Page 13 - Studio International - December 1974

as William T. Wiley, and each as much as the 'art' terms — modernism unfolding in art's recent (namely Bush's, Dzubas's, Motherwell's, and
other, although each in different ways. history; a taste-criticism which attends some others') is that which openly uses figural
Geographic distance and cultural exclusively to the formal properties of artworks drawing and depicted shape, containing and
differentiation do not originate provincialism, plus lip-service to 'feeling'; a total rejection of using its expressive potential now that
they increase and complicate it. Imitativeness any other content and all context; an ascription modularity seems more or less exhausted and
per se can be no bad thing, but it tends to occur of increasing autonomy to the nature of each that the path of all-over painterliness seems
against a background of a long history of past separate art — all these entail corresponding increasingly to be blocked by the very stature
compromises — interspersed, perhaps, with social and ethical commitments. of Olitski's art.' (p.7)
occasional moments of past glory (as in English Portrait of a formalist: you surrender In other words, the framework is that of
art, unlike that of, say, Australia). independence as to the basic framework within autonomy (i.e. modernism); the stylistic cycle
There is no single way out of the provincialist which your judgement functions, i.e. it is yours has predetermined 'painterliness' for the
bind. Its nature is not that of a problem, only in the details. You service the continuance seventies (according to the fifteen-year turnover
admitting thereby of a solution, however of an unabashedly bourgeois art market system, from 'linear' to 'painterly' which Clement
difficult. Rather, it constitutes a problematic, especially the dominance of the Emmerich- Greenberg laid out in his 1968 Power Lecture
a developing situation of continual struggle Rubin stable. You surrender your Lecture [4]); and within that your choice has
wherein options (alternative then oppositional responsibilities to your own culture in favour of to be between Olitski and Bush. So, whereas
structures) have to be generated — if they can the continuing repressiveness of the super-star many New York and London painters have gone
at all — in dialectical opposition to all aspects of hierarchization of the New York artworld. You for Olitski, Elderfield and a few others have
the metropolitan-provincial model of culture. lose focus on the particularity of your daily life, gone for Bush. Put this way, the essential
As a minimum beginning, then, we have to your culturing against and with your triviality of the choice becomes obvious enough.
construct a clear, unkowtowing and, above all, enculturation, and abnegate yourself in service As a critic, Elderfield behaves in the same
useful view of what is going on in New York art. to a fantastical metaphysical entity 'Art' — the way. The main burden of his argument in the
It is precisely this which the July-August issue terms of which are given, the progress of which 'High Modern' essay — that modernist painting
of Studio does not provide. Its editor, John is predestined. Praxis becomes an impossibility; has recently achieved its full autonomy —
Elderfield, is a joiner. And so are the majority specialization acquires its own inherent, self- amounts only to typical discipleship: he has
of the abstract painters in the 'British Painting sustaining value; your conformist behaviour taken a fundamental element of his master's
74' show. We are witnessing an up-dating of the becomes invisible to you; your going-on theory and exaggerated, extended it, by
'American invasion' of the late 1950s — early becomes a tissue of convenient mythologies ... pronouncing it fulfilled. It is fulfilled, for him,
1960s, and among these painters the 'British You might, perhaps, attain the 'freedom' which above all in Louis's Unfurleds. These achieve
response' is even more servile than it was then.[2] release from essential doubt can bring, but you 'a reconciliation of figural drawing [now Bush]
In his Foreword, Elderfield is obliged to cannot escape those occasional glimpses that with all-over surface [now Olitski] ',surpassing
acknowledge that his 'American Painting your fabric is illusory. [3] Pollock thereby and, with the addition of
1962-74' constitutes a 'fraction of current Without wishing to single out John Elderfield 'superior' colour, make Louis perhaps 'the best
painting'. But, he adds, it is the fraction on as a scapegoat for the 'errors' of others, it is of all American painters'. [5] This, again
which painting as such depends for 'its clear that, as a painter, his accomplishment is typically, reconstructs the art of a member of
continuing existence as a high art' (p.2). The merely that of a stiffened, tentative imitation the modernist pantheon in terms of current
implication here and throughout is that this is of the anyway mediocre Jack Bush. Some formal needs, but the rhetorical style attempts
'the best', 'the most ambitious', 'the definitive' sentences towards the end of his introductory to be that of giving in objective account of a
painting of our time. For a critic who, four essay 'High Modern: an introduction to post- historical fact allied to an objective ascription
years ago, wrote some original articles on Dada Pollock painting in America' are revealing: of value.
and Constructivism, such an affirmation of his 'It was left to the modularity of 'sixties painting Another ethical question concerns the
commitment to painting as a priori and and then to the "emptiness" of subsequent quality of emotional life which these sorts of
ultimately a 'high art' is a saddening shift in painterliness to fully establish the genre of an accounting imply. Elderfield is curiously
ideology. autonomous abstract art. This said, however, revealing on this topic as well, and is, again, a
The commitment is ideological because its some of the most ambitious of current painting prototypical modernist in the way he approaches

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