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 ...
