Page 55 - Studio International - May 1972

New York
commentary
THE WHITNEY ANNUAL; WALTER DARBY BANNARD
AT RUBIN; SUZI GABLIK AT TERRY DINTENFASS
(UNTIL 26 MAY)
A mood of uneasy expectancy has hung over the
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New York art scene this season. Everyone seems
to have been waiting to see who would make the
next important artistic move; so far no one has
recognisably made it. (The interesting
assumption operating is that the next crucial
aesthetic advance will be instantly recognizable
as such, or at least that one won't fail to hear
about it. Perhaps the clear feeling of community
among artists here accounts for this confidence.)
As the season wears on, I've had the feeling that
all the anticipation in the air might be a kind of
sublimation of the political energy that surfaced
among artists here last year. Certain artists
seemed to feel last season that a political view of
the way the art world operates would more or
less automatically disclose alternative
possibilities. So a lot of people got politicised in
one way or another but nothing much came of it,
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as far as the art public could tell. In the spring
Hans Haacke assembled the only truly successful
political work I heard about all year, a piece
documenting the ownership of some squalid
New York slum tenements for his show at the
Guggenheim. The museum's response was to
cancel the show. But the incident got a lot of
coverage and the piece had an impact anyway;
conceptual art shown in New York since then
has looked really evasive, with the exception of
a powerful piece by Dennis Oppenheim this
past autumn involving attack dogs.
My sense is that the prevailing anticipation
felt here during the present season has a
particular, if bleak, hope behind it. Artists are
still dissatisfied with the way art enters the
world, so to speak; that might be a way of
summarising last season's common political
sentiment. What they are really hoping for, I
think, is a change in the circumstances that
make artistic intelligence register according to
the familiar cycle of innovation and
assimilation. What people would really like to
see, perhaps, is a new kind of innovation, one
that would threaten, among other things, the
entrenched system of dealership.
Some of the frustration of political action that
occurred last season was due to the artists'
inability to align political purpose with what
they believed to be good art. Art and politics are
both such highly articulated areas and both are
so intolerant of compromise that it is difficult to
picture political content in sophisticated works of
art. Haacke is about the only one who seems to be
able to incorporate explicit political matter into
work that is not trivial nor shrill nor offensively
personal. Earthworks, conceptualism, body art
and such frequently carried political
implications, but those implications have proved
for the most part not to be transferable. Only
Carl Andre seems to have noticed that political
content can be discovered within what are
ostensibly purely aesthetic issues. Andre seems
to have reached a temporary dead end (his show
this spring was comprised of floor pieces
apparently made out of the elements of his work
in last spring's Guggenheim International). But
his work has been part of an ongoing inquiry
into the nature of the spectator himself; and one
way of describing that inquiry is say that it poses
the question ' "who" sees ?' So far Andre has
been the only one to acknowledge the political
overtone of that philosophical question, and he
no longer seems to know quite what to do with
it. But I think if the hoped-for reconception of
innovation takes place, it will occur in response
to this sort of issue and will probably occur
gradually (since suddenness is one of the features
of innovation at present). And I think that what
may be political about art (not just about the art
world) may become clearer at the same time,
because some of the best recent work done here
has begun to deal with the relations among
spectators, not just the relation between
spectator and object or event. For the time
being, though, one doesn't hear much talk of art
and politics; that was last year's hassle. In a
way, the Haacke incident may have relieved
everyone of the need to appear politically
motivated; it provided an outlet for specifically
political sentiments, and the current discontents
are not cast in those terms.
The situation I've been describing is
something like the background for experiences
of new art in New York this season, or for my
experience of it at least. The Whitney Annual,
this year a painting show, has become the
occasion to test one's responses not just to new
painting, but to formalist criticism. The Annual
this year brings together 132 new paintings by as
many artists, forming an exhibition about which
it is difficult to say anything clearly, even
something stupid. Just about everyone tends to
see his own pet notions about painting confirmed
in the Annual. But what it makes the critic wish
for is a consistent notion of quality. And since
the formalist criticism pre-eminent here during
the past decade offers at least a consistent sense
of how quality is achieved, one's attitude
toward that critical mode is tweaked at the
Annual. It seems that the formalist critic
already asks the question that the Annual almost
coercively raises: how much does the definition
(that is, the self-definition) of painting matter to
you ? Although the Whitney always
perfunctorily celebrates the variety of work in its
Annuals, the cumulative effect of that variety is
to drive home the modernist notion of the
constraints on painting. Insofar as the self-
definition of painting makes sense, it cannot be
arbitrary; any claim a picture makes on behalf of
painting in general must be justifiable in terms
of its own claim to be a painting. (And the use of
the word 'claim' in formalist criticism is not
casual.) The stringency of formalist critical
attitudes becomes appealing once more because
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