step up. But the sons who step up in 1971 take life away. The 'Me Tarzan, you dead' Book, $3.35). It should be mandatory reading
are more likely to be, if not Cain and Abel, at syndrome is in full operation. for the plateau Beaubourg's jurymen, for it fizzes
any rate descendants of a different temper and Among the words that now take life away, with ideas, many of them none the less stirring
with quite other preoccupations. They are 'linear' holds a high place. Like the black spot for being mutually contradictory. Few of the
unlikely to want to do as their fathers did before in 'Treasure Island', it augurs doom. Linear contributors would have much time, I suspect,
them; and even if, exceptionally, they do have systems, linear thinking, linear education—all for the kind of museum-building which has
the same ideas they are unlikely to be able to are in disfavour. And where the Modern hitherto been regarded as normal and desirable:
put them into practice. The new art costs more; Museum is a holding institution, it is necessarily the new County Museum in Los Angeles, for
they themselves may have less money. The linear: a place in which one thing leads to instance, or even the intelligent solutions to
new art may be of an unbuyable sort; or the another. Now, to a certain extent, anti-linearity already formulated problems which can be
artist may refuse to sell it to them. The time is is a necessary reaction: it corresponds, for one found in Buffalo, Cleveland, and Oakland. In
now far distant when every purchase was thing, to something inherent in structuralizing— such matters the museum-man, like the
esteemed as a favour. the synchronic, as against the diachronic, view five-star general, often turns out to be fighting
Over and above all this is the fact that the of the world. Linearity is diachronic: concerned, the last war but one.
notion and, indeed, the very name of the in other words, with temporal succession. In Like every other great wave of feeling, the
Modern Museum are now out of favour. No most Modem Museums, for instance, events anti-linear, anti-elitist, anti-finite-object
sooner was the forty-years' dream of an ideal line up in order of time: Cezanne, Gauguin and campaign carries within elements of cant and
historical sequence of first-class works of art van Gogh are in Room I, the Fauves in Room fatuity. Reading the futurologists in the
within sight of fulfilment than people got up II, early Cubism in Room III, and so on. The art-magazines often reminds me of how Degas
and suggested that all the older, established train of modem-art history chugs along for ever said of a colleague 'such a tiresome fellow ! He
works should be sold off anyway. Even the new and ever, with Cezanne next to the locomotive will keep on inventing the umbrella.' So secret
young Director of the Modern Museum did and our contemporaries locked in the guard's art is the new thing ? Perhaps the news of
not commit himself one way or the other when van. If that's linearity, who can blame them if Duchamp's Etant donna . ., elaborated in
this idea was put to him. they want to get through to the restaurant car ? clandestinity between 1946 and 1966, has not
There are several reasons for this. We have, One way to get to eat is not to be on the yet reached these islands. So the idea of the
in respect of modem art, an economy of train at all: not, in other words, to make finite individual masterpiece as the culmination of art
abundance. It is very difficult for anyone under works of art which can be bought, sold, is out of date ? It is, admittedly, a long time
forty to imagine how scant, incomplete and possessed, and categorized once and for all. since Braque's post-war Ateliers were seen here;
erroneous was the information available to What if the finite commodity, 'art', were to be neither Rauschenberg's Ace (1962) nor Johns's
enthusiasts for modem art before 1939. Where replaced by the representation in model-form of According to What (1964) is everyday fare;
we trod marshlands, our juniors tread marble. on-going processes ? If those processes were Caro's Deep North (1969-70) was whisked away
Where we could see a canvas or two, here and really on-going—in a state of continual change, to America before people in London could see it.
there, and passed from hand to hand the only with or without the intervention of their Though different in all other respects, these
copy of 'Cahiers d'Art' within a hundred miles, audience—so much the better. Art would be for works had it in common that they were complex
our juniors have everything to hand. The everyone, and everyone would be an artist: and statements which took for granted a certain
present which once seemed formless, with that other black-spot word, 'elitist', could be historical continuity, a truth to inimitable
connections that could at best be groped for, reserved for the artists who still sent work to the private experience, and a readiness to accept the
has now turned into a past so comprehensively dealers. The artist would take his revenge on challenge of time. They were not made of ice, or
charted as to seem to gang up against a new the money-market, in the way that the of rotting cheese; they didn't change colour or
present. It is as constricting to know too much composer of aleatory music takes his revenge on shape when we looked at them; they resulted
about one's forbears as it is to know too little. the gramophone record. from a series of irreversible decisions. Like
History freezes over, like the Neva; and the This development came about just at the every other good work of art, they presented
young, fearing to become its prisoners, run for same time when linearity—the development, themselves as instruments of negotiation
the bank and pretend that the great river is no that is to say, of ordered collections based on the between human beings and their ambitions,
longer there. notion of temporal sequence in art-history — doubts, needs, anxieties and spheres of
This freezing-over of recent history is a became an economic impossibility. Even in ignorance. It is the grossest of errors to suppose
by-product of abundance. We know too much, Nordrhein-Westfalen, where Werner that the form of communication offered by
where lately we knew too little. The American Schmalenbach over the last decade has built one works of art of this order is what James Burnham
museum is like the American corporation: too of the great linear collections, there are limits to calls 'a contemplative, one-way process' : a work
large an establishment at the service of too few what can be done; elsewhere, linear collecting of art is, apart from anything else, the sum of
ideas. It can get to be a city within the city, could well come to a halt within the next year or what people have thought about it, and the
with all the neuroses of city-life to outweigh its two. As Pierre Schneider suggested lately in Modern Museum exists to preserve and protect
advantages. A generation which prizes the 'L'Express', we are approaching a point at which the works of art about which people have
guerilla above the five-star general is the life-span of a work of art will be the length of thought hardest and most deeply. No one can
antagonized by precisely the achievement for time it takes to make the tour of the world's doubt that within the next twenty years the
which a previous generation laboured Kunsthallen : the icon will give place to the conditions of life will undergo many a most
wholeheartedly: the Great Museum, the road-show. Even the Kunsthalle may turn out radical change, and that there will be a
Pentagon of art, with its staff of hundreds, its to be too formal, too restrictive, too inflexible: corresponding change in the demands which we
penetration into many departments of life, and art will become street theatre, field theatre, sea make upon art: the majestic individual, at this
its buildings which, though huge, are always theatre, sky theatre—until, as was suggested not time, is the one who takes up the challenge and
too small for its responsibilities. The new long ago, the ultimate exhibition takes place and goes out not for knowledge alone, but for
dream is the Arts Lab, where old people are the world is rolled flat. validity. The big single statement remains, in
seen off at the door. The Museum stands for A book which has much to say on all this and other words, the highest aim of art; and the
possession, the Arts Lab for participation; and was overdue for publication in this country is Modern Museum should be able—and
'participation' is one of the magic words, the 'On the Future of Art', a collection of seven encouraged—to contain it, no matter how
words that confer life, in the 197os, just as there lectures organized by Edward Fry for the daunting the architect's task. q
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