Writings

“The close relation existing today between the museum and the art market reveals pressures from our society.  Ever since our culture subscribed willingly to historicity as well as to the principle of marketing, it has ceased to classify the museum’s difference from the market.  The museum consecrates commodities that are simultaneously traded at the art fair.  Institutions and events help in where art as such no longer appears to be convincing on its own terms.  Enforced mediation is called for to support the former prestige of a weakened art.  For a variety of reasons, society depends on a culture of privilege and is therefore determined to give art credit whether it deserves it or not.”

Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, p.98

“Our concept of art is rooted in that of the Enlightenment age, which credited it with a timeless and universal significance transcending the specificity of individual works or genres: art was declared timeless and universal, much as human rights themselves were meant to apply to all people, however different they might be in race and origin.  But this idea of art was tenable only when phrased in a general art history.  The view of art history was needed to frame the individual time of the works since art history had a universal validity, while the individual works did not.  That is why the art museum was to become the spatial equivalent of the time scheme of art history.  It offered a place for everything capable of representing the logic of art history, which, when the Louvre first opened, was only old art, while new art first had to earn the status of museum art — it had to wait for it.

“The nervous debate over the recognition of today’s art proves clearly the degree to which we still cling to an idea not older than two hundred years — regardless of the age (or the youth) of the works of art to which we apply this idea.  This idea of art history as still ongoing links us to the great tradition of historical culture, since we fear nothing more than art becoming a notion of the past.  The definition even of contemporary art ultimately needs the horizon of history, as it is this history that helps to explain what is, in essence, inexplicable.  But art enjoys a privilege that mere ideas can never obtain:  it materializes in ‘a work of art’ that can be acquired by a museum and exhibited there as ‘art’, that is, in a work that always possesses a place and a name.  Even if it is a fiction, as Marcel Duchamp suspected, it is still a necessary fiction for the purpose of exhibiting culture, though market values seem to dominate as a result of present practices in art commerce.  Even if the market insists on the purchase price and the museum proclaims art as its property, it is still only the symbolic value that can engage our fascination for art.”

Ibid., p.105

...since we fear nothing more than art becoming a notion of the past…

We may indeed fear art becoming a notion of the past.  And yet, it seems as though the belief, more - the experience, of an object embodying real force, call it spiritual force, call it numinous, call it powerful, call it whatever works for you — but somehow embodying an actual energetic force that somehow gives form to human meaning — to depths and heights of human existence — that relate to soul, consciousness, guts, heart — call it whatever you want but it has to do with something essential about being human — that this belief and experience is clearly on the wane in our culture and art no longer necessarily means that, if it ever did.

Which brings up the question - where is it then, exactly, that we are headed?

When in the mid-50’s I first saw canvases by Pollock, Still, Kline, and de Kooning, it seemed to me that painting had made a totally new definition of freedom.  The structures that I was looking at owed nothing, or so it seemed, to the closed, self-contained, self-consistent notions of composition and pictorial syntax that my experience up to then had taught me to regard as mandatory.  These canvases, apparently improvisations on a heroic scale, seemed both more rooted as objects in the material facts of paint and canvas than anything that I had seen before, and at the same time paradoxically more inward.  Yet this inwardness had nothing of the willed, whimsical quality that I found intolerable in Surrealism.  Inwardness in the New Yorkers had something headlong about it.  It was passed over directly in the quality of the attack, the frank acceptance of painterly gesture and virtuosity as form-making factors; through open hesitancies and revisions, and the naked exposure of painting itself as a visible argument.  It was carried over, too, in the man-sized scale and the invitation to close viewing and envelopment.  Above all it was carried in the sense these paintings gave of being seen.  Each nuance, each final decision was an episode in a dialogue with the canvas — a dialogue in which the eye faced and took in the visible facts of paint and canvas and the spatial readings built into them.  The very terms of vision seemed to be recreated here — even in the matted cat’s cradle of Pollock, even in de Kooning’s reversals of figure and field.  For all their abstractness, these canvases seemed nearer to the great figurative traditions than anything that was being done in the name of abstract art in Europe, and for me at least that was not a mark against them, but the opposite.  They were nearer to the figurative tradition, not, obviously, in terms of subject or compositional hierarchies, but in terms of spaces filled with seen forms.

Andrew Forge, from Painting and the Struggle for the Whole Self, Artforum 14, 1975

When Forge describes his experience of the Abstract Expressionists’ work as providing the “sense these paintings gave of being seen” -what does he mean?  What is the import of “Each nuance, each final decision [being] an episode in a dialogue with the canvas”?  In contrasting the New York painters with the European Surrealists he wasn’t simply implying that Dali perhaps wasn’t taking a good look at the whole canvas before signing his name.  Rather, when Forge writes of the picture being seen he is referring to a particular kind of seeing, which is inherently relational, as a deeply felt dialogue.  This kind of seeing not only considers the formal situation on a canvas (basically two-dimensional design problems), but relates the formal situation to an inner felt situation within the painter.  It is this inner situation, that may be referred to as an inner body, which imbues seeing with vision.  Ultimately, it is the power of vision, stemming as it does from the inner body, which works as a gate or hinge, bringing itself to bear upon the canvas, steering it towards an image that functions both outwardly and inwardly, that is working decoratively or conceptually or both, and at the same time - through the impact of the inner body - embodying presence and consciousness, which are essentially formless.

It was the vision of painters like de Kooning and Pollock which demanded a way of painting that was necessarily dialogic and created images that were seen and recognized.

December 28, 2009

Here:

It is the relationship between style, form, that which changes on the one hand, with presence, the formless, that which does not change, on the other.

Put historically, it is the relationship between modernity and late/post-modernity’s need for change and innovation with that which resists innovation, precedes and supersedes it and ultimately, fundamentally informs it.

‘Academic art tells us that knowledge takes precedence over experience.  Romantic art — which means all serious art since 1800 — says the exact opposite.  But the moment it proclaims the sovereignty of experience it is inserting intention between the impulse and the deed.  The rubric of intention allows the Romantic artist to find metaphors for what he is doing: “I will paint as if I am able to see instantaneously” or “I will paint as if I had never seen another picture” and so on.  Without that “as if” and its enabling fiction he is condemned to indulgence and self-parody.  Armed with it he can begin to see himself and to move himself to genuine strenuousness.  Psychologists have often reminded us of the horrible shock Monet would have had if he had really been able to see the messages that came in through his eye.  But by claiming that this was what he was painting Monet was able to spin a content for his efforts, a thread of intention that led him deeper and deeper in the development of his pictures, which were not real showers of rain, as Maupassant pretended on his behalf, but constructions to be read.’

- Andrew Forge, Monet, p.130.

What we’re really talking about is a range of positioning, a range of attitudes, a range of ways of relating to the world, a range that generally occurs in flux throughout our days and hours, unnoticed and unbidden, like weather.

‘Most people who work in an organized art world are, by definition, integrated professionals, for no art world could continue to exist without a ready supply of people capable of turning out its characteristic products.  The network of distributive organizations art worlds develop — galleries, concert halls, theaters, and publishing companies — requires the continuous creation of a body of work to be distributed.  These institutions may cease operation, thus requiring less work.  But while they exist, they look for work to display, and some of the many people who aspire to be integrated professionals will provide it.  Furthermore, the aesthetic current in a world will certify as sufficiently good to be displayed roughly the amount needed to fill the display opportunities.’

–Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, p. 230

‘What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy.  That’s the only direction you could possibly have towards painting.  There’s no other direction at all.  There’s no other space in art.  There’s no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it.  And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss — and sometimes hit.  And this contact you make when you hit is all-important.  If that contact holds, and you hold, then you are washed by that and all the technological shit that’s in your mind gets thrown out.  You have a chance.  And it takes everything — every pore — every molecule within you to hold — and you don’t know if you’re going to live or die; I mean things happen to you then.  And you must refrain from trying to grasp for the outcome of it.  Certainly not who’s going to review you or something.  It’s got to be out of your mind; you’ve got to refuse it.  That’s something to do.

‘So a word like “space” — you can spend your life with it, you know that?  Imagine.  You can go through your whole life talking about space and motion, sound and rhythm — and all that crap.  It’s all nature; it’s all the things you find everyday.  But art isn’t everyday.  Nothing like it.

‘So ascendant things; that’s what it is; Rubens over Rembrandt.  Absolutely.  I mean you have to know better.  You have to guess at it, make your mistakes and find out.’

– Milton Resnick, Out of the Picture, p.111-112

The picture has to become stronger than you are.  When the picture is the elephant or the wind and you are the straw, then you know how to paint.

– Milton Resnick

Out of the Picture, p.2

May 26, 2009

Thinking of the passage in Spurling’s extraordinary and masterful biography on Matisse, when she writes about his work before the First World War, how he was “attempting to bypass an exhausted classical tradition” (p.54) – I’m not sure what my question is – we certainly do not have a classical tradition today, and it would be hard to say that what we do have is in a state of exhaustion – a great deal seems to be going on all over the place, just flip through any current art magazine. But facing our contemporary situation – what would Matisse do today? That is, what would be a response today that would embody a position of renewal and invigoration? Is such a position vis-à-vis the art world, or the world at large, even tenable, given how giant and how everywhere everything is? What does “renewal” even mean today? When Matisse speaks of returning to first principles – what would that mean today?

September 6, 2009

In relation to the paper cut-outs that Matisse was beginning to spread, in 1946, over his bedroom wall during nights of insomnia, that would eventually crystallize into Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea — Spurling writes, “Matisse…had dived without thought or afterthought into an art more concerned with states of consciousness than with any specific visual allusion.”  p.445

And this — the attraction to light acts as a door to space.  Through that pull into the beauty of light  comes a sense of expansion, space, and not exactly the dissolution, but the easing up of the perceived material boundaries that our minds defend so fiercely.  Here the love of light expands into the wash of space and the easing of the heart.