Art Criticism - The State University of New York

cent. Its fluidity of happy accident flows away from the hard, dry channels of
adamant abstraction that aims for such pragmatic conveniences as decoration
. and therapy.
K. Stockhausen's electronic music is disturbing to me in its
unintoxicating boundlessness-a pathetic "content" almost overhumanistic
is bent to an anti-poetry unenthusiastically, as though not wanting to offend
the suave Zeitgeist. Such giving and taking back in painting would amount to
erasure (almost achieved in some expressionistic abstractions). Oversweet
bucolic greens humiliated by such shock dissonances might be returned from
sentimentality to the harsh red excitement of Nature's bloody matrix. We welcome
these brutalities in this time of total reconstruction when it seems natural
for us to be revolted by our bodies and their once sacred autonomies now
inadequate appetites for our desired, but unacknowledged mutation to pure
mind. This insistence on complete honesty, resulting in the disassembling of
all our motivations is the most beautiful trait in our present anguish. Perhaps
the time has not yet arrived for artists to try to put it all back together
The world is full oftirst-rate artists barking up the wrong tree, And in
the U.S.A. our true folk treasure has yet to be dug up. We who haven'tthe
patience or skill to copy nature exactly have built up an academy in which that
skill becomes a liability-the rationale is that we must draw inspiration only
from ourselves, or bend Nature to our own peculiarities. Is this just a reaction
to the Nineteenth Century positivistic dogma or will it lead us positively into a
more convincing way of objectifying ineffable phantoms? Negatively, I hate to
make small line drawings even as "cartoons" for larger works but delight in
using the brush to draw lines in a sanctioned ritual of large painting where the
arm has been allowed to come into play for the first time since Rubens.
I attempted and failed, in 1952, to walk around Manhattan by staying
as close to the rivers as possible, but I didn't have the inspiration to call it an
art project. When K. Koch predicted in a poem in Art News at about that time
that artists would make large scale Earth monuments, none of us thought it
would come to pass. Those who have created this kind of theatre are more
interested in confounding fellow artists-than in getting large groups of belie v­
ers behind them, which is all to the good. Imagine what would happen to the
land if we all got into this anti-ecological act! Beneath all the fund-raising and
press releases there is some kind of large masochism that must disturb anyone
who doesn't wish to adopt his enemy's tactics in institutionalizing irrelevant,
uglifying narcissisms. For good reasons they are ashamed of being artists,
move up to a more intellectual showmanship. Is this what their mentor M.
Duchamp meant when he said: "No longer will we say 'stupid as a painter"'? A
clearing in the wood, Nature's own earthworks, is what is wanted now in art's
jejune anarchism.
There is something immature about the passivity ofthe art-lover who
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Art Criticism