Postscript

THE DUB FACTOR
1992/3

From cradle to grave the black diaspora artist is haunted by originality informed by an historical memory of the Middle Passage and slavery mostly in the New World. Torn by reminders of the need for revenge and a driven desperate love of the enemy. In hot embrace through which all instincts towards revenge are consumed, some human secreted chemistry turns innocent anger to confusion equally innocent. Only to be replaced by a sometimes difficult and dangerous search for truth; truth to oneself. Picking out the brighter selves from the tangle of mundane everyday, the works made under this pressure often return to a childhood that persists like a memory of the intolerable wise wound from which it sprang. One aspect of this originality is its capacity to assimilate and to challenge the romantic.

Twenty years ago Clement Greenberg said to me that it takes three generations of middle class breeding for a people to produce individuals with the ability to make good art; or words to that effect. In our line of work these things count but they don't always pan out the way the pundits claim, besides which Greenberg is not the only one to hold such opinions. These sentiments are more given to the way English society ineluctably conducts itself. And anyway artists are notorious mould breakers.

It has also been suggested that the language of art, today, appears totally inadequate for conveying the experience of horrors such as the Holocaust and white man's enslavement of black people in the New World. And to which only silence can be a fitting tribute. But herein is a perceived misunderstanding of the traditions of painting and sculpture where the language of these disciplines either lost, disclaimed or simply abandoned to photography and the cinema any claim to convey the utterly base nature of such man made, human engineered and deliberately induced disasters and destruction. Quite simply as painters and sculptors we are into art's power to redeem and transform this burden which is a much more modest task, yet paradoxically is an additional and greater challenge.

Given the current funereal atmosphere in Britain, with the deadly lawlessness in the City of London during recent time: Barlow Clowes, BCCI, Guiness, Lloyds and currently Robert Maxwell, younger black artists and art workers like Eddie Chambers and his friends must, to my mind, be saluted. You can't make art without money and the prevailing odium generated by the deservedly bad publicity attendant on the rotten state of affairs in London, tends to affect adversely the market place machinations of all but a very few artists livelihoods; if you're dead and famous the market for your production is a good deal more secure. Last on the list of purchases for the consumer society are fine art pictures and sculptures, and during difficult times such like "luxury" items are not on the list at all.

Difficulties for me arise when works of art however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals become the products of collective negotiation and exchange. Even before the Hayward Gallery exhibition "The Other Story" had closed here in London over two and a half years ago, one of the organisers was overheard declaring that, after this show, Black Art which the exhibition was partly intending to help establish, was finished. To my ears this was shocking. Although never an advocate, believer or supporter of this loudly proclaimed and aggressively debated new kind of art heard of throughout the Western Hemisphere, the United States, Europe and perhaps even in Africa, the way in which it came across to me sounded as though the intention was to marginalise the efforts of artists who happened to be black. Or to put it another way, works made by African-somethings: African Americans, African Brits [Irish, Scots, Welsh]. Indeed West Indians of African descent. Diaspora blacks. How wrong can one be. My listening must have been informed by the paranoia about which my friends are endlessly tolerant.

It transpires the younger artists themselves were already in possession of the awareness that Black Art as a notion was historically insupportable; or at least that a certain kind of illustrative figuration learned in the illustration and Graphic Design departments of U.K. art schools, featuring fashionable black history and its gallery of heroes and heroines, hardly stood out as arresting images alongside Classical African Art, nineteenth and early twentieth century Oceanic Art, the pictures of Delacroix,Gericault, Goya and even Daumier. That all the black art to be seen consisted of badly drawn black people type faces and slogans derived from unquestioned generalisation given to the world of advertising, commercial promotion and minstrelsy, seemed not to have occurred to their makers. And within a few years of "The Other Story" a change. Yet artists trying to make pictures of a personal and specific nature must always have been there in the existing art circles around the U.K. Image makers in the visual fine arts who hopelessly embraced the rod delivering indiscriminately that deeply emotionally wounding lash that said they were slavishly succumbing to formalist modernism, a white man's notion if there ever was one.

To my certain knowledge Anthony Daley has been trying to create original work, and now, though new to me, Eddie Chambers has introduced me to the things of two painters who also happen to be of African West Indian descent. It is clear that Tony Daley, Sylbert Bolton and David Sommerville [and perhaps many others yet to come forward] are wrestling with the continuingly elusive notion of a specific location between motif, theme and archetype within the activity of painting itself. It is as if, on the wing, the artworks we expect them to produce must be touched by an impulse to serve a new order of cultural coherence. That they fail, in the eyes of the antipathetic undiscerning other, may not be cause for celebration; but is hardly cause for regret. This is a testing time; time when such artists, and the ones to come, must test their efforts alongside the great works in the museums; to self-sustaining and lofty traditions and not be afraid of such like confrontations but respond with critical perception; with the will, the willingness to create as good when not better. And to turn away from fashion and flavour of the month type local success, where claims for universal validity deny to others first order products of the human intellect while failing themselves by the very criteria they invoke. Where, in other words, the yardstick by which achievement is measured is no longer about excellence but whether it's British.

Recently it was put to me much more clearly than my own fumblings in this direction have done, that comparisons between black musicians and painters or sculptors tend to be pernicious. Stanley Whitney the African-American painter and printmaker from Philadelphia, who begins teaching at the American School in Rome this autumn, talks about lifestyle. Mr. Whitney admits parallels in drive, humour, innovation and acute technical grasp of the essential disciplines. But insists that the material and physical apparatus which painting and sculpture traditionally entail, separates us for better or for worse from musicians. Despite the known fact that African-American artists aspire through their exertions to create works of equal power to their brothers and sisters in jazz.

Some Notes Towards An Exhibition of African American Abstract Art.

THE SEARCH FOR FREEDOM: AFRICAN AMERICAN ABSTRACT PAINTING 1945-1975
Exhibition held at Kenkeleba Gallery, 1991

It's doubtful whether by declaring that the discussion 'Black Art' is moribund will make it go away. Vanish! And so lighten a burden which often seems, in its onerousness, well night unbearable to those of us as artists, wh also happen to be ethnically African in origin. Yet the ramifications of Black art appear to me somewhat as institutionalized civil war. It's an enduring irony that in a democratic republic such as is the current United States of America this aberrant, racist, rubbish continues to gain legality. Black art is about repression. Great, even good art is ever about distinction and quality inspired by and wrought through the strict confines of a given discipline. Quality from Black people: made by the hands and from the minds of able, stirring, revolutionary African Americans exists, in this land of dreams and continuing promise. Of this fact there can be little doubt, and searching for Black art will have contributed to the discovery of some of these treasures.

However, obvious instability, irresolution and weakness visits all discussion on Black art, a slip, a conceptual fault in all talk about art in general as it concerns and involves Blacks, and also discourse about Blacks doing art in particular, a particular kind of visual art, such as painting or sculpture. Following from culpable reporting of what these Black people are actually doing has come and, inevitably, unsteady grasp of an at once bold, changing and fragile Black temperament. This much is revealed in an overall reservation to African American abstract art. An art, which even in the variety of skills involved, is never looking, through its productions, for reminders of life; its practitioners tend more to responding inside pulsating living forces through each individual medium. As though egressing like the Cimmerian veins and tributaries of a very great river, flowing every which way into histories and pasts spread wide; African American abstract art is hybridization on the very outer reaches -constituted, as it must be, from a bewildering range of original human types -locked into a world where gender multiplied by tincture and grace addresses the order of living day.

Trouble arises along these varied lines, these compelling if dizzying directions, where real endeavor abuts historical territory and zones that remain open and free for all to enjoy, to exploit and to use, including whites, in America. Suffice it to say that in this fraught maze any argument is bound to be obscured when given in a series of pictures transformed by a narrative carrying other burdens besides predication. For Black art also impairs the traditional soothing which art and culture administers in the name of consesus, by too manifest a political message stressing fundamental differences in ethnic outlook.

Tearing asunder, the scene is further compounded by recent violent political upsurge of feminism. A special intimacy, one we might say very close to the art making activity, has been undermined. And my understanding is this exhibition is meant for the first time to locate that landscape, accurately described, of Black temperament to a real firmament in its attempt to establish quality from existing art productions by Black people across age and gender divides in America.

It's elementary to perceive how past conditions in America made it impossible to combine for political action. Although African American culture cannot be thought entirely independent of those general and economic influences. But the old Black art notion is not really graspable except in its own terms; it has autonomy represented by its radical venerable assumptions and exercised by the brute fact that it is not white. Hurt feelings never made art which is about celebration, and at this point we were left with nothing so much as spectacle; much entertainment, little joy, no satisfaction.

American Black people never had the political clout to impose their vision on American culture, yet ineluctably, this same vision has pawkily done so in music and style. Whereas the ideology of utilitarianism is the origin of American states' relations and dealings with Blacks, randomly if not calculatedly seeing in Black life only obedience to necessity and the satisfaction of elementary vital needs. Original and creative Black have resisted the imposition, finding it senile and spiritually corrosive.

In my time the "Harlem on My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1968 opened a can of worms into the smooth running of culture in New York City; though essentially it was a media event and obviously it was not an art exhibition. Newspaper reports commented harshly that the show stressed information and communication over art and culture. This resulted in cunning, neurotic interference in Black and Jewish community bonding where a showing of painting and sculpture would not have, and would have served merely to add ginger to an already pretty hot discussion on the subject of Black artists and their position in American mainstream society. And in my mind served to agitate two peoples who for decades had had something of an alliance. Even if it remains true that Black people continue to believe themselves mortgaged, as being in hock to the system.

That same year 1968, the African American curator and historian Henri Ghent, who was then the director of the Brooklyn Museum's Coommunity Gallery, organized a show uptown at the newly created Studio Museum on 125 th Street and 5 th Avenue in Harlem. The exhibition "Invisible Black Artists of the Thirties," was intended as a counter show to the Whitney Museum's "The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America," also of the same time frame. Mr. Ghent was later to put together an exhibition "Eight Afro-American Artists" for Switzerland in 1971.

As the politics of protest dominated the thinking of the early sixties official establishment, the young and forward-looking Kennedys had died and it was Lyndon Johnson's, Texas, White House that prevailed. Political survival adressed the conditions of the day, not ideals, not any theory. After all LBJ had bested the allegedly racist South West, but he was no less a racist himself.

When word filtered down with concerns for the given culture and its art world, things took a different shape. Museum people, collectors, salesroom bods and educators were more familiar and therefore more receptive to ideas. Militant art workers like Benny Amdrews came to prominence and were celebrated, and Mr. Andrews' art was lauded by critics in the August, New York Times as well as other publications.

The situation forced certain art making acts for African American artists that smacked of expedience under the banner of Black art. My own work which had not yet developed into abstraction, could be said to fall into this trap. My pictures were concerned with map making and an attempt, by me, to understand my personal and historical journey across the Middle Passage. Black artists were not to be outdone in the mainstream of art trends which most Black artists then felt they were not a part of. William T. Williams made a trough for Larry Rivers, a hog trough, welded steel minimal art which it was hoped they could both puke in. Peter Bradley's Marcus Garvey was tampered with by, it is claimed, Larry Rivers and or his assistants, who placed glossy, grainy advertising photographs on an original piece of Bradley's sculpture; newspaper snaps of the fiery West Indian leader in his many costumes. And a growing number of African American or Black art shows, up and down the country, catered to this; and even worse perpetuated the consistent lowering of artistic standards. A move clearly assumed by some museums in attempting to accommodate works by Blacks. In fact, those Black artists and their sponsors did more to help themselves individually than their less politico-system oriented brothers who were making works that appeared too lack ethnic commitment; even if socially their behavior did. From then popular current talk, Peter Bradley and Joe Overstreet were pariahs; regarded as bad boys, "niggers" in the manner of the late great Bob Thompson. And as a result more acceptable to hip whites, part of the white/Negro syndrome. A right double bind.

Yet, all the discerning in the African American community knew this said social, rather anti-social posturing was consistent with a clear history of anarchism given to Black radical behavior, American radical behavior in the Western tradition. Overstreet was seen as from the rough mean streets of New York City's Lower East Side; but Peter Bradley, a Yale graduate with something of an education in classical African art, and who at the time worked in an esteemed Madison Avenue gallery dealing blue chip early 20 th centurt European expressionist art, like Chaim Soutine, Bradley appeared as something of a nine day wonder.

At the same time there could be no doubt of the quality of the art productions from these two artists. Overstreet more consistently, but Bradley whenever he did his pictures they looked good. And Bradley possessed, moreover, a youthful cunning professional sense that often seemed theatrical. More, perhaps, in tune with what passed in the white world; Norman Mailer's ever so notorious Advertisement for Myself.

Neither Bradley's nor Overstreet's work was included in "5+1" at Stony Brook and Princeton in 1969, a first attempt by me in the struggle, and which was helped by the good offices of Lawerence Alloway and Sam Hunter. Bradley and Overstreet may have scorned us. No. Me, the English nigger. "5+1" consisted of antagonist pairs. Hot/cold, moist/dry. Bill williams, Mel Edwards; Al Loving, Jack Whitten. A convenient grouping of your all male club. Drawing attention, now in retrospect that show clearly reveals our, then, innocence.

What all are now aware of is that making essential and significant art in any culture is an urgent political business; at least it is of intense moment to our controllers, leaders and masters. Even if sadly, these people are not our betters; people who alas must fly the flag. And the thing was out about quality in Black artist's work.

Come the seventies exhibitions such as "Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston curated by Barry Gaither minding solely for an all Black viewing public, appeared to be mistaking the productions of vernacular culture for high art. Where in a museum setting [any museum, ethnographic or other] the works they tended t show could not compare with classical African art or contemporary works of an advanced order made across the board by Blacks as well as whites.

The most courageous if not, as it turned out, the most sensitive attempt to put flesh on the bare bones of the controversy about the position of Black artists [painters and sculptors] on the American scene was, of course by a white artist, Larry Rivers. It's well to remind ourselves what brought to a head the simmering and unchecked resentments below what in the end was an exhibition titled, "Some American History."

Bill Williams' cousin Walter Jones published an article in Arts magazine titled "Larry Ocean Swims the Nile." Cousin Walter set about Rivers with vitroil and what was considered an "undiscerning and narrow" aspect. And this even before the show was complete and mounted at Rice University in Texas under the auspices of the De Menil Foundation in February, 1971.

But the whole attempt turned to disaster through the fact that Rivers, who was commissioned by the De Menils to do an exhibition, took upon himself, rightly, to make most of the pieces. Of course, some of it was about money. The Black artists involved grumbled about being used by Rivers, and about how much more he, Rivers, got than they did. The real tragedy remains two fold. First, attitudes soured art performance; and the show ended up looking like inside the most awful musty ethnographic museum display which had since post-colonial late 1950s never seen the light of day. And second, some of the artists in trying to undermine and to upstage Rivers and his white studio assistants' work, fell short of their best.

An exception was Joe Overstreet's stark New Jemima depicting a Black woman, her tommy gun ablaze in vivid popular image style. Coupled with this, Rivers, whose intention appeared to be to assemble a comprehensive overview of most of the talented younger Black artists around, found that several artists refused his invitation. He thus in a passionate overkill ended up rather manic in his attempt to do justice to the subject matter. The Black artists he invited were not into narrative vernacular but formalist abstract artists by intent and determination, as well as militant Afrocentric Black activists. This combination overbalanced the entire project and led Rivers to compensate by taking up the challenge he himself threw down. Besides which Rivers' American history is rather different from the American history of the gifted Black artists he tried to employ.

By the early seventies, now open-minded curatorial staff at the most forward looking museums were looking too at quality from African American artists. Offering firm commitment to redress the balance in favor of works by those coming forward. The then newly built Whitney Museum of American Art was an obvious target. The first artist mentioned by Robert M. Doty in his catalogue essay for his 1971 "Contemporary Black Artists in America" exhibition is Joe Overstreet. Mr. Doty, an early admirer of Mr. Overstreet's work, chose the pieces. But in this show, as hung, there was not a single piece by J. Overstreet. And Bradley's work was not seen in any of the Whitney Annuals and subsequent Biennials, until 1973. And then only through the lobbying and good offices of Mr. Kenworth Moffett, who by this time was curator of modern and contemporary works at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. In those days Mr. Moffett was considered a Greenberger, but he also happens to be an authority on the 19 th century German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe. Mr. Moffett is also a champion of the radical abstract art of Jackson Pollock through to David Smith, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland.

As the situation began to change there appeared beginning with Mr. Doty's show of 1971, at the Whitney Museum, outstanding women artists like Howardena Pindell. With the advent of Mr. Doty's show, the dominant male preserve seemed broken. It was a false dawn. Marcia Tucker, easily the most acute and willing curator around then, was sacked. Mainstream artistic activity coopted a large following from Blacks and it did seem for a brief moment that the day of the Black artist and Black art had come. What began as an issue oriented quarrel settled into a fierce and continuing debate about quality.

The courage of the women artist in this present exhibition of African American abstraction cannot be exaggerated, and as artists all seem to share certain characteristics. In choosing to make abstract or semi-abstract art works, they decalred their allegiance to the avant-garde, responding organically to the "Harvest of the Heritage." What indeed looked to some eyes, and will, as the new and experimental, to Alma Thomas came unattended by zeal. Together with Vivian Browne, Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Betty Blayton, Howardena Pindell and Mildred Thompson they represent something of a Black constellation of model artists displaying, in their fashion testimony to quite the opposite of a recurring theme that Blacks are pathologically married to a past of oppression.

Sprouting like a Gorgon's head willful Medea is paint material in Mary O'Neal's work. Spreading spatters, and, drips of color suggesting landscape and figure embracing, clinging to, the picture surface as one. Reminding the eye, but yet not quite, of early German Expressionist work; Munch, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, etc. But more recently to be glimpsed in much weakened and watered down state in the productions by Rainer Fetting, the fashionable young German artist pressently living in New York City. Ms. O'Neal is very likely far more influenced by examples closer by in Hale woodruff, De Kooning and Diebenkorn.

Vivian Browne is an improvisor, capable, according to circumstance, of being able to articulate with almost oriental clarity. Her ideation of "African sounds to which we respond so completely and directly" is a sort of breathtaking grasp of the resulting space-force on which line, in art [ in painting] functions, the variety on display indicating the direction of color and also in defining shape, links her pictures to the great Russians, Kandinsky and his circle.

From the African American scene what emerges, principally, is diversity. Some have gone far down the road to separating; others are struggling with pre-New World histories in Africa, which was also pre-national or tribal in Africa. What can be retrived from the chaos; intense discourse, individual accents, auricular confessions. The pushing and pulling, of structures collapsing into new colors; new directions seeking simultaneously to enforce their own rule, must weaken the central political axis and dominate their works.

Formalism Versus New Art

ARTSCRIBE #44
December 1983

A Conversation between Frank Bowling, Paul Harrison and Jeremy Thomas

At a time when my work was slowly moving away from the kind of undisciplined expressionism my sojourn at the Royal College of Art afforded me, I began to seek out, and to listen to, my more formally trained friends; these happened to be mainly architects and engineers. Then there was my friend Paul Harrison, who to me simply represented science; the image of science as a study of pattern and order. Presently a lecturer at Poole Tech, when we met, in Bristol in 1958, Paul Harrison was about to commence his graduate work involving research on color, at the university there. But he was more often to be found in the Drama department and in the pubs around, worrying on the nature of 'context'. Our modest discussion group was actually formed some years later, in late spring and autumn, 1963. This consisted of myself, Harrison, the architect Jeremy Thomas and Jerry Pethick the Canadian sculptor who had studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College at the same time as me. By autumn 1963 Finch's pub in Fulham Road, where we used to meet, had turned into a madhouse and Pethick, Thomas and myself decided that to do our talking we would travel down to Poole in Dorset where Harrison was living with his young family. This present talk was recorded in October 1983, also at Paul's house in Dorset.

What would be the value of such a planned act as ours, taking place twenty years on? To me the value is inherent in our gathering together: then and now. It is coeval with the act of visiting and talking about art and culture and not something separate; not disconnected in the sense that by visiting each other we would derive value from our attempts by referring to some future goal, or end.

On looking for newness, new ways of proceeding to announce ourselves, we considered a dry subject: something opposite to calm and composure of philosophy, like technique; not skill, but the making of an object and what lay behind its proficiency. How to make it really new but of tradition, the 'how'.

The science of making seemed appropriate to us for a variety of reasons. Art and technique tend to meet when one or the other are at their best, or at their worst. At their worst when they produce mannerisms and encourage that witless, heavy impotence which seems to run through the scene presently, and at best when technique is used, from time to time, to temper and restrain.

Also there is something compelling about the way in which, in western art and culture, we proceed from means to end. When, really, the nature of context, intensity of interaction, a living zest - people meet, things happen. In art it's mainly when you least expect it that it huts the bottom for you.

Frank Bowling: One of the things we were trying to get out of Paul when he was doing his researches on colour, was some notion as to what the physical properties of colour could do in art. There was talk about the possibility of the perfect painting: a picture of a root 2 rectangle of a particular colour - would this be the perfect painting?

As well as Paul's colour ideas we were trying to get ideas from Jeremy about geometry and structure.

Jeremy Thomas: Well, we began talking about two dimensional proportion using Jay Hambidge's book. But my mind, as an architect, was set on problems of three dimensional proportions where you thought in terms of volume. I was interested in Jerry's idea of the saxophonist and the potter who told him they considered themselves to be at the 'centre' of the thing they were making - the centre of the sound, and of the piece of pottery - and where you are thinking in terms of volume rather than area. We all know about two dimensional proportions. You have the Golden Mean and the root rectangle. But if you go into three dimensions you have the cube root which you've got in exactly the same way except that you have a proportion of volume which is equal to the overall proportion. And I was trying to push a sort of three dimensional Golden Mean which again has a whole number series, like the Fibonacci series, but which works in three dimensions. And I suppose I was slightly appalled that no one seemed to be interested in proportion, that painters were not really concerned with this sort of thing. They found it inhibiting. I think a lot of people would simply find it inhibiting. They don't want a picture to 'work', they want it to appeal, I don't know, to the guts or something.

FB: But I would like to say to you at the same time that because of that practise, that measuring and structuring, that I got from yourself and Paul, that I could probably make a picture work by eye, or I hope that I should be able to. And this was the whole notion, that you get some kind of rigorous involvement, formal rigour, a law, which becomes part of your ability. It seemed to me that what was lacking was not so much a reason for making paintings as a way of 'making it good'. I looked to you two whose backgrounds implied a more rigorous and formal approach to the business of making. And certainly in the case of colour I tried to get a deeper understanding of how colour works through the odd remarks Harrison would drop now and then. He talked about the 'weight' of colour. There were explanations in textbooks about the weight of colour, and one didn't know if it was tonnage or the weight that strikes your eye, or what. But the impulse towards this kind of thinking was, I felt, right. That even though one may not approach the technical prowess displayed in a Titian or say, Rembrandt's Jewish Bride you could try and achieve something of the way they built these paintings with the new acrylics and glues and so on. That is, there was a sense in which we knew we couldn't paint Titians or make great Michelangelo sculptures, but that is exactly what we were aiming to do within the limited social situation in which we found ourselves.

Paul Harrison: But what we also felt was that science could, in fact, provide something new. We were thinking about abstract designs and it was almost like the more abstract the better. It was an inclination really towards fairly simple ideas, we weren't being too pretentious. There was no attempt to make great art out of any sort of formula. We were trying, for instance, to put colour to light in a very simple way. Certainly that was what Jerry was doing, working directly with light rather than painting surfaces at all. We thought there could be a link with the study of light, things like the frequency of colour and so on. The whole thing became a little bit out of hand, certainly. But I think it could definitely be seen as a rejection of an expressionist attitude.

FB: Yes, it would not have been easy for us to articulate it as such. It was an intuitive response. Expressionism never came up as such in our conversations. It would be something as simple as the difference between 'nature colour' and paint colour, something which your high school senior now takes for granted, to the extent that if you asked he would think you were an idiot for putting it in those terms.

PH: In fact I remember there was quite a big production about avoiding local colour entirely. One was being, I suppose, constantly dragged back into a naturalistic area. Which, like expressionism, might be said to be another point of repudiation on our part. And I was looking towards what I call 'chemical colour'. This was something I was working on myself at the time. They weren't pure colours, they arose out of particular scientific situations. They were actually properties of certain structures. This was part of the fascination really. That these structures, which were in fact molecular structures, had their own symmetrical pattern; that a numerical value could be put to them; and that they were producing, shall we say, this particular shade of purple that you would never perceive in the natural environment. I'm not saying anything terribly advanced developed out of that but nevertheless it seemed as though it could be used by an artist in some way.

FB: Yes, when these things came up one went away and tried the nearest possible equivalent, through the limited materials that we had. One tried to make some of these things work in a painting or a sculpture.

PH: In our excitement it seemed there was perhaps a color equivalent that could be found. I remember fiddling around with groups of frequencies and wavelengths and so on. And of course one was brought up short by the physiology of the thing. But the point was not so much that the experiment itself would be a success, it was what could be got out of it in terms of art.

FB: well, I went away after some of these exxperiments with colour and the throwing around of those ideas about the 'perfect painting', and started to put blocks of colour together, measured out in terms of flat rectangular areas, to see whether some of those notions could bear fruit. So it's not that one was sceptical about that formula idea so much, that as the ideas came up we tried them on to see how they fitted. Certainly this sort of attitude later became the object of much criticism, the 'betrayal' of art and so on.

JT: I would think that anyone would want to find out more about ...

FB: ... ways of getting to unload your number! I agree it's a curious notion, but I can see there is the possibility of a real criticism. But I think if this charge were to be levelled it would be undermined by the mere fact of our intentions; our intentions were not so much going towards science, as to do with a cross-breeding. the intention was to get to a way in which one could facilitate the development of one's endeavour to make better art.

PH: It might be said that one was using science as a kind of crutch. But you've got to remember that we were thinking about these things in the early sixties. I don't think we saw these ideas as necessarily a direct critique of the art establishment that existed at that time. Really that was a very optimistic period in general, not just in the area of art. All right we were beginning to recognise the limitations of the art criticism and so on, and I was writing some criticism myself at the time, but it was simply that we were looking for new angles. Obviously at that time science and technology were coming into everything, evrything was being improved or at any rate affected by it. What we were doing was simply to question the possibilities, on the basis that we were all quite closely linked to an educational system. If there was an implied critique of that system it was in the sense that we were all looking for something new. We felt that one could look around and that there were other things to find out. I'm sure artists were getting involved in plenty of other things, it was happening all over the place. I'm sure our situation wasn't unique.

FB: what I think was unique, if anything - and I must be careful in putting it this way - was that even though the education we'd been given was narrow, we were short on dogma. We were very inquisitive. Whereas some people might have taken up this proportion idea from Hambidge's book and run with it as a sort of theme, or art notion, we wanted to see what were its possibilities, how useful could it be. That business of making a painting of one colour, of certain dimensions, was something that was taking place, or was about to take place in the very near future. But that's not what our little circle was about, those easy solutions. We were already, I think, firmly entrenched in ourselves as creative people. There was no looking around to see what the next thing was going to be, or where the stuff was going to go next. I think I'm right in saying we had the measure of ourselves. It was not a question of getting a new gimmick and making your mark out of that. We didn't know anything then about formalism or Greenberg. We looked at American painting - Rothko, Newman, people like that - only as a first step towards making good art. The intention wasn't in the least to emulate them. what we were trying to do was to find a way in which we could structure our work so that it could carry the kind of excitement we thought art in museums had. And of course the trap there, into which I eventually fell - was Pop art and surrealism. And it's only the attempt to get out of that, in the investigation into formal ways of structuring and formal considerations of colour and what it does, that brought me to American abstract painting of that generation. I think actually Jerry is still locked into a kind of - I was going to say 'rejection' but I think that's not the word - a kind of suspicion of what we now call formalist painting. I was interested in Jeremy's response, as an architect, to the Tate Gallery's New Art show. Having looked at the work he turned round and said to me that he would prefer to see the Rothko room. I'd like to hear more about that.

JT: I think I just found the New Art boring. Perhaps I must look closer but, like the sculpture show at the Hayward, out of the whole thing I found about four of the works engaging and the rest depressing and worrying. Perhaps this is just architectural taste.

FB: Can we consider the New Art 'informal'?

JT: It's certainly unstructured, if that's what we mean by informal. I think it's happening in architecture too, in this idea of 'post-modernism', which again seems to be flip and insubstantial.

FB: The term has been taken up in painting and sculpture from Charles Jencks. A former New Statesman critic has it that Jencks never got iy right. It seems that in his approach Jencks never really fully grasped the notion of architecture, and welded this business of 'there must be a new way of making architecture that's more decorative' onto this false premise. It seems to me certain that post-modernist architecture is mainly engineering with borrowings from various decorative styles simply stuck on.

JT: It's applied yes, it's not part of the context. Is the New Art considered to be post-modernist?

FB: 'Post-modernism' is like a resounding drum. Like another of those terms that one used to hear a lot of -'post painterly abstraction', which is perhaps more easily understandable since there was clearly painterly stuff and stuff which was not quite so painterly. Let's go back to someone like Goethe and the issue of the link between science and art being somehow a moral issue. I tried to locate the reason behind our seeking each other out. And it seemed it was partly a search for something, as I said earlier, that would put 'spine' in one's endeavour. But I also think what we were involved with was a moral search, a search for that kind of verification. If we have any idea of Goethe's development, it's clear from his own life as I understand it that he started off rejecting this notion of formal discipline, and gradually as his life and his career developed he became more involved with it. It seems to me the richness of his discoveries and what he was able to achieve is an illustration, or model, of what we were trying to come to grips with. Can a moral case be made for what we talking about in those days, the search for structure, rigour and so on? Was Jeremy really implying something of this kind in his rejection of New Art?

JT: I feel that paintings should be expected to last in their own right, and not just as a statement about how one felt in a certain year. I accept that's a very narrow view.

PH: I don't know how much mileage can be got out of the issue of morality in this context. I think the only morality that would have any general gainsay these days is eco-morality-ecology. It's the only area that a good proportion of the audience going to see New Art might be expected to agree on, in moral terms.

FB: New Art comes out of liberalism ... but surely the search for values, eternal values, is a moral search? I think what I'm putting forward is that the artist's search for an art that might be expected to last is a moral search. I'm making this claim; that the search we were conducting for ways to make the art as substantial as we possibly could, as tough as the work in the museums, through what was available - colour science, structure, architecture - is a more specific search. I think you could say it has a moral content to it, or moral aspect, which is different tot he sort of flag waving, breast beating, that you find in exponents of the New Art such as Schnabel, Baselitz, and the rest. Let's take my work. It was concerned with legalistic ritual murder, birth, all sorts of themes which on the face of it you could claim as being of the utmost importance - that this was the 'right stuff'. At the moment that I became suspicious of the work I was not suspicious so much of its content as the way it was put together. I began to feel that it wasn't enough to say that what is urgent is the distortion of human life by political regimes, or that life and death is urgent, but that the pictures had to be substantial within the confines of the material itself, within the history of what was the best. I realised that the subject matter was not my main concern, that subject matter was more like your portmanteau that you carry around, it was not what makes pictures look good.

Art has to be made from a basis of certain restrictions and if it's going to be good art it's going to surmount those restrictions. And this is my basis for pointing to certain kinds of art being made at the moment which seems not to be able to accommodate restrictions. I'm not saying that the one colour picture notion would work, because in fact that seems to me to be an impoverished area within my discipline. The one colour picture never really worked. I've seen one or two examples that looked OK but as a whole series of things they ended up being a big yawn. But I'm still saying that restrictions as such can only produce a kind of maximalising from the good artist. There have to be restrictions in the sense that you can't build a building in an intemperate climate without having certain constituents. You can't paint a good picture without having these limitations in the same way.

Let's say another work for restrictions is 'formal' or 'formality'. Formalsim has t do with producing your best within the limitations of the activity itself. If your Golden Section works because it opens up spaces that people can go through and feel confortable within, that this is something to do with the way people turn and the way they stand, then build buildings on the Golden Section and don't build them on some other notion to do with flattery of the political climate, like decoration for the sake of it. A lot of the buildings we see in London when we're running around buying materials, have non-functional bits of pre-cast plastic just stuck onto the facades. Which makes a terrible distortion and lie of your cyma recta/cyma reversa that youu get in older architecture. Yes, those people did sometimes make those geometrical swaggers for decoration, but the internal logic of the thing is left explicit. Whereas an awful lot of postformal architecture does not make sense in terms of an ideal notion of freeing the person in his space. Painting falls fooul of the same sort of thing I believe. Too uch of the explanation is political, sociological and market. It's too much to do with how society works and what pressure groups in society can bring to bear on each other.

If you have a tie-up, for instance, between the museum, the dealers and the market, the artist who fills their collective brief can do almost anything and expect to get a sort of structure that will carry him. On the level of official recognition the curator is a promoter who then lends further reinforcement by, very often, writing about the work. And the dealer meliorates as the items find a public. We can say there's a sort of wheel, and the art that comes out is more involved with sociology of whatever cultural milieu or circle the artist is involved in, than some real well-spring of expression. And I can't see that limitations in any kind of formal sense has any part in that. It seems to have to do more with what materials are available 'on instruction' from within the closed circle.

If you take a couple of the artists who were of that generation of Pop - and I think New Art is mainly novelty and Pop - I think we can look at what Larry Rivers tended to paint, look at his approach. What does he paint when he comes to London? He paints Bill Brooker, he paints Liz Frink, he paints David Sylvester [ Mr Art ]. It was like he was a court jester and it worked for him. Larry is someone we all know so we can point to him. Take Jasper Johns. We don't know him so well - but what does he paint? Again you could say the work has an easy passage in terms of the sociology of the culture. It's explained in terms of map making, the significance of emblems and flags, their meaning in western culture. And not until a long time after was it spoken about in the same terms as Rothko or Newman. That is, the terms dictated by the activity itself and the means through which he could make the stuff. Of course some of that was over the top; some of the talk, the promotional drive for that other generation. But it was certainly nothing in comparison to what we have now. For instance, this idea that Schnabel's plates are brushstrokes. I mean, that's such a leap! Whoever thought that one up should be given a prize. Rene Richard ... but then it should be laughed off because anyone who understands what language can convey would see immediately that there's no connection. We know what he's talking about because clearly Mr. Richard is a poet. But it's not communication, there's no way it can be upheld. It's a poetic phrase only.

Artistic freedom does not permit easy solutions. Form and freedom go together. And the plates are an easy answer. An easy answer to creating a rippled surface. You drag a loaded brush down a whole lot of plates and crockery and the paint splashes and it flashes a sign: 'rippled surface'. One can point to painting that has achieved things, say Hans Hofmann, and the verve you get in the handling of the stuff: the brushing of the paint, the mauling of it, is made easy in this plate stuff. For me it's not inventive or new, it's just show. An easy solution.

PH: Perhaps it's also sown onto a bit of eco-morality, the recycling of the city's detritus. If you ask any first year student to go away and paint something that's socially significant the first thing he's going to do is empty the rubbish bin, indicating the detritus of the consumer society.

FB: There's that too maybe. But I don't think that one can really level criticism at Schnabel so much. Because the artist as an individual has to make it into and through society. I think that if one is levelling criticism of this kind it has really to be at the coterie that makes it possible for all this work to be taken seriously. And he doesn't do that on his own. I think, if anything, you have to take your hat off to him because he is an American phenomenon, like all those early stars. Someone who made it big right away, very young. And he's not so uneducated an artist that he doesn't know about brushstrokes and about the kinds of special effects that will call attention to themselves. That big brush stroke has a history. One can think of Ed Strautmanis painting with a big mop out of de Kooning, and out of Kline. Schnabel is a friend of Ed's, but the difference between Schnabel and Ed Strautmanis is that Strautmanis is aiming with a kind of hot naïve energy to drag his paint so that it has an equivalent in Goya. He's thinking about those big broom paintings of Goya's. I don't think Schnabel's ambition is the same kind. I think he's calling attention to things that are immediately located in the society in which he lives, his immediate environment.

The big brushstroke has a history in American painting, in people like Kline and de Kooning and it is accepted as that which is expressive [look at Lichtenstein's cartoon strokes]. But over and above that is the marketing. And bully for Schnabel that as an intelligent person he is able to find the right combination of people who would support him in the market. I mean he must be the most expensive painter alive - does Francis Bacon even command those prices?

The reservations I have developed about Rothko since my earlier enthusiasm are consistent with my reservations to do with contemporary chaps like Schnabel and Baselitz. And again it's to do with an overexposure to the rhetoric that followed in the wake of his work. There was also the rhetoric surrounding the work while it was being made. The business about the "non-imagery", about "Nature", Rothko's preaching, which seems terribly much like Schnabel's although Rothko of course was a much older artist when he made it big. But the breast beating about his mission, and the piles of crapulous writing on the art, built up a reservation in me which was underlined by my visit to the chapel in Texas where I though the quality of the work was poor. Jules Olitski was already painting better pictures. But maybe that's all by the way. It's like the plates being an extension of brushstrokes. When you hear that sort of thing, you think, Oh yes that sounds right. And when you see the work you think, Oh my God, it's just a weak brushstroke.

[PICTURES]

WORK IN PROGRESS 1983 ACRYLIC 72"X120" [SANDCIRCLE?]

WORK IN PROGRESS 1983 ACRYLIC 72"X144" ??//

LENT. 1963. OIL TWO PANELS, EACH 72"X72"

Notes Along The Way

FUSE
Fall 1983

In a piece of writing entitled "Notes Along the Way", George Orwell mentions the cruel trick he once played upon a wasp. "I cut him in half", wrote Orwell. "He [the wasp] paid no attention, merely went on with his meal ...Only when he tried to fly did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him!" Now, if like me you can see the wasp, rebinding itself with the help of all the jam on Mr Orwell's plate, you will then, like me, be totally non-plussed as to why there should be this continuing poor reception of modern Formalist art in the U.K., and especially in England. Formalist art once elicited a better public response than in present-day wasp-dominated Great Britain.

One explanation put to me is that there is a lingering suspicion in some quarters that formalism of any kind requires piety. And we don't like piety in this country. Moreover, Formalism is believed to lead inevitably to intellectual domination and bigotry, and reaction against it, for which Clement Greenberg is said to be responsible. Although Modernism has been declared dead, the truth is otherwise. Modernism is alive and well and, despite its discontents, has never been more vigorous.

In the recent past, Formalist art has had a very different reception among intellectuals and the public. Among the Poles and Russians and among the French and Americans [who, on their own admission, are very like the Germans]. Among the British, there has always been a tradition of suspension of belief, resulting in a vigorous creative life at all levels, high and low.

Witness the daring of the contemporary theatre in this country. The contemporary practice of Formalist art has evolved, with established rules, right down from Cimabue, through Cezanne, Matisse and the Cubists, Mondrian, to Hans Hofmann, and is as much an international phenomenon as Punk or Neo-Expressionism. Contemporary Formalists remain classical in intention and express their individual freedom within those rules. In my eyes, the others are romantics, but that is a matter of taste.

In his catalogue essay of ten years ago, "Four Scottish Painters: Douglas Abercrombie, Alan Gouk, John McLean, Fred Pollock" [Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 1977]. Clement Greenberg speaks personally to me when he says; "You may want to go for Bacon ...but have to go for Olitski instead ." And I would add Darby Bannard, Peter Bradley and Larry Poons. Greenberg claims to know "how they, and not they alone, perceive, and don't at all take decisions of taste". Put another way, these four Scottish painters intuited that what the common eye likes, and taste encourages, doesn't necessarily bespeak authenticity, the fit will look right, but of discomfiting familiarity. Difficult and important new art tends not to engage us immediately; kitsch does.

Formalists believe in or act according to rules. Individual expression can run riot within the confines of the dictates of the given disciple. It is what moves and enriches art and culture. Formalist art is disadvantaged for the simple reason that it is almost always hard on itself and indulges in rigorous self-criticism, within the given discipline alone. Painting never gets mixed up with literature. And to me the practice of painting [and sculpture] within the boundaries of Formalism provides a setting in which I am able to test and ultimately prove my own freedom. Herein lies the distinction between a cultural idea and the display of social justice, which includes happiness among the highest goals of civilisation, yet does not provide one with purely intellectual satisfaction.

The only London-based, or British artist [not the same animal according to some], who ever gets mentioned consistently in the context of the international Formalist circle is Anthony Caro. Ask yourself why this is so, and why Caro choose to live and work among us here in London. The fact is, it's exciting and challenging to work in London, Turner's town, and the pressures of the weight of British tradition is exhilarating. And the likes of Clement Greenberg and Ken Moffet know this, yey pronounce very little on the activities inside the studios of their friends and admirers here, in sharp contrast to antics reported by the media-orientated outriders like Matthew Collings, former editor of Artscribe International . This may well be a logistical problem. We are an offshore island. Doesn't this aggravate our isolated and entrenched position even more?

Anthony Caro is the greatest living sculptor in the world, and when we speculate why he chooses to live and work in London, we must accept it can't be an accident that most of his mature pieces developed within the limits of abstract Formalism. [Welded and painted steel stressing the pictorial over the haptic drive, an area involving the aesthetic distinction of what turns one on in art and which painters used to consider their sole province.] Following Caro's lead, a generation of artists making sculpture - all of them respecting the canons once thought of as "Greenbergian" -moved into premises at Stockwell Depot in 1967. In 1969, eight of them exhibited their works jointly. The four Scottish painters that Greenberg wrote about also either worked at or were connected in some way with Stockwell Depot. This multiple work space - and there are others in Wapping, Greenwich and elsewhere - contributed some of the lively energy that sustains British painting and sculpture, not the market , despite the talk of our living in a market economy.

To begin with, there is much less abundance of material available to these British artists. And their paint and supplies are expensive and of suspect quality. Out of necessity, the materials are used sparingly, if not always from taste and inclination. An obvious influence is Helen Frankenthaler, early Olitski, sometimes Ken Noland, but continuingly Jackson Pollock, Barney Newman, Clifford Still, and the wonderful scope of Hofmann's works, which are nevertheless less protean than some mistakenly believe.

It would be easier, if presumptious, to name the bad artists, rather than the good. But I would prefer to point to such shinning examples of the good as the four Scots named in Greenberg's essay, Mali Morris, Geoff Ridgen, Steve Lewis, Sally Lewis, David Rhodes, David Gittings, Jeff Mowlam and Tim Coppard, who unfortunately haven't yet much of a public.

Today, we no longer look to the avant-garde for manifestations of a new culture, as was foreseen by Greenberg and others. The self-proclaimed avant-garde has become pessimistic and academic. Rather we look to the universal traditions of abstraction and formalism for the preservation of what living culture we have presently.

Untitled

COVER #5
Spring / Summer 1981

After years of intense lobbying and sporadic linguistic fights for a return to the figure [or figuration] in Western painting, we now have a new generation of Pop-artists, currently described as New Wave or Punk. Even the work of older artists included in this "movement" seemed, when they first appeared between 1959/1963, a second-wave Pop [David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Malcolm Morley].

• By the early 60's, art colleges in the United Kingdom were dominated by the kids of the British working class. The disturbances in the art schools in London in the late 60's and early 70's showed [among other things] this working class separated from their background. A central issue in the disruptions and protests was the value of the "life room" where students were subjected to a means-test of drawing from nature and the nude.
  
• During this time, the United States [for some time now disputedly the leading nation in the western world] was preoccupied with its self-appointed role - the job of policing the globe. With its manpower and its youth in perpetual mobility - trussed like headless birds following an ordained call - American military personnel could be seen everywhere, but they were more especially devoted to disciplining and defending the region of South-East Asia.

  The Vietnam war did more than just run interference in the development and growth of the American nation's youth - it bled its creative sap. Protest against war was civil disobedience and a means-test of a different, more brutal sort - "for real," not for performance . That this dissent [which came to a head during 1968 and had run its course by 1973] did not affect the United States is mainly due to the Viet Nam war.

• Students in London [and in the rest of Europe: the Provos in Amsterdam, followers of Rudi Dutchke in Berlin; May'68 in Paris] wanted to perform, to be out in the streets in contact with life. They wanted to be able to play with the "New Tech" - video and computers - which by then had gained currency as the most exciting art "medium." This generation of student-artists openly questioned the validity of the "life" class and figure painting. They seemed to be saying that the working class artists would want to paint [when they did paint] pictures of elegance and completeness rather than works depicting the broken and distorted, the effete and the faint-hearted - an area which, in the history of British painting, belongs to the visionary, the genuinely insane or results from middle-class boredom [Bloosbury, the Pre-Raphaelites].
  
• Not for them a refusal to have and to declare a sensibility. It was as if they were asking "IS NUDITY NECESSARY?" From the popular daily newspapers with cheesecake page -3 bosoms and bottoms and centerfold spreads of young women in various degrees of undress to the popularity of communal nude bathing in the family and community -nakedness was no longer exciting and mysterious. The result was -- along with performance art, minimal art, conceptual art and the rest-- talk.

  There is always in areas of production a linguistic accompaniment. Even before my brain -lingering in consideration of when things happened and what they had looked like -had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify or focus, there was the New as New: more talk, new news.

  Lip service will continue to be paid to the fact that art is made from the penetration of resistent, recalcitrant and mysterious matter, revealing the whole spread and mess of vulnerability made live by order and knowing discipline. In fact, life reflects art revealing true instances.

• Take the business of Howard Hodgkin and his work...If you look hard at these works - with steady gaze - you will almost certainly come away with the compelling impression that here are the fumblings of an individual with a need, with an itch ...one whom, possibly, used to be described as "possessing a gift" and one who is now described [by Lawerence Gowing in his forward to the catalogue for Hodgkin's current show] as "more entirely himself than anyone alive ..."

  Within the condition of possibility, this kind of talk falsifies and it generates antagonism to the knowing subject - the work itself. The phenomenon which is Howard Hodgkin -related to Roger Fry, an old Etonian ... "a highly intelligent Senior Civil Servant" - by definition produces original work.

• We must challenge this. In painting, the concept of the artist must now be changed for less personal ways of grouping, studying and understanding the base cognisance of each item as it lays bare conscious meaning. Spectulation must make sense on the surface of each individual piece - in the thing itself. Hodgkin might be uttering something to Gowing which is private [irrelevant] and which is not determined by the wishes of these two men, let alone the entire English race. But the possibility of the exchange between Gowing and Hodgkin is not just lacking in relevance. By being neither true nor false, this talk - all this talk -does not reside in an "individual" desire to communicate.

  Hodgkin is good. But these pictures in his recent shows [M.Knoedler, NYC; R.A. winter exhibition; elsewhere] are not , in terms of conditions of my New York, quality works - works which must declare truth/value capable of being stated visually ... and such conditions do remain in American painting in the vision of Post-Painterly Abstraction.

• This vision leads us from material conditions in the production of an art piece to a prior history to an ideal look. We have to go back to Emmanuel Kant stating that the classes of possible experience lie in the structure of the human mind, or [at the very least] lie in the "place" - that historical and at once transient and stable "station" - with proper conditions for possible meaningful exchange. It is the look -not the material conditions under which it was forged - which will preclude legal or permissible options from being reclassified all the way back into the 19 th century and ending up deviant.

  When Cezanne was in his stride, he was painting air. Cezanne was using the categories of his mind to order his perceptions. He was working in such a way that the objects viewed were perfectly represented in accordance with their appearance -"perfectly" according to Cezanne's mind and nature.

  Hodgkin is merely decorating time in the manner of English school-boy games. At his age, "punk" is unsuitable since everyone knows about games played by those smooth-faced leggy hairy boys, their attraction almost unbearable. But a piece of precious wood found among the memorabilia of grandfather's colonial travels remains unsafe from hot hands, fingers groping almost aimlessly for the magic and the secret.

• Maybe Cezanne's return to Aix was a function of memory, and maybe painting the figure [or figuration] is a way of combating memory to allow for desire, inventing even the concepts of norm/ pathology and then alloting them a treatment in Surrealism and psycho-analysis.

  In the 60s and 70s, the legal reforms devised new architectures for the schools and new means-tests for qualifying. Overt forms of power, such as jury shows and prize-giving, became judicial machinery with its new crowd of experts ministering to art's local health.

  But being an artist denotes a recognition of [or preoccupation with] Art. Painting is about the will to be knowledgeable about this. The will in question is not racial [as Dan Johnson and others would have it] or local, and it is without gender. The will in question is nobody's in particular. It is not East or West. Indeed, it is an allusion to it all. It is a will to create the possibility of declaring truths and falsehoods about art ... and New York City art, since the first generation of New York painters, dominates.

• Hodgkin is good. Julian Schnabel is not. Schnabel's is not even the work of a minor talent struggling to escape provincialism. Hockney's work is in a class by itself. Enormously gifted and possessing an education to match. Hockney is able to exploit his fine, firm grounding in attested masters ... educated in pictures, a beneficiary of the best teaching - we are told - of traditional drawing that was the best to be had anywhere in the world during the 50s [ at Bradford College of Art, along with Norman Stevens and John Losker]. The trouble with Hockney's own pictures, now, is that they all tend to look familiar -teasing reminders of other great names [Dufy, Klee, Magritte, Matisse, Miro, Picasso] and, alas, the poorest possible examples of each of these artists' genre.

  While Malcolm Morley's recent exhibition [Xavier Fourcade, NYC] did reveal his distinct flair for an expressionistic use of water-colour, the oil paintings were too big. Lacking "image" and bite, these particular pictures fell back on orthodox, pre-conceived picture-making mechanics of a Euston Road cast [taught at the Camberwell School of Art and the London University Slade School] ... where forms on a surface are graded from light to dark, with light in the middle and darkening towards the edges, tops and sides [but not always bottom] ...almost as if seen by candle light, where scumbled paint is called into service for profile drawing ...doing a similar, generalized job on the difficulty of finding the edge of form -THIS is expressionism for the interior decorator and coiffeur salon. As individual pieces, these works might remain romantic and emotional, but they lack that startling Fauve colour with its grip on one's heart, and as such, they are in clear betrayal or contradiction to their wild expressionist pretention.

Formalism: A Selective View

COVER #6
Spring / Summer 1981

In the beginning, the modern movement welcomed and accepted Formalism for its appolonian and classical honing of matter drenched in expressionist and almost wantonly romantic excesses. Formalism was also identified with the Avant- Garde. Except in the widely dispersed European centers [mostly French and German city-centers, of which Paris in the late 19 th century was the capital], the most ardent contributors, respondents to and supporters of formalist theory and practice were based in Russia. Formalism, then, is a most Russian phenomena, as some recent exhibitions [notably the Guggenheim's Art of the Avant Garde in Russia and the Tate Gallery's Towards a New Art ] have noted. And like Leninism, Marxism, Trotskyism, it remains a Western tar-baby with a most passionate revolutionary cast.

By the end of the 1920s, that much heralded revolution -the days of excitement, the energies of imaginative adventure and discovery - flickered. There was silence. The researches of El Lissitzky, Kliun, Malevich, Tatlin, had all been abandoned and tattered elements which did constitute this vast avant garde's attempt to splice formal-modernism [as opposed to romantic-modernism] to utilitarian mass demands are a painful testimony and criticism of the even more threadbare Western kitsch, which has fed, accounts for, and still informs all Pop art and most of what followed - novelty, minimal, conceptual, so-called idea art, and the New Wave.

Instead, advocates of scientific creativity declared that the good fight would be taken elsewhere, fanning out across Europe, joining the Bauhaus and stopping in the U.K. Most formalist ideas and notions found their way to the U.S. [via those who held them and were fleeing from the ever-increasing totalitarianism which surrounded them - in Western as well as Eastern Europe to the New York - that new capital of the Western World.

That all formalist activity ceased in post-revolutionary Russia, and the catch was thrown back [still sticking to the tar] onto the fertile Western briar-patch of the New World of America [especially New York] is of significance but must not delay us in these observations.

[ PICTURE]

Kasimir Malevich, Prayer, 1913, lithograph, 6 7/8x 4 1/2". Photo: Geoffrey Clements. Courtesy: Guggenheim Museum.

For most people interested in art, the difficulty with Formalism is that it spells Authority, that formalism is not just simply authoritative [like all good art happens to be] but that it is restrictive, pressing and bleak. And this flies in the face of our cherished Western view that art and artists are free, afloat, almost embalmed in the rough, unpredictable seas of freedom - wherever the tide takes you it goes, especially in the practice of advanced art.

It is as if with the modern movement came artistic permissiveness, license: after Manet

[admittedly, long after] openess degenerated into and finally became incompetence [look around you at the abundance of truly awful realist work].

In an inexplicably short time, flatness became less of a wonder, less of a marvel true shallow depth, of touch, malerei, as opposed to fabrication. The excitement created by crisply held and stunning movements, those pulsating expanses of highly and individually conceived canvases of nothing ...nothing, that is, but paint marks whose sole purpose and beauty was quite simply, there for the looking.

But the seasonal appearance of this work became tedious, as the very surfaces teetered and twisted from lack of structure, within from overload. What was offered as verisimilitude revealed crimping and buckling under the pressure of high-key colour packaged into ungenerous design. It was known that colour works best when spread-out, but even here [in the wrong hands] colour turned slack, smooth, vacuous.

Flatness veered to being truly empty when artists were seen to be asked to [and actually tried to] tickle in heroic messages unto their work surfaces after Barnett Newman. One needn't look very far ...compare late Rothko and most Clifford Still [as this work floundered and failed] with the ample late achievements of Hans Hoffman. In the presence of Hoffman's late pictures, even the most innocent and untutored viewer of art will sense themselves in the company of a boundless imagination and a rare concentration of pictorial thought and feeling.

Yet before [even during] Hans Hoffman's marvelous achievement, worse had to come. In Pop art, we had a long run of flat with graphic flourishes and social meaning. Wasn't this the art we were all waiting for? Under the revolutionary banner Forward With The People? What was overlooked was that with Cezanne, painting took on a new interpretation of that high moral tone which informs and is so essential to Western thought and life. It is not a tone dissimilar to that of Karl Marx. The difference is that in Cezanne's work, we have less of a tone of voice , less an epistemological stance and more a material one. The moral fibre of Cezanne is expressed in things in the pictures he made and the [c]?ore structure of his intentions. To most people, this was overbearing ...all this rigour and its implications.

As we get to late Guston, the art which is painting with a social, self-conscious message/purpose came back with alarming, bullying swagger. Out from those under-stairs, broom-closets and attic box-rooms came comic books and nostilga-filled family photo albums; old cupboards assembled as new, mass entertainment trivia. In the hands of the new-wave artists, this work settles in cosily with the Pop art of Rauschenberg, whose chief occupation over the years [even before being taken up by Richard Wollheim in Minimal art] has been juxtaposing ready-made images. Neither Rauschenberg's recent work nor the old work look new anymore [nor does that of Hamilton, Johns, Dine, Kitaj, Lichtenstein] and it was never original. Yet, it is still being celebrated [ nay- promoted] half way across Europe and everywhere in this country, as any calendar of last season stll shows.

Avant garde art flows without license, with unstructured freedom in fact; that is why it looks as it tends to look. It follows that being an artist and believing this sort of thing means that you are a free person, free to follow each and every path of your choosing.

There is no immediate nor easy explanation for any of this, and it all seems constituted ineluctably so; no amount of truing and faring of society is going to do much to change things. No social contracts, social scientists, interfering busybodies, critics, and our immediate political masters will try. But the results will be the same as before, with little if any change, if all this well-meaning activity is not informed by that natural, organic structure which makes not only people but trees and grass and mosquitoes grow, and which allows for hurricanes, early snow and Indian summers. Truing and faring is what you do to the art itself; or what you do to your individual life, if that is your art.

Now Clement Greenberg and the artists around him are identified with formalism. Greenberg himself is seen as an authoritarian. It is seldom realized [let alone understood] that there is never more room in the best art [be it old Kingdom Sculpture, French Impressionism, Benin Bronzes, some Japanese art, some Indian minatures, Cubism, Sepic River carvings, or a bit of the Fauves] for invention and open creativity than there is in the formal attitudes best articulated through and supported by Greenberg, and as practiced by his friends and his [sometimes not so] devoted adherents.

The difference lies in the fact that Greenberg, one an admirer of Trotsky, long ago spotted and continues to clearly understand the remarkable susceptibility which radical, left-wing attachments have for authoritarian and heirarchical impulses, deeply set in the attitudes these movements set out to revolutionize and overthrow. It is in this sense, and in this respect only, that vanguard movements, reflected clearly in the personages of their every avant couriers, atrophy into clusters of stars and single-figure conservative academies or degenerate in attitude ...Joseph Beuys is as much an example as Marcel Duchamp, or the rather touched Robert Morris ... no matter how far-fetched and off-the-wall the ideas, culturally, are credited with being. The execution of this work is never anywhere as spirited and bubbling with mental and imaginative energy as the effusions of hot air and the occasionally rather clever promotional writing by which it is accompanied.

Their disposition and opinions, whether of a political or sexual sort [ including those mesmerizing combinations of both] change quickly, sometimes within months rather than years, into counter-revolutionary conservatism -into defensive and highly pressured categories. While Formalism remains open, its true practitioners continue the ongoing revolution, in search of quality inside the confines of each individual discipline and with the limitations on that discipline imposed by the constituents of the materials used. Further, formalist art continues to raise doubts as to whether one can actually or positively tell the skin colour, race or gender of the artist just by looking at the work ... unless the art is contrived [ yet another display of prior studied attitude, when it - however skillful -becomes worthless.]

From their inceptions, movements like Dada, Surrealism [for which we must be eternally grateful since most of the actual painting is so unspeakably bad] and on through Popa art, Minimal and Conceptual art have sustained themselves not on painting nor on sculpture; their focus is sociological. And it is due to this fact, to this received axiom, that such endeavour is to be taken more serious, however indifferently skilled, and more important since it works directly as a service. Large sums of money and ritualized obesiance are paid to an individual, a star - be they stars of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, or those of the new wave ....what we love and have commonly referred to as the Personality Cult with its attendant academies or acclaimers. But the clangour, the accompanying din, usually signals the demise of such movements; it is a version of the death rattle. It is when these convenient gatherings begin to fall apart that a common shallowness is revealed. Thus, the trumpeting becomes not just audible but visible. The collapse is an exposure of its latent design, its place in the over-simplified scheme of picture-art: taking pictures, moving pictures - as this system distorts, fragments and fractures reality.

Greenberg's language, too, though often seemingly didactic, is singularly empty: empty of any kind of pressure, saving to the poetry of his distinctive diction with its clear tuning and restraint.

Greenberg does not tell artists what to do; he nearly always surmises as how best an artist might, even should, proceed. And this almost grumbling solipsism is conveyed highly off-beat in manner, delivery and portent, and it can appear hard and chilly. It is formal but it is not restrictive.

And here is the rub: you don't have to follow his advice; only the best do. Greenberg, it seems nowadays, doesn't even tell his admiring, loyal and committed public what to like, what to look at, or what to even go to see anymore [ if he ever did, unless he was asked]. What is undeniable is that during Greenberg's long career he has shown that what appeals, immediately and instinctively to him, are the right ingredients, have to be in the right place... only results matter. You can't second guess that, certainly not from just talk; things, pictures, people catch his eye and he moves toward them.

But this is not the whole story; I am not competent to tell it. The story of Formalism is still unfolding, and its tale is such a formidable undertaking that there is not enough space here in which to try. And because the issue is not yet closed, let us take a look at something which is closed but matters nonetheless: some results. Formalist works are revealed in their facture.

There is a body of writing, in the New York Times and elsewhere in the current Art Trade press, which is purely negative as criticism of contemporary formalist art. This writing does not express personal taste or opinion borne from that source, but rather re-affirms reptations. Further, these writings greet with puzzlement and indignation what is of formal substance and is of high quality therein, simultaneously being resourceful, purely new and genuinely created within the confines of its given ...

The false grasp of whether an artistic interpretation nestles securely with a given formal strategy can be seen from the current opinion of the kind of art with which Greebberg is identified [ the kind of art which I, too practice and admire] ... the sculpture of Michael Steiner and Anthony Caro, the paintings and sculpture of Jules Olitski, Larry Poons' work.

In text after text, from partisan to non-partisan commentators, comes this effort to locate what it is, exactly, these artists are saying. It is as though what is being asked is this: is there a book, an attitude, some leaflets, or a catalogue? What is the category of your utterance? FORMAL! Yes ...But ...! By and large the trouble with these critics is that they do not evaluate even then; they either misunderstand or they are blind to what is "relevant."

These artists are not telling anything, even when they write, beyond the same thing everyone else is telling everyone else: "Oh, heavens! The well of loneliness began to appear as though it would envelop me until you came alnog..." What they are doing, each of these superbly gifted, reckless individuals, is merely showing something. And when we bother to look, we can see what is relevant.

What is sufficient to begin with and what is applicable in support of my assertion is the quality of the vision. Are you in the presence of such entities which appeal to you? Do the items [individual pieces together and/ or separately now having engaged your attention lead you in your reverie to Rembrandt, to Matisse, to Titian? Do they lead back to the quickness and specificity of things of nature itself transformed?

The formaliist artists, known to Greenberg, score every time because even the "bad" work they make has a core of grit.

Michael Steiner's work is so very different from Tony Caro's, yet to most strangers comparison is a futile exercise and defies them. I, too, have been baffled. Caro's sculpture, for a long time, blinded me to all other work in this area [his only area, although he has written well on occasion] and dazzled me by its inventiveness and variety - those boundless, new juxtapositions of such ordinary found things; Caro - a better Dadaist, Surrealist even, than the older [original] lot because somehow he is free of all that political/sexual baggage.

But recently Caro's work has atrophied; missing is that supple springiness and bounce. Working in the given materials of heavy industrial waste - with which Tim Scott and Michael Steiner [notoriously an ex-minimal sculptor, whose talent was spotted when the minimalists saw their grand purpose inside a new notion of sculpture, under the crusading zeal of the late Tony Smith] and others went after Caro and seemed to be bunking in with him - made all the difference to this artist's work. One of the results of this time is that Caro found himself an old fashioned star with a school , rather like Picasso and Henry Moore and all the other visionary surrealists.

[PICTURE:] Frank Bowling, Vitacress, 1981, acrylic on canvas, 93"x68". Bowling's current paintings on view 6-31 March, 1982 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC.

There is nothing in art that the English thrive on better than fantasy. To this fetish Bloomsbury owes its cultural and social poistion; Anthony Caro is a sculptor.

Steiner's recent show [Gallery One, Toronto, October 1981] ...it is as though the blur on my vision has cleared by seeing this new work. On the other hand, in the bronze pieces which Caro showed recently [ Kenwood House, London, June 1981] there appeared, for the first time, a utilitarian primness, rather Victorian in appeal. It is as though the efficancy of those same juxtapositions in Caro's work - to which I am so attached and by which my eye was so engaged and engaged - have become coerced. The pieces looked forced, ungainly, not elegant. They did not permit me the ability to surmount the distinct impression of being in a mess hall, in a military compound, of a civilization some thousands of years before Modernism...be it of the old Egyptian Kingdom, the Ife and Benin, the Dogon and the desert wastes, or decaying Imperial New Delhi, even.

Steiner's work is fresh, not so hide-bound. The works on paper and the recent sculptures seem more engaged and excited about real issues ... about the reality of positive thingness , not ideas and customs relative to institutional considerations. They present what our Western culture is about - the things we value, in themselves and finally, in the look of things after they have engaged us.

Steiner's work is not just fresher, but as a consequence of "freshness" the pieces are all appealing. There are times when what Steiner is exactly hinting at in art is distracting, but a blink later it seems not to matter. And these pieces display gifts many another artist, including myself, will continue to envy ... A formal, courteous and refined treatment found in evidence in the finished bronze of the individual pieces stunned me ... the shapes and materials hinting at what it is and what is not took my fancy ... even the titles given to the works-on-paper [which completed the Toronto show] and to the sculptures would have been a joy to a lepidopterist like Nabokov ...

Revisionism Part 2: Color and Recent Painting

ARTS MAGAZINE
March 1972

A century ago the momentum which changed the course of that aspect of our awareness through culture called painting, declared itself within the confines of the art movement known as Impressionism. The story of Impressionism is often a dismal tale of fatigue to mind and muscle. The Franco-Prussian war exiled people from France, and all over Europe economic and religious revolutionary turmoil created havoc with human lives. Yet despite exile from France and being driven crazy in Holland, these people painted pictures which continue even now to reflect pure paint possibilities.

Exiled in London, Monet and Pissarro were reduced by indignities, whose effect could prompt Pissarro to write "I shan't stay here and it is only abroad that one feels how beautiful, great and hospitable France is. What a difference here. One gathers only contempt, indifference, even rudeness. Among colleagues there is the most egotistical jealousy and resentment. Here there is no art--everything is a question of business,"

The artist as heroic individual may or may not be a 19 th century European idea, but the artist as star is of our time, and for this reason, among others, here in New York where the energy is now situated, the important business of painting pictures was overshadowed.

The Café Guerbois in mid 19 th century Paris was, evidently, hot with feuding, maybe even fisticuffs, but what we see now are splendid pictures. So it's not that naïve to assume that painting, after all, is not fighting -nor anything else for that matter.

A hundred years after the inception of Impressionism painters still walk around carrying painting like a guilty secret. For a while, to discuss pictures in any terms but their essential barter content was anathema. The situation hasn't changed radically, but there are signs which indicate the exposure of cynicism is upon us. In painting every effort at product should be concerted evidence. Questions are posed and answers are made. An essential difference, one of the aspects or qualities which distinguishes it [painting] from most other kinds of making, is inasmuch as it is being made, paint is culled to the surface, to life, through, by, with color to deliver articulate paint on one's canvas.

An artist like Joan Snyder poses a problem about touch through visual attraction, and her pictures come over to me as rather splendid touch. Snyder seems set on demonstrating the fundamentally simple principle of ordered relationships in space; in her case flat pictorial space, so that virtually anyone can understand by responding to the spaces through color; gaps like breathing or hand-arm span, scribble, dribble, notation; secrets that can't be told, only shown.

The picture by this artist in the present Whitney Annual [ Smashed Strokes Hope, 72"x120"] is one of the more interesting works in the annual within the context of color painting. The way the marks are put on this regular, rectangularly proportioned canvas creates a vague but infuscating triangle which dominates the picture. Beginning about a third of the way down the middle of the surface, a rather muddy patch, though open area, connects to a mauve line, runny and slightly fragmented going diagonally across the surface from the center to the left. Patches which are literally "smashed strokes" of green, red, blue, going right diagonally across the surface, serve as another of [//] visual drifts. These ideas [//] actually reach the bottom perim[/] of the work but visually head there because of the way the surface area commands attention. The open area to the [/] of the work is so stepped up by exquisite color mixtures - blue, red to mauve, yellow to green - the surface is delicately balanced forward. The other side which would again be the plane above the stuttered outer edge of the triangle is visually less clear and not because it is more densely painted. [Cezanne painted his picture of a plate of peaches densely but it doesn't come out this way]. The work all over is done in that thick/thin manner which is a marked contemporary trait. I don't know what adjective, in terms of a verdict, to use about this picture but I'm very attracted indeed by it, at the same time as being aware that it groans with overload.

[PICTURE]

Garry Rich, Big Paint # 1, 96" x 144".

[PICTURE]

Joe Fisher, Thirteenth Hour, [1971-72], 14 1/2" x 7 1/2", a/c.

To attack the Whitney is not my purpose: That old football which one couldn't shy, never mind carry, is worse than indulging all other criticisms of establishment institutions. If the Whitney is to be blamed at all, it is to be blamed for going on trying, which is absurd. But it's a visual obvious fact that most of the marks made on the overtly figurative works are banal, empty and unevocative to an extraordinary degree except for a very distinguished work by Alex Katz, Raymond Saunders' memorable Jack Johnson , and two or three others. From Malcom Morley's New York it looks as though he is going back and trying to refine John Bratby by the way of Oscar Kokoschka. Paint color has more life.

This Whitney Annual is lively in a different sense with Ken Noland showing a Benjamin's Mess which if one has to deal with this kind of concrete quality, Dan Christenson's Yellow Loom is of-the-school-of. Jules Olitski's picture is outstanding because Larry Poons and various fellow travellers feed the mind with opulent confusion; thick paint was never an issue. Robert Melville recently had this to say about Leon Kossoff: " ... there are artists whose handling performs a sort of burial service over the subject whilst proclaming its resurrection ..." Kossoff's work began thicker, and at times continues to be thicker, than Frank Auerbach's, whose exhibition here at the Marlborough galleries we saw the Fall of 1969 and which was less than warmly received. Kossoff had his retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery in London.

Here in New York there is Poons et al. Shivering Night! I ask you ... Shivering Night where? Off Broadway or on the moon? Pictures have more visual substance through paint than this performance. Cy Twombly, whose exhibition at Castelli downtown is the major showing of pictures that building has housed thus far, has a work which in the hodge-podge looks regular, so has Jasper Johns. Both possess a certain quiet distinction which has to be seen. That we must, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "disenthrall ourselves" for big names and a certain life style is the meaning of this visual parable. The Whitney after all, being a strictly American institution, is often brought to near compromise over issues which have little to do with quality in art. It might be a great day when art history is not written from the point of view of wars and revolutionary social upheavals. But it appears, contrary to certain privately aired opinions, that this continues or will continue to be the case. The history of this period's art, if it is ever to be written, will have to include Women's Lib., the Black Panther Party and Gay Liberation. There is irony here, for by popular consensus it must be possible to judge a picture by the color of its skin or what sex it is.

[PICTURE]

Murray Reich, Red Out, [1972] 92" x 130".

A work by Murray Reich is in the Whitney Annual; he and Garry Rich are sharing the space at Max Hutchinson's gallery. At first glance both artists seem to be reworking areas which Piero Dozario and Edward Avedisian have touched on and hastily moved on. Rich rolls his color on either raw duck or a ground as neutral and unmodulated as the duck. That he lets the device have its head is interesting - avoiding the geometry of the supports the rolling takes place the way rolling would, in a multitude of organic stops and starts. That there is very little clarity in these pictures at the moment does not deny an implied quality but there are question marks [the image itself gives up, literally, a set of question marks]. A picture stops and starts not necessarily by cropping at the perimeter of the supports but by pictorial statements about vision.

In reworking some areas Avedisian touched on, Reich recently produced a three panel work which is rhythmed to green, what green can take without collapsing. Where the panels meet the color is red and a shade of red, a kind of maroon; an oval which looks like a long coffin shape rounded at the corners. This dapple or variegation of organic matter is held by a thinner stripe of blue at the outer edge, then green in to paler green. The outside edge is broken evenly both sides by a pink slither ending in the green which, by here, has become a long thin strip halfway up the picture surface. The curving no edge, then edge, then not so much edge as a thin separating line arresting the eye because of the raw canvas like a freely hanging thread, opens up the picture surface like the pages of a book seen flat. The curve goes [/] and up causing the green to billow, just perceptibly, in and out. The effect of these pictures is color almost like breathing.

In speaking about or trying to articulate self evident truth one can miss the point about relative truth. Since no artist as painter is going to make the ultimate statement about paint-color-action-reaction 'one shot' there is a lot to be accepted about cropping. But a picture is a whole picture and as Einstein said on the formulationing of the "Rules of The Game", " The danger ... lies in the fact that in searching for a system one can lose all contact with the world of experience. It seems impossible ... not to waver between the two extremes." A good picture must visually impart the kind of truth implied in what Buckminster Fuller had to say: "It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes."

[PICTURE]

Mark Alsop, Untitled, [1971].

Joe Fisher and Frances Barth are two young artists. Barth is included in the Whitney Annual but Fisher is not. Barth's work in the Whitney is rather large, 73 1/4" x 145 1/2", a green picture called Boudu Saved From Drowning. In a very physical sort of way the literary title of this work hits one after experiencing this rather splendid effort. It is a picture of green with reds, very mysterious and dynamic in a way only color can serve up. This large work consists of two rectangles within the larger rectangles but the right hand one is physically painted out so as to leave a right angled triangle with the hypotenuse, rather jagged and freely painted, forcing the interest back into the picture. Some palimpsestic tension is set up between this triangle and the paler rectangle, that is just off square, with its right hand corner blunted or rounded and which shows traces of the reds which have now become a delicately balanced grey pink.

Fisher and a host of younger artists who have been spotted and encouraged by perceptive teachers at place like Pratt, Cooper and various out of town schools, are often amazed at their transition, through paint color, to Pollock, Rothko - the first generation of New York painters - with a positive pro-life articulation of that paint color. As Fisher himself says "Baronik had the most influence on my work in that he was able to recognize and trace my influences which were at the time Francis Bacon and Gorky ...Magritte".

They are actually tackling pictorial problems of such magnitude that one wonders who it was or how it presumably came to have been that very concerned and respectable people could announce the death of a highly complex activity which is so vigorous. It is true that someone like Fisher, who vacillates between tinting and shading, betrays some of the current indecisions but the evocation of common pictorial ideas challenged is of such potentially high quality from the visible marks made that, as opposed to hope [since the thing exists], one must express total concern at the fact that the people are afraid of well painted pictures, if not of the people who make them, to the extent that they won't look at them.