Structure of Color at the Whitney

ARTS MAGAZINE
April 1971

For one hell of a long time now, a body of works has needed a body of literature to go with it. This is why, after viewing The Structure of Color, an exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker, I had to get the catalogue. For apart from accepting that Mrs. Tucker "knows what she likes," the show seemed purposeless.

If as Mrs. Tucker contends, Joseph Albers uses the square as "only the dish I serve my craziness about color in," what is Frank Stella's twisty-twirly "plain" geometry doing or, at the opposite end, William Williams' irrational bars of color, whose only geometrical logic is forced by the dominance of the rectilinear format to which he sticks?

The most mysterious and evocative painting in the show [Ad Reinhardt's black Abstract Painting ] is roped off cheek-by-jowl with not the best example of an artist who has produced a body of work which, though uneven, has greatly influenced a group of young painters whose art is essentially a response to color. Quite the opposite of Reinhardt, who one might say without apology, drove painting into a cul-de-sac. We don't need words. As Reinhardt made clear: "No colors ... Colors are barbaric, physical, unstable ... cannot be controlled" and "should be concealed" [quoted from the catalogue]. Look at the art I ask you! Where do you go from there?

The rest of the essay and the artists' statements in the catalogue are tautological, justifying the dismissal of the occasion as just another excuse to show the same old paintings. This game is surely given away by assertions about an exhibition's basic premise being the questions paintings themselves raise about the nature of color. Color in painting is different from any other kind of color because of the transcendental and evocative nature of the position which painting finds itself in, as a first-order activity in our society. The day man decides that painting, like philosophy, is not helping, but perpetuating the choking emptiness, all will be burnt and then, perhaps, we will all be able to breathe again - and perhaps see. Until then, exhibitions like this show that people [painters] are trying, and Mrs. Tucker ought to be thanked along with the Whitney Museum for letting us know. [ Feb. 25 -Apr.18]

FRANK BOWLING.

It's Not Enough to Say "Black Is Beautiful"

ARTS MAGAZINE
April 1971

Author: Frank Bowling teaches art history at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; he will be included among the Whitney Museum's forthcoming "Black Artsits in America" exhibition.

[PICTURE: Alvin Loving: Diana: time Trip, 2. 1971, 20 feet, eight inches wide: Zierier gallery.

The problems of how to judge black art by black artists are not made easier by simply installing it; here a painter examines the works of Williams, Loving, Edwards, Johnson and Whitten as both esthetic objects and as symbols expressing a unique heritage and state of mind.

Recent New York art has brought about curious and often bewildering confrontations which tend to stress the political over the esthetic. A considerable amount of writing, geared away from history, taste and questions of quality in traditional esthetic terms, drifts towards "relevance," arbitrating social balance and even quotas. For such writing to be serious, it must consider the artists' intent. Intentions, however, cannot be kept within formalist or literalist confines, even when the works display strong formalist or minimalist aspects. That the answers to questions of intent seem to match demonstrations of formalist or literal content, thus freezing the whole dialogue, leaves a highly complex, often fugitive and hence largely ignored area still to be investigated.

Much of the discussion surrounding painting and sculpture by blacks seems completely with notions about Black Art, not with the works themselves or their delivery. Not with a positively articulated object or set of objects. It is as though what is being said is that whatever black people do in the various areas labeled art is Art - hence Black Art. And various spokesmen make rules to govern this supposed new form of expression. Unless we accept the absurdity of such stereotypes as "they've all got rhythm...," and even if we do, can we stretch a little further to say they've all got painting? Whichever way this question is answered there are others of more immediate importance, such as: What precisely is the nature of black art? If we reply, however, tounge-in-cheek, that the precise nature of black art is that which forces itself upon our attention as a distinguishing mark of the black experience [ a sort of thing perhaps, only recognizable by black people] we are still left in the bind of trying to explain its vagaries and to make generalizations. For indeed we have not been able to detect in any kind of universal sense The Black Experience wedged-up in the flat bed between red and green: between say a red stripe and a green stripe.

If formalism drove painting out of the arena of Action, and painting got to be more about itself as "process" and "thing" [ we are not likely to forget the late Ad Reinhardt], painting didn't just isolate itself from questioning; it drove itself and the artists to declaring not just simply the works, but themselves, in a talismanic role.

The art may be a simple box, but the artist remains a magician.

The painters I am about to discuss all work in New York. Although they all are black, they have been grouped together almost entirely in relation to their role as artists. They first came together with the curatorial assistance of Lawerence Alloway and Sam Hunter in an exhibition called " 5 + 1" at Stony Brook University in 1969. Of the artists, Mel Edwards and Dan Johnson are sculptors, Al loving, Jack Whitten, William Williams and myself are painters. It must be however understood that there are many other comparable artists, not necessarily connected with my main thesis but who must be included for reasons which will become clear both in this essay and in the future. [ These artists are the natural inheritors of modernism through the contributions of their ancestors in traditional African and modern art.]

The arguments for an African legacy are often over-stressed and at times aggressively asserted. However there's no denying its emotional and political significance. It is clear that modernism came into being with the contribution provided by European artists' discovery of and involvement with African works, and their development of an esthetic and mythic subject from it. But the point I am trying to make concerns the total "inheritance" which constitutes the American experience and that aspect of it which black people can now [perhaps they always have] fully identify, due to the politization of blackness. It would be foolish to assume, as some do, that the development of modern art through the contributions of African ancestors is solely the property of blacks, for it is evident that the filtering must include white consciousness.

I readily admit that this is partly a question of historical placement and time; it nevertheless remains a complex issue; to wit, a situation which does not shift objective facts, the works or the artists, into areas more readily meaningful. For there is a body of work there and there are figures on the scene we simply have to ddeal with, no matter what the political climate is. At the same time parallel to the question of "intent" there is still the question of standards. How do we judge and salute works by black artists?

I believe that standards exist and complexity of "intent" can be judged by the ability of the individual artist: his ability to fulfil a meaningful talismanic role. But the meaningfulness of the artist's role in many areas of black life is similar to that of such popular figures as Imamu Amiri Baraka, Bobby Seale, Elridge Cleaver and the late Malcolm X. It is interesting to note how the magic of the talismanic figure has been usurped by establishment art for its heroes at large, where we are led to believe that the most "relevant" artists are those who display the greatest "curatorial sensitivity." The trouble is that in an open-ended situation like ours, the establishment-hero functions more like an earnest modern Sunday school teacher -that is, hip.

Consequently, the artist-hero becomes a power behind the throne [a Western tradition which goes back to the Renaissance], or worse, a priest saying the last rites. He is not at all the same thing as a caster-out of spirits, who, it was held traditionally, combined his panache as a showman with the ability to receive, set up and articulate universal vibrations within the confines of a particular community and discipline.My point here is that black anything - energy, life-style, myth, traditions, even music - is now public property to be used by anyone who cares to, but often this use or rerouting is heavily laced with misinterpretation and bad vibes, producing a kind of hysteria only explaainable in terms of politica and supression.

[PICTURE: Jack Whitten: First Frame, 1971, 60 inches square.]

The problems containing if not yet strangling as assertion that "experience" forges the content of art are such that a general statement in today's open-ended situation is available to any interpretation. The central principle that everything which exists can be analyzed into substance and essence, forces one to shift ground over whether works touted under the black label are consistent and positive examples of Black Art.

This is a complicated business, but if we examine some of the works themselves, certain distinctions emerge. There are the political-realist works of certain New York, Boston and Chicago artists, still committed to a mode with a long tradition in American genres, and also in 1930s paintings. Such Social Realism, used to create an irrational hyper-reality , permits the play of feelings without necessarily either including or considering the limitations of reality itself. None of it measures up to the impact or immediacy of a television newscast.

Unlike, say, the Surrealist painters, who choose an illusionist style to articulate a heightened sense of the reality of their erotic and dream world, they direct their attempts at captivating a local audience in finding a way out of a cultural dilemma. An example of this is the much reproduced and talked about Champion by Benny Andrews. Both the work, which is an ungainly papier-mache, collage and rope job, and the sermon the artist apparently preached [parts of which were duly published in The New York Sunday Times ] at the Boston Museum of Fine Art [ where the work was shown] for the benefit of a gathering of the brothers and sisters, stress the emptiness of a " main [?] event" at an exhibition of painting and sculpture which was not success fully turned into theatre. [ The establishment press and the exhibition itself jeopardized any possible future effort in this area by the inclusion of works which could not be considered even theatrical props [?], much less art. Press emphasis on this aspect simply turned Andrews' lecture/happening into the empty gesture of tokenism the museum intended the show to be.]

The inherent problems are not resolved because, like so much bad realist painting, this kind of art is a denial of both forms, i.e. painting and sculpture, and that which truly exists in its own right, such as a tree, a table, a box, a man; as against a color or a relationship, in the disciplines of painting and sculpture which are a [???] of form with matter.

The true reality of particular entities is the embodiment in them of distinct form/matter as a species expressing itself in the spirit of the [???], lending itself to being distinguished by such tried and proven [however arbitrary] substantives as, say, language-based systems there is such a thing as black language in the U.S., as there is such a thing as Neger Engel in Surinam, a well-known source for the continuation of certain African forms in the New World]. And people may [???] to observe certain rules only, perhaps, because of man's inherent[??] drive towards order. Then knowledge of that reality consists in the [?] apprehension of the specific [unmistakable!] in an expression of [??] group mind of that species. It is in this sense that one cannot deny the claims made for such artists as Dana Chandler, Gary Rickson and Benny Andrews, who probably rightly deserve their reputations as having produced Black Art. But the divorce between art [painting] and [?] life [polotics] fractures or blocks the suggestive or evocative [?] to call up the spirit of the situation or event: what remains[? particularities, in a journalistic sense, of an event. What is missing [?] the feeling, the complicated response, not as history, even instant [?], not now as television or radio, but as direct "inherited" experience.

A work of art with the power of making actual or implicit the [???] of the species immedately apprehensible to sense perception [?] more, must also stand up to a rigorous analysis consistent with [??] which is "inside" the given discipline. The essence of the articulated experience may belong solely to the species; it constitutes [?] essence, and not what was contrived by politics, fashion or mannerisms. Thus it might be discovered that the species Black may have a face as part of its essence, whereas its color is merely an accident. [?] Color does not in any way define black . It is not enough to say "black is beautiful."

The traditional esthetic of black art, often considered pragmatic, uncluttered and direct, really hinges on secrecy and disguise. The understanding is there, but the overwhelming drive is to make it complicated, hidden, acute. Being up front is so often given a double edge, often turning such things as language inside out. What was overlooked in Mel Edwards' barbed wire and chains show at the Whitney was his wit, in the tradition of Duchamp, kept afloat by Robert Morris and Les Levine. The elegance and deliberately loose[??] serial geometry were a sure cover for painful implications. The fact that so many critics missed the point is a lesson in the separation of white from black. Inherent in this delivery is the bondage[/] neurosis in top hat and kid gloves. This particular museum exhibition was not a game, but controlled criticisms gone beyond anything Minimal or anti-form had achieved. In terms consistent with the convention of dropping hints, Edwards "drew" a linear pyramid directly in a material whose identification is with agony; it is not the same activity as Morris or Olitski invoking the state of Fallen-on-the-floor. And Edwards' unforced delivery is the opposite of political-realist art. He reroutes fashion and current art convention to 'signify' something different to someone who grew up in Watts rather than to "signify" only in the meaning of Jack Burnham and his colleagues. Never mind the implication of the "free drawing" of a pyramid as opposed to building one. This work was like taking the Classical tradition and Humanism by the ear and making them face reality from the inside. The trouble is if your gaze is elsewhere, only an act of violence will redirect you, and, as I've pointed out elsewhere, don't burn the museum down: this will only bar you from the art experience. Watching the museum burn is a spectator sport. Tangling with barbed wire hurts.

William Williams' work is like Frank Stella's in not being about memory. It's about discovery. There is almost no apparent residue, only amazed recognition as these bright abstractions register their charge to the eye and brain. The flow of energy is astonishing. But before I discuss Williams' work specifically, I want to establish a clear and to me obvious distinction between what Williams does and what Stella has done. Criticism, none the less influential for being word-of-mouth, seems to want to penalize the former. But I contend that this is what we are about: Self-evident change!

Stella and Williams don't share an educational background. One went to Abstract-Expressionist Princeton, the other to Bauhaus Yale. This simple fact is not only important, it's explicit. The influence on Williams' work, for very special reasons [social reasons, if you like, but it is self evident from the nature of the background of white American art, that he, like so many others before him who also happened to be black, couldn't identify with it] was not Abstract-Expressionism. Instead it appears to have been European abstraction of the hard-won sort, represented by people like Albers, or even Johannes Itten. There is something [an attitude, a drive in so much of this energy] recalling the force of the Bauhaus, the inconsistencies of proletarian ambition; the implied, if not actual kitsch , of knowing too much and understanding too little, except in the larger societal sense. It is a kind of style and energy which glitters like a newly manufactured brass button.

Much of Williams' earlier work was close in spirit and execution to Lissitzky. The posture and the placing of forms recalled Russian Suprematism and re-enacted in an uptown situation things that one had read about that kind of revolutionary drive. More important however, compare Williams' jazzy, jagged 1968-69 works [when they settle into the format of the dominant rectangle, after the confused burst of first encounter] with Lissitzky or Malevich and one gets a near equivalent of that circle-and-square tyranny dominating the intentful works of the Russians. One begins to appreciate that the content of this work is not about abstract decorative high art, but aggressive hammer blows in the uptight geometry of color and line. Everything in those paintings - color as line, lines in between the colors -clashes wherever the elements meet in a confused surge of passion.

[PICTURE]

Mel Edwards: Pyramid Up and Down Pyramid, section, installation at the Whitney Museum. March 1970.

The work is virtually irresistible, hallucinatingly original when it should be pathetic and disastrous.

In the end there is a reason for this attraction toward European abstract revolutionary art, not inlike the late Bob Thompson's absorption in European old masters. Over and above Williams' Yale schooling - in the sense of a talisman - this brother is standing on the corner winning a round of "the dozens," hands down, against odds.

The mood has begun to change in his recent work. In a four [???] picture like Overkill, 28 feet long, what seems like leftovers of [///] faceting have crept in, creating concave and convex drives, flattening and asserting equivalents or challenges to the surface geometry. [///] they seem on closer scrutiny more a filtration with what has come down to us from the flattening of certain spherical forms [///]sculptures of Baluba art [with its distinctly spaced out and [///] hemispheric curves] than with any of Cezanne's discoveries.[//] picture switches from positive to negative, which intellectually implies [//] cancellation. This is not such a new idea, in fact it is common currency. The astonishing thing is that just the opposite of [//] expected response is received. Looking at the painting top to bottom, left to right, the forced diagonal drifts both ways from the pink to the [///] panel through to the black and the off-blue into green at the [///]. You begin to want to hold on to something.

What is delivered through this hectic drive - a kind of circus go-cart[///] - is the idea that these pockets of space begin to exhaust [//] [they "giddy" the blood or whatever it is] because the exposed channels of the raw duck support, left like trails of tortured passage, have little to do with flatness, but build almost to relief. Kinesthetically the works begin to collapse in a confusion between painting and such sculptural objects as pyramids - pyramids which keep appearing[//] a tactile way, more sneaking up than appearing. It's as if a confusion of forms that once had to do with face masks and the psychological implications of the pyramid have come together to produce something completely original. Most of Williams' work is like this. I have difficulty convincing myself that they are paintings, even though painted. Doctor Buzzard Meets Saddle Head is almost completely red and green painting. The saturated green field seems to accommodate the busy lines and swirls on the left panel allowing an [//] pyramid of green on the right to assert itself with a kind of no-nonsense dignity.

In a sense [not our sense, but painting and sculpture], the subtlety of black experience, as articulated by behavior, is amply demonstrated in several examples from the recent heated past. What however is never fully taken into account, hardly ever acknowledged, is the pressured and sustained denial of the natural curiosity of blacks born in the new world. Since time immemorial blacks have had to content themselves with the "sneaky" approach. It is a tradition of subtle, driven awkwardness, now stretched to the breaking point, now suddenly a moment not of release, but of explosion of voluptuous, cynical amusement. Irony and sudden change, complete many-leveled [//] contradiction are stock-in-trade and automatic. This is part [//] of the species and the finely wrought articulation of the [//]. Most completely successful works by black artists can be viewed as direct, arrogant spoofs generated from a complete understanding of the issues involved in the disciplines. The game of white-face is not the same as black-face. Desperation takes on the image of survival and makes for grim touching irony in the face of extinction.

Robert Farris Thompson in an essay in Black Studies in the University points out that Anglo-Saxon American missed " an entire dimension of New World Creativity" and suggests that Afro-Carolinian potters made vessels " as a deliberate gallery of tormented faces in order to vent response to a slave environment." Further in the same essay he quotes a South Carolinian "Strut Gal" [accomplished dancer] of the 1840s: "Us slaves watched the white folks' parties where guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a Grand March. Then we'd do it too. But we used to mock 'em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it but they seemed to like it. I guess they thought we couldn't dance ant better."

Several black artists work in certain genres which I take to be pretty awful attempts at this spirit of "jive" [ a word black people [//] use to mean dancing].

The work of Al Loving is a different story. Loving's educational background consists of undergraduate work at the University of Illinois and graduate work in Michigan. He also taught for five years in the Middle West. In fact Loving is very much a Mid-West middle-class or professional-class entity. Loving began as an Expressionist, and he still regards himself as one. However much of his early work [portraits of his first wife konking her hair, putting on make-up, etc., in front of a mirror] also implied the geometry it grew out of . Rectangular windows, mirrors, etc., echo the fact of the framing edge in a way that convinces through its consistency and persistence. Objectifying impressed itself on Loving through this earlier work into geometry to the discovery that "even a box can be a self-portrait." The emphasis in Loving's earlier boxes, apart from self-discovery, is on composition. Then he moved to change the shape of the supports of his canvases from the rectangular to other "viable structures." It was as though such perspectives could clear the confused or confusing Surreal imagery of the work of such an artist as M.C. Escher [whom Loving admires] and declare painting's distinct expressive content through structuring.

This observing through discovery of rules and insistent drive towards order, evident in Loving, is consistent with his background; [/] cannot carefully be explained without a long dissertation on this gifted artist's development. His "activated banding," "small fine lines," which seemed so imperative in the segments, the individual hexagonal pieces recently dominant in Loving's work [like being boxed-in, incarcerated] have now given way to color mixing. In this sense one can say that Loving's earlier Expressionist color is changing: "I'm thinking about color as viable structure." Instead of "not being conscious [of color] except whether I like it or not." The interesting thing here is, much as Loving is convinced by his "natural" colorist sensibility, as one follows the progress of his work, the lines keep creeping back. That I could be fooled by an apparent elimination of lines in these big pieces is heartening. But the lines are still there as function in the pure sense. Loving says: "If I could get color that's strong enough, the lines would go ... but anyway I like what the lines do."

For lots of rarely mentioned reasons, Loving's work denies sedate enjoyment, if less so than Williams'. It is discomfiting like any new kind of art, however much it may operate within the context of the already accepted, and hence fliply understood. And it demands maximum attention if the black shared experience and heritage are not t o go wasted.

Loving's Timetrip One, 25 by 12 1/4 feet, consists of 11 hexagonal pieces, painted on primed or in some instances unprimed cotton duck, in totally artificial colors, held together by cunning as well as by experiments with chemical formulas. It is an important work. Even the dense brushing and priming do not let the colors operate as anything more than tints. The opacity pushes the artificial light [under which most of this work is seen] back into one's eyes, to the extent that one can't see the color. It's ever too bright and dazzling, like bad, bad neon glitter.

A weakness in Loving's work, and it is reflected in his attitude, is rather like what went wrong with Neo-Impressionist painting. He seems to neglect the fact that color activants are not color expressions. His response, both intellectual and physical, is not essentially expressive [ as was so much of what was done by the Pollock, Kline, de Kooning generation], but an ego trip into ways of excess or extravagance. Enormous paintings are more literal signifiers to a better way of life than those which illustrate freedom in realist or Expressionist styles.

Loving's painting intelligence is beyond question. After his early pictures, he decided that "just to go to other imagery made little sense ... I could repeat any imagery and still come up with the same [/] I chose the cube or the box simply because it was a foundation to intellectualism .. a sort of mundane form that could be very very dull unless a great deal was done with it." He was impressed by "Frank Stella's first pieces where he had dropped the Expressionist vocabulary about composition."

Even though painting is still dealing with the wall and the floor, its expressive content relates to how one responds to the object as a specific. Painting is so complicated that it really doesn't bear explaining except as to what it decidedly is not - i.e., not architecture or sculpture. In this sense, Jack Whitten's work gives off a sunny, glowing, natural response from somewhere in the spots of paint pushed up from orange to that kind of rich grey one only gets from an instinctive and natural response to color. The color is not greyed [/]. On first confrontation one may be confused until one realizes that this grey has a richness which must have something to do with weathered Southern sensibility exactly in tune with itself. Whitten makes"fine" paintings which his new technique of pushing the randomly selected color through a fabric screen of various dots on already wet and receptive other fabric [ in this case cotton duck] makes for a kind of tough choosing that only such a sensibility can pull off. The pictures are so new and mysterious that only intuition tells me this down home brother has it in his hands, his mind, his psyche. His mind reading back to me is laughter. His very body action makes every mark without a mistake, even though painting is full of mistakes.

Dan Johnson's work is, he says in transition. He is under no [/] as to what it is he is doing. His sculpture may be a spectator sport, but his commitment is without question. His position in the community is easily consistent with his status as a kind of Ebony magazine STAR, emerging into a larger society. It's more than Bill Bojangles Robinson tapping out and shuffling the Star Spangled Banner at a party for President Nixon ... or Larry Rivers' arrogant remark about " a better life for black people with the emergence of people like William Williams ..." If River's remark has any truth or meaning[/], it is only true in my opinion for Dan Johnson, who is a magic man and should be Mayor of Soho, at least.

If you can't draw, trace

ARTS MAGAZINE
February 1971

Frank Bowling talks to Larry Rivers

[PICTURE]

Larry Rivers, Me and My Shadow 1 [1970], 79" x 71 1/2" x 24 1/2", canvas, photomontage, plastic and wood construction.

Frank Bowling: Larry, before your things went up to the gallery, they were all around the studio, I among others, was in and out. Recently it occurred to me that perhaps your work is about "common seeing." The question with common seeing - as an example, your preoccupation with black faces - is not so much, it appears to me, an investigation of the "shape" of Negro features and its relationship to all other heads, but rather the particularities of seeing through something like a camera. What kind of seeing do you think you become involved with when you are working?

Larry Rivers: In certain instances I have an idea for a translation of what I see three dimensionally into two dimensions. Sometimes I take from a photograph, sometimes I trace, sometimes I project ... so what these images do under those conditions will determine what I'm going to take from them. In other words, if I take a photograph and project it, it gets larger - certain parts of it ask to be sort of taken out from their general context to represent what is there in totality. For instance, take lips. I've always thought to myself that in order to make a pair of lips I have to investigate the line between the two lips more than anything else. If I'm lucky enough to get something that goes on between the two of them, it seems to speak for the upper lip and the bottom lip.

FB: What is line? Does it describe space?

LR: Line is like the division between one and the other ... it is the beginning of one and the end of the other.

FB: Is that space?

LR: Sometimes it goes so far as to actually ... not describe space, but it begins to tell you what is happening. You can make as much space out of it as you want to.

FB: You can make the line as long as it is broad?

LR: Well, the line between the two lips begins to be ... on the top lip it's the point at which the top lip goes in and meets the bottom lip which already is beginning to sort of move out. It's like two curves.

FB: The two curves, that's more of a concept. The curve is something different from the line; the line is really the fact.

LR: Yes, the curve is something that you sense and each one would sort of do it differently. But the fact, it's true, is more objective. I mean, we can say more about it and agree, and know what we're saying.

FB: I started to pin down "seeing" as opposed to corporate symbols that everyone knows ... The camera seems to provide the means for a kind of total objectification, where the eye does not. The eye does better in concept but not in fact.

LR: I understand you, but what does that lead us to?

FB: It possibly pushes us back to common seeing. Do you feel that objectification - making a thing more accessible by making an object of it - and common seeing are so separated that it creates confusion?

LR: What do you mean by common seeing?

FB: It is related to the eye ... there are as many possible variations of what a thing is as there are eyes, yet objectification as process denied this. I don't really want to touch on your art in terms of advertisement and all that well-known stuff. I mean, I want to talk about seeing. The shape of Negro features and its relationship to all heads is not an art idea, it's a philosophical or an anthropological thing.

LR: It is like some objective fact. If you would separate each feature you would befuddle everybody. I had a day where I tried to find what would constitute a Negro person's lips. If there is anything the average person thinks distinguishes the "European" face from the African one, he would say the lips ... the Africans have bigger lips, more sensuous lips. I spent twenty-four hours looking through magazines and just cutting out lips; separating them from the rest of the face, from the nose, from eyes, from color, from shape of face ... and I could not do it. I had a man whose photograph I kept for five years. He as an East African. That man's lips, if they weren't African lips ... I mean, there were no pair of lips I ever saw that were African when I took them out of the context of the face. Do you remember, I put them on a female Vogue model's lips, and no one was able to say to me, "Where do those lips come from?" They looked perfectly natural. I've been trying for years to do a painting of a Negro person, take all the features and transfer them onto a pink background or what we call a white person, and I've never been able to do that test. White people probably think I'm nuts, black people think I'm insulting ... I tried to do that with the Identification Manual.

FB: A thing which is structured differently for every individual seems to lose its many facets when you nail down the particularities seen through the objective - I mean through the device of a camera. Common seeing is ruptured by the camera, which proceeds to "objectify" that image. The process of identifying, the "investigation" or the building process in art -is that kind of seeing different?

LR: Yes.

[PICTURE]

Larry Rivers, Black Olympia [1970], 78" x 41" x 34", mixed media.

FB: Now that you've wrestled with that, I want to ask you about the use of certain words in criticism. In Beyond Modern Sculpture Jack Burnham says, "Rivers has consistently created fetish figures."

LR: But isn't fetish some sort of aberration within a certain culture?

FB: I've been checking out the word fetish. Here is what I got: religion, sentiment, acts of religion, idolatry, canonization, sacrifice, holocaust. It apparently also means pictures.

LR: Critics and people in general don't seem to realize that an artist can only talk about a work he made in a certain way, either out of prudery, self-consciousness, pride, or whatever word that seems to cover whatever one is embarrassed by. On another level the work may really be about something that you would just like other people to discover ... That's there just as well. Lamp Man Loves It can look like it is about a simple myth of black man's virility in a sexual situation with a white woman ... and I read that thing to you the other day, from Fanon. The subject, if you want to carry it further, is really quite serious and can go back to slavery and make one understand what is going on all the time. I mean, would you ever have though that I, in doing that work, though to myself: in order for a white Christian to be able to behave toward another thing he knows is a human the way he did toward a black who was supposedly a slave, he had to make him something other than human - he had to make him into an animal or an object in order to make him a slave.

FB: I would have thought that people like Marx and Freud cleared all that up anyway.

LR: This work, you can say, is some kind of final personification of the guilt of this white man, in having to make the black man an animal by saying, "Well if he is closer to an animal, he is much better in bed." It's as if, if he is much better in bed, his notion of him as a beast is true and therefore he can continue to behave the way he did toward him. That's a very serious accusation ... Now, it's contained in the work I call Lamp Man Loves It. On the surface it would seem like a fucking simple dopey funny Pop thing. Is it Pop? Has anybody who's gone into any of these works thought that I do like that? No! I mean, I would ... if I started to say something like that, I would ... I sound as if I'm the most serious thing since Albert Schweitzer!

FB: So in effect, this work, among others in your recent show at Marlborough, cannot be assessed, judged, and hence evaluated in formalist or literalist rationale.

LR: You could look at it that way, I'm that too ...aren't I? ... I had to put it together, I had to use plastic, I had to use wood. It looks as if I had a great interest in that part... I did. But underneath it there is also something else going on in my thought. The same with this work that I did on the Black Olympia, or I Like Olympia in Black Face, that title we had made up. Did you notice what happened in the show, it was Black Olympia ... but at any rate, it is a work which on the surface seems to be about Manet or something about now and the change. Let's see what a subject matter that comes down in the history with a white whore and a black domestic ... we'll make the whore black and we'll make the domestic white ... let's see what it looks like. But no one talked about it that way, no one went into that ... Why? When I did Washington Crossing the Delaware, it took about seven years for people to finally come around to the fact that maybe I did something that was the beginning of something else. Because of Pollock and everybody's preoccupation with a certain kind of abstract art, it just seemed like something that fell down in the middle of nowhere for no reason. It's the same thing that think is happening now ... Maybe my work just seems to fall into the old-fashioned idea of subject matter, and so they don't see yet that it requires anything new from them in talking about it.

FB: Quite, which brings me to -

LR: I still want to say one thing. Now, you know, the show we've done called Objects of American History ... in the context they are going to see the works, it's going to be just the opposite; it's going to be like a hammer blow, which isn't completely the intention either. They will only examine it from the point of view of ... oh, a slave ship, and what is meant as a slave ship ... and then nobody is going to look at the structure, at the ribs, or the way it's made.

FB: An appreciation of any new kind of art comes about in one, or all, of several ways. A couple of these could be a reaction against current taste or perhaps some compromise with current taste. Everyone was talking about black art a little while back; it is now clearly a dead issue.

LR: Just when I'm getting interested in black art you want to bury it ... treachery!

FB: Why don't we talk, say, about Pop art. I have it fixed in my head that it all began in London with people like Kitaj ... the catalyst for that kind of image came directly out of your work, for instance, The Last Veteran, the first one you ever showed publicly. What is your feeling about that, about the ways any kind of new art comes out?

LR: There could be a third route. Like the guy is so blotto about what is going on that he's doing something that doesn't come out as a reaction. I've been pretty steady about the fact that I may like what we call primary-shape sculpture and everything like that, but I always felt that in some ways I had to do something else ... it has to have a certain lift for me. I had to touch on something in life, I suppose. The work is the work, and I know it is - and I know it only exists as a work - but it has identification with certain things we've gone through, visual memories, etc. I don't know if my things are against current taste. I don't know if there is such a thing as current taste any more ... in the museums, in the universities ...Where?

FB: Wherever art is being made, shown, discussed. I don't mean there is a tyranny, but it has to do with the issues discussed. The discussion runs through everything; for instance, is there such a thing as Black Art? Your relative position forces this question. After all, there is this Texas exhibition ...

LR: I don't know ... would you call it? ...I would say the blackest white art I've seen, in the sense I've inundated myself with information.

FB: Is art about information?

LR: In my case it is in many instances. It is like a distillation of information. I get a hold of this, of that; I read that ... You know more than anybody else the time I've spent ...It's getting on for two years, doing this work. It has probably embarrassed more black painters who have been involved with cubes and squares. I would think that Jacob Lawrence, suddenly, if he saw this work, wouldn't know what the hell has happened. The only thing is that you find that because of my experience "prior" to this work, the manner, the abstract actuality of this work just looks different.

FB: Prior experience...are you also talking about political positioning, activities, consciousness of injustice, white supremacy?

LR: Well, look, I did a map of Africa before it was connected with this particular work. So you could say that it was all about the fact that Clyfford Still's work looked like maps to me.

FB: How much influence has Still had on your work?

LR: Not very much. It suddenly seemed as if a map was an absolutely valid move to make. I also think that my experience in jazz, the number of black guys who have filtered through my life from time to time, gave me some ideas. Whatever I would do on this subject would not just be an interesting idea ... it came out of the fabric of my life.

FB: Well, back to language.

LR: Black language has a wider attraction, the lines of communication are so varied ... But that's political ... Governor Rockefeller goes down on the East Side and eats bagels, he has spaghetti with Italians. This language thing has an appeal, it attracts students, but I don't think anyone owns it. We use it at moments for better or for worse, we just try to see what it can do for us.

FB: This seems to work as well in making art - the way you tackle anything to turn it into your kind of magic.

[PICTURE]

Larry Rivers, Throwaway Dress: New York to Nairobi [1967], 45 3/4" x 78" x 3", oil on canvas and wood construction.

LR: That's something else, that's a translation. I don't think one can get that into art, that's a pretty fancy idea. As yet no one has come along and employed that language. When they do, like Walter Jones, it's mainly out of belligerence: it's as if while whitey was looking at it, he was going to get a lot of shit thrown at him ...

FB: There is a lot of painting going on now ...

LR: Really?

FB: Yes, painting with paint. But that's only one aspect of what I mean by current taste.

LR: Well, it takes a certain strength, for instance, for someone like William Williams to ... when he walks over to his studio ... to sort of obliterate all that ever goes on in his mind through being black; knowing him as little as I do, it's quite a strong thing in his life. I mean being black is not just something he has like a lollypop; he is responding to it daily in a very strong way. Yet when he gets into his studio he doesn't want it ... it takes a certain kind of strength and he has to be admired for it.

ARTS MAGAZINE / April 1971

Structure of Color at the Whitney

For one hell of a long time now, a body of works has needed a body of literature to go with it. This is why, after viewing The Structure of Color, an exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker, I had to get the catalogue. For apart from accepting that Mrs. Tucker "knows what she likes," the show seemed purposeless.

If as Mrs. Tucker contends, Joseph Albers uses the square as "only the dish I serve my craziness about color in," what is Frank Stella's twisty-twirly "plain" geometry doing or, at the opposite end, William Williams' irrational bars of color, whose only geometrical logic is forced by the dominance of the rectilinear format to which he sticks?

The most mysterious and evocative painting in the show [Ad Reinhardt's black Abstract Painting ] is roped off cheek-by-jowl with not the best example of an artist who has produced a body of work which, though uneven, has greatly influenced a group of young painters whose art is essentially a response to color. Quite the opposite of Reinhardt, who one might say without apology, drove painting into a cul-de-sac. We don't need words. As Reinhardt made clear: "No colors ... Colors are barbaric, physical, unstable ... cannot be controlled" and "should be concealed" [quoted from the catalogue]. Look at the art I ask you! Where do you go from there?

The rest of the essay and the artists' statements in the catalogue are tautological, justifying the dismissal of the occasion as just another excuse to show the same old paintings. This game is surely given away by assertions about an exhibition's basic premise being the questions paintings themselves raise about the nature of color. Color in painting is different from any other kind of color because of the transcendental and evocative nature of the position which painting finds itself in, as a first-order activity in our society. The day man decides that painting, like philosophy, is not helping, but perpetuating the choking emptiness, all will be burnt and then, perhaps, we will all be able to breathe again - and perhaps see. Until then, exhibitions like this show that people [painters] are trying, and Mrs. Tucker ought to be thanked along with the Whitney Museum for letting us know. [ Feb. 25 -Apr.18]

FRANK BOWLING.

Another Map Problem

ARTS MAGAZINE
December 1970 - January 1971

The aim of criticism, it has always seemed to me, is to unearth through understanding the most direct possible interpretation of the achievements of painters, as with the specialists in any field. This does not mean that the critic should tell the painter how to be a good painter. It is even a liberty to assert, as it has been reported one well-known critic has, in response to a painter's accusation of bullying, " I don't tell you how to paint! Only how to proceed." It is also presumptuous to draw larger conclusions from the isolation of noninvolvement with the activity, and inform the painter that a particular view about the nature of space or matter, i.e., paint or canvas, cannot be correct because it has awkward metaphysical implications.

If, therefore, as Barbara Rose has said, criticism has run out of superlatives, this does not mean that quality hasn't been discernable. On the contrary, there is a consistent nodding agreement among peer practitioners about what is good painting. They are the ones who are acting it out and criticizing by doing, by declaring; as witness the recent Larry Poons exhibition at the Lawrence Rubin galleries.

It is perhaps too early to access the true essence, implications, and likely value of Poons's latest attempts, but one thing is certain: a short comparison with the exhibition of John Hoyland's recent work, shown at about the same time at the Emmerich galleries, reveals some of the differences being talked about and dealt with. Related to this, there prevails a general lack of understanding of Hans Hoffman, of what Hofmann achieved in one rectangle reaching across [sometimes several] others and echoing the extent to which the actual image carries vibrancy in terms of sheer color: The whole resounds in a sort of concertinaed burst, holding the surface so taut visually that one doesn't question its shallowness, hence its flatness. This idea does not work in any of Hoyland - the paint oozing all over, devoid of any structure or tension, bellied and sagged visually in a sort of messy collapse. Poons, on the other hand, is not playing at plastic surgery but, one suspects, seeking in the doing and seeing the expressive possibilities of the paint itself as it is related to the art of painting. The basic character of his pictures lies in the figurative event of paint moved - paint moving, having moved.

There has been a lot of talk about thick paint, but this is not really a new issue. It was going on in 19 th century Germany, and London had its so-called Bromberg School, dominated by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof. [We saw examples of Auerbach's works here at the Marlborough Gallery in September - October 1969.] In Sweden there is Evert Lundquist and his followers; in Paris there was De Stael, etc. The originality of Poons, however, is in his dealing with paint as visible paint possibilities - expressive, openly articulate as color and as force - and not with paint as building material - skin and / or bone equivalents, etc. He uses a process of not quite scooping or bailing out the water that separates from the heavy pigment settling; letting it drift, he oversees the internal volition rather like a hawk.

For what we have seen, Poons's handling is both subtle and delicately balanced. His sense of color braces this capacity so finely that it often strays over into slickness; however, the successful pictures are images of great power resulting almost entirely, one guesses, from his disciplined response to paint. The ability of paint to fluctuate and deal with fluid structures by piling up, drifting, etc. appears to be not a question of sculpture bas relief, and so on, nor of space [flatness, concave, convex, etc.], but an inherent character of the nature of paint as experienced by the painter.

References to science, philosophical description or other closed definitions of "paint" and "color" thus seem completely disconnected from the reality of paint as illustrated by Larry Poons. Walter Darby Bannard has written several essays on the problems that contemporary abstract color painters are confronting. In the March 1970 issue of Artforum ["Color Painting and the Map Problem"] he contends that for some geometrical reason one cannot, in the making of a map or a painting, place more than four different color areas adjacent to one another.

In trying his best to isolate one aspect, or unit, from the pictorial fullness of painting for our understanding, he ends up rendering it brittle and negative. The aspect or element I'm particularily referring to is structure. "All painting is relational" is one of those happy kinds of observations. Editors have a habit of discomfitting one with questions like "relational to what?" But never mind, perhaps explanation is not quite so steadfastly needed, after all that idea has been talked about. Bannard goes on to state, "But they [the pictorial units] may not interact ... they either stand alone or exhaust themselves on their immediate neighbor ... The wholeness of the picture is [thus] fractured and the structure gives in ..." This is stating the obvious. Extended substances, like particular bodies, don't move. By emphasizing the mathematics of the surface, Bannard dismisses the fact that the almost casual efficacy of a particular good painting implies, indeed constitutes, a certain kind of action.

Since Bannard claims that the "mutual isolation" of picture units weakens a painting, we are forced to assume in terms of absolute abstract relatedness that all nonrelational paintings --made and not - fall into the same bag. Yet "painting a canvas all one color, or ... leaving it [the canvas] blank" are surely two different things, for painting is painting and the proof of quality is in painting." Leaving it [the canvas] blank" is decidedly not painting.

Bannard's essay seems to block the appearance of two equivalents. The first being the natural connection between the two-dimensional structure of the stretched canvas, and the "orderly system of parallels and meridians" and the grid/systems of most comprehensive maps. Second, the organic nature of shapes which masses take on - water, land, soft, hard, and so on - very much like the fluid structure of paint itself as it forms up and delivers. Given that these are equivalents through the actual formal existences inherent in both things, however superficial, the fact of various differences through action could be taken as understood from the existing evidence. There is all the difference of action, as it pertains to painting, on an actual woven, absorbent-like canvas, in that on this molecular, or porous surface, if we block the pores we get opacity; if not, we get something which, if not quite opposite, is pretty near to it. Whereas the degree of subservience of an actual map's [the sort readily at hand] ability to go through the same process proves an insoluble barrier.

[PICTURE]

Jasper Johns, Map [ Based on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Airocean World[1967]. encaustic and collage on canvas. 186" x 396". [dimensions can vary]

[PICTURE]

Larry Rivers, Africa 11 [1962-63], oil on canvas, 113" x 133".

The point that "pictorial units have an automatic or forced relationship," though correct, limits the consideration to a space problem and puts a halter around the vulnerable fact that what is being discussed is rigid as opposed to fluid structures. Emphasis is on limitation, not on freedom of paint ability.

Rand McNally World Atlas, 1967, states, "... a map is merely an orderly system of parallels and meridians on which a flat map can be drawn ..." Most projections are disguised to preserve on the flat map some particular property of the sphere. By varying the systematic arrangement of the latitude or longitude lines a projection can be made either equal area or conformal. Although most projections are derived from mathematical formulas some are easier to 'visualize' if thought of as projected upon a plane, or upon a cone or a cylinder which is then unrolled into a plane surface, and thus are classified plane [Azinuthal], conic or cylindrical ..." Much of this is closer to the fact of painting as process, with its constant drive to reiterate and assert flatness, as opposed to the serial implication of topology, which would accept flatness as a given in needing no assertion. Carrying this further, a more precise rendering of near-equivalents with painting as we know it through Cezanne and Mondrian would be difficult to equal. Bannard himself tells us that Jackson Pollock's work, blossoming from Cubism "...took the line and threw out the form it enclosed."

There is a continued, deepening threat of negative importance essential to Bannard's position. "Recently ... the best paintings have been in terms of color rather than space ... Artists often reduced space variety or the importance of space variety..." could be taken as an observation from a sensibility with "a highly developed sense of fact," in Clement Greenberg's words. The trouble is that what follows [i.e., " ...painting in terms of color brings up special problems of isolation and interaction ... Many colors spread at random on ... a flat surface become mutually isolated because each color can interact only with those colors sharing its borders"] is not good enough because of the self-evident a priori limitation; also the language implies once again that what is being touched on is space. Coming as Bannard does out of that era when "hard-edge" painting was the dominant issue, it is not, perhaps, surprising to find that these utterances turn out to be a rather academic view of color; but there are other points about color besides these comparatively well known abstract ones.

[PICTURE]

Paul Cezanne, Mt. St. Victoire [1905], 14" x 29".

[PICTURE]

Jasper Johns, map [1963]. 60" x 93".

A lot of color painting going back to the mid-1960's with Jules Olitski, which seemed to refer to Monet's work as the particular location which springboarded the present dialogue, is really more properly located in the discoveries of Cezanne and the Cubists; a sort of re-connecting to the object world to leave the painting free to define itself as painting. I think that William Rubin is right in suggesting, rather stating, that the earliest fully realized paintings of Frank Stella [the "black paintings"], which seemed a long time to refer to Jackson Pollock, were much closer in time and directly connected to what Jasper Johns was doing. Seen now with the perspective of hindsight to be a contention of objectness and Cezanne's juncture, operating not as separating lines but as guides to the next open space, the oft-repeated assertion that the space in Cezanne "looks" as if one could walk into it is really about a kind of "blindness." There is an anxious, groping certainty/uncertainty as the marks stutter across the surface until they are built up in an increasingly sure but always perplexed march to the edge, which nevertheless has an uncanny magnet of drawing one back into the midst of the image. This is what grips one in an incredible tension very like Old Master painting, where one tends to forget what one is looking at. It is quite unlike Monet's Impressionism, which attempts to catch the "fugitive effects" of nature.

In the hands of Cezanne, the color structure discoveries of the Impressionists became a mark-making guide to the next space , rather like a seeing-eye dog. In this sense it could be said that Frank Stella took up one of the things, more accurately one of the aspects, the Cubists discarded. This could be read several ways. I think the proper one is, simply, that it didn't apply because it was too difficult. It came too close to decoration, and Matisse was the only person able to cope with decoration, but then Matisse was never a Cubist. It is interesting that Matisse, who used to map out his work in the sense that his cut-outs were constantly being re-arranged in a kind of charting in search of balance, is never mentioned in connection with any of the known users of maps such as Johns and Rivers.

In Sam Hunter's recent book on Larry Rivers, for example, no mention is made of the almost compulsive attachment of this artist to specifying, much as this penchant is turned loose by the artist to the point of being vague. Rivers' use of map can only be said to be vague in the sense that the use to which the appearance of a map is put is indicative only of something else; not painting but something in or about a work. Like his use of Abstract Expressionist painting attitudes, vacillating between "plain" figuration and fragmentary allusions to figuration, Rivers' use of maps suffers from a lack of worry . Though employed literally [Africa, Boston Massacre, Russian Revolution], they serve to depict some thing or place outside the work itself. Max Kozloff in his book on Jasper Johns spends much greater energy in discussing where the paintings don't fit into a concept of Apollonian aspirations through structure, rather than on the structures themselves. Of the map done in 1961 and now in the Museum of Modern Art, Kozloff says Johns "...betrays such an indifference to geography that the United States are swamped in shrill yellows and reds and light blues, without any compensating adjustment of stroke to image. It is an unravelled, acrimonious picture." The wholly literary and emotional connotations around the three map paintings are, one suspects, hardly Jasper Johns. What one sees after, and in, connection with False Start [1959] is the demand of mobile paint structures. Linear space or plane structures, which lend to a one-to-one color articulation, become considerably undermined when color is busier, more natural, more fluid. If the control of False Start is direct and intuitive, the maps with their "stepped" but natural up-and-down, left-and-right, right-and-left, stuttered diagonal drifts, looping bellying lines, demand [within the rectangle] a certain kind of order that Johns seems unwilling to pursue.

Kozloff is right that the map done in 1963 is the better of the three paintings, but the most successful work using "map" as a springboard into the making of an image is the print of Two Maps. The reason for this is that the one-to-one demand is being satisfied by linear space repetition. Whereas in every painting Johns seems incapable of dealing with the left-hand corner, where California juts out into the ocean, and the curved drift implied by that shape, finds no echo anywhere else. In fact it is badly disrupted by a completely different set of curves around Florida. The lack of natural rhythms at the borders, both left and lower right, of these pictures makes the comparative order and seductive colorism in the middle appear overdone and confused. The "stamped" stencil supports, but only to emphasize device. Missing is the understanding found in Cezanne and Mondrian, and suggested by Rand McNally.

Because painting can be so decorative in the worst sense, a quality inherent in the works of artists like Johns and Rivers, there is a kind of existential touch that makes the liberties they take with objects sustain themselves in the facture of that tension, that plight of risk. Color painting, or more properly abstract color painting is only the most recent example of that which gambles with the absolute hazards of collapsing through being decorative.