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 ...