THE
PREVALENT NOTION is that latter-day art is in a state of confusion.
Painting and sculpture appear to be changing and evolving faster
than
ever before. Innovations follow closer and closer on one another
and, because they don't make their exits as rapidly as their
entrances,
they pile up in a welter of eccentric styles, trends, tendencies,
schools. Everything conspires, it would seem, in the interests
of
confusion. The different mediums are exploding: painting turns
into sculpture, sculpture into architecture, engineering, theater,
environment, "participation". Not only the boundaries between
the different arts, but the boundaries between art and everything
that is not art are
being obliterated. At the same time scientific technology is invading
the visual arts and transforming them even as they transform
one another.
And to add to the confusion, high art is on the way to becoming
popular art, and vice versa.
Is
all this so? To judge from surface appearances, it might be
so.
A writer in the Times Literary Supplement of 14 March 1968 refers
to ". . . that total confusion of all artistic values which prevails
today". But by his very words this writer betrays where the
real source of confusion lies: namely, in his own mind. Artistic
value
is one, not many. The only artistic value anybody has yet been
able to point to satisfactorily in words is simply the goodness
of good art. There are, of course, degrees of artistic goodness,
but these are not different values or kinds of value. Now this
one and only value, in its varying degrees, is the first and
supreme
principle of artistic order. By the same token it is the most
relevant such principle. Of order established on its basis,
art today shows
as much as it ever has, Surface appearances may obscure or hide
this kind of order, which is qualitative order, but they
do not negate it, they do not render it any the less present. With
the ability to tell the difference between good and bad, and between
better and worse, you can find your way quite well through the
apparent confusion of contemporary art. Taste, i.e., the
exertions of taste, establish artistic order-now as before, now
as always.
Things
that purport to be art do not function, do not exist, as art
until
they are experienced through taste. Until then they exist only
as empirical phenomena, as aesthetically arbitrary objects
or facts.
These, precisely, are what a lot of contemporary art gets taken
for, and what many artists want their works to be taken for–in
the hope, periodically renewed since Marcel Duchamp first acted
on it fifty-odd years ago, that by dint of evading the reach of,
taste while yet remaining in the context of art, certain kinds
of contrivances will achieve unique existence and value. So far
this hope has proved illusory. So far everything that enters the
context of art becomes subject, inexorably, to the jurisdiction
of taste-and to the ordering of taste. And so far almost all would-be
non-art-in-the-context-of-art has fallen rather neatly into place
in the order of inferior art. This is the order where the bulk
of art production tends to find its place, in 1968 as in 1868–or
1768. Superior art continues to be something more or less exceptional.
And this, this rather stable quantitative relation between the
superior and inferior, offers as fundamentally relevant a kind
of artistic order as you could wish.
But
even so, if this were the only kind of order obtaining in new art
today, its situation would be as unprecedented, still, as common
opinion says it is. Unprecedented even if not confused. The good
and the bad might differentiate themselves as clearly as ever,
but there would still be a novel confusion of styles, schools,
directions, tendencies. There would still be phenomenal if
not aesthetic disorder. Well, even here experience tells me–and
I have nothing else to rely on–that the phenomenal situation
of art in this time is not all that new or unprecedented. Experience
tells me that contemporary art, even when approached in purely
descriptive terms, makes sense and falls into order in much
the
same way that art did in the past. Again, it is a question of
getting through superficial appearances.
Approaching
art in phenomenal and descriptive terms means approaching it,
first
of all, as style and as the history of style (neither of which,
taken in itself, necessarily involves quality). Approached
strictly
as a matter of style, new art in the 1960's surprises you–if
it does surprise you–not by its variety, but by
the unity and even uniformity it betrays underneath all
the appearances of variety. There are Assemblage, Pop, and Op;
there
are Hard Edge, Color Field, and Shaped Canvas; there are Neo-Figurative,
Funky, and Environmental; there are Minimal, Kinetic, and Luminous;
there are Computer, Cybernetic, Systems, Participatory-and so
on.
(One of the really new things about art in the 60's is the rash
of labels in which it has broken out, most of them devised by
artists
themselves-which is likewise new; art-labelling used to be the
affair of journalists.) Well, there are an these manifestations
in all their variegation, yet from a steady and detached look
at
them through their whole range some markedly common stylistic
features emerge. Design or layout is almost always clear and
explicit, drawing
sharp and clean, shape or area geometrically simplified or at
least faired and trued, color flat and bright or at least undifferentiated
in value and texture within a given hue. Amid the pollution
of
novelties, advanced art in the 60's subscribes almost unanimously
to these canons of style–canons that Woelfflin would call
linear.
Think
by contrast of the canons to which avant-garde art conformed
in
the 50's: the fluid design or layout, the "soft" drawing, the
irregular and indistinct shapes or areas, the uneven textures,
the turbid
color. It is as though avant-garde art in the 60's set itself
at every point in opposition to the common stylistic denominators
of Abstract Expressionism, art informel, tachisme.
And just as these common denominators pointed to what was one and
the same period style in the latter 40's and the 50's, so the common
denominators of new art in the 60's point to a single, all-enveloping
period style. And in both cases the period style is reflected in
sculpture as well as in pictorial art.
That
avant-garde art in the latter 40's and in the 50's was one,
not
many, in terms of style is now pretty generally recognized.
Lacking the perspective of time, we find it harder to identify
a similar
stylistic unity in the art of this decade. It is there all the
same. All the varied and ingenious excitements and "experiments"
of the last years, large and small, significant and trivial, flow
within the banks of one, just one period style. Homogeneity emerges
from what seemed an excess of heterogeneity. Phenomenal, descriptive,
art-historical–as well as qualitative–order supervenes
where to the foreshortening eye all seemed the antithesis of
order.
If
this gives pause, the pause should be taken advantage of to
examine
more closely another popular idea about art in this time: namely,
that it moves faster than ever before. The art-historical style
of this period that I have so sketchily described–a style
that has maintained, and maintains, its identity under a multitude
of fashions, vogues, waves, fads, manias–has been with
us now for nearly a decade and seems to promise to stay with
us a
while longer. Would this show that art is moving and changing
with unprecedented speed? How long did art-historical styles
usually
last in the past-even the more recent past?
In
the present context I would say that the duration of an art historical
style ought to be considered the length of time during which it
is a leading and dominating style, the time during which it is
the vessel of the largest part of the important art being produced
in a given medium within a given cultural orbit. This is also,
usually, the time during which it attracts those younger artists
who are most highly and seriously ambitious. With this definition
as measure, it is possible to see as many as five, and maybe more,
distinctly different styles or movements succeeding one another
in French painting of the 19th century.
First
there was David's and Ingres' Classicism. Then from about 1820
into the mid-1830's, Delacroix's Romanticism. Then Corot's
naturalism;
and then Courbet's kind. In the early 1860's Manet's flat and
rapid version of naturalism led the way, to be followed within
less than
ten years by Impressionism. Impressionism held on as the leading
manner until the early 1880's, where the Neo-Impressionism
of Seurat
and then the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, Gauguin, and
Van Gogh became the most advanced styles. Things get a little
mixed
up during the last twenty years of the century, though it may
be only in seeming. At any rate Bonnard and Vuillard in their
early,
Nabi phase appear during the 1890's, and Fauvism enters the
competition by at least 1903. As it looks, painting moved faster
between the
mid 1880's and 1910 or so than at any time within the scope
of this hasty survey. Cubism took the lead away from Fauvism
within
hardly a half a dozen years of the latter's emergence. Only
then did painting slow down again to what had been its normal
rate of
change between 1800 and the 1880's. For Cubism stayed on top
until the mid-1920's. After that came Surrealism (I say Surrealism
for
lack of a better term: Surrealism's identity as a style
still remains undetermined; and some of the best new painting
and sculpture of the latter 20's and the 30's had nothing to do
with it). And by the early 1940's Abstract Expressionism and its
cognates, tachisme and art informel, were on the
scene.
Admittedly,
this historical rundown simplifies far too much. Art never proceeds
that neatly. Nor is the rundown itself that accurate even within
the limits set it. (What I see as hurried stylistic change between
the 1880's and 1910 may turn out under longer scrutiny to be less
hurried than it now looks. Larger and unexpected unities of style
may become apparent-in fact, they already are apparent, but this
is not the place to touch on them, despite all they would do to
strengthen my argument here.) But, for all the exceptions that
can rightly be taken to my chronological schema and what it implies,
I do think that there is enough unquestionable evidence to support
my point, which is that art-historical styles in painting (if not
in sculpture) have tended since the beginning of the 19th century
(if not before) to hold their positions of leadership for on an
average of between ten and fifteen years.
The case of Abstract Expressionism does more than bear out this
average; it exceeds it, and would go to show that art actually
moved and changed more slowly over the last thirty years than in
the hundred years previous. Abstract Expressionism in New York,
along with tachisme and art informel in Paris,
emerged in the early 40's and by the early 50's was dominating
avant-garde
painting and sculpture to a greater extent even than Cubism
had in the 20's. (You weren't "with it" at all in those days unless
you lathered your paint or roughed your surfaces; and in the 50's
being "with it" began to matter ever so much more.) Well, Abstract
Expressionism collapsed very suddenly back in the spring of
1962,
in Paris as well as New York. It is true that it had begun to
lose its vitality well before that, but nevertheless it continued
to
dominate the avant-garde scene, and by the time of its final
retreat from that scene it had led art for close to twenty years.
The collapse
of Abstract Expressionism was as sudden as it was because it
was long overdue, but even had its collapse come five or six
years
earlier (which is when it should have come) the span of time
over which Abstract Expressionism held its leadership would
still have
been over the average for art styles or movements within the
last century and a half.
Ironically
enough, the seemingly sudden death of Abstract Expressionism
in
1962 is another of the things that have contributed to the notion
that art styles turn over much faster, and more abruptly, now
than
they used to. The fact is that the demise of Abstract Expressionism
was an unusually lingering one. Nor did the art-historical
style
that displaced it come into view nearly so suddenly as the events
of the spring of 1962 made it appear. The "hard" style of the 60's
had already emerged with Ellsworth Kelly's first New York show
in 1955, and with the renascence of geometricizing abstract art
in Paris in the mid-50's as we see it in Vasarely. Thus there was
an overlapping in time. There was an overlapping or transition
in terms of style too: the passage from the "painterly" to the
"linear" can be witnessed in the painting of Barnett Newman, for
example, and in the sculpture of David Smith, and in an artist
like Rauschenberg (to name only Americans). That the scene of
art,
as distinct from the course of art has known abrupt changes
and reversals lately should not mislead us as to what has actually
happened in art itself. (It is again ironical that the overlapping,
the very gradualness involved in recent stylistic change, made
for the impression of confusion, at least in the first years of
the 60's, as much as anything else did.)
What
at first did surprise me in the new art of the 60's was that its
basic homogeneity of style could embrace such a great heterogeneity
of quality, that such bad art could go hand in hand with such good
art. It took me a while to remember that I had already been surprised
by that same thing in the 50's. Then I had forgotten that, because
of the subsequent collapse of Abstract Expressionism, which seemed
to me to separate the good from the bad in the art of the 50's
pretty correctly. All the same, some of my surprise at the great
unevenness in quality of new art in the 60's remained, and remains.
Something new is there that was not there in Abstract Expressionism
when it first emerged.
All
art styles deteriorate and, in doing so, become usable for hollow
and meretricious effects. But no style in the past seems to have
become usable for such effects while it was still an up-and-coming
one. That is, as best as I can remember. Not the sorriest pasticheur or
bandwagon-jumper of Impressionism, Fauvism, or Cubism in their
first years of leadership fell below a certain level of artistic
probity. The vigor and the difficulty of the style at the time
simply would not let them. Maybe I don't know enough of what
happened
in those days. I will allow for that and still maintain my point.
The new "hard" style of the 60's established itself by producing
original and vigorous art. This is the way new styles have generally
established themselves. But what was new, in scheme, about the
way that the 60's style arrived was that it did so carrying
not
only genuinely fresh art but also art that pretended to
be fresh, and was able to pretend to be that, as in times past
only a style in decline would have permitted. Abstract Expressionism
started out with both good and bad, but not until the early 1950's
did it lend itself, as a style, to specious as distinct
from failed art. The novel feature of the "hard" style of the 60's
is that it did this from the first. This fact says nothing necessarily
compromising about the best "hard-style" art. That best is equal
to the best of Abstract Expressionism. But the fact itself would
show that something really new, in scheme, has happened
in the new art of the 60's.
This
schematically new thing is what, I feel, accounts for the greater
nervousness of art opinion that marks the 60's. One knows what
is "in" at any given moment, but one is uneasy about what is "out".
It was not that way in the 50's. The heroes of painting and sculpture
in that period profiled themselves against a background of followers
fairly early on, and for the most part they remained-and have remained–heroes.
There was less question then than now of competing tendencies or
positions within the common style. Just who and what will remain
from the 60's, just which of the competing sub-styles will prove
out as of lasting value–this remains far more uncertain. Or
at least it does for most critics, museum people, collectors, art
buffs, and artists themselves–for most, I say, if not exactly
for all. This uncertainty may help explain why critics have
lately
begun to pay so much more attention to one another than they
used to, and why even artists pay them more attention.
Another
cause of the new uncertainty may be the fact that avant-garde opinion
has since the mid-50's lost a compass bearing that had served it
reliably in the past. There used to be self-evidently academic
art, the art of the salons and the Royal Academy, against
which to take position. Everything directed against or away
from
academic art was in the right direction; that was once a minimal
certainty. The academy was still enough there in Paris in the
20's,
and perhaps even in the 30's, to assure avant-garde art of its
own identity (André Lhote would still attack a salon exhibition
now and then during those years). But since the war, and especially
since the 50's, confessedly academic art has fallen out of sight.
Today the only conspicuous fine art–the exceptions, however
numerous, are irrelevant–is avant-garde or what looks like
or refers to avant-garde art. The avant-garde is left alone with
itself, and in full possession of the "scene".
This
hardly means that the kind of impulse and ambition that once went
into avowedly academic art has now become extinct. Far from it.
That kind of impulse and that kind of ambition now find their way
into avant-garde, or rather nominally avant-garde, art. All the
sloganizing and programming of advanced art in the 60's, and the
very proliferation of it, are as though designed to conceal this.
In effect, the avant-garde is being infiltrated by the enemy, and
has begun to deny itself. Where everything is advanced nothing
is; when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over.
Not
that the avant-garde ever really meant revolution. Only the
journalism
about it takes it to mean that–takes it to mean a break with
the past, a new start, and all that. The avant-garde's principal
reason for being is, on the contrary, to maintain continuity: continuity
of standards of quality–the standards, if you please, of the
Old Masters. These can be maintained only through constant innovation,
which is how the Old Masters had achieved standards to begin with.
Until the middle of the last century innovation in Western art
had not had to be startling or upsetting; since then, for reasons
too complex to go into here, it has had to be that. And now in
the 60's it is as though everybody had finally–finally–caught
on to this: caught on not only to the necessity of innovation,
but also to the necessity–or seeming necessity of advertising
innovation by making it startling and spectacular.
Today
everybody innovates. Deliberately, methodically. And the innovations
are deliberately and methodically made startling. Only it now
turns
out not to be true that all startling art is necessarily innovative
or new art. This is what the 60's have finally revealed, and
this
revelation may indeed be the newest thing about the bulk of
what passes for new art in the 60's. It has become apparent
that art
can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything
startling–or new. The character itself of being startling,
spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part
of
safe good taste. A corollary of this is the realization that
the aspects under which almost all artistic innovation has
made itself
recognized these past hundred years have changed, almost radically.
What is authentically and importantly new in the art of the
60's
comes in softly as it were, surreptitiously in the guises, seemingly,
of the old, and the unattuned eye is taken aback as it isn't
by
art that appears in the guises of the self-evidently new. No
artistic rocketry, no blank-looking box, no art that excavates,
litters,
jumps, or excretes has actually startled unwary taste in these
latter years as have some works of art that can be safely described
as easel-paintings and some other works that define themselves
as sculpture and nothing else. Art in any medium, boiled down
to
what it does in the experiencing of it, creates itself through
relations, proportions. The quality of art depends on inspired,
felt relations or proportions as on nothing else.
There
is no getting around this. A simple, unadorned box can succeed
as art by virtue of these things; and when it fails as art it
is not because it is merely a plain box, but because its proportions,
or even its size, are uninspired, unfelt. The same applies to
works
in any other form of "novelty" art: kinetic, atmospheric, light,
environmental, "earth", "funky", etc., etc. No amount of phenomenal,
describable newness avails when the internal relations of the work
have not been felt, inspired, discovered. The superior work of
art, whether it dances, radiates, explodes, or barely manages to
be visible (or audible or decipherable), exhibits, in other words,
rightness of "form".
To
this extent art remains unchangeable. Its quality will always
depend
on inspiration, and it will never be able to take effect as
art except through quality. The notion that the issue of quality
could
be evaded is one that never entered the mind of any academic
artist or art person. It was left to what I call the "popular" avant-garde
to be the first to conceive it. That kind of avant-garde began
with Marcel Duchamp and with Dada. Dada did more than express a
wartime despair of traditional art and culture; it also tried to
repudiate the difference between high and less than high art; and
here it was a question less of wartime despair than of a revulsion
against the arduousness of high art as insisted upon by the "unpopular"
avant-garde, which was the real and original one. Even before 1914
Duchamp had begun his counterattack on what he called "physical"
art by which he meant what is today vulgarly termed "formalist" art.
Duchamp
apparently realized that his enterprise might look like a retreat
from "difficult" to "easy" art, and his intention seems to have
been to undercut this difference by "transcending" the difference
between good and bad in general. (I don't think I'm over-interpreting
him here.) Most of the Surrealist painters joined the "popular"
avant-garde, but they did not try to hide their own retreat from
the difficult to the easy by claiming this transcendence; they
apparently did not feel it was that necessary to be "advanced";
they believed that their kind of art was simply better than the
difficult kind. And it was the same with the Neo-Romantic painters
of the 30's. Yet Duchamp's dream of going "beyond" the issue
of artistic quality continued to hover in the minds at least
of art
journalists. When Abstract Expressionism and art informel
appeared they were widely taken to be a kind of art that had at
last managed to make value discriminations irrelevant. And that
seemed the most advanced, the furthest-out, the most avant-garde
feat that art had yet been able to perform.
Not
that Duchamp's ideas were particularly invoked at the time. Nor
did Abstract Expressionism or art informel belong properly
with the "popular" avant-garde. Yet in their decline they did create
a situation favorable to the return or revival of that kind of
avantgardism. And return and revive it did in New York, notably
with Jasper Johns in the latter 50's. Johns is–rather was–a
gifted and original artist, but the best of his paintings and bas-reliefs
remain "easy" and certainly minor compared with the best of Abstract
Expressionism. Yet in the context of their period, and in idea,
they looked equally "advanced". And under cover of John's idea
Pop art was able to enter and give itself out as perhaps even more
"'advanced"–without, however, claiming to reach the same levels
of quality that the best of Abstract Expressionism had. The art
journalism of the 60's accepted the "easiness" of Pop art implicitly,
as though it did not matter, and as though such questions had
become
old-fashioned and obsolete. Yet in the end Pop art has not succeeded
in dodging qualitative comparisons, and it suffers from them
increasingly
with every day that passes.
Its
vulnerability to qualitative comparisons–not its "easiness"
or minor quality as such–is what is seen by many younger artists
as constituting the real failure of Pop Art. This failure is what,
in effect, "novelty" art intends to remedy. (And this intention,
along with other things, reveals how much "novelty" art derives
from Pop art in spirit and outlook.) The retreat to the easy from
the difficult is to be more knowingly, aggressively, extravagantly
masked by the guises of the difficult. The idea of the difficult–but
the mere idea, not the reality or substance–is to be used
against itself. By dint of evoking that idea the look of the
advanced
is to be achieved and at the same time the difference between
good and bad overcome. The idea of the difficult is evoked by
a row
of boxes, by a mere rod, by a pile of litter, by projects for
Cyclopean landscape architecture, by the plan for a trench dug
in a straight
line for hundreds of miles, by a half-open door, by the cross-section
of a mountain, by stating imaginary relations between real points
in real places, by a blank wall, and so forth. As though the
difficulty
of getting a thing into focus as art, or of gaining physical
access to it, or of visualizing it, were the same as the difficulty
that
belonged to the first experience of a successfully new and deeply
original work of art. And as if aesthetically extrinsic, merely
phenomenal or conceptual difficulty could reduce the difference
between good and bad in art to the point where it became irrelevant.
In this context the Milky Way might be offered as a work of
art
too.
The
trouble with the Milky Way, however, is that, as art,
it is banal. Viewed strictly as art, the "sublime" usually does reverse
itself and turn into the banal. The 18th century saw the "sublime"
as transcending the difference between the aesthetically good and
the aesthetically bad. But this is precisely why the "sublime"
becomes aesthetically, artistically banal. And this is why the
new versions of the "sublime" offered by "novelty" art in its latest
phase, to the extent that they do "transcend" aesthetic valuation,
remain banal and trivial instead of simply unsuccessful, or minor.
(In any case "sublime" effects in art suffer from a genetic
flaw: they can be concocted–produced, that is, without
inspiration.)
Here
again, the variety of nominally advanced art in the 60's shows
itself to be largely superficial. Variety within the limits of
the artistically insignificant, of the aesthetically banal and
trivial, is itself artistically insignificant.
