LETTERS
Sirs:
I have a high regard for Eugene D. Genovese as an historian and as a political writer, but his references in the February number of Artforum to my article on the Harlem Studio Museum show (New York Times, November 24, 1968) are so misdirected that I can only conclude he shares with Mr. Hoving at least one characteristic in common—a willingness to take on subjects and responsibilities he knows nothing about. For on the subject of painting and sculpture he appears to know exactly nothing. Nor, apparently, is he eager to repair this gap in his knowledge. Though he devotes a good deal of space to my criticism of this exhibition of black artists of the 1930s and even uses the occasion to offer a hypothetical “history” of black art in America, I gather he did not feel it necessary to look at the art in question.
From this position of ignorance he proceeds to hand out grades—failing in my case, just barely passing in the case of Mr. Henri Ghent, who organized the Studio Museum show. Though he admits to “not being an art critic” and offers to “leave specific judgments to those qualified,” this does not prevent him from suggesting that the question raised by my article—whether it is proper “to judge black artists by standards greatly inferior to those we bring to the appreciation of . . . white artists”—can be regarded as “fair only because the white art world has been so blinded by racist indifference that men like Mr. Kramer have had no basis from which to advance beyond a sense of guilt.”
I reject the suggestion that my criticism of the Studio Museum show derived from “a sense of guilt,” or indeed, that my article had anything to do with “racist indifference.” In fact, my criticism derived from a sense of art—a subject as remote from Professor Genovese’s sensibilities, apparently, as the life of Harlem is from Mr. Hoving’s. Professor Genovese avers that “the evaluation of black painting in the 1930s” must not be approached “as an abstract question in esthetic theory,” but it is his own article—not mine—that reduces the exhibition in question to an abstraction. I was dealing with specific works of art—works of art, moreover, that were being offered to the public as equal in esthetic achievement to the paintings and sculptures in the Whitney Museum’s 1930s exhibition. What Professor Genovese seems not to grasp is that, pace Mr. Ghent, it was the low esthetic level of the Studio Museum exhibition that acted to perpetuate “the myth of the inferiority of black artists.” But how could Professor Genovese grasp this point when (1) he didn’t see the work in question, and (2) he appears not to be interested in works of art except as counters in a socio-historical hypothesis?
—Hilton Kramer
New York City
Sirs:
One must note the remarkable moralistic and ethical tone of Barbara Rose’s article “The Politics of Art, Part II” (January, 1969). The didactic ethos she attributes to Minimal art is combined with puritanical attacks on such gross evils as illusion, metaphor and metaphysics as well as a general attack on European civilization, particularly as it confronts the American ideals she claims to speak for. Her first article, striking down assorted critics, analyzed the politicized uses of language. Here, “contextual” criticism is used as a moral (political) scaffolding for an ideology of utopianism.
The work of Judd, Morris, etc., is related to 19th and 20th century predecessors whose “cleanliness, integrity, efficiency and simplicity” is correlated with a democratic and utopian America. Standard units, the “natural, the uncontrived, the immediate,” relate to an “ideally leveled, non-stratified democratic society.” The latter is the key phrase.
Such a justification is made in terms of the ideal (hoped for) functionings of our technological world. We can indeed hope that if art hitches a ride on technology, that technology itself will prove to be as innocent and non-malevolent as the artists claim.
The rationale for all this is complex. Barbara Rose equates the theoretical positions of these artists with an egalitarian, democratic American vista of human promise (the ultimate justification becoming an appeal to “truth and reality”). The political assumptions Barbara Rose makes regarding Minimal sculpture, etc. are reinforced through the use of such concepts as “concreteness” or “credibility.” Internal relationships are denied in respect to the purity (innocence) of such objects. These arguments are then buttressed with strong attacks on metaphor and metaphysics and to a so-called European-dominated elitist art. It all comes out very clean: utopian vistas and no historical or social hangups.
A punitive moral tone colors the issue of American (good) versus European (bad) art and experience. Language is condemnatory; “European-oriented upholders of elite cultural values”; “without falsifying it (American art) with a European veneer”; “modernism as a European or alien style”; the “American regret that there is nothing to remember.” This is intellectual know-nothingness, a claimed innocence and frontier ideology hardly to the point in respect to American imperial power and our vast communications and technological networks.
“The pragmatist demands an absolute correspondence between facts and reality: things must be as they appear to be.” This corresponds to what actual state of affairs? What is asked here is that the “real” be without connotation or extension. The “absent (American) monument” is a striking concept. But it hardly requires the kind of buttressing erected in its behalf. This buttressing may be referred to the complicated metaphysical need of Judd and Morris to prove that their art is so “real” that it requires no metaphysics. Barbara Rose finds that rejecting the “metaphoric, the metaphysical and the symbolic” is “peculiarly American.” Reference is made to “Judd’s impatience to get on with things, to rid art of metaphysics and metaphor, presumably because they are inefficient . . .” What can such a statement mean? How does art extend into the macrocosm? Western art ultimately speaks for power over, extension into or intuition of time and space. Excepting rational scientific or logical analysis, illusion, metaphor and metaphysics are the only other means of bridging the macrocosm.
Barbara Rose: “I am suggesting that nothing less than an artist’s conception of the nature of truth and reality is at stake. . . .” But her correlation of Minimal art with a democratic and utopian America is farcical in respect to the America of the 1960s. America in the 1960s doesn’t correspond to a Constructivist utopia. Nor does Minimal art, etc., correspond to a Constructivist vision. Is it possible to export destruction, to burn and drive peasants from their homes, and maintain the dream of the perfectibility of art? Well, it is possible if art concerns itself with itself and does not dare to presume political meanings.
Barbara Rose writes of the “correspondence of facts and reality” and the “politics of art” but ignores politics and history (facts) as they occur. Sure, the “real” world has bricks, gas stations, earth and cubes and anything else one could name. The “real” world is also Americans in Asia or Guatemala, street rioting, etc., etc., etc. What is reality? And what are the facts? Is a gas station more “real” than a military-industrial complex?
Utopian ideologies won’t go. The politics of utopia won’t go either. And a “determination to base art on what was authentic in the culture.” Today that’s a tough one. And one has to be damned careful of the political claims one makes. Speaking of his Store, Barbara Rose describes Oldenburg as a “revolutionary personality faced with an impasse in American politics” (like Lenin, no doubt). The words won’t fit the facts. The language, the political terminology, the implied references are not proportionate to the ideas exemplified by the artifacts described or the artist’s presumed intent.
In “Art and Politics: Part II,” Barbara Rose congratulates American artists for their success in realizing the American dream! This is farce. I might claim that war, violence and racial struggle and unrest blot out the American landscape. The abstract sculptures, etc., in our cities become grimacing monsters if viewed in political or utopian contexts.
If America resolves its problems of race and poverty, and the third world is amalgamated into a kind of technocratic maximum consumption society, there is some possibility of technological “utopias” somewhere in the future. Maybe even democratic technological utopias.
Assuming America will resolve its crises at home (a big assumption but potentially realizable), a high-powered consumption society here, while much of the world starves, can only be maintained by an American empire dominant through technological power and armed intervention. America now has the power of waging wars of great destructiveness. To what extent will this be utilized as the population of the world increases astronomically?
Again, what has this to do with art? America has the capacity to wage wars which would only affect the consumption habits or ideologies of “fortress America” to a minor degree. (The anger and repugnance which may eventually force an American withdrawal from Vietnam might work with diminishing returns in future interventions.) Those arts that began with the modernist dream of human freedom may find they serve technological masters and the American empire. Art then will service the consumption habits of a triumphant managerial class, a cyberneticized elite civilization protected from the outside by the fantastic weapons and control agents of the future. Is this fantastic speculation? The final word will not be in for some time. The look of the comparatively anonymous arts of the modern world will depend on the look of the modern world. It is a little early to proclaim the triumph of the American dream!
—Leon Golub
New York City
Sirs:
In her article on “The Politics of Art II,” (January), Barbara Rose continues to make her carefully analyzed, pertinent observations on the current art scene. As in the past, she advocates a critical approach “based only on the direct and immediate experience at hand, as it is weighed on the scales of the critic’s own judgment.” One cannot help wondering why she does not apply this approach to the works of Olitski as well as to those of Judd. Instead, she divides American art of the ’60s into two camps: the rationalists (disciples of Clement Greenberg) and the pragmatists (devotees of John Cage). It may be true that the paintings of the so-called color field artists can be used to demonstrate the Greenberg ideology; however, because their work lends itself to interpretation by one theory, does not mean that another theory could not explain it as well.
It is strange that such a perceptive critic as Miss Rose should take Greenberg’s interpretation of Olitski’s work as the gospel. Miss Rose should examine his work from the pragmatic viewpoint she has been preaching. She would discover that Olitski’s color fields, as well as Judd’s boxes, favor “synthetic perception, involving motor, retinal, and kinesthetic as well as emotive factors in a single response.” Ironically, if one scratches deeply enough beneath the surface of Greenberg’s rationalism, one discovers that it grows out of the same empirical thinking that Miss Rose says he opposes. In “The New Sculpture,” 1948, Greenberg states that painting must have literal, sensational concreteness. He is as adamant as Judd in his rejection of illusionism and in his insistence on the literal. Each writer has different reasons for asserting that art must conform to their austere demands. However, the art itself, the end product of their contradictory theorizing, is remarkably similar. From a pragmatic viewpoint it is only the end results that count, for, to quote Charles Sanders Peirce once more, “Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves.”
It is clear that the rationalism of Greenberg and the empiricism of Cage and Judd are only two sides of the same coin. Serious art today, like all great art of the past, reflects and reconciles opposing ideologies. As Virgil Barker, in From Realism to Reality, states, “classic purity and romantic intensity co-exist in tense equilibrium. Or rather: abstract statement (non-figuration) and sensuous reality (pigment) have become one thing.”
Miss Rose has been so involved in classifying and categorizing that she has represented art merely as a demonstration of one philosophical line of thought. Art includes and synthesizes many different ideologies which the artist both consciously and unconsciously shapes into a form of personal expression. It is useless to segregate today’s best works into pragmatic or a priori compartments. Ultimately, only an esthetic system that is broad enough to include both these modes of thought can produce any kind of meaningful art criticism. Therefore, to specifically interpret and evaluate Olitski and Judd by the various tenets of the opposing philosophies Miss Rose assigns to them, is to misinterpret and devaluate their art.
—Cindy Nemser
New York City
Sirs:
Edward Kienholz had the sensitivity to do The State Hospital, shown in Artforum, April, 1967. Now how can this same individual present us with such a nothing as the Portable War Memorial (January, 1969, p. 51).
To be blunt, I think that Kienholz is insulting our country, and, what is worse, he is insulting those men who died so that he today can perform his merry pranks undisturbed. Does he think they were on a picnic on Mt. Suribachi? Kienholz is one of the few good artists in California, and also one of the few socially conscious artists in America. I hate to see him play around; when he hasn’t anything to say I wish he would shut up.
—Robert Witz Tomah
Wisconsin
Sirs:
Your report on the MIT Symposium on Art and Science was very interesting (January) . . . An artist’s creativity will be limited proportional to his knowledge. It would be disastrous, for example, for an artist to use the tool described as a “lathe” in the photograph on page 32 to turn a wood form: it is a drill press, as every “tradesman, entertainer or clown” should know.
—Frank M. Smullin
Flushing, New York
