Art Criticism - The State University of New York

preserved some of the exuberance that made us runners toward paradise?
Those who would float in this natural stream, nourished by the
uninvestigated .mysteries around them are not to be confused with the petulant
seekers after specific miracles who are always changing their styles of
painting in this fruitless quest; their aim to shock and delight only a small circle
which, in turn, presents it as fashion to the great art audience. "Can you top
this?" is what they ask and, as in the laboratories of innovational science, each
new "breakthrough" makes all else obsolete. But the Nature-dedicated painters
never have solved any of science's problems and only want to go deeper
into the poetry of what they must do. As in the work of I.S. Bach and Mozart,
they want to find new and more profound melodies (which exist intact like the
forms Michelangelo claimed to release in his marble) not to launch new and
superficially exciting styles, leading to "progress".
Tolstoi's clean old peasant arbiter does not seem so simple-minded
when we behold the latest sick jokes and trashy toys of the spoiled brat art
collectors. Rewards for frissons stultify with discouragement the dedicated
painter who does not wish to diminish any output, least of all his own. Earth
should teem with life; those planners of others' lives who so quickly move to
stop overpopulation should try instead to irrigate the deserts and share the
food and land now hoarded by the rich. This is the spirit of the painting that
celebrates the deep sources of nourishment in the loved Earth, whether the
painters are aware of it or not. We see in hard-edged minimalistic abstractions
evidence of the misery and fear that surface when the flow of these green
juices is thwarted.
The art that supplanted that of expressionism was the coolness of
marijuana, all things equally hilarious, as opposed to the heat of alcohol with
its built-in punishment and creativity to placate guilt. Sticky with sweat, American
whisky, blood and a few tears, these extrusions of ambivalence were, as H.
Rosenberg suggests, records of unleashed energies rather than objects of
contemplation. But the method should be broadened now and deepened to
vitalize paintings with larger vistas, populated with the symbolic (if not literal)
images of natural life, dragged in perhaps in the form of cloud phantoms and
proportioned by statues with the stance of human dignity. Deformations and
psychotic .obsessions would be embedded as compost in a panorama of forgiveness,
not blown up as ephemeral pranks.
Instead of finding out what painting can do that it never has done ·1
before we should ask what painting does that no other art can do. Why should 1
it-in its self-deluded evolutionary "progress"-turn into sculpture or theatre?
The painting hangs still on the wall. We visit it as we do a church for our
spiritual refreshments and it does not change. The pilgrimage is not like that
which one takes into Nature's realm, where all is enervating cycle and repetition;
neither is it like that grim glimpse we get in mathematics and some sci-
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Art Criticism