Building a New Critical Foundation

ART INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE
LOS ANGELES LETTER - KURT VON MEIER
CHRISTMAS, 1967

That we have an art more truly international than ever, is clearly the result (or but one of the manifold, indirect results) of the pervasive and extraordinarily sophisticated technology of communications, which has come into being especially within the last two dec­ades. Information about art is communicated by TV and satellite; and of course, artists themselves travel widely and more frequently than could ever have been possible before rapid, low-cost jet trans­port. International competitions, fairs, festivals and travelling or invitational exhibitions aid in this intercourse. But the greatest single factor must surely be the spread of fairly accurate and plenti­ful photographic reproductions, as disseminated by the class of art magazines of which the present publication is a member.

Expatriate English painters, such as Michael Illingworth, who now lives and works away in the bush of New Zealand, can remain nevertheless astutely aware of all international activity in painting—whether or not he rejects it entirely to pursue painting in his own strange and intimate Klee- and Miro-inspired world. By way of contrast, native young New Zealand painter Ross Ritchie in part founded his rapidly-maturing style on small-scale reproduc­tions printed in seldom-too-faithful color, but purporting to picture the work of Francis Bacon. Until recently, there had never been a Bacon in New Zealand, nor had Ritchie left the islands. Yet the influences, rather than working a pernicious and dominating effect as they might well have done upon young painters in London, became so removed from their sources of aesthetic power, that their ability to intimidate or corrupt was also correspondingly lessened.

One result has been the survival of an integral personal style in artists such as Illingworth and Ritchie (in very different ways, and for different reasons, respectively). This same tendency could also be observed in a small travelling exhibition of paintings in Los Angeles presented not too long ago by the Australian Trade Commission. In the work of those who stood out, amid considerable rubbish, one could discover some typical Australian elements. Fred Williams, for example, really does manage to evoke the sense, and the light qualities, and almost the smell of a eucalyptus grove, without recourse to the usual nationalist, literalist gimmicks.

Los Angeles, one would think, is ready for a full-scale exhibition of work drawn from the various countries around the Pacific Basin. Such an idea was intelligently anticipated a number of years ago by Colin McCahon, Peter Tomory and Hamish Keith at the Auckland City Art Gallery in New Zealand. The significance of a sub­stantial exhibition (to follow up what was then a rather exploratory project) would be dramatically increased by both the quality of work in the middle 1960s, and by the abundant range now avail­able from which it might be selected.

The general aversion to expansive concepts, as expressed in a sort of socially self-indulgent lethargy, sadly characterizes the art circles in the huge metropolitan complex of Los Angeles—in many ways as remote and provincial as the art circles of any colonial or Commonwealth island in the South Pacific, and fully the match of any cultural wasteland in more northerly climes. In fact, as Ca­nadian cities such as Vancouver, British Columbia, begin to pro­duce consistently stimulating work by demanding and exploratory artists, it is quite apparent that it is Los Angeles that is dragging its feet, and not the traditionally more provincial centers.

There is an immediate and blinding need for all different levels of institutions concerned with art (through the schools and the universities, the museums and commercial galleries, various foundations and some industrial firms) to cooperate in establishing a com­munications and media center. There are already bold but well‑conceived steps in this direction at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas—another key city in which there are creative men­talities that should be in instantaneous contact with their counter‑parts in Los Angeles and elsewhere. An excellent direction is also being explored in Vancouver, where in the new and relatively rad­ical Simon Fraser University there is a united Communications Department—including but not limited to what would otherwise be known as a Department of Fine Arts. There, as in New York, are the beginnings of a close cooperation between "artists" and "technicians" (as if they could be effectively separated any more).

One of the essential elements contributing toward this productive and promising situation has been the willingness of the established institutions to open their doors to the outside world. Unfortunately in California, or at least with the University of California, there are strong efforts to bolt closed the doors of academe even more tightly. Following the trend and succumbing to the pressures generated by a shift to conservative and reactionary political attitudes, it will be tragic if the State university system and other public institutions are allowed to inhibit and condemn the salient oppor­tunities for a vital and vigorous artistic life in that whole part of the world of which Los Angeles is certainly one of the major foci.

A communications revolution has now made it possible for in­stantaneous international transmission of information—and, what is particularly important for the arts, that information can now be transmitted in visual and aural media without having to be trans­lated into media based on the written or printed word. It's the Early Bird satellite instead of Morse code. There are already ap­pearing deep implications for art—in the work of artists them­selves, as well as in the work of writers on art (whose function, we might expect, would place them closer to the sources of such influ­ence anyway). For one thing, the whole question of " influences" —betrayed by an artist's biography, or discovered stylistically in his work—has been heretofore a standard point of departure for writers. This old art historians' academic game of "bagging the Einfluss" was certainly not limited to dissecting the work of various hands in Books of Hours. There is a cancerous body of neo-aca­demic writing that already surrounds the art of the last decade. The " influence" is cited either as a put-down of the work in ques­tion (in its gentler form, as a sort of "See, there isn't really any­thing new under the sun"), or as an exegetical principle (along with a couple of other recurrent fusty notions like "chronological development" and the "masterpiece"). In seriously pretending to explain the art, or somehow to make it seem worthy of serious en­quiry, this latter abuse of influence-citing is perhaps the most per­nicious of all. The point is that changes in communications and technology, which have directly affected the art itself within the last decade, demand a substantially new approach to writing about art.

None of this means that we can, or that we should disregard the conceptual tools of conventional art history and criticism. We are, on the contrary, faced with the immediate necessity of amplifying and expanding them in revolutionary ways if we ever hope to make sense writing about art again. The superficial, descriptive chron­icle, for example, is almost completely outmoded. If there is still some value in recording what has been "going on" in Los Angeles in the last month, it could perhaps best be achieved by a series of photos illustrating the relevant work, together with the factual de­tails, biographical information, and some capsule interpretive corn­ments. The most efficient way to do this is of course to place each example in a little box, which is then given a title or a number. The best chronicles do this. But certainly this is far from being model art criticism, which deals with ideas as much as with art itself, with values, with feelings, and with "problems" of aesthetic, cultural, historical and altogether human concern. The chronicle approach is ill-equipped for such a task, although it will probably always retain a limited utility. One major reason for this is that the truly relevant and exciting art of the "recent present" can no longer be contained by the exclusive concept of precious-object-in­a-scarcity-economy. Nor is it any longer possible to make sense writing about art as a commodity. The obsolescent ideal of such art writing rests very close to an auctioneer's checklist anyway.

An intriguing hypothesis to test out on the new art, is: the better the art is, the more it is free. Resuscitating the flaccid phrase of old Geistesgeschichte writers, there is one hell of a lot of art in the air. This is literally true—and can be proven by electromagnetic con­tent analysis (wirephotos, sound and radio waves, the maze of TV transmissions, moonbeams, etc.). And the air is free, even if the automobile and power industries add tons of poison to it daily, polluting every large unwindswept city in the world. Even in such a relatively slow mode of communication as air-mailed art maga­zines, we can document the overwhelming abundance and world­wide availability of new artistic concepts, images, techniques, ma­terials, presentations and interpretations. The space and time limi­tations to communication, which in the past functioned as control factors for the art historian, are today largely inoperative. We are dealing with a completely new structural interrelationship between artists of the world; national boundaries have been supervened by the new network of relevant ties, in a way analogous to the break­down between the various artificially categorized media of the fine arts—and indeed also analogous to the breakdown of barriers be­tween the so-called fine arts and the fields of popular and folk art. Attempting to understand even some of the most basic postulates of contemporary art with a mentality conditioned by exclusively pre-1960s experience is like trying to repair a computer with ham­mer and nails and a roll of bailing wire.

The paintings of Ron Davis supply an excellent case in point. Since he began working in the present direction some two years ago, considerable critical attention (and discussion among artists themselves) has centered on the relationship of his work to that of David Novros, Frank Stella, Clark Murray, Nick Boisvert, Michael Egan and others. To unravel just what it is that each of these art­ists owes, and to whom, may necessitate a far more subtle, complex and time-consuming process than the importance of its conclusions seem to justify. Whether they did or not, any of these painters could have seen the work of any others in time enough for it to have supplied a marked influence or stimulus. The histories of any specific statements or formal innovations can be written; and for these painters, the histories would have to consider Stella's earlier work, that by Noland, and indeed that of much earlier Mondrian. Better however to save much of this for the formalistic hoop-jumping of Masters theses. As the constant and controlling factors of limited communication and physical mobility have been effectively dissipated since the middle of the century, the meanings any such history might have also have been severely compromised. For in­stance, one cannot be at all sure that young Canadian painters like Reg Holms, Gary Lee-Nova, or Michael Morris don't belong in the story at some key point during the last few years.

One of the things that must be sacrificed (along the way to build­ing a new critical foundation from which to approach recent art) is the idea of a lineal, sequential, causal stylistic "development" or "evolution" based on "sources" and " influences". Some such gen­erative or conditioning patterns still do exist, of course, and they are not wisely scuttled altogether. But we may now find ourselves flung back from the easy causal assumptions projected by this ear­lier approach, to asking what the artist does with the wealth of interrelated stimuli available to him. Attention to such questions has revitalized the approach of formal analysis, as in the writing of Michael Fried and others. This is most effective when the writer can concentrate upon the work of one or a very few artists, with the opportunity to discuss carefully selected work at length. Some­times this can be done well in art-magazine articles, although it is usually more acceptable in the form of an introductory essay for an exhibition. The frequently narrow range of such an approach, however (even if self-imposed) often opens up the back door for lineal type-head preconceptions.

As a complement, or as an alternative, there is another approach, focusing on certain "problems" or topics or ideas, which the works of art are chosen to exemplify or illustrate. Artists may not like to think of their work being used or abused in this way; but it is really a relationship of respect, since as often as not the work of art deserves credit for raising the problem or suggesting the topic in the first instance. The most brilliant example of such writing to appear recently is the article by Sheldon Nodelman, "Sixties Art : Some Philosophical Perspectives", in Perspecta 11 (The Yale Archi­tectural Journal, 1967). Then, there was the extraordinary little prefatory remark in The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quota­tions in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history." And that was in 1962.

Perhaps McLuhan has already provided a model for what the art critic can do best, within his magazine medium and with his word and photo limitations; he can offer probing questions and observations, or exploratory juxtapositions. Since his major func­tion is no longer to document and describe, he can risk even occa­sional silliness while retaining the prospect of profundity.

So where does that leave us with respect to the new paintings of Ron Davis? It is not easy to tell from a single photograph that the surface has been prepared with several layers of pigment and fiber glass, nor even that the shape of the paintings is indeed an irregular pentagon out of which a chunk has been removed. In fact, Davis has recently produced more than one series based on "pentagonal" shapes, with the interior forms creating perspective-illusion games, and audaciously juxtaposing various planes of color in what may be deliberate experiments with the sometimes ambiv­alent phenomenon of color advance and recession. The works are also rather large, and seem to epitomize Nodelman's notion of "thingness". Nodelman did not cite them as an example, although he might well have done so; except that there may be an added sophistication: the painting as a thing can be read, in addition, as a picture of itself.

The way the work of Ron Davis straddles a picture-thing dichot­omy suggests selecting examples for comparison from both the media of painting and sculpture. Michael Morris, the young Ca­nadian painter mentioned above, has already created an impres­sive collection of drawings and graphic work. His scale is more intimate than that of Davis, but in the gouache drawings Morris evokes a surprising feeling of mass and monumentality. An en­grossing problem emerges when we try to figure out just where the work of the two artists "crosses". For Davis' work is big, and some ­how looks small, like an almost-completed Chinese puzzle, whereas Morris' drawings loom up like pipe complexes at an oil refinery. It would be soothing to some, no doubt, to compare work that looks more alike, that uses the same kinds of form or material, or that feels like it inhabits a more similar aesthetic realm. But then, so what ? One of those artists probably wouldn't be worth spending time and energy upon. Nice that he does it, and all that; still, the interesting and relevant questions to be considered by art criticism must shine through in order to help this medium, in turn, retain validity. And writing about art is valid when there is a self-aware­ness of the medium, what it can do and its limitations; this implies a deep and thorough commitment or involvement with, among other things, the recurring question about the validity of writing about art at all.

It used to be that writers could get away with dismissing the art under scrutiny. Styles were in or out of vogue; artists gained pub­licity and luster, then lost it or were overtaken by a field of new stars; movements arrived, and were then superseded by other, yet more "modern" devotions. There was, in short, seen to be a series of more or less parallel linear developments which collectively com­prised the history of art. In most American universities art history is still taught as though this were the way it really happened and the only way it could have happened. Recently, however, we have had mosaic approaches, Gestalt attacks, or pattern-recognition and problem-solving methodologies (at times no less dogmatic in their claims to be the "one true way"). A nice product of this is the burden of sweet tolerance forcing us to forbear condemnation. Let everyone do his own thing. And, as the post-hippie poet Chester Anderson has suggested, that " thing" everyone does is one of the best contemporary definitions of the Tao. Every artist paints his canvas or chips away at marble, or produces synaesthesia with rock and roll. No one can be out of date when we have sacri­ficed the "necessity" of relating values to a linear time sequence. Of course there are still artists of vastly differing stature and talent or aesthetic worth and historical significance. The good and im­portant ones tend to deal with the unresolved, demanding, elusive artistic problems, whether formal or conceptual or technical. There are many others whom the forthright critic might call the legion of mediocrity or the relatively irrelevant; they give the appearance of dealing with artistic problems, but actually do not. They range from the wicked or the self-deceived, to the merely ignorant who do not realize that those problems engrossing them have already been saved. After the wicked who always fascinate, this last type is most interesting; their shortcomings, for the critic, are their essential failure to come to terms with a world of instantaneous total information, which becomes (in the mind of the conventional, con­temporary writer anyway) their artistic failure as well. It is easily remembered but often forgotten that this never has, and never will have anything to do with the intrinsic aesthetic worth of any cre­ative activity. It is easier, and more beautiful, to live with the implications of this when we stop insisting that art is so damn precious and exclusive. Then we can proceed with any kind of game it is fun to play—including that of making aesthetic evaluations and pronouncements—with a radical return to the criterion of quality.

The sculpture of Pat O'Neill illustrates many of these points. He can be compared (or contrasted) with Ron Davis so as to com­plement our consideration of the gouache drawings by Michael Morris. O'Neill uses similar materials as Davis, including fiber glass, and creates smooth, light-reflecting surfaces of high gloss. Some works similarly have layers of deep, suspended pigmentation. But again, the work of the two artists does not bear superficial resemblances in form or feeling at all. Morris and Davis used straight lines, for instance, and O'Neill does not. Davis and O'Neill produce physically solid objects, and Morris retains two-dimen­sionality. Again, the quarter- or half-circle forms in O'Neill's " Scene #2 " or " Scene #3 " pieces could easily occur in a Morris drawing, but less so in the work of Davis. Clearly we are not going to get very far on this usual level of analysis.

As between Davis and Morris, however, there are also rather more complex or subtle levels of comparison. Citing just one here, we may recall the problem of illusory perspective attacked by Davis from the context of painting. One of the forms such a prob­lem may describe when translated into the medium of sculpture involves the allusion, in O'Neill's work, to landscape. As an analog to the concept of "mapping" in mathematics, perhaps it is possible to consider the spatial illusion system of perspective in painting. with its internally-consistent sense of scale (where the relative scale of each element within the picture suggests a coherent system which is an illustration of scale in the "real" world), mapping these inter­related systems onto the medium of sculpture. Such a problem has not arisen in traditional sculpture, which has been almost exclu­sively concerned with the forms of the human body ever since it became technically possible to produce life-size work. The very phrase "life size" begs this question. It might have been raised before the advent of monumental (life size) sculpture—around the time of the millenium in the West. But it would be pretty fanciful to assume that it did so in fact. On the contrary, when such philo­sophical speculations are generated by the use of perspective in painting (say, in the second quarter of the 15th century in Flor­ence) the medium of sculpture is already capable of over-life size representations—which would invert the problem, if anything. In­deed, it is only with the attempt to treat landscape as subject matter in sculpture that analogs to the scale problem in painting become apparent. Leaving the way open for someone to suggest prototypes (beyond the use of landscape elements in the relief panels of Dona­tello or Ghiberti), this concern only emerges in the 20th century. It is implied in the architectural models (and magnificent sculp­ture) of Vladimir Tatlin, and in the figure-landscapes on Henry Moore.

In Los Angeles recently, at the Esther Robles Gallery, the Swiss sculptress, Amalia Schulthess, exhibited a series of works in bronze and in marble, all essentially concerned with forms that evoke the human torso. In the work itself one may well discover the same kind of implications as contained in the giant Moore figures. But beyond that, Mrs. Schulthess has consciously sought to express this scale concern. One sculptural gesture that exemplifies this is the enclosure of the human-derived form (entitled Torso, but more Arp-like and abstract in conception) in containing frames or boxes. Even in conversation, Mrs. Schulthess is preoccupied with the qual­ities of space and scale as encountered in Los Angeles, in contrast to those landscape elements in Florence, where she now works. This is dramatically illustrated when her work is viewed against such a landscape setting.

This landscape concern is much more explicit in the sculpture of Pat O'Neill. Not only are the titles related to natural forms instead of to figures, but also there are illustrative elements. " Scene #1" re­tains a very funky appendage, which relates it to some of O'Neill's earlier work—and also to the San Francisco Bay Area's rather self-consciously developed "instant tradition" of Funk. " Scene #2 " takes the general hill-like shape of the earlier piece transposed into the medium of photography—a shot of a rocky cluster appears under a clear plexiglass sheet (actually there are two identical im­ages, slightly offset), and it is the resulting silhouette that deter­mines the 90-degree arc of pearly white fiber glass which comprises the bulk of the sculpture. " Scene #3 " is a further controlled extension in space. The black mountain form of " Scene #1" re­turns, but now cleaned of its funky excrescence and surmounted by a white rainbow arc.

There were some rather nice coincidences of visual correspon­dence in a recent "performance" of a piece of sculpture by an artist who has chosen to retain his anonymity (at the performance too, as well as in print). The material was white silk in the shape of a large circle (15 feet in diameter). Inside were four people in­tended by the artist to be nude, but who, in fact, were hung up enough to wear tights and bathing costumes. There were alternat­ing 10-second periods of illumination and darkness, easily hinting at some rather interesting directions the artist intended to explore. A Los Angeles educational television station recorded this "Four in a Dress" event—in part explaining the sudden advent of shame. This is typical of the perversions perpetrated by the so-called mass media; and, unfortunately, it is also typical of the way in which much art and many artists sell out. Now as it turned out, by chance, there happened to be two men and two women performing "Four in a Dress"—but no matter, for real educational television the producer might have insisted on backing up the artist. And we all know what he had in mind by this serious concern with human interrelations as an art form—don't we ?

They aren't related, except perhaps by a thread of sexy thought, but Mel Ramos and Frank Gallo also showed works in Los Angeles recently. One more time: there are ways in which they can be criti­cally related, and these ways sometimes give rise to reflections or speculations of genuine interest and/or value. For example, both Ramos and Gallo are pretty well up front about presenting very sexy babes for our enjoyment and fantasy-involvement. Some of Gallo's pieces might even get taken to bed for all we know. Now there's a problem or two.

Lest this seem too cocky a suggestion, it should be pointed out that Ramos often combines his prurient nudes with trademark em­blems or brand name signs. This unavoidably suggests the same kind of commercialization of sex (and of the female image as the symbol of sex) in international (but especially American) art, ad­vertising and industry. This is much the sort of thing Andy Warhol had in mind back with the Marilyn Monroe paintings. Obviously, this is a valid and serious problem for artists, just as it is for the rest of the perhaps-not-quite-so-aware world.

Kurt von Meier

This is the cover of the Christmas, 1967 edition of Art International, in which this article appeared. Art International discontinued publication in 1984.

Kurt was a regular contributor during the years 1966-67.