In Europe of the early 1900s, abstraction of a visual image
permitted painters to express additional emotion or features that a simple
representative painting might not. It was part of the constant experiment of
thesis-antithesis that permits artists to innovate, rejecting what came before
and creating something new. Witness how German Expressionism in the hands of
Oskar Kokoschka produces a scrumble of paint in the flesh of his figures to
show conflicting emotion. Some movements, like Cubism, were an attempt to come
to terms with a fast paced society where, in a newly invented car, for example,
a rider will see the front, right and back, of a walking pedestrian, all in the
matter of two seconds. Cubism was an experiment to communicate this experience
visually on a two-dimensional surface in a fixed time. But in the hands of US
artists in the 1940s and 50s, these attempts at new means of communication and
expression to an audience evolved to exclude the audience. The first original
art movement created on US soil, Abstract Expressionism, eliminates any image onto
which a viewer could latch. It encompassed a collection of motives, some useful
for the development of painting. Pollack’s drip paintings are a freeform play
with technique that liberates the painter from the fist and brush. It results
in often aesthetically pleasing patterns, but for a viewer who has not read
that Pollack is only playing with technique and not attempting to communicate,
it can be confusing. Robert Motherwell produced conceptual works. He wrote
volumes on his ugly shapes of black washes on white canvas that look as if they
could have been applied with a dish sponge. There is not one person who could
look at his famous “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” and see anything that
vaguely resembles its title. But his concepts have inspired generations of
artists, even representational artists, to create and invent.
It would be authoritarian, and potentially censorious, to
say that these works are not art. Such pronouncements are too often used to
squelch creativity that is either not understood or not approved by an
establishment. If we wish artistic expression to remain an unrestricted process,
an open-ended definition such as “Art is an expression using a medium” is
required. It prevents art Nazis from defining and controlling what is, or is
not, art.
However, there is nothing wrong with saying that a kind of
art has difficulty communicating with a viewer, especially when it is not the
intention of that work to communicate. Let’s take, for a moment, the
black-and-white lines applied to paper by Franz Kline. Some conceptualize his
works as “A Unique Existential Act.” Others claim that his inspiration came
from Zen Calligraphy. And still others state categorically that his “work had
nothing to do with … Zen Calligraphy” (Hughes, p. 481). It is possible that,
given the many contradicting opinions on Kline’s work, that no one can grasp
what he is doing. Maybe he is describing the taste of cauliflower. He doesn’t
say. It is an internal monologue not meant to communicate.
Then, of course, there are those artists who are simply
attempting to deceive the viewer. About his abstract “zip” paintings (visually,
a canvas painted all one color with one contrasting color stripe down the
middle), Barnett Newman once said that a friend “challenged me to explain what
one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he
and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism
and totalitarianism.” The critic Robert Hughes responded “Such utterances are
the very definition of bullshit: empty depth” (Hughes, p. 494). But these
utterances are so common that they have become a written prelude to most art
shows. The art world is now open to a greater number of posers and con men
than ever before.
So how does an art lover approach work that is entirely
abstract? Should we follow the advice of knowledgeable, well-read critics and
art historians? The same generation of critics who could not agree on the line
paintings of Franz Kline also panned the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack in
1948; then in 1949, when Clement Greenberg wrote that Pollack was a genius,
they all started to praise the artist. The critics don’t know any more than the
casual observer. The only solutions appear to be either 1) to keep one’s self
up to date by reading the volumes of sincere and insincere writings that
artists and critics have produced on individual painters, democratically making
one’s own judgments, 2) Look at the specific works in galleries and museums
with an emotional/gut approach concerning how you feel about the work, or 3)
Forget about abstract art and look at representational forms. This is art; not survival. How
you approach the topic is entirely up to you.
Hughes, Robert. American Visions. The Epic History of Art
in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
No comments:
Post a Comment