Dec. 1969 - Jan. 1970
Current art criticism is developing an attitude which threatens to consign the idea and fact of Black Art to the periphery of artistic events. This establishment criticism hides behind useful political terms "revolution," "pragmatism," "Marxism," and sociology. It is a form of cultural myopia, malignant in its approach to Black art; for Black art, like any art, is art. The difference is that it is done by a special kind of people.
Threatening through "anarchism," which someone defined as "permanent revolution," may sound it defines Black existence - not Black struggles, but Black existence itself. Black life has had the spirit of anarchism as its content for centuries. Our history [this "historylessness"] within a framework of degradation and oppression is a creative self-perpetuating process of anarchist, pro-life zeal. This perennially underground concept is in peril of being destroyed by assimilation, fragmenting, and watering down. The total thrust of the establishment is toward annihilation by ignoring contemporary black existence in the light of history.
Earlier criticism, in every book and article, confirmed a deeply held opinion that, in the plastic arts, Black endeavor didn't exist or, when it did, was "lesser." At present there is no support for any such prejudice, suggested or real, for no contemporary art criticism deals with Black history or experience with the indelible anarchist content. Of the new criticism, Gregory Battock in The New Art says, "If our response to the present is inadequate and outmoded what of the future and the 'new' awareness of the non-white peoples? ...the new criticism presents not only a direct confrontation with the new art in question, but also a 'confrontation' with its cultural, moral and social logic." Those were the dark romantic days of 1966 for subsequently, Mr. Battock has, evoked that well-known, itinerant Marxist-humanist-theorist Professor Marcuse, so often called upon to diagnose society's ills. But even with Professor Marcuse's aid, Mr. Battock was not able to increase our understanding.
[PICTURE]
Melvin Edwards, My Turn to Bow [1965], welded and forged steel, 14" x 20" x 10". On view in the X to the 4 th exhibition, Studio Museum in Harlem.
Miss Barbara Rose, with a nod or two in the past at individual artists who happen to be Black, sets out in the new criticism [ Art Forum , last season] and delivers a labyrinth of learned name dropping, concluding with a totally White, controlled, pragmatic plug for her favorite young White exponents of the American dream. Miss Rose contends that "younger artists are responding to a new world view which holds far more in common with pragmatism than idealism ..." This observation may be the case in the narrow White American sense but it is too late to disguise the fact that what may have started out as pioneering and pragmatic has revealed itself as arrogant, colonialist and greedy, with an idealist zeal somewhat unprecedented in history. Pragma might be Greek for action, only, when this turns out to be brutal and domineering it leaves open for question whether Miss Rose's suggested distillation, via her learned peers of the "... function for art, placing us back again on a favorite terrain of American artists, who have felt so often that art must transcend the 'merely' aesthetic to inform experience more directly ..." isn't essentially a plea to perpetuate a rather abnormal and now notorious situation where a people have to let themselves be hypnotized into believing a huge section of their population were not simply irrelevant but virtually didn't exist. If one can have "world view" without local perspective it is plain we are dealing with the cyclops, regardless of John Dewey, Morse Peckham et al ...
Of the "sociologists" writing in the New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl, on August 31, 1969, praised two recent art shows of low calibre - both organized by Black people. Of Afro-American Artists at Brooklyn College, he observed it was a painstaking selection of the best available recent work by Black Americans, but wondered whether "Black viewers were universally pleased with its fastidious elegance ..." Of the Harlem Artists 69 exhibition, he says, "The Studio Museum evidently opted to survey the actual state of art in its community. The decision was not to educate the taste of the community [though the Museum is heavily funded from outside] but convey to the people of Harlem that Black Art is worthy of their pride. Harlem Artists 69 obviously did apply minimum standards ..." Whose minimum standards? Part of the function of any Museum in any community is to educate by survey. If Mr. Schjedal's conviction is that this is what the Studio Museum in Harlem could not do then the clear implication is that this must be the freak Museum in the history of Museums: its function being only to instill pride. Again, much as one can come to art through sensitivity and intelligence; which, one must assume, is what " the guy off the street" brings with his "natural gifts" as a maker of art works; art cannot sustain itself without "education" [this much maligned activity] - the swop, exchange, cross-splicing, this necessary growth-process of ideas - which is true of all people in the history of the world, whether the means is the apprentice system, art schools, or enclosed societies of long ago where there was "appreciation of its own art by a people for whom it is not a luxury but an integral part of life ..." These words by William Fagg, in a symposium on "Tribality" at the First World Festival of Negro Art, refer, as he said, to "the ideal relationship between art and society ... enjoyed for some centuries in Christian Europe before the Renaissance." But we are not pre-Christian Renaissance Europeans." We are Black people in the Western world. To lower standards for our benefit is condescending and insulting to art.
Mr. Schjeldahl's patronizing progress report finds artists influenced by the look of 50s Abstract Expressionism and even 30s and 40s realism. "Black artists who are automatically participants in the turmoil of current history would not seem quite ready to submit to the cool reductionisms and aesthetic ploys of fashion ..." Were Black artists left out of history's turmoil before? This patently contradictory nonsense is anti-life and uninformed. Let it suffice to say if Mr. Schjeldahl found no connection between the contemporary life-style of the people uptown - which is the hippest and most modishly influential there is - and their art [which he documents and dates by identifying it with the 30s and 50s] then the educative function of the Museum has capitulated to something of which neither it or he approves: insidious racism.
It is hardly surprising then that museum people of various persuasions have been revealed as not believing their own publicity. Two prime examples are Harlem On My Mind and the X to the 4 th Power exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The fact that the former exhibition was a disaster and the latter praised does not disguise the flaw in both; neither believed in Black artistic effort; both merely tried it on." If he really believed that museums had a function outside the limits of their constitution, Mr. Hoving would have let the Blacks turn the place on its head; he had nothing of the sort on his mind. He would have had nothing to fear for Blacks have always "re-routed" without destroying. Good as X to the 4 th exhibition was, it contained a similar lack of conviction - the inclusion of a White artist being a fruitless gesture of politicizing by pointing up how equal, or as-good-as-White the Black majority was. In whose opinion?
The net result of the publicity for the Black Revolution spilling over into art is the fact that in all of the more unfortunate displays it hasn't mattered whether the art was good or not - a testimony to the sadly overwhelming and burdening concentration on politics and sociology. There are good works, as demonstrated by the X to the 4 th show, but mediocre, ethnic, amateurish, irrelevant stuff is also being touted in the name of Black endeavor. As long ago as 1934, Romy Bearden was protesting against an "attitude ... of a coddling and patronizing nature." Have things really changed? Except for the greater viciousness of the surrounding misunderstandings?
