Page 15 - Studio International - December 1974

Pollock, Smith and Hofmann) not only has to (Left) Peter Joseph Cream Colour with Black 1974
have the listed qualities and be relevant to Acrylic on canvas, 105 x 66 in.
(Below) Leon Kossoff Children's Swimming Pool
industrial society, it also 'at the same time
Autumn 19 72
maintains and asserts itself exclusively as art' Oil on board, 72 x 84 in.
(Centre) Basil Beattie Reds 1973
(p. 30). This goes beyond dialectic, far into
Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 168 in.
impossibility. The 1947 essay as a whole shows (Bottom) John Copnall Untitled 1974
Acrylic on cotton duck, 99 x 145 in.
Greenberg's struggle to reconcile two mutually-
exclusive starting-points for art: that art should
function for its own sake within an avant-garde
tradition deriving from Cubism, and that art
requires a broad social relevance, no matter
how indirect. His writings for the Partisan
Review throughout 1948 betray the beginnings
of his gradual surrender of the latter to the
former — a process which, in "American-type"
Painting' 1955, [12] is complete and has
remained so subsequently. In 1945-7, however,
his efforts at fusing the two led him to construe
Pollock as attempting the same thing: thus the
odd hybrid of emotions as pictorial structure.
Having dropped all claims to social relevance,
having affirmed as the central principle the ever-
developing autonomy of 'modernist art',
Greenberg and the Group [13] have left
themselves with vague allusions to intensity and
quality of 'feeling' as the sole contextual,
referential property of the art they make and
admire. But even this 'feeling' has, as we have
seen, to be 'aesthetic' (Bell), 'connected with
painting itself' (Fried), 'start out pictorially'
(Greenberg), 'connected with the safe-guarding
of art' (Elderfield), etc., etc.
Elderfield's one faintly new emphasis in his
`High Modern' essay turns on a kaleidoscope of
ellipsii. He goes slightly beyond his mentor in
claiming that our picking out the structure in an
artwork does not merely provide us with grounds
for evaluation, it is itself to evaluate. And it is
so sufficiently. The reason for this, he suggests,
is that there must be some doubt about others
failing or refusing to see `the precise and
particular configurations we claim as structural,
and therefore of primary importance' (p. 5).
The last point gives away the rhetorical level
on which Elderfield sees criticism functioning.
The main thrust of his point here does reflect
the work of Hanson and others on the theory-
ladenness of all observation, but manages to
reverse its import. In current philosophy of
science, it is the relativity of the logical status of
the observer and the observed that is being
underlined — the impossibility of 'objectivity',
of wertfrei knowing. [14]
Describing is indeed a form of valuing (or,
more precisely, certain conditioned and
adopted preferential patterns decisively inflect
our very ways of seeing, and thus what we see),
but describing is not only valuing. And valuing
does not end with describing (because other
patterns are employed in relating what we are
seeing to our sets of value-preferences). To
Elderfield, valuing is picking out structure and
picking out structure just is to evaluate. There
are no external references which even hint at
what valuing might be — and there is no
suggestion that non-evaluative procedures might
influence the way we pick out structures. This
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