Joe Overstreet

ARTS MAGAZINE
Dec. 1969 - Jan. 1970

[PICTURE]

Joe Overstreet, Chieftain, acrylic on canvas, 8' x 8'.

Joe Overstreet's first, comprehensive one man show is this season at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It is the most challenging pictorial confrontation in my recent experience. This show is a triumph!

Much of the work through aesthetic aspirations ends up with a certain academic rigidness. But Overstreet, along with all other major painters, is exploring painting as a first-order activity. He is unique in that with all the rhetoric, his efforts in breadth and detail provides us with an unusual and bold understanding. Color resonance for emotion, shape for edgy understanding of protection. Space for essential change. The wall is not dealt with formally, but with utter distrust: first tentatively. Formal [western] geometry plays an ever increasing part in Overstreet's work. The most distinguished is Tribal Chieftain which looks like a big kite. Four equi-v's isosceles triangles - juxtaposed to assymetrical triangles are constructed freehand; they rotate in a circular motion, becoming the straight-lined edges of this shaped canvas. They ripple over and under, now concave, now convex, leaving slightly optical rectangles partly through the choice of color [these areas are painted red and black] but very much through their irregular freehand placing. The whole primary structure and primary color field oscillates between the complementaries - yellow/blue, red/green - setting up a resonance lateritious in content and firm in delivery. All of these elements tend to aid the lucre of visual knowledge, the illusion of a stuttered, vibrant, indefinite, yet unequivocal color flow.

The geometrical discontinuity and sectional structure disengage the optical flow to leave a fictile arena flat in color resonance unlike what one finds in large, single color field paintings, like Rothko's where the subtle changes billow like a heart pumping warm blood. "All pervading, as if internalized [is the] sensation of dominant color..." is an observation made by Professor Myer Shapiro. Mr. Overstreet has managed to hold down this busy flutter - the seen image - by a process, in the studio, of heightening and slackening to give full vent to a personal morphology. He tightens up the painted surface as a whole to prevent complementary color from interfering with the sinuosity of an open, accomodating, spatial illusion. This space integrity is countenanced by the almost compulsive maintenance of a map-structured African experience. The almost abstract [in a western sense] structures of shields and other African utility are designs which preoccupy Mr. Overstreet; but he is not involved with them in any but an anterior frontal sense, once removed from the spiritual fatherland.

He-She , a work of two six-sided figures strutted together, is built up from a beginning base of two casually constructed rectangles shifting left to right, right to left - dominant red into orange, yellow into green. It reaches out somewhere to the borders of being the completely successful pictorial statement. All in all one can choose any of the paintings, even the ones that failed, to demonstrate the arrival of a truly striking new talent on the scene. [ Studio Museum in Harlem, Oct. 26 - Nov.23]--F.B.

Letter from London - Caro at the Hayward

ARTS MAGAZINE
March 1969

Going back to London fills me with such dread that I have to plan my stay nowadays. At first I used to think it was that long nerve-racking air journey, then I found that London itself—the people, the Art scene – puts the cold hand of fear on my heart.

I have to confess that this time I got a shock. My moment was the Anthony Caro show at the Hayward galleries on the South Bank. This was the real event for me in London. As a student, one didn't think of Anthony Caro as a major artist, and indeed he wasn't in the sense of stature alongside other young artists. [Somebody like Elizabeth Frink whose recent drawing show at the Waddington Galleries was one the high water marks of my recent three week visit. The show was a complete success.] Nor did the fuss they were making at St. Martin's School of Art make much sense to me [perhaps that is saying more about me than about what actually was happening] because the Caro works I admired, if at all, were those compact lumpy and largely witty sculptures like Man Smoking or Smoking Heads. They were lighthearted and English in the same proportion that Giacometti's work seemed profound and universal. But this exhibition was something of a revelation. Caro's work has been bracketed with the work of people like David Smith and Kenneth Noland in painting. It is my contention that Caro is a "gent" alongside these people. The persistent feeling one got from the Hayward Gallery show was one of frolic and gaiety. Here was a man who enjoyed what he was doing in a different sense and is presumably doing it for different reasons. Now this is a very special quality, very English.

I remember sitting on a jury with Frank Auerbach – a comprehensive showing of whose work, it is rumoured, is due fairly soon at the Marlborough Fine Arts – at about the hottest moment of the Pop Art thing. He rather passionately rejected the work of a friend I had encouraged to submit. The work got past the jury. It in fact fitted amply with the show and the mood of the London scene at the time. But perhaps knowingly, what Frank was attacking was my friend's attitude which came out blatantly in the work. It wasn't so much that he was an old Etonian dabbler but that art for him was something one enjoyed doing and with whatever one pleased. John has since written a long, loving and complicated treatise on flying saucers having given up painting and the Mosely facists party as uninteresting.

This quality of mordinate fun pervades some of the best English artists. Be it Roger Hilton's having no reverence for his major prize winning painting at the John Moore Exhibition a few years ago or the major part of Caro's work at the Hayward. I can't imagine Caro working through a tough self conscious autobiographical phase like David Smith: as discussed by Lawrence Alloway in the last issue of the magazine. This is a joy exhibition in the real sense. Caro is no amateur. In fact he must be a strict professional to do quite as much work and teach. I would say that with William Turnbull and a very few others in London, he really is committed. However the element of the fanciful is so strong, it is impossible to remove the game fantasy aspect of the works and take them seriously. Caro breaks all the rules, I suspect, without taking any of them into consideration. I mean much as he must know what a rectangle is all about, it doesn't bother him, he just uses it and be damned. So with color, so with ready made material, R.S.J. tubular stuff, etc. Anthony Caro's work is not difficult and demanding as say Turnbull's. On first confrontation this work looked [perhaps I mean to be the uneducated eye] like a lot of metal of the "found" type, bars, plates, nuts and bolts, and so on, carefully but rather haphazardly put together and carefully painted bright colors. The opportunity provided by the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank to see this work at its most advantageous is truly commendable. The show takes up all the space there is and rather splashes and lavishes its way into the open air sculpture courts.

The Caro breakthrough or "revolution" which completely passed me by as a student was suddenly revealed. For one thing that uncomfortable feeling one gets of objects [especially those cumbersome freestanding sculptures in gallery rooms] competing with one for space [making one immediately take up a rather aggressive, superior and rigidly critical stance – you go up and touch it as though fondling abstractedly, a girl or give it the once over to see what the possibilities are] is almost totally missing in this exhibition. The galleries are filled works but "look" remarkedly open and unconstricting. Quite the contrary one felt one could approach the whole thing unimpeded the way one would pass other such structures in the real world. Added to this is the complete extraction of the menace [that lamppost which looms as you sit in the passenger seat of a motor car, the sudden realization with its attendant vertigo, that that massive bridge is only supported by the seemingly flimsiest of structures] from my identifications with the modern industrial landscape by the actual choice of painting in sweet or candy colors and the free associations of ""inside""the studio and outside in this world. The gestures of these sculptures are distinctly accommodating. One walks along or past these works almost saying to oneself "well, it's a bit of all right isn't it" suppressing a chuckle. One would like to get acquainted. Suddenly Caro's work has that universal touch.

After this, I had to admit that London was different. The place is changing or do I mean it has changed. For instance Norman Stevens had a successful show at the Hanover Gallery. Norman is an exact contemporary of David Hockney. They are the same age and started Art School in Bradford at the same time. It is my opinion that Norman is a very good painter and there is a real respect and admiration for what he does in that underground esoteric sense for which art scenes are notorious, whereas David is a star. Norman's work is not characteristically English in that it is not involved with grey and understated. It is bold, precise, matter of fact – painted in bright, crisp colours. In a sense, his is a very private surrealist world whose only connection with the English thing is that spiky [prickly?] uncomfortable feeling one has come to expect from Graham Sutherland. However, in Norman Stevens' paintings, one feels it is not forced and aggressive but rather delicately balanced and poetic with more than a touch of sly humour.

Discussion on Black Art - 11.

ARTS MAGAZINE
May 1969

The question remains: why have black artists, given their historical role in art, contributed so little to the mainstream of contemporary styles or better still, why have they contributed so little to the great body of modern or modernist works? Left at sea, as I indicated in my last effort, I have been groping madly for answers. {PICTURE: William Williams, Untitled [1969]} To such a fundamentally obvious question there can't be any easy answers, and it's surely simplistic to state – as William Williams did in a taped interview at the Metropolitan Museum and reproduced in the Met's bulletin in time for the "Harlem On My Mind" show – that "we don't have a visual tradition..." Even given what was being discussed, the American Northern big city scene, this is a rather narrow and flabby declaration. However I have to come back to this as I want to deal with where its at and that is America. The confrontation of Black or in this specialised case Black Art is American. One could go further and say New York but that would be overstating it. One of the points I made last was the relative economic positions black people held within the structures: Here I want to emphasize the economic structure of America. The Blacks were first "no-citizens", then rural near chattels and lower class "ghetto" citizens. This is the straight line of interpretation and my recent readings and planned trip to the South do not put me in the category of "expert." However what is hard to define in the inexplicable bombing of a black middle class. The explanation is that there never was a Black idea here. There always was [and perhaps still is] the American Dream: which is white. See James Baldwin's essay on being an American. Your black middle class of which so many of us boast in all the right publications and places were European geared. Whiteness was its essence. Black middle class people were either European trained, versed or loaded toward.

The standards were measured by the same ones articulated in a brochure put out by the Center of Inter-American Relations [an institution to which I want to return] which states "the purpose of the center is to strengthen understanding between the people of the U.S. and of other nations in the western Hemisphere..." and then goes on to state its visual arts programme"... the one area of hemispheric culture most easily communicated to U.S. audiences is the visual arts. It transcends language barriers, its origins trace back to our common European cultural heritage."

The class system in America cannot really be evaluated in as easy terms as the class system in England. The constant shifting, renewing and changing life style pertaining in this country makes analysis part of that complex. However, a large part of the reason for why there is no tradition or Black preoccupation with advanced works of art lies with the sort of people who at one time were the essence [apotheosis, apogee?] of that milieu: namely the light skinned Mulatto. The fact is that "their" middle class was a slavish harking back, or seeking of the past [white]. This left only cul-de-sacs. For fuller discussion of this see Cedric Dover's largely stodgily put together but otherwise excellent book, "Negro Art." My esteemed friend and co-worker William Williams notwithstanding, the explanation can only marginally, if at all be blamed on "...no visual tradition..." Almost without exception the black middle class, now vocal and militant, is profoundly uneducated and [in many instances] "...can't spare the time..." for high art and plastic values. Bob Thompson's "instinctive" reaching for total expression in this area is rather like those throw-ups who underline a rule.

Reading and looking at a lot of what was, and is, popular Negro art prompted me to go back to Clement Greenberg's essay "Avant Garde and Kitsch." Negro art up until recently was a perverse kind of Kitsch, rather in the order of slavery. Greenberg has a lot to say about Kitsch which applies to Negro art and now to Black art. {PICTURE: Mel Edwards, Untitled, 1968}[I suggest the term is interchangeable.] We know from the middle class bit that Jazz wasn't music, nor dancing, nor for that matter singing. By the same token Picasso's use of Negro sculpture [Primitive Sculpture and the like...] was not painting and the lesson of him and his cronies in the Bohemian coteries was not to be tolerated. I find a real equivalence in all that Greenberg talks about when quoting Dwight McDonald on Russian films and his subsequent discourse and see no point in either quoting or stating bits. I refer the reader to this essay in toto. Incidentally there is a recent piece by Harold Rosenberg in the "New Yorker" which is a journal Greenberg cites. Doesn't McDonald write for this – I recommend it to my readers – there's not a single nigger mentioned.

The bombing-out of the black middle class and the subsequent challenging of all old and largely outmoded concepts being harassed by the young give a great deal of moment to this multilayered, fraught, and essentially self-defeating attitudes the young are involved with. It's not a question of who admires who and hence gives underlying force to who, but of standards in terms of that wonderful phrase Life-Style. I hope I have given at least an indication as to why Black artists have contributed so little to the Mainstream. My next point is that now they definitely are, which is inherently part of why they have not before.

The new middle class black product is as alienated from society as the white: the American dream has failed and all these badly misled people are not so much wrecking as getting together: hence questioning and feeding off each other. It's a great revolutionary moment but it still has its roots in what feeds it. Black art is still being done by black people only now it isn't Kitsch; it's the real thing. Take an artist like William Williams. It has been said that William's work is rather like Noland's [that school] but these paintings, although painted in that no nonsense flat masking tape and all process are so "irrational." One thinks of multiple swing rest points... One thinks of single swing rest points/ stable, rigid, [dead] as, say, in the construction of a quadrant arch with a brittle instrument. Or multiple swing rest points as say when describing a circle by the "primitive" method of string and any kind of mark-making tool [brush, pencil, charcoal] the maximum of ones natural reach: regular and irregular heart-beats. But nothing holds; these paintings are articulated in such an anxious "slipping-n'-sliding" fashion as to be eminently "niggerish" in content and it's no use confusing this work with some sort of influence by Frank Stella. The off-hand nature in the order of a Stella is very much a shrug. In Williams it's a "holler."

Again an artist like Mel Edwards could be superficially confused with David Smith except that Edwards produces a kind of ambivalence unknown in Smith. The calibration of weights is a basic generation [rather like "red" in the spectrum of theoretical "white" light]. Since the weight of an object is determined from the sum of the masses of small weights which just balance the object, it is essential in exact work that the masses of the individual weights be accurately known: Impossible! Those Mel Edwards works posed alongside architecture are not a challenging or an education – it's very much a love thing. I suspect Edwards is much closer to Caro than Smith, in that what furnishes the passion and informs the forms is a love – a nigger love – where humor is something like flying in the face of death.

Walking into Danny Johnson's studio was like walking into a death house, not, mind you, a morgue, but a mausoleum; but gay, man, gay. The light. The color. Those beautiful, decorated coffins were so sunny, pretentious, and healthy in a completely unhealthy way. It dawned on me that Johnson's recent discovery of African sculpture has engendered an uncanny expression of the Californian death thing now common currency via Waugh books and films: those streamlined funeral parlors and arty graveyards. Johnson's work is black in the same proportion [expressing a similar complementary, perhaps, but never identical aesthetic] as an artist such as Kienholz. Johnson's earlier work used to involve smashed dolls painted black and other kinds of urban ghetto debris rather in the manner of the so called "Funk" school but he was never in anybody's book on Pop Art or group show involving that. Johnson's instinctive understanding of the linear aspects of certain African sculptures locked in an intense marriage with current "striped paintings" a rebirth completely fresh and triumphant. Yet on a knife-edge and troubled with questioning. What was once an almost academic tyranny is now a flowering of possibilities. With all the attendant risk. The irony is what came out is not African but "Black" Californian. Johnson's use of this source material is like and at the same time totally unlike Picasso's whose work from an authority like Rosenblum to Life magazine sets up only generalizations, or better still confusion. The sculptures that were supposed to have influenced Demoiselles d'Avignon are so different and from tribes [African tribes] so far apart as to annul or frustrate checking. Picasso's use of this material is completely original and remains mysterious [perhaps] even ironic, frustrating and amusing] in much the same way, in this area as Johnson. And there is an irony in that from "Nothing" we went straight into Kitsch and from Kitsch to this splendid flowering; one wonders if it is going to happen now so suddenly: Integration. It would be awful, wouldn't it. I hope that I may discuss why it isn't desirable or possible in the Arts next time.

Black Art 111

ARTS MAGAZINE
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?

A Shift in Perspective

ARTS MAGAZINE
Summer 1969

[PICTURE]
Konrad Klapheck, Soldier's Brides [1967] oil on canvas, 47 1/4" x 67"
[PICTURE]
Konrad Klapheck, Exigent Wife [1968] oil on canvas, 39 1/2" x 31 1/2".

While participating on two separate panel discussions, it struck me that a recurrent theme was the relative absence of a style, mode, or fashion. An absence of tyranny. You know, like Abstract Expressionist, or Pop; that kind of thing. One was either doing it like all the other fellow travellers, or was ostracized. Of course there was always a "leader" whose edicts one ignored on pain or isolation - and indeed the loneliness was painful and baffling. Such tyranny inevitably set up the kind of confusion and resentment which often leads to tragedy. I don't know if the other artists on the panel, artists who also write and are historians, were feeling close to celebration at this freedom, and were conscious [here in New York] of just how much a sense of purpose the open-ended situation gave one - or whether they were casually observing the fact. I like to think that it was not the latter. It didn't take long to understand that what we were really remarking on and pointing up was New York. After a brief sense of unbelievable disappointment. I began asking myself questions. Is it a fact that everyone wants to come to New York? That one I found I couldn't answer. What, however, is true is that it is important, for specific aesthetic reasons, to exhibit here. The influence of American art and artists has so dominated, changed, and vitalized art concepts, that it is imperative that an artist measure his stature against what's going on here. The polemics are nothing, if not active and productive.

I began to wonder, at this point, if this isn't really another kind of tyranny. Granted one couldn't label it so, but whatever the blanket term happened to be, if this was the case, no matter how one spelled it, tyranny was tyranny. With this in mind, I reflected, with a certain skepticism, that there are artists working in parts of Germany, Wordswede, Dusseldorf, say, or England, London, St. Ives, whose work we never see here. This season, however we have had a good look at three artists of stature [in their own countries if not here] who are in their early thirties. Of the ones we saw, Konrad Klapeck and David Hockney could be cast in starring roles. Then there was John Hoyland, whose show just closed at Robert Elkon.

The Klapheck exhibition was a great success early in the season, and Hockney's at the Andre Emmerich is presently enjoying the same aura. I think what distinguishes these two artists, one working in Germany, the other mainly in England, is the almost total lack of influence American painting has on their work, [unlike John Hoyland]. Let me say at once that the Hockney exhibition is a beautiful and successful show. The paintings, however, as individual objects, do not measure up to this abstract, general, kaleidoscopic impression. It is one of the biting, scratching dilemmas of our time that if one does "know" an artist and his world, it compounds the problems when discussing his work. David Hockney is a good artist who successfully inhabits and articulates the world he has chosen, or rather, has leanings toward. These paintings are as good, or successful, as that world he inhabits. If it is the studio and the context of painting that are to be assessed, this is at least a half way decent performance. If it is painting, then I'm not so sure.

[PICTURE]
David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler & Christopher Scott [1969], acrylic on canvas. 7' x 10'.

[PICTURE]
David Hockney, Parking Prive, [1968] acrylic on canvas 3' x 4'.

This exhibition, however, should not be missed. Like Klapheck, Hockney paints the recognizable world. I myself, though accepting the difference between their individual painting, feel there is a connecting thread in their individuality - thin, I admit but there. That twin-headed mystery which runs through so much intellectual and creative endeavor in Germany -disciplined, controlled, seemingly reasoned [yet certainly going beyond my understanding of reason], though on the other hand romantic, excessive in sentimentally, yet ending up roughly the same place - is baffling. At best the effort is really rather brilliant - for no apparent reason. Klapcheck's work is centered on the former. However, this is only tangentially my point: there is a transcendental malignancy lurking in the work of both artists. It is obvious in Klapheck, but rather timid and dandified in Hockney. Put far too simply, Klapheck's Germanic, if up-to-date, version of Surrealism is well within reach. Mostly this work is just merely academic. But when it's good, as I suspect Klapheck's is, it bears invertigating. There is a certain bombast and removed pomposity that keels over into edginess, arrived at purely via cerebral passion. A kind of intuition by way of thorough, well-learned, retained [drilled] knowledge of pictorial possibilities, and the adept manipulation of this to keen and very deliberate purpose. No, I'm not suggesting that this is arrived at by some predetermined [grand] design - as would befit the arrogance out of which facism is the natural outcome. Rather, there is a deep commitment, agony acted out and overcome, which lends itself sympathetically to aspiration through endeavor. In many cases it feeds envy. The precision and deliberate pictorial manipulation toward this transcendental end is spoilt, for me, in veritably all of Klapheck's work, beginning with my first confrontation with this truly striking picture-making phenomena first in Dusseldorf, and then more closely at the Robert Fraser Gallery some years back in London, by an unexplained and purely physical [perhaps unjustified] revulsion against the actual picture surface. It is odd, I will readily admit, and perhaps weakens any legitimate case I might have in the painting mark-making area, that such a highly idiosyncratic reaction in the face of obvious ability is trying. But bear with me. [I need hardly stress my admiration, sympathy, and involuntary seduction in this area by the idea lying very stern, uncompromising, and open here.] The question is: is painting about marking up [I use the word "marking" as opposed to, say, scratching in a [deliberate] attempt to point up a physical difference from say, sculpture] a certain surface with purposeful or deliberate intent to establish, define, and distinguish a specific, in this case painting through its attendant handmaidens, paint: acqueous based, oil, etc, canvas: canvas supports: rectilinear shaped, etc. Or otherwise? The answer I am suggesting is that since by accepted implication, any mark, or set of marks, must have a legitimate case for access, and exposure the requirements of painting must be fullfilled in terms of value judgement. I am speaking strictly about painting as essence, i.e., a first order activity worthy of human endeavor, or more simply the sort of thing at which one can justifiably spend one's precious time, whether doing it, looking at it, or thinking about it. The "excuse" or theme is unimportant. The point I want to stress, difficult to deal with, even in its obviousness, is one's overall reaction - you know; "I don't know much about art ...but I know what I like ..." as the saying goes. Well as I began suggesting above, for the life of me I cannot get on with the way Klapheck marks up the surface. Regardless of the interest, time spent and ideas; I find myself reacting, or, more accurately, resisting. Missing that quality which for me can only be equated with, or called, seductive and soothing in paint as substance. In short, if painting has anything which both distinguishes it from and links it to everything else, it is Poetry. A term which may frighten a lot of people but this, I submit, is what makes David Hockney a more interesting painter than K. Klapheck. Hockney's work might suffer from the understatement and hesitation which dances about somewhere on the borders of conviction [the lack of it perhaps?]. but whereas one feels that Klaphech might have handled a passage [for example, the stack of books in the Isherwood Portrait] much more firmly and suggestively. In this Hockney Painting [surely the most satisfactory individual work in his showing] what it amounts to is that this passage is a demonstration of the illusive, weird by virtue of the whimsical quality found in so much English painting. It doesn't strike one as sinister, as say the swastika armband in a Bacon painting, but it has the same literary fascination which brings one back. Why is it there? And since it is there, why didn't he do more about it? What does it mean? In fact the couple in this picture could well have provided a limitless source of pictorial speculation in close and meaningful juxtaposition with Germanic transcendental fascination, about which, surely, at least one of the subjects could bear witness.

[PICTURE]
John Hoyland, 25.2.69 [1968], acrylic on canvas, 78" x 144"

With the Englishness of English art; gawky in its hesitant expressiveness, and all that literary bias resplendent in Hockney's show, John Hoyland is, it it's at all possible, the exact opposite and this may go a long way towards explaining the disaster: Hoyland's work is overwhelmed by the influence of American painting. There's no point in discussing scale - most young British painters looking across the Atlantic sooner or later begin to grasp this aspect. It's obvious that even an artist like David Hockney has been touched by his American experience. But the spirit of this show, this exhibition at the Robert Elkon Gallery, was not so much bad as weak and decorative. There was one painting, with a rather sweet-hued drift, which may have been on its way somewhere, however, even this one didn't arrive. For the rest the less said the better. What I found totally lacking in the spirit of this work was that lively questioning of pictorial values which goes on with great strength, intelligence, and resolve in American painting. The sort of proposing and re-proposing of large fields of colour; tightening and narrowing, the dismantling of old values, formulas, discoveries, is done with rigorous painting intelligence and daring. At the moment, Hoyland is stuck somewhere between Rothko and Hoffman. Stuck, I venture to say, because the information may be available. "... what happens in New York today, everyone in Tokyo, Sydney, and London knows the next." But what it's about is certainly missing. It's questionable to bracket this with tyranny of any kind, but I venture to place this distressing phenomena. Hoyland, was, after all, not so very many years back, an artist who other young artists looked towards. He at least appeared adventurous. Pointing away at other possibilities in painting where there was a dearth of real painting ideas in a swinging London. Artists might visit one another, but the subject, the activity to which one is presumably going to devote one's life, is very rarely, if at all, discussed. England is known for her tradition of great rugged individuals in art, but how does that help one, or sustain one, if the questions being posed and explored, with which one is attempting to deal, are not being dealt with - in fact being dealt with elsewhere? What does one do? I must say it seems to me that the tyranny must lie in that isolation and loneliness.

[PICTURE]
Neil Stocker, The S.S.Rethink on Love, [1968] construction, steel and leather.

A real life victim of this tyranny was Neil Stocker, a young Australian sculptor just into his mature style after a long struggle through. Considering his life and his art, one can only wince at the crushingly philistine token acceptance and the lukewarm encouragement that masks a deepseated chauvinism and thoroughly unwarrented and misplaced arrogance. Like everyone else, Neil was eventually forced to join the pernicious desperate scramble - playing the art school politics that the London art world seems to depend on for survival. It is probably bad manners to name-call, but it remained a consistent and degrading mystery to me why Neil should preoccupy himself with people like Bernard Meadows, Nibs Dalwood, Bryan Kneale, and the like. One could perhaps say that Stocker only had himself to blame -if he didn't know the rules of the game, he shouldn't have tried to play it. But there is one glaring fact which overturns and makes nonsense of such an observation. Having done all of whatever they do in those colonial countries [I mean that whole gaggle from Lands End to John O'Groats and the islands in the Atlantic, the Channels, and the North Sea], the one thing the British didn't do, was to leave much cultural awareness behind [in fact they did mainly the opposite]. Having left us with a deepseated belief in "The Mother Country", it is to the Mother Country we all went. It is on the English Art Establishment doorstep that the blame must be placed, quite squarely, for this recent, most tragic suicide.

The least they can do now is put together a retrospective exhibition in homage to a man who not only devoted his energies to helping fellow colonial products like Billy Apple and myself but also worked very hard at helping establishment artists because he sincerely believed, not only that they liked and admired him, but that through them he would be liberated. Added to this was all that earnest and compelling teaching he did with such devotion and belief. Neil Stocker, with his great sense of irony, his knowledge of modern American art, would get a kick out of how deluged, harnessed and cheated he was by swallowing all that garbage about the New York art scene. The trouble with the bitter pill, alas, is that finding out can be too late. One's already swallowed it.

X to the Fourth Power

ARTS MAGAZINE
Sept. - Oct. 1969

Four currents in contemporary art are dealt with here - to varying degrees of success. The mood is one of up-to-the-minute immediacy, the scale is monumental and the impact varies from work to work.

Sam Gilliam sends bars of color fleeting across surfaces of flimsy irridescence. These are lyrically activated seas of color space. Steve Kelsey plays optical games with spheres of color. They dart across his canvases in horizontal spurts of energy or obscure themselves serially in cloudy spatial mists.

Heaps of chain strewn around the gallery are attributable to Melvin Edwards. The sculptor also shows a sinister two-part pyramid of barbed wire and a cylindrical, suspended construction enigmatically entitled Remember.

Most vigorous to this viewer were the paintings of William T. Williams. In Red's Dream space is clenched between a vivid criss-cross of stridently colored bars. The tautly interwoven flat shapes seem to tensely and deliberately congeal and lock in space. The mood is one of vitality compressed and controlled - violence checked strikingly designed. [Studio Museum in Harlem. June 1 - 13]

Review: De Stijil and after - MONDRIAN by Frank Elgar.

ARTS MAGAZINE
April 1969

This is a highly eccentric if overwritten and repetitive book. Essentially what Mr. Elgar is saying is that he finds Mondrian not just an interesting artist-painter but also an interesting man and he would like us to know this. This is perhaps for the non art public. Indeed in a book of this sort the real value is only in the profusion of illustrations; It's a kind of bedside book for gazing sleepily at the pictures. Mr. Elgar says nothing new about Mondrian. At one point he comments "...although he was our contemporary and had friends many of whom are still alive... his personality is still wrapped in mystery..." I suppose this kind of thing has always been around but I for one am a little bored. This necromantic psychoanalysis masquerading as History. Why in heavens name do we have to know so much about an artists personality to "read" what his paintings are about [perhaps there are plans afoot to make a film on Mondrian soon: title? The first real square].

If it is true that Mondrian didn't, after a while, do much socializing, isn't it at least as much to do with that need, which surely he shares with every committed artist, to stay in his studio? Mr. Elgar himself mentions some of the things Mondrian had to do to make money: it must have been the most galling of experiences, that kind of poverty. Enough, that is, to make the toughest spirits seek and emphasize the relative tranquility of the studio and familiar surroundings. Very few artists would fail to recognize this trait.

Again in talking about the geometry of aesthetics and Mondrian's possible use of it, Mr. Elgar says "...Mondrian might by chance have stumbled on divine proportion'. Nevertheless, I very much doubt that he did so intentionally, particularly as he made a point of breaking the relations between lines, planes and colours by graphic syncopation and discord..." I don't really get an argument here which convinces me that Mondrian didn't deliberately "use" [selfconsciously] this geometry. In fact quite the contrary. My reading of it is that there is ample evidence to support a claim that Mondrian did and it's just this factor which strengthened and made so powerful his statements. The lyrical quality which Mr. Elgar comments upon several times in this book: towards the close of the book he remarks apropos Mondrian's development "...Later a sudden blaze of lyricism gives animation to his pictures..." Surely it is not inconsistent to point out to Mr. Elgar that much as he's right, he's hardly original within the context of Mondrian's development. The point he's missed in indulging in that now quite disproportionate and arrogant fantasy [which is so fashionable among a certain kind of critic] about artists not knowing what they are talking about, is that when Mondrian said "...In my paintings after 1922, I feel that I approached the concrete structure I regard as necessary. And in my last pictures such as Broadway Boogie-Woogy and Victory Boogie-Woogie, the structure and means of expression are both concrete and in mutual equivalence..." That this is exactly what the man meant, and that that same "lyricism" was now ablaze in those last pictures he did here in New York. Mr. Elgar may agree with Charles Biderman that at this point Mondrian was going soft, and the pictures were not finished [when is a painting "finished"?] but the evidence is difference.—