Another Map Problem

ARTS MAGAZINE
December 1970 - January 1971

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[PICTURE]

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

[PICTURE]

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

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

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

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

[PICTURE]

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

[PICTURE]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence: People Die Crying - When They Should Love.

ARTS MAGAZINE
September / October 1970

[PICTURE]

Boston Mural, top half by Gary Rickson, bottom half by Dana Chandler. Photo courtesy of Harvard Art Review.

The past season has seen a spate of correspondence surrounding the nature of Black Art. The definition seems to have gained little clarity but the issues still rage: thus, the spoken utterances of artists [painters and sculptors] perpetually left a certain non-plussing, discouraging confusion often full of " ... I was aiming at" " I could have done" etc. perhaps it's a defense mechanism, in defense of this non-realized - but is it realizable? figment of "might have been." Be that as it may, the discouragement does appear to reside in retrospective, if inscrutable potential; not just during the experiencing of the utterances, but in one's own reverie of that past of potential - a sort of recapitulation in strictly elusive, non-definable terms: shapeless, formless. The chilling notion dawned on me on rereading specific utterances by black artists and writers on art, particularly those who relate themselves to "the street," sitting on the coffin of unspent possibilities. It's not just given to blacks: this is what I'm dealing with. It has been remarked that these artists are unwilling, unable, even afraid to deal with "dwellings," floors, walls, etc., but this is not our discussion. The algid, sad, resentful: "it's-like-this," "look-here" hairies who deal in "I could haves" yards from the possible; with much navel directed encouragement given to these shadow chasing, shadow boxing activities. The popular press has caught and frozen this. Though no mean thing, and unprecedented in itself. Its significance, surely, lies in terms of sheer journalistic weight; period pride can be the only explanation for the cautious but quite heady claims of a significant first. [1] Black Art, as an idea, is very much with us. Any age alert to evolutionary, revolutionary forces stretching its possibilities, brings with it painful scholarship: bracing in a "wind of chance" challenge; it is articulated in the undertones of delivered, evocative speech ... but alas, irritatingly dry, nail-bleeding and uncomfortable in its typing and scratching.

It is of signal importance to emphasize that the only positive thing to come out of the recent situation has been the loudly bellowed demand and published assertations for a criticism to accommodate, nay [for won't I be accused of condescension?] explicate, veritably the Black experience: it needs new structures of criticism. The demand? Indeed a new criticism! That the polemicists, artists and others want to be praised for their labors, ahs, I'm sure, not escaped these protagonists. If the revolution is right, praise I'm sure is forthcoming where praise is due. Meanwhile it is quite clear that the concept of Black Art has to be dealt with through criticism. So far there has been little evidence, "off the street," in the museum and gallery system, in fact revealing " ... through careful study ... of styles and salient points of contrast and similarity ..." anything significant. Between the eye, the wall and the floor there was little which was new. There was nothing signally original or surprising, as there are plenty of precedents for

" the social artist ... radically committed and involved with the living world ...": all those artists in the history of awkward genre and realistic allegorical painting in this country. It is in fact a home-grown phenomenon, the genius of which must reside in the American psyche itself. There was little that would support a rectifier, except quantity, numbers. For that matter, since we are on the subject, anything Black! Except the social phenomena. Essentially what was revealed was a certain conservative clinging to well tried, now creaking, now worn out [but by implication not necessarily " no longer valid"] pictorial devices. That most of the figuration of these social artists could be put to better use in say graphic designs is signalled by the fact that most of the works appear evidently better, more explicit, more accomplished in reproduction. This is because the qualities of paint, of collage etc., do not engage one - as here they are not meant to. The reproductive process's ability to neutralize things reduces everything to a bald graphic message totally devoid of material nuance. That this stuff is more about information is underlined by the comparative distinction afforded through catalogue, magazine and newspaper reproduction. For the "Black Experience" puts it all out of focus and into question [as for instance is this the right medium for X?]. Extremely literal in the worst sense these works seems designed to deny the subtlety of black experience, indeed experience of any sort: and black experience, at any rate the experience as given, is "subtle." The temptation to label this work "bad" to use the derogatory term "Bad Art" as an apellation for the products of these art endeavors, has to be resisted. [But it may well be to come, Bad Art, for who is the final arbitrator!] The question is: bad as compared to what? Alas! We still haven't come up with any secret cache of instructions which the African ancestors provided in their distinctive "written" style. Since this is not, I suggest, the case, we can't really disprove "Racist Lies" about Black impotence. Since on the evidence the summoning of art, i.e. painting and sculpture, to extirpate Black Art does prove recalcitrant and awfully tricky on the one hand by present claims then powerless? The answer here is an unqualified No! For what we can do and it's already happening [otherwise now the ongoing dialogue!] is question "The Assumptions" from the positive deductions of our experience. Since the problem of eliciting from painting and sculpture an adjudication redefining art [with the express intention of defining Black Art] proves rather like pulling strong teeth without anaesthetic. I would suggest two ways. One, as I said, through our experience: concrete equivalents which extend through determinants, measurements, yardsticks. Or total rejection of the immediate experience which will involve a boat back trip on the Garveyan precedent; that might, that does imply all kinds of potential discovery. The treasure hunt! Home!

In trying to make sense of the former, my endeavors led me far afield. [more about this] to talking and reading finally several books where I lingered: one might say I put out to sea with some books! In the summer 1964 issue of Art and Literature I found Richard Wolheim's essay "On Expression and Expressionism" a discussion of Marion Milner's book On Not Being Able to Paint. Page 178, "At one point Wittgenstein asks us if we can imagine ourselves using one phrase and meaning another by it [e.g. saying "It's cold here" meaning "It's warm here"] ... our explanation would probably take the form of alleging that we say a word cold out loud, we say warm to ourselves: [not even that I venture!] or that we treat our utterances as though it were a slip of the tongue..." My travels lead me to believe that every dweller in the black ghetto [community?] from Junkie to Jack-of-all-trades knows about those changes. Thaat!! that is their life style. Yes! I am suggesting that the people on the streets [the oft re-flashed "guy off the street"] is tuned-in-to Wittgenstein through Wollheim as revealed in Art and Literature or [more pertinently] the other way round.

Addressing oneself, upfront or otherwise, through the auspices of an art magazine, is not necessarily dealing with and reflecting the literal situation in the ghetto or community. My point, however, is that the energy is located in the subtility of "experience," shared experience. And this is why literalness, though precisely such in every measurable dimension, fails to express: fails, that is, at "expression." Wollheim further [same page] says "...we might find here a suggestion as to how the present question about the limits of expression is to be answered. For it might seem that a man can express y-ness by x-ing, only if x-ing stands to y-ness in a relation which is, or analogus to, that of meaning..." Experience has no literal meaning, only "subtle" meaning [idiosyncraticatic, personal, etc.,] Though it accommodates literalness, this is only part of the whole story. Literal shape for instance has no meaning, it's just shape, but it can in one sense stand [has stood, does stand] for painting through being "depicted" [painted. I-was-aiming at often turns out not to be I-did, after literal action, except in the limited sense. Blackness is therefore no more expressed in the literal sense by painting a black face than by painting a black line, for it is the depiction of a face or a line that we are witnessing; hence, the experience a painting "carries" through literal and depicted shape is generally a painting experience [time, color surface/area, perimetric demarcation points etc.]

The black experience must therefore be operating on a different, more subtle, level, or not at all. But there is a missing link. If we may turn again to Wollheim's essay, on page 190: " ...I now want to suggest an association between ... two aspects of expression in art: the existence of a physignomic link between emotion that is expressed and the expression of it, and the privileged character of the spectator's verdict. Now on to the face of it ... the spectator will be expected to recognize this link, but his verdict has no special authority to it: his opinion is relevant only as so far as it is true of the link..."

All the works discussed [perhaps not discussed but mentioned in this respect videlicit Black Art] last season had their merits and usefulness, but as painting and sculpture few if any could or did carry those disciplines and the black experience.

Benny Andrews in a very longer letter included this : " ...the gallery tour came to a halt ... ” [ the scene was the exhibition Afro-American Artists, New York and Boston, mounted at the Boston Museum of Fine Art] “…in front of my painting titled The Champion and a black person asked me to comment…. I wanted to show the strength of the black man …” Mr. Andrews says, “… the ability to persevere in the face of overwhelming odds, and I have used the symbol of the prize fighter … I cannot fail to relate my sense of indignation over the fate that has befallen the black man’s Thors and in this sense on indignation I tried to paint my heart out in The Champion … I finished talking about my feelings and my reason for painting. I looked into the crowd, and as I looked from one black face to another, I knew that they felt in their way the way I felt in mine and it was no longer a question …I had those beautiful and soulful faces nodding and silently saying, “Yes, yes, indeed we understand…” It occurred to me that the “silence” was due to some museum bylaw about noise, but never mind, I could be wrong. The above quoted not the half of it, it’s very strong stuff, very heady and moving, reminding me considerably of going to church on a Sunday morning in Alabama. I wish I had been there. However, I strongly recommend to my readers Wollheim’s essay when next confronted with this work The Champion.

Finally, could it be that on this evidence we must assume that the "Black Experience," since neither painting nor sculpture is mentioned or rather when referred to, totally without the context of the discipline as such; nor could they be mentioned, I dare say, for from that sermon, apparently they would get actually in the way!] leaves no room for either; or, put another way, leaves painting and sculpture free and intact? Wollheim says, page 191 "...Given a man cannot express his feelings in a painting simply by standing in front of the canvas with these feelings and then trying to put them into the painting, what is the difference between the man who is in this position and the man who has rules to aid him..." Wollheim splits this question in two parts but for our purpose let us skip to the observation "...whether there is any specific kind of painting that unmistakable shows signs of having been painted to a rule: or whether since any kind of painting can be brought under a rule, we must always take the painter's word for the fact that he was following a rule. In which case what is left of 'spectator supremacy?' ..." Concluding with Wollheim, in a mutual admitting of the difficulty, I nevertheless cannot accept the inconclusive saying " This one musn't rule directed, therefore it isn't supposed to be." For quality to be discernable and therefore success, rule-directed or otherwise. The trouble with rules are that in a situation like trying to define Black Art the confusion is deepened by the polarized stands taken about which are the rules to follow. That "experience" forges the content of works is an assertion, one I intend to deal with more thoroughly next time.

[1] TIME magazine, April 6, 1970. [Although the Black Art Color section was considerable reduced for TIME international!]--- Art Gallery, April 1970.
[2] The New York Times, June 21, 1970

The Rupture - Ancestor Worship, Revival, Confusion, or Disguise

ARTS MAGAZINE
Summer 1970

" ...I want to make the black people remember they're black to define their heritage ..." [Dana Chandler, "Art in the Ghetto," Harvard Art Review, inter 1968-69.]

"The assumption ... that slavery in the United States destroyed the creative memories of newly arrived Africans ... holds that no form of African influence remains." [Robert Farris Thompson, Black Studies in the University, Yale University Press, 1969.]

"... basically we come from a non-visual culture or people ..." William Williams, "The Black Artist in America," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 27, No. 5; January 1969.

When I complained of negative comparisons in art criticism and comments in diverse publications which at the time seemed disposed to ridiculing black people's endeavor in the areas of painting, graphics and sculpture, I rather adopted the attitude that among institutions, museums were just as guilty of that hidden but quite positive decline of standards which must have started with the most serious attitudes and highest motives. It occurred to me that everybody has been complaining. For the most part, though, what is obvious in the marked asides, when not direct statements of anger, is who has been left out [ or left themselves out] and why. As I sat down to write I asked myself if I was not slowly slipping into the same groove of negative comparisons and uncritical complaints. For instance, is there any real point, when discussing the present Boston Museum show. "Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" in reflecting upon the work of diverse talents like Zell Ingram, Emma Amos, Thomas Sills or Richard Mayhew in dissert with Matisse or, perhaps closer to home, Milton Avery [ Matisse happens to be in the news] when it may result in the conceivable detriment of these serious, concerned painters? Or to talk about that world of private configuration verging on the most dynamic aspects of Surrealism as exemplified by Albert Pinkham Ryder when confronted with the less successful attempts of Luther Van or Vincent Smith? And if what we are troubled by in this particular pictorial neighborhood is skill, how well would Cliff Joseph and at least one of Lois Jones' attempts fare? After the recent Realist show at the Whitney, how does one assess [re-assess?] the works of Ernie Critchlow, or for that matter, Reginald Gammon or Richard Waters? How useful is it also to bemoan the absence of stouter mettle and greater stature in the "Establishment Art. World?" [Mistake me not; the two, that is recognition in the Establishment Art World and strength or stature, do not necessarily go together.] These are all questions that need answering and fairly soon, but I fear that the contentions that will ensue from any attempt to do justice by answers will at the moment degenerate into that confused sphere: is black as good as white? Is black different from white? How? Why? Does proof justify either neglect, dominance, etc.? Perhaps what I am saying is that I am not prepared, or that I am ill-equipped to deal with those pertinent issues which I contend, uphold, assert, that though slightly inside, are paradoxically almost totally outside any positive assessment of art content. Quality is the only criterion from which to judge: in individual works as in the case of a mixed showing or achievement in that direction - and quality in the case of a body of work by an individual. And of this fact everyone is aware.

The question, the only question, that remains is the one that publicly at least no one seems to ask. It is possible to put on yet another black show? [Call it Afro-American if you want.] Now when I complained of comparison, did I not fall into that same trap? After all, I was thinking of California, the Waddington Galleries, Kasim, Emmerich, the Lawrence Rubin Galleries, modernism. American-European style, all the lush emporiums downtown, the entrepreneurs and the heated gossip. There seemed to be a movement. There was even a show called " 5 + 1" under the, I thought, healthy protection of Lawrence Alloway and Sam Hunter at Stony Brook.

In another recent museum exhibition [about which it was widely remarked but again hardly ever publicly asserted] black artists were not included. And perhaps why? But then to ask that may have been going a little too far. In the catalog to the exhibition, Harold Rosenberg claimed, "What makes any definition of a movement ... dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement..." because he was talking about art, it is one of the times when I profoundly agreed with Mr. Rosenberg. Movements are fugitive and at best a just tolerable, irritating burden. After endless discussion, most of the people who used to meet and discuss came to recognize that there was no movement and like every other artist gathering, met through common need, like all the other gatherings, to make a dent in the situation, to draw blood from those hardened arteries.

" 5 + 1" had the avowed intention to once and for all put a stop to all those rotten ethnic shows -- throwing caution to the wind and declaring that the idea that there was "quality" was not some romantic notion about black bravery of the sort people readily identify with Black Panther sacrifice. It was not even meant to attract a wide audience. In the sense that the exhibition was deliberately university based, the attempt was to garner a corner in the heated discussion of essence and worth. It was not so much black pride but thoughtful speculation addressing itself to aesthetic realizations. The young people clamoring for more and better Black Studies seemed a natural audience to which one could address one's own discoveries. [Perhaps it would be better to say the trails left behind in one's searches, for there was certainly a lot of talk about letting those young people into one's studio and passing around in written form everything, including extremely adverse criticism of art.] If white artists' works, over the last twenty years, amounts to thumbing noses at bourgeous society, and a conspiratorial coalition between the artist and the only people who could wear their intellectual mantle with ease - the rich - it constitutes little less than a Babylonian raid of gigantic scale on the jaded appetites of the inheritors of the "dream." The black artist was confronted with a put on-or shut-up situation of awesome proportions. There was to be no flunking direct engagements, yet there was the inherited dilemma of art, like all the other dilemmas black people inherited. It was at this point that no meaningful separation could be made; for art had become, because of the breakdown, the crisis, call it what you will, of bourgeois society, the property of all with its accompaniment of existentialist man and alienation as a reality and a dilemma. However, separation was in the works as a political and social reality, dragging art, which had, in fact, been left to its own devices, with no obviously and readily definable function. In the scramble for works that were in fact made by black people, the barrel-scraping process began and goes on today.

The European / African confrontation and splitting apart have produced, in music, jazz with its distinct stamp of blackness. African utilities and motifs have sustained artists like Joe Overstreet, his friends, and a host of designers where black rhetoric had recently failed. One wonders, therefore, if outside the theatre and music, one can answer that real question of whether one can legitimately put on another Black Art Show, with its direct implications about the nature of black art - for with what else do you fill a Black Art Show?

The opportunity presents itself with a vengeance. Coming together, almost on the same day, are the openings to the public of "African Art" [Brooklyn Museum] and "Afro-American Art: New York and Boston" [Boston Museum of Fine Arts]. It gives us an opportunity to do some comparing. An opportunity not just to do another kind of comparing but the only real kind of comparing one can legitimately do at the moment. How does Black Art here and now in the United States fare alongside old Black Art, i.e. traditional African works? On these showings, so close in time and place, the answer is an unqualified; badly . Clearly missing from the realms of garbage [as I view it from where I stand, that is, as an avid consumer of what the people are given to read about the situation and a participating contributor to the on-going polemic], is that expected run on research, its dependence on continuous argument; the discoveries and therein the suggestive teasing between concerned minds accepting and rejecting from concrete evidence advanced. In fact, the great sifting process from which only will we get the truth is, for the most part [there are the rare exceptions], sadly missing. One explanation could be that the numbers, the profusion and trite non-observations, like the exhibitions themselves, are without art purpose.

"Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" fares very badly indeed for all kinds of reasons alongside what we have very justly claimed with pride as inherited contributions from the ancestors. But mostly by the flimsy and ever so transparent, in a literal sense, flirtation, almost embarrassed, in some sense of the most worth-while and strongest works here. Dan Johnson's tulip trip through chrome-plated graveyards of California vulgarity has left the work wanting from any understanding. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that from his earlier interest in the linear scarifications of traditional African masks - the tightly symmetrical abstract deductions, evident in flat reliquary guardians, in fact, the inability to encompass the breath of these well-honed functionary pieces - the funerary aspect seems to have overwhelmed at best a rather indifferent joiner. Wakes and jazz [out of funeral marches] celebrate pro-life, whereas hawking elegant boxes for the already dead is an undertaker's shot, despite the elegance. Minimal Art, with its direct criticism, arrived at something. But these obelisks, when denied their purity, are blunt. Here is a grassland marauder straying into the desert, eyes stinging from the debris of a vast wind-blown arid waste, stabbing in the dark which is supposed to be light.

Of the older artists in the Boston show, there can be no doubt that Bill Rivers survives the Western cliché of seniority; a camp disguise as prima donna for the sake of balance. ["Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston" is on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, May 19 - June 23; "African Sculpture" is showing at the Brooklyn Museum, May 20 - June21.]

[PICTURES] WITH ABOVE ARTICLE

Daniel L. Johnson, The Boy Wonder Dejohnette [1969] oil on wood

Benjamin Jones, Five Faces Images [1969] fluorescent acrylic on plaster, 8 1/2" x 6" each.

Sherbro, Massive Soapstone Head [c. 16 th cent.], 14" long, shown at Brooklyn Museum.

Richard Waters, Tutankhamen [1969], latex on canvas.

Bill Rivers, Eclipse, oil on canvas.

Jack White, Deo-dare [1966] white marble.

Frank Bowling, Mel Edwards Decides [1969] acrylic on canvas, 10' square. At the Boston Museum show.

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?