Art Criticism - The State University of New York

were letting a lot of subtle insights slip by because of group pressure.
As a creative minority, we usually save our most deadly weapons of
anger to use against ourselves, but are capable (if driven too far) of swiveling
them against those who accuse us of narcissistic masochism. The self-immolation
that characterized the paintings of the abstract expressionists (physically
they beat themselves up) was inevitably replaced by the cool, calculating
hatred of "pop" artists who had been waiting for their moment. Rather than
being a return to the universal language of recognizable forms, their objectivity
was the wounding reverse of the coin of masochist inwardness carried too far.
Half-in-anger is no good at all for the artist's wish to publicize injustices
and half-in-Iove is the source of sentimentality. The diplomatic deceits of
ambivalence, love-hate made palatable, are still poisoning our paintings. Assuming
that a worn-out social system and not our unalterable "human condition"
is to blame for our discontent may not be the correct diagnosis, but it will
serve to polarize the ambiguities of an art that then can move toward complexity
in a more self-aware fashion. In painting there is no substitute for the
content-laden masterpiece that speaks to all who see it.
Critics like H. Rosenberg seem above the sordid painterly questions
that absorb all of the artists except those enraptured by the politics of gallery
and museum. Like the rank and file of science, business and government, they
describe the world only in the jargon of their trade, unintelligible to outsiders,
their bohemianism closer to the sanctioned letting-go of the work ethic than to
the distress of an anguished idler like E.A. Poe. Sensitive to defections from
their fragile cohesion as abstract artists, their attitude is like that of Alcoholics
Anonymous toward the member who lets them down by falling, making it
easier for them to lose faith. This is how artists survive in a country where any
individuality is a liability for all.
Deposed royalty is still deferred to, if only inadvertently. The subjective
expressionists, who H. Rosenberg now figures were closer to surrealism
than he or they thought at that time were a superannuation, the last stirrings of
the vast European "post-romantic" excitement of which the cubist method was
only a belated facet, and which had started before the century's turn in, the
liberation from Victorian paternalism into a sort of female-erotic earth-mother
fermentation as found in Rodin, Klimt, Mahler, Rilke, Sibelius, Strauss, T. Mann,
Scriabin, Debussy, d' Annunzio, D.H. Lawrence, Knut Hamsun, Isadora Duncan,
Yeats, Munch, etc. But our cafard now had to be depicted more naturalistically,
all warts. The lovely shimmering of all those Edwardian subjectivities, a heroic
lullaby that no longer lulled, had to be torn down, replaced; not restored.
Those who tend to fall down, who succumb to psychosomatic sickness,
who blame themselves for necessary vulnerabilities,gaze too steadfastly
at the painted surface for it to release its magic. Turning away from their guilt
allows a healing to begin, when they realize that they are the chosen meek. The
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