Barnett Newman (1950–1970)

OBITUA, the computer that writes the death notices for the New York Times, outdid itself for Barnett Newman. It clacks out pretty good copy on financiers and politicians, and does a workaday job with movie stars, but with artists—wow. With artists it does all right on the WHAT, WHERE and WHEN and sometimes the WHY, but it’s pure hell on the WHO. Since the name isn’t that common and the age was about right we figured it was the Barney Newman that interested us, all right.

Friends were staying with us for a few days, and the night the paper came we had been talking politics all evening. Later, we had what must by now be the ritual conversation each time OBITUA comes to the art world: “Well, who’s left?” Newman had lived a pretty long life for an American artist, especially of the Abstract Expressionist generation—65. Hans Hofmann had done better, but we attributed that to his long-lived European background. Anyway, you could count the ones remaining on one hand. We talked about why these revolutionary artists didn’t seem so revolutionary to the revolution, which seemed to prefer the art against which they revolted. It got around to Clyfford Still.

Still thinks his paintings can be used for life and misused for death. Newman thought his paintings meant the end of state capitalism. Maybe they did. Not many artists who dug Newman and Still found those claims outlandish. About the people that readed in them, well that was another thing. It was a thing Serra and I had talked about, also. We had both gloomed over Smithson’s dreary conclusion, “Everything is purchasable.” I thought that Heizer’s piece, among other things, might have moved art a little more our of the system than ways other artists were thinking up, but Serra despaired. It was still gallery-backed, still needed art world money. (“Galleries are finished,” said Nick Wilder to me in San Francisco, “but not dealers.” And proved his point by giving me a lift in the first air-conditioned Cadillac limousine I’ve ever been in, chauffered by two delirous art students.)

Well, Newman was part purchasable, but the parts that weren’t belonged to artists. OBITUA thought he’s laid some claims to being “father of the shaped canvas.” (If an American artist can make it to 65 he gets to be father of just about everything.) I told about Heizer’s piece, and of how directly it shook hands with Barnett Newman. Artists are colleagues, not fathers and sons, and the colleagues of good artists find prophecies in their work, and carry them out. That’s what it means for an artist’s work to “go on living.” It goes on living until one day it looks out the window and there’s state capitalism—on it’s knees.

The first rule for a good community is bad roads.
– Canyon saying

I ran into David Lynn in a community called Canyon, about fifteen miles north of Berkley. I remembered his sculpture from Artforum. He had taught at the University, and his sculpture had been more abstract than a lot of the work being done in the Bay Area at that time. In Canyon, he was working on a house, with one helper and a broken-down crane. The house was four stories high. The frame was well on the way, and was being made of the hugest beams I’d ever seen. The corner beams kept the original shape of the trees in tact: they were not even planed. Lynn got his beams from piers that were being demolished and a number of other inconvenient sources: he isn’t into cutting down trees.

(When he runs out of money, Lynn contracts to design and build a house for someone else, and stops or slows down work on his own house. For one of these jobs, in Pleasanton, Lynn used Canyon labor, thus giving Canyon people some good carpentry training and also bringing a little money into the community. Local construction bosses heard about it and demanded to see union cards, so all the workers went and joined to I.W.W., including Lynn. He showed me his Wobbly card (“Master Builder”). “It has a Preamble,”/he said, “and a slogan, and there’s all my dues stamps.” I looked at it with incredibly curiosity.)

Lynn hadn’t been doing sculpture for a while, but a lot of his friends were Bay Area artists. I had been to an opening in San Francisco and saw some people that Lynn knew, and we more or less brought each other up to date. The opening had been of a collection of ceramic work by Dave Gilhooley. They were very whimsical pieces, with titles like “A Thousand Frogs Dance on the Head of a Nail.” I told Lynn that I’d met Gilhooley, who’d told me he was living in Saskatchewan. He didn’t like living in the States very much any more, and Saskatchewan seemed just fine. Arlo Acton and Mel Moss were building a house way off in the country about 100 miles away from San Francisco. We’d heard that Win Ng was living in a pottery commune on a Canadian island. Goodness, I thought, lots of artists seem to be disappearing…