This is not an Essay

This blog is part of an ongoing investigation into the visual arts, primarily painting, and with a side interest in why important public galleries feel obliged to exhibit work that alienates all but those initiated into the world of artspeak and arcane discourse. But trying to make sense of the art world is like trying to nail jelly to the wall – as soon as you think you’ve pegged it, a later re-think makes the whole thing slide. So this is not an essay because, as I often say, I’m not a scholar or an essayist, but a mere artist trying to make sense of the art world and my place in it.

So I look for ideas from writers that have tried to capture a sense of what is happening in and to the Western visual arts. This is a daunting challenge as it is impossible for anyone living in a period of time to stand outside of it and look objectively and from a future perspective to say that this or that phenomenon, philosophy or paradigm represents the times. Harold Rosenberg was just such as writer who tried to see where art was going in his time and what might be expected in the future.

Though written 50+ years ago, Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticism Harold Rosenberg was prescient. At first I was put off by his use of terms like “the artist is a man who…”, but I came to overlook his gender insensitivity. Rosenberg’s primary concern is that art, and he is primarily concerned with painting, is in danger of going over the edge that separates it from crafts, commercial design and the mass media. This concern no doubt grew out of the success of artists like Andy Warhol, a former commercial artist, who wholeheartedly embraced popular culture and commercial processes.

What’s interesting about Rosenberg’s views, is that, though he is deeply immersed in the art world, he is not aware of the term, or the fact, of post-modernism. He is writing at a time of huge changes in attitudes toward art and he is documenting this change as it is taking place.  Thus he is able to report on the transition between the philosophical endorsement of modernism that was widely accepted by the art establishment, and the shattering of this consensus through emerging artwork critiquing that philosophy.
In many ways, his writing was prescient as it can be said that art has since gone over the edge he described. But this jump was a conscious choice by the artists involved and made out of a sense of necessity. That felt necessity was to rebel against the commodification of art and the modernist illusion that the art object could meaningfully convey a response to a world that was capable of creating two devastating world wars and weapons of mass destruction. The jump was also motivated by photography that could record life much better that painting and had replaced it in many ways.,

Instead of making irrelevant art for money, artists such as Marcel Duchamp were making art as criticism through parody, irony or subversion. Artists like Troy Emery continue that tradition today. though one has to question whether using parody, irony and subversion has become an avenue to sure commercial success. Whereas Duchamp only made one Fountain, like Jeff Koons, Emery makes dozens of pieces, with slight variations. He has fully embraced the post-modern acceptance of commercialization as a defensible and even central aspect of an art practice.

Perhaps one of the reasons that painting has been considered an outdated art form is that it is difficult to crank out paintings at an industrial/commercial scale. While it is accepted that sculptors will farm out the actual casting or fabrication of their artworks to artisans, there is no similar tolerance for painters. Sophisticated collectors of paintings expect it to have been the work of the artist that signs it, not a painting factory. Of course there were the screen prints of artists like Warhol, and currently there are Gicleé prints of paintings, and paintings that have clearly been mass-produced. But these never have, and likely never will, achieve the recognition and respect given to mass-produced sculptures.

Rosenberg’s primary concern was that painting would become commercial design and mass media, but this has not happened. Instead, it became somewhat irrelevant to the art establishment and by extension, the art market and many artists. Rosenberg’s insensitivity to gender issues reflects his lack of attention to other important issue that created the post-modern revolution. Though he touches on the fact that taste in art, especially modernist painting, was set by an elite made up of white, middle & upper class males. They in turn found they most admired the work of white, middle-class male artists, so that women & visible minorities were excluded from exhibitions & sales.

There were many other artists who did not accept that there were insurmountable problems with making artworks such as painting. For instance, Rosenberg suggests that “…if Miro had a “problem” it was how to reach a state of creation unhindered by problems”. And as Rosenberg says, many artists saw the only other alternative to be making art for oneself.”For Barnett Newman, painting was “…a way of practising the sublime, not communicating it

Others such as Piet Mondrian, believed that it was possible to “…conceive of a grand vision such as the salvation of the human race.. that could be expressed in paint.” He believed his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balance relationships”.

Mondrian was aware that his work could not speak for itself without a “new phase in human development” so he wrote statements and manifestos explaining his ideas. The irony, for Rosenberg, was that in contemporary art, the meaning of artworks is not in themselves, but in the personality of the artist, “…his ideas, his role, his pathos.” He saw with clarity that what would become post-modernism would replace ideas in art altogether.

Modernist painters wrestled with the issue of content and the reaction against using recognizable images. Rosenberg refers to “pre-formlist abstraction” as that which has an unmistakable subject but “…projects a content that is implicit in but not restricted to the marks on the canvas”.

In this approach, a painting “…comes into being through unanticipated responses to what is taking place on the canvas”, as Rosenberg describes the work of Joan Mitchell. Whatever has gone on before provides the clue & the motivation for the next move.

The “meaning and emotional intensity of Mitchell’s pictures] are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meaning and feeling.”(1)

Rosenberg describes these as pre-formalist modernist painters as differentiated from the formalists who conceived abstract art in terms of “…a grammar of dimensions, edges, and color relations”. Formalism also focused on eliminating metaphorical references, perhaps in reaction to what had become a cloying use of metaphors by some artists in earlier periods.

But the ultimate destination of this formalist direction were paintings that eliminated not only metaphor, but dimensions, edges, and colour relations as well, to become a flat plane of one colour. My question is, where’s the fun in that compared to Mitchells’ aim and method: to express delight at having been taken by surprise?

This is not an essay in that it does not attempt to wrap up an argument with a neat conclusion that summarizes previous rambles but is an ongoing exploration that can be continued in another post.

1) Nochlin, Linda (2002). “Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint”. In Livingston, Jane. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 55. ISBN 0520235703.