Art Criticism - The State University of New York

Bruckner did in his music) was not the aim of these painters only recently given
the freedom to expose and make concrete their tics and compulsions in public
places. Anything that seemed to resemble the furtive symbolism of yesteryear
was wiped out in favor of honest emptiness. Yet now these once harsh vocabularies
seem to stand for a benign nature, symbols again as friendly and
toothless as Bruckner's elephantine verities ..
We dug too deeply and too soon and now hasten to refill those pits
which are no longer discoverers' excavations but only holes full of stagnant
mud, something to stumble into. Today few are dedicated enough to that
search to return to the ground where the shards are monotonously those
stamped with the personalities of artists we dare not imitate now. Is it here that
in the future the great city of Telluria will be unearthed and all the warring sects
of modern art and literature reunited?
Music, which employs a difficult mathematics in its working out to
communicability, permits a person with no mathematical or intellectual gifts to
invent some of its most unforgettable melodies. The fortuitous inventions of
the thrown brush likewise imply, at least to the layman, a more complete followup,
a controlled working out. If the finished work is difficult to understand, the
artist has ignored the message of the initial intuition, the craftsman's sedulousness
has triumphed over the poet's serendipity,
Abstraction in the sense of mathematical analogs is not the
essentializing of irregularities of Nature that characterizes the sort of alchemy
that in painting searches for the encoded universality that each cell of an
organism might contain. A simplistic reduction, as in much straight-edged
constructivism, gives the pleasure one gets from mathematical solutions, not
the "informal" intuition we receive in "expressive" music, poetry, painting,
sculptures dance.
K. Burke's polemic against the use of synecdoche amounts to saying
that one doesn't call the woman he loves a genital (except perhaps when alone
with her). But like the laughter evoked by someone calling out the number of
a limited series of jokes shared by marooned men, the response of a conditioned
public to half-worked-out canvases leads to instant recognition of a
certain artist's work, even his intention that he hasn't bothered to declare. We
indulge fearfully and by rote our new facility to make symbols out of almost
nothing in our religious demand for omens, portents. We end up making love
to naked canvases, blanks of Pointlessism.
How skillfully we learn, as we age, how to expand or shrink our allotted
time, after youth's wasteful pillage! But the work of very few mature artists
finds much welcome in a society obsessed with childish forgetfulness; witness
the frequent superannuation today in this country by aging artists of
their serviceable but immature styles. Defining a wished-for spiritual serenity
with metaphors of sensual pleasure may be one way to achieve sublimation,
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Art Criticism