On Robert Hughes Hughes will occasionally admit,
if you read between the lines, that there really isn't much there to bite on
even with the artists he likes, such as Johns or Hockney. He says for example, "Johns' liking for
paradox seemed, to many people raised on the Abstract Expressionist ideal of
authenticity, quite dandified and pointless—art complacently regarding its own
cleverness, in an emotional void. What
one tends to forget, a quarter of a century after the event, is how badly some
corrective to the cliches and slop of Abstract Expressionism was
needed...." High praise
indeed. Apparently what he means is
that if one expects very little from a work of art in the first place, and then
is careful only to compare it to what immediately preceded it chronologically,
some Modern work can come off looking almost palatable. But why, really, leave these artists
standing, if you are Robert Hughes? Why
become indignant about the pretenses of Andrea Dworkin or Julian Schnabel, but
leave Johns alone? Why call for standards
and refuse to apply them? Another
artist that Hughes has left alone is Barnett Newman. Describing Newman's methods, Hughes admits, "On the evidence
of his early drawings, he had no discernible talent as a draftsman... [but] he
was tenacious and argumentative, and his reductive cast of mind served him well
in the studio." Praise on this
level hasn't been seen since Lewis Carroll and the Snark: His
form is ungainly—his intellect small— (So the Bellman would often
remark)—
But his courage is
perfect! And that, after all,
Is the thing that one needs
with a Snark. Hughes will not come out and
say so, but what served Newman well was his talent was for talking about art
(and making the right friends). His
paintings are perfectly suited to criticism because they are created by a
critic: his primary interest was in
defining art, and his paintings are simply an example of a definition. His work is abstract in the fullest
sense. It is not just abstract in
content. It is not an abstraction from
nature, an abstraction of line or color.
It is an abstraction from painting. It is not a painting but an example of a painting, given a
certain definition. It is a painting of
a definition. One would expect the
painting to come first, and then the criticism. With Newman the criticism came first and then the painting. It is the art of the hysteron proteron. This turned art history on its head, even
more fully than Duchamp and the Dadas were able to do. The Dadas made nothing into art, but
this "intellectual" coup was not as useful to the critic as Newman's
coup. Newman made a definition of
art into art, and a writer can say so much more about a definition than
about nothing. A writer can say nothing
about nothing for only so long, but he can say nothing about a definition
indefinitely. As we have seen up to
the present moment: the critic is still
talking and art is still the handmaiden of Theory. Beyond that, Hughes' compliment begs to be read in a different
way than it was meant, due to that one word, reductive. "Reductive" means a) tending to
reduce complex data to simple terms, and b) attempting to explain a process in
the way that scientists would explain a theory about inanimate objects. The
simplemindedness of the first definition is obvious, but the inartistic nature
of the second definition is the one that most concerns me here. It is important that one understand this
"reductive cast" and how it colors Modern criticism. But to make clear how [unintentionally, I
take it] damaging Hughes choice of adjectives is here, and how it fits into the
present argument, I must go a little farther a-field. In psychology, behaviorism is a reductive theory that has had
great influence in the twentieth century.
B.F. Skinner is just one of its many well-known proponents. A behaviorist treats his or her
psychological subjects (whether animal or human) as machines whose actions can
be predicted by an objective study of the outward responses of these subjects
to stimuli. The "inner
workings" of these machines is of no interest because they cannot be quantified. The behaviorist is not interested in ideas,
only in actions. Behaviorism dismisses
as groundless any theory that attempts to go beyond a strictly scientific
method. Like all the "hard" sciences—which modern psychology so
wants to be—behaviorism does fairly well within the narrow limits it has set
for itself. Unfortunately it has little
insight into those questions that have naturally intrigued psychologists since
Hellenistic times. What is the nature
of the human mind? Where do ideas come
from? Is thought existence? (Cogito
ergo sum?) And many others. Obviously
there is a close tie between the modern schools of psychology and art. Both are heavily analytical. Both have been burdened by the smashing
success of the hard sciences. Ever
since the influence of the logical positivists (and probably since the
influence of David Hume), philosophy, and especially epistemology and
aesthetics, have become more and more quantized, scientific, and left-brain in
order to continue to be taken seriously.
Aesthetics, our primary concern here, hardly exists anymore in its
original form. In the 20th century,
questions about the nature of beauty were replaced by questions about
"purification." Or, where the
philosopher was once interested in the nature of creativity and the source of
the artistic impulse, he now became interested in the place of art in therapy
or in the production of well-rounded workers for industry. In the 1930's, Walter Benjamin judged
artists on their relation to production and equated a work's political tendency
to its artistic quality. He
accepted without reserve the idea (that he got from Marx, but that he might
just as well have gotten from Locke or Smith) that everything must be judged
economically. For him the only question
was, is the painting pro-capitalist or pro-communist? Since the 30's, politics has changed somewhat, but the attitude
is the same. That is, art is judged
politically rather than aesthetically.
We are no longer interested in Social Realism as propaganda for Commune
or Empire, but we are certainly interested in art as a mouthpiece of
progressive politics. We are no longer
so naive as to simply illustrate our ideas; but that art is about ideas,
no one who matters in art would question.
Hughes confirms this again and
again. In his review of Philip
Pearlstein, Hughes says, Pearlstein's
dispassionate drawing gives the whole mass of the body an analyzed presence,
and in its perceptible vehemence of thought seems to be beyond mannerism. There was in fact something in common
between the blunt discourse of Pearlstein's approach and the tough, detached
polemic of much of American abstract art in the 60's. Both recognizably come from the same culture, where what you see
is what you get. Notice the words "analyzed,"
"discourse" and "polemic"—art as an argument. This is what art was expected to be, so
Hughes took no exception to it. Nor did
he critique Pearlstein in other ways.
He didn't lead the reader to a proper conclusion about what all this
meant about Pearlstein (although it seems pretty obvious) because he wanted to
keep Pearlstein around. Pearlstein's
return to realism, to the nude, pleased Hughes (I assume) and so he refrained
from making any negative comparisons of Pearlstein's nudes to historical nudes
that perhaps pleased him more. But in
giving Pearlstein perferential treatment, he cemented Pearlstein's place at the
top of the heap. In refusing to tell
the whole truth, he gave a false impression of Pearlstein's abilities. And, most importantly, in glossing over the
implications of Pearlstein's "philosophy," he added to the shelf-life
of that philosophy. For five pages later, no longer discussing Pearlstein, Hughes
admits, A cloud of uneasy
knowingness has settled on American painting and sculpture. Its mark is a helpless skepticism about the
very idea of deep engagement between art and life: a fear that to seek
authentic feeling is to display naivete, to abandon one's jealously hoarded
"criticality" as an artist. This is my favorite quote of
Hughes. But he refuses to make the
connection between this "cloud" and Pearlstein's cloud. It is the same. Pearlstein will not "deeply engage" himself in his art
or his life, his nudes are purposefully cold and inhuman, he makes no effort to
transcend his precious "criticality," but Hughes will let him get
away with it. He lets him slide, just
as he lets Kitaj or Hockney slide in claiming to draw well, just as he lets
Lucian Freud slide with a much deeper emptiness. Hughes will not come right out
and say that the entire Modern aesthetic (or lack of one) has been fatally
flawed from the start. He can't. But the belief is implied in his work. If a critic's panegyrics to the Johns and
Pollocks of the world are mainly non-sensical, while his equal-time critiques
of these same artists are spot-on and terribly damaging, it is not hard to see
the sum total of his remarks. As the years passed and his status as an
important person became less and less assailable, Hughes became more and more
critical of the avant garde. The
1970's meant little to him, and the 80's he has dismissed as the decade of
"monetized art". And although
he is still loath to take on the 50's and 60's (because it was, in a sense, his
time), and although the time of Picasso and Kandinsky, Miro and Chagall, Arp
and Picabia, has taken on a kind of sacrosanct historicity that no one who
makes his money from art criticism would think of taking on except in little
fragments, Hughes' writing betrays a wistfulness that gives those such as me
hope. His outlook on the future of art
is so bleak and his arguments against Classicism so weak, one almost imagines
he is asking for another Renaissance. It seems to me that Hughes is genuinely
frightened about the future of art, as well he should be. And so he feels compassion for the poor
wretch, Modernism: he cannot kick a man when he is down. He is no doubt afraid that too much aggression
toward the roots of Modernism could throw us into an artistic dark age. It is therefore one thing to butcher David
Salle and Julian Schnabel and another thing entirely to demythologize the likes
of Picasso or Cezanne or Kandinsky. But he forgets that Modernism
has never been the ground beneath anyone's feet. The 20th century has been proud of its day-to-day existence. It has needed no tradition. How could it create one? He should know that all the momentary blips
of Modernism are already as good as gone.
No one misses them now.
How could their further fading or complete disappearance be a tragedy? At the end of The Shock of
the New Hughes says, "The signs of that constriction [novelty] are
everywhere today—in the small ambitions of art, in its lack of any effort
toward spirituality, in its sense of career rather than vocation, in its
frequently bland occupation with semantics at the expense of the deeper
passions of the creative self... Perhaps the great energies of modernism are
still latent in our culture, like Ulysses' bow in the house of Penelope; but
nobody seems able to string and draw it." This is
because the latent energies that Hughes has just so concisely described are not
Modern but Classical: "creating a sense of wholeness in opposition to the
world's chaos," rising above the "bulk of the familiar,"
demanding "an effort toward spirituality," great ambitions (artistic,
not political), treating art as a calling and a craft rather than as a career:
these goals are the goals of tradition, not of the avant garde. The real foundations of art are unassailable by Hughes or
anyone else. Time and wars will
continue to eat up some of them, but as the Dadaists recognized truly, there
are a lot of great works left. It has
taken all the energy of Modernism to suppress the instruction of the Greeks, of
the Renaissance, of the Far East, of the 17th c. Dutch and Spanish painters,
and of the 19th century Barbizons, Naturalists, and Romantics. But the possibilties remain. The examples of Phidias and Praxiteles,
Michelangelo and Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, Velasquez and El Greco, Corot
and Courbet, Carpeaux and Rodin still exist.
I am not afraid of an artistic dark age. I have already lived through one and survived. If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction. |