Art in America 1945–1970 (4)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, edited by Jed Perl.
You can’t criticize mystics. What might you say, for instance, about The Practice of the Presence of God? That Brother Lawrence didn’t know what he was talking about when he wrote that pain is a favor from the Lord? “Worldly people do not comprehend these truths,” said Lawrence. So it is when Hans Hofmann claims that art converts the surreal forces (“that is, their nature is something beyond physical reality”) to fixity in materials, and that this transformation “proceeds from metaphysical perceptions, for metaphysics is the search for the essential nature of reality.”
So far as I know, Hofmann was the first to note that the first line you draw on a rectangular sheet of paper is the fifth line in the system that includes the paper, the others being the four edges. This is an interesting phenomenological observation.
By adding another line you not only have a certain tension between the two lines, but also a tension between the unity of these two lines and the outline of your paper. The fact that your two lines, when considered either separately, or as a unit, have a definite relation to the outline, makes the lines and the paper a unified entity which (since the lines and the paper are different) exists entirely in the intellect.
Can we get from there to metaphysics? We can if we’re Hofmann. Echoing Lawrence, he observes, “The layman has extreme difficulty in understanding that plastic creation on a flat surface is possible without destroying this flat surface. But it is just this conceptual completeness of a plastic experience that warrants the preservation of the two dimensionality.” I’m no layman in this realm, but if you pressed me to clarify what is “plastic experience,” I could at best fool you into thinking that I was entirely sure.
That brings us to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg was no mystic, but his confidence in his intuition was so certain that he possessed the capacities of one. In rereading the extensive and well-chosen Greenberg selections in this week’s section of Art in America 1945–1970, it occurred to me that Greenberg’s uniqueness lay in that his intuitions operated seamlessly with his observations, so much so that, for him, they were equally factual. When he wrote that “For de Kooning black becomes a color—not the indifferent schema of drawing, but a hue with all the resonance, ambiguity, and variability of the prismatic scale,” it combined an observation about a material fact regarding de Kooning’s paintings with a phenomenological claim about prismatic blackness that would bewilder Hofmann’s layman. But unlike “plastic experience,” I can tell you what Greenberg meant. He was talking about black as a color as such, as opposed to a mechanism for altering or containing color, such as takes place when one draws with it.
This clarified for me why I’ve never felt sympathetic to complaints about what Jed Perl, in his introduction to the Greenberg chapters, called his “strenuously austere vision of artistic experience.” Strenuousness and austerity are relative. A 135-pound deadlift is not particularly challenging if you can pull 500. I’m not one of those guys in the gym, but I’m one of them regarding the experience of two-dimensional composition. People like us are not exactly rare but we’re not universal either. The category does not even include everyone making art.
If you’re in art, but don’t have a lot of access to that realm of visuality, it must seem like a club from which you’ve been excluded. Greenberg, consequently, must infuriate you. “…nature did succeed in stamping itself so indelibly on modern painting that its stamp has remained even in an art as abstract as Mondrian’s,” wrote Greenberg in “The Role of Nature in Modern Painting.” Many will find that statement no more penetrable than Hofmann’s: “The function of push and pull in respect to form contains the secret of Michelangelo’s monumentality or of Rembrandt’s universality.”1 But there’s nothing you can say about it except that worldly people do not comprehend these truths. There’s a standing invitation, open to all, to contemplate the related matters while looking at the art in question. More than that cannot be offered.
As reflected in the calendar, the Asynchronous Studio Book Club will go on hiatus for six weeks while I attend the Manang Artist Residency. We will resume with more from Art in America 1945–1970, then proceed to Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë. In the meantime, I’ll be painting, reading Phenomenology of Perception, and working through My Nepali Alphabet Book, billed as a “Coloring Extravaganza.”
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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
While Greenberg’s claim may be hard to see if you don’t know the germane history of modernist painting, and maybe even if you do, Hofmann’s may simply be wrong. Rembrandt’s universality hinges on more than the abstract functioning in his pictures, which is not to say that such functioning has no role in it. Furthermore, not everything Greenberg wrote over the course of seven decades holds up either. But there’s a difference between disagreeing with some of it and feeling angry at him.
The Greenberg problem, to call it that, may well be multifactorial, and its components may vary depending on the afflicted party in question, but I expect it's not so much anger as defensiveness or resentment. Greenberg had an eye and corresponding taste of his own, to which he was true, and that is clearly not the case with many "art people" who came after him. This causes tension and friction, not to say insecurity and anxiety, which can lead to rather unseemly acting out.
Franklin, the term "plastic arts" has been in use since the early 19th century to refer to art forms that employ materials that can be modified or manipulated by the artist to create a work of art. It may be more familiar or in more common usage in languages other than English, but I have long been very used to it in Spanish as "artes plásticas."