“There are so many unspoken dilemmas facing a gallery visitor. We arrive at an exhibition space that is displaying pieces by artists of whom we may or may not have heard. Often we are attending a show which exhibits works by names so illustrious and so, we are told, important, that they have already for hundreds of years been called Old Masters. Or they are Modern Masters, geniuses, icons, cultural heroes… they are great, or scandalous, or notorious or revered.They are intimidating.

Cover art for the Viva la Fry project.

Are we supposed to know facts about the artists and their works? Are we supposed to talk? Shall we be entirely silent and slowly stand and stare at works without comment and without revealing what we feel or shall we occasionally dare to say that we like this expression, or that shape, or those colours? Do we whisper to our companions, or do we imitate that awful show-off over there who is talking so knowledgeably and loudly about morbidezza, sfumato and golden sections? And isn’t it actually snobbish of us to disapprove of him, he is obviously enjoying himself and what is wrong with him imparting his enthusiasm and knowledge to his companion? Why should we assume he is showing off, doesn’t that assumption reveal nothing but our own self-conscious insecurity? Oh dear. It’s all so complicated. Aren’t we just striking a pose too, the pose of one who refuses to listen to any nonsense about art history, or pay any attention to the tradition or biographical background of the works before us. In fact we are going to ignore the so-called masterpiece in front of us and stylishly prefer the lesser known work next to it, just to show how original we are and how unswayed by reputations.

“A Private View at the Royal Academy” by William Frith.

Even if we avoid all those contortions we still have to stand before art works that might have us entranced, or confused or perplexed, or shocked or bored or thrilled or hungry for more while at the same time knowing that there are others clamouring to see them as well, so we mustn’t hog the space directly in front, yet we are conscious too that we don’t know how far away to stand – should we step right back and risk other people getting in the way? On the other hand if we go too close are we pretentiously implying a connoisseur’s expertise in brushwork and technique? Oh dear, all I want to do is engage with the piece sincerely, with no pre-conceptions or prejudices but my own manners, fears and anxieties and my awareness of myself and of others, all obtrude. There’s always someone blocking my clear view of an artwork and that someone turns out to be myself.

All this self-consciousness. It sometimes seems that the only safe way to go round an exhibition is entirely on one’s own, otherwise we’re in terrible fear of looking like a show-off, or an ignoramus, or affected or blasé or pretentious or philistine or something equally shaming and dreadful. We yearn to be open, to learn, to be provoked, to engage honestly, simply and truthfully with a work, but to do so we must leave our self-aware, social, verbal and public selves behind. But how hard that is when we are in such a public sphere. The very fact of our being in a populous gathering automatically activates all those tribal status, power and perception regions of our brain that are death to plain, honest, naked encounters with art.”

[Excerpted from a Speech Given by Stephen Fry at a Dinner for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition - 8th June 2010]

[Via Franklin Einspruch's Journal]

Don’t apologize, justify or rationalize bad art or bad writing. If you do, you are part of it.

Green Valentine #2

Whether something is called art is beside the point. What counts is what happens when you ask it to actually be art.

The Flurry

One needs to be right before getting righteous.

Old Battles

Too much freedom inhibits choice. Constructive narrowness clarifies choice.

June Park

Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don’t want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.

Tugman Hills

A critic without a good eye is a eunuch in a harem.

Early Riser

When anyone can produce dreck or publish gibberish, and not only get away with it but be celebrated for it, the discipline is no longer a discipline, and it will get no respect.

Tara's Hammer

Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly.

First Strike

The more freedom artists have to do what they want to do, the more they do what other artists are doing.

Calypso

There is no best way to make art, but there are a lot of better ways.

The Prodigal

Always let intuitive perception precede analysis.

Settling

The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.

Potatohead Blues

All words and images: Walter Darby Bannard

A Conversation with Clement Greenberg
Continued from parts I and II…

Russell Bingham: Is it important to build a good collection? Is that something that should be a main priority with an art museum?

Clement Greenberg: I’d tend to say yes, especially the further away you are from a metropolitan centre like New York.

Elizabeth Kidd: What is it that’s important about having a good collection in Edmonton?

CG: Because a lot of people cannot afford to go to New York, or even Chicago. That’s why. And the kids especially.

RRB: Are they going to see good contemporary art in New York?

CG: No, but they’re going to see good past art. That’s it.

Roger H. Boulet: It’s becoming a problem. I dislike talking about the market, but in many ways the market has passed us by. And you mentioned Morris Louis – he happens to be one of my favourite painters, but we’ll never be able to acquire a Morris Louis. It’s just beyond us now.

CG: The idea is, again, easier said than done. Buy early enough, when they’re cheap. That’s exercising taste the way only a critic can. Don’t think an institution can so readily. Let’s take the case of Pollock. The Museum of Modern Art could have bought any number of Pollocks for from $100 – $300 in his best days, before 1951. They did get one Pollock and a good one from his first show, and waited six years and got another one that wasn’t so good, in ‘49. And that was it. And then after he died, after the early ’60s, especially – prices went up and up.

RRB: There’s a lot of good contemporary art that’s under $10,000.

RRB: Do you think that art critics in our century have a more important role than they did in the past? When you think they’re more of a recent phenomenon, the last 150 years or so…

CG: Not all that recent. Diderot in the eighteenth century started regular art reviewing. I think art criticism has declined.

RRB: But is it more critical though, even though it’s declined in the broad sense? Does the good stuff count more?

CG: Good art criticism? I can’t say. I know my stuff never counted much – which isn’t to say it was good criticism.

RRB: Speaking from my own experience, your stuff counts a lot.

CG: Only in retrospect.

RRB: I know a lot of people look to you and to other critics like you to provide encouragement. Was that always the case (in history)?

CG: I don’t know enough… that aspect of the past hasn’t been researched enough – put it that way. It’s like so many aspects… The French had a lot of art critics, most of whom wrote rather well I thought. They’re all in discredit now because they weren’t for the Impressionists.

EK: It seems to me that what you’re getting nowadays is star critics and star curators and the artists are often marginalized. There’s so much emphasis on art writing and theory and theoretical writing and curatorial approaches that somehow the art seems to get lost.

CG: I don’t agree with you. Maybe out here they do, but not in New York.

RRB: Related to this is my theory that there are important critics and they count quite a bit to artists. I’m wondering if the art of our era is more subject to decay.

CG: Being influenced by art writing and publicity?

RRB: Just by popular taste or something. Whether these people (the critics) need to be here because it’s harder to make good art these days.

CG: I don’t think so. I think there’s more promising young art around now than there was 30 years ago.

RRB: I’m talking about a couple hundred years ago.

CG: You can’t go back beyond the late eighteenth century. When Baudelaire and Flaubert (and, in his day, the English art critic Haskell [?]) were talking about decadence, they were marking the first time ever in the Western tradition that the best new art was being turned down at first. Its a fact that even Ingres and Delacroix got accepted pretty early, as controversial as they were. Delacroix got commissions before he was middle-aged. And so did Ingres, certainly. In the 1840s, 1850s, that’s when artists began howling against the bourgeoisie.

RRB: Do you think because of this maybe critics do count more now?

CG: I can’t answer that. If you make noise about an artist, it finally penetrates. But I think Pollock’s reputation would have risen as it did after his death in any case, without my beating the drum. I think so far the best work has emerged eventually. It’s taken more time over the last hundred-odd years than before. But in the end it [wins] out. Just think of Cézanne, how obscure he was most of his life, right to the end. He had a small circle of admirers in France. He was unheard-of outside [France].

RRB: He got support from his peers I guess.

CG: A circle of admirers and that was it. A pretty good painter, a French painter known world-wide in the early 1900s – he died at half Cézanne’s age ad almost at the same time – was Carrière. The Museum of Modern Art a while ago even bought a Carrière. But, take Carrière, a minor artist – as good as he was. And there he was. He was known in New York in 1900 and nobody had heard of Cézanne except maybe one or two people who’d been abroad.

RRB: What is the importance of high art. What does great art do? Does it improve people morally?

CG: I don’t think so. It’s a value in its own right. It’s an ultimate value. It’s prized for itself. It’s not a supreme value. That’s the mistake the “art for art’s sake” people make. But it’s something desirable for its own sake – the experiencing of it. Not because it improves you.

RHB: You mean it’s purely sensorial?

CG: No, we won’t talk about what the aesthetic experience consists of. It’s something that’s of value in its own right.

RHB: It’s intrinsically satisfying.

CG: Intrinsically. Whether it’s Shakespeare or whether it’s Beethoven or whether it’s Titian. It’s an ultimate end, an end in itself. But not a supreme end.

RRB: What things would you put in that category?

CG: Supreme… Human life. Human beings.

This is the concluding installment of “A Conversation with Clement Greenberg.”

A Conversation with Clement Greenberg
Continued from part I…

Russell Bingham: In Edmonton we profit by being, in a certain sense, isolated and having kind of a pressure cooker environment for making art. But there’s also the fact that the world-at-large doesn’t know about art here and the art here is only measured up against the other art here. So in that sense, would artists here get better if they had the opportunity to show in New York and have their art seen in a larger context?

Clement Greenberg: I don’t think it would make much difference. I know that about 31 years ago people like (Morris) Louis, (Kenneth) Noland, and (Jules) Olitski fared well in their art because they lived outside New York. But not too far away, so they could come to New York and see what they didn’t want to do. (I mean that literally.) But New York itself ate artists up.

Elizabeth Kidd: New York is sort of seen as a testing ground. If you can survive New York, you can survive anything, but I wonder really what that means.

CG: For the art or the artist? That’s deceptive. At my age you begin to repeat yourself very much… but, since Manet’s time, since the 1850s, the best new art is kept in the background and it usually takes a decade or two to come to the foreground. That was Manet’s fate and that was the Impressionists’ fate. You can tell that by sales, market, press. And the pattern hasn’t changed since then. There are exceptions now. I think Picasso was an early success. Matisse certainly wasn’t. The stars of yesteryear, like Pollock. Pollock had to sweat it out for a dozen years. David Smith. It hasn’t changed. The best new art, it’s still back-stage.

EK: If you were an advisor to putting together a show of Western art to send East what would it be like? Would it be a group show?

CG: Probably, but my relation to this place and Saskatoon is such that it doesn’t belong. Group shows are usually fatal. The Triangle group shows in New York…. Everybody’s diminished in some way. I organized a show of Syracuse painters for Skidmore College a couple of years ago. And, damn it, the show, as a whole, disappointed me and disappointed a lot of other people. So I’ve become wary of group shows. Selecting the right artists would be difficult too.

Mark Joslin: I guess that’s why a lot of contemporary curators choose to arrange exhibitions around ideas; it’s easier to reject and accept people on the basis of how they fit into a scheme.

CG: I haven’t noticed that, that much. I think most curators of contemporary art are not as good as they should be. With all due respect.

RRB: What should they be doing better?

CG: They don’t look hard enough. They succumb to trends – whether you go to the Hirshhorn, or to the Walker, or whether you go to Boston Fine Arts, or Boston Museum of Contemporary Art, or whether you go to the Whitney.

Roger H. Boulet: Couldn’t they defend themselves by saying that they’re doing as you suggest they should do, which is showing a sampling of everything that’s made.

CG: They don’t. They exercise their taste implicitly. A so-called “formalist” hasn’t been included in a Whitney annual or biennial in seven or eight years.

EK: So they’re being just as narrow in another way. Are you saying that if everybody were looking and those who had developed the “best eye” they would all agree on the same people?

CG: It takes time for the agreement to emerge. The consensus emerges only over time.

EK: You don’t think taste is also developed by looking at other kinds of things, or perhaps seeing things that other people haven’t seen that are probably just as good? There’s a wide range of tastes that are all, if you want, “good” but they can be different, surely?

CG: No, I don’t agree when it comes to contemporary art. No.

EK: Contemporary art. Whereas when you look at historical art, it’s different?

CG: The art of the past has already been sifted by the consensus of taste. The big names are there and they’ve been confirmed, they’ve been ratified. When the Met puts on a big show it’s a big name. They’re not going to show [unknowns]. The consensus missed George de la Tour, missed El Greco until the mid-19th century, and they missed Vermeer because they couldn’t identify him.

I think in de la Tour’s case, he lived in Alsace; and El Greco was in Spain and people didn’t go there for a long while. Maybe some other artists got in their own way. Van Gogh would have been a rich man, I think, had he lived another five or ten years. The consensus will make mistakes now and then, too, like overrating Salvatore Rosa, or as I say, Michelangelo’s sculpture – one of the biggest mistakes I think the consensus made. He was a great painter, but not such a good sculptor. And Wyndham Lewis anticipated me by writing that.

RRB: Do you feel that people living today that have good taste tend very often to focus on the same artist?

CG: Contemporary artists or in the past?

RRB: Contemporary artists.

CG: With good taste? I know so few. Many fewer than twenty-five to thirty years ago. I knew people whose disagreements with me would trouble me, give me pause. I don’t meet them anymore… I haven’t met any… either abroad or here. Now that sounds arrogant, I know, but that’s the way I feel. I’m not bothered about disagreements about contemporary art anymore. You know, maybe it’s something I missed or something like that. If someone like Arshile Gorky disagreed with me, I was given pause…

RRB: You’re saying that these are people whose opinion and taste you respected. Is it important to have confidence in your taste?

CG: That’s all you’ve got. In order to express it, you have to have confidence I suppose.

RRB: There’s no point in qualifying it by saying, “but it’s only my taste”?

CG: No! What has anyone got but their own taste?

RHB: To me, the problem is as curators that’s a very very small limb to stand on.

CG: There’s no other.

To be continued…

Sculpture of Clement Greenberg, Joe Fafard

Art Critic Clement Greenberg came to Edmonton in November of 1989, to visit several artists’ studios and provide critical reaction to their work. Mr. Greenberg took the time to spend a few hours with Edmonton Art Gallery Director Roger H. Boulet, Chief Curator Elizabeth Kidd, Associate Curators Mark Joslin and Russell R. Bingham, and Edmonton art critic Lelde Muehlenbachs. They discussed a variety of topics about art. An edited version of their conversation is presented in this, the winter, and the early spring editions of Outlook. [The Magazine of the Edmonton Art Gallery, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1990.]

Meeting With Clement Greenberg November 21, 1989

Elizabeth Kidd: When was the last time you were here, in Edmonton? It was quite a few years ago, wasn’t it? Do you get a sense of much change?

Clement Greenberg: January of 1986. Everything keeps getting better in the art. I also noticed more new buildings.

EK: Do you notice there seems to be a swing back to more modernist art-making and an interest in it again? It’s almost like a pendulum that’s starting to go in the opposite direction. People are starting to look at the roots of modernism and abstraction in Canada in the ’50s. Have you picked up on this trend at all in the U.S.?

CG: The guy who writes art for the New Yorker told me that Leo Castelli said that Jules Olitski was the most undervalued artist around. I thought, wow! That’s… (great) I happen to think that he’s the best living painter. And then Dodie Kazanjian, who writes art for Vogue, was telling me about the attention she notices being paid to someone like Olitski. And in a sheet like Seven Days, they listed the shows most worth seeing… there they had Olitski number one, and a little picture by him. Olitski’s been the test case because everybody execrates him.

Roger H. Boulet: Why do they hate him?

CG: I don’t know. When I talk in the city, in public, and I mention Olitski’s name, people will stand up and, with confidence, say “You’re wrong.” They’re not in any doubt, or hesitant. I suppose it’s something in his art.

Russell R. Bingham: There’s a theory that high quality art criticises the art around it and it irritates people.

CG: I don’t think these people are capable of appreciating the criticism.

RRB: Of appreciating the problem you mean.

CG: Of seeing that Olitski criticizes his company…

RRB: At least he makes art that demands to be seen in some sort of critical framework.

CG: But people are not interested in critical frameworks. Go to Soho and you’ll see what the scene in New York is.

Mark Joslin: In 1982, you were the keynote speaker for a corporate art collectors’ conference that Terry Fenton set up here with Karen Wilkin and Aaron Milrad. I was one of the people in the audience and one of the things you told us was that the best way to develop our eye was to look at as much art as possible. And that influenced me a great deal and I put myself under a regime to go out and look at as much work as I could. The four of us went to New York very recently, to the Whitney Biennial and we saw the kind of work that could be deemed “bad art”, I suppose.

RHB: And trendy.

MJ: And trendy; and I guess the question is, are we “muddying” our eye if we mix the kind of work we see? Should we continue to see as much as we possibly can?

CG: I’d say yes. You’re not going to hurt your eye. Uh, uh.

EK: How about confuse the mind? There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into the mind which does not have to do with your eye. There are thoughts and ideas and issues and premises; so your intellect also plays a role in this whole process.

CG: God, do I have an answer for that? The art magazines have done a lot of mischief in the last 30 years… because it’s only in the last 30 years that people out of town have been reading the art magazines so much. It was different when I came around… people would be confused anyhow. They were confused when Harold Rosenberg wrote about “action painting.” And it was accepted. And it was nonsense. So a lot of people got confused. And they had every right to be confused. You know, they read this Frenchman, Baudrillard. Baudrillard can’t see art. I don’t know whether he looks at it. It’s all over Soho… Baudrillard…. So you get confused, and it’s your own damn fault.

MJ: So are you saying then that the eye sorts out everything that you see? Yesterday, when you were in Terrence Keller’s studio, you used the phrase “organizing one’s perceptions”. Is that what you were talking about?

CG: I was talking about Bob Scott, in the case of his art and the trouble I was having organizing my perceptions because he was going in three different directions. That’s all I meant. You look and look and look, and you talk to people about art and it’s up to you yourself to recognize when the people you talk to are talking nonsense. Like about “action painting” and so forth.

EK: Am I hearing that you can “train your eye” by looking and looking?

CG: That’s the only way.

EK: Is it possible that there are certain people that are some way or other predisposed to never being able to “see”?

CG: I don’t believe that. I don’t know enough to believe it. I don’t want to believe it. I want to believe that all human beings are able to.

RRB: Is it a process of deciding to discriminate? Some people just never decide to pick and choose or compare, whereas some people always compare.

CG: Maybe they can be encouraged to discriminate. Maybe. To explain, I’ll describe my experience with a group of people at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria – people who directed art centres, and things like that. Salzburg has a good small museum. I suggested that one day we all go there, and about 15 of us did. I said we’re going to come in the first room, and you pick the picture you think is the best. I said don’t worry about what I think is the best. You’re forced to make a choice. You’re compelled to buy a picture in this room. Choose it – or a piece of sculpture. They eventually got excited by this idea. They had to choose. You would force people to choose.

EK: Do you think it is the process of choosing which is important or the final selection?

CG: No, just the process. You have to look. You look with heightened attention. You’ve got to choose. You can’t say no, I don’t want to. And people enjoy that by the way.

RRB: You’re talking about the responsibility of the individual. What about us as museum people, curators and critics. Should we do the same thing or would we be more broad-minded and more open to presenting everything?

CG: I can’t lay down the law. Nobody can here. Were I the director of the Whitney, I’d show everything that was up, but acquire what I liked. I would acquaint my public with all the Soho junk as long as it was conspicuous enough. But not acquire.

EK: Because you’re saying through acquiring, you’re making that discrimination selection, you’re making that final choice.

CG: You’re saying to your public “this is what we think is good.”

RRB: Is there any incumbency on you to try to point to the best other than to just purchase the best? Is there any responsibility to somehow try to educate taste?

CG: By talking you mean, writing and talking? It depends on who tries to do it. The easiest way out is to indulge in art jargon. You’ve got to find some way to leave out art jargon. And also what makes praising art tough for a critic is that, what he says about one good work in praise is applicable to a lot of other good works. Suppose I go on about Rubens’ colour. What I say (the words) is true of Titian, too. It’s true of Delacroix. But when it comes to talking about art you don’t like you can be much more specific. Then the mistakes you see are not common mistakes, or necessary.

EK: They’re particular to a particular artist.

CG: Yes they’re in context.

RRB: Can you identify something as being good without liking it? Is that possible?

CG: I don’t feel it’s possible. You don’t choose your reactions to art, music, literature. You don’t. It’s given to you. You have a good friend and you want to like what he or she does and you don’t like it. And then you know someone you don’t like, and you find yourself forced to like what he or she does. You don’t choose what to like.

To be continued next issue.

Asked why he was so unpleasant to so many people, he gave the characteristic reply, “Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming, and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away too keep from being bored to death.” Characteristic, too, is the dedication of the present volume, indicating his voluntary alienation from men, “To The rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid Themselves of the Friendship of the Many, these pathetic Papers are inscribed.”

Whistler was neither charming nor delightful to his teachers at West Point. Once, when he could not give the date for the battle of Buena Vista, an event of the Mexican War, the professor asked him good-naturedly what he would do at a dinner table were he asked the same question. He retorted, indignantly, “Do? Why, I should refuse to associate with people who could talk of such things at dinner.”

Pyrrhic victories like this caused him, who had flunked out of West Point, subsequently to lose his job as a draftsman in the United States Coast Guard. Following his natural bent by concentrating on art, he led the kind of dissolute life in London and Paris for which he would have been ostracized in his native country. He had servants and drank costly champagne even when he owned nothing but debts. To attract attention, he dressed like a music-hall artist, and from the more conservative Degas he elicited the remark: “If you were not a genius, you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris.”

Bernard Bosanquet on Aesthetic Experience:

It is a common feeling. You can appeal to others to share it, and its value is not diminished by being shared. If it is ever true that “there is no disputing about tastes,” this is certainly quite false of aesthetic pleasures. Nothing is more discussed, and nothing repays discussion better. There is nothing in which education is more necessary, or tells more. To like and dislike rightly is the goal of all culture worth the name.

“People who are born into an isolated and homogeneous community are liable to be conditioned much more strictly than the members of a society composed of many diverse elements and in contact with other societies, having traditions different from its own. An Eskimo never sees anyone but other Eskimos; and as Eskimo society is classless and unspecialized, this means that he only sees people who have been brought up in exactly the same way as himself. Comparison is the beginning of criticism, and he has nothing with which to compare the accepted conventions of his small world.”

Prometheus made man by dabbling in mud; Auguste Rodin, aged five, found his own raw ingredients in the kitchen. He saw his mother dropping thin twists of dough into hot oil and extracting crisp pastries; discerning human shapes in the contorted batter, he asked her if he could fry some men. Practising to be a sculptor, he kneaded dough into shapes that were almost too big for the pan. He was delighted when the heat animated his sticky prototypes: the spitting oil caused them to writhe, violently quickening them into life.

The business of making also intrigued the young Leonard Bernstein. At the age of four, he discovered that man had been formed from dust, and decided to repeat the experiment. He collected the coagulating drifts of fluff from under his bed, then soaked them in the bathroom hand-basin to make them gel.

But he left the water running, the drain-pipe clogged, and the apartment beneath was deluged by the overflow. God did not have to bother about neighbours downstairs.

Every form of art has its own myth of nativity, and its own version of the originating deity. For Ruskin, Genesis identified God as a sculptor. Goethe, in the theory of colour he published in 1810, celebrates an invisible creator who is a painter – or who at least encourages men to paint so they can register the luminous array of creation.

His Faust, basking in the sun beside a waterfall, admires the rainbow that shimmers in the spray, and says that it symbolises life’s hazy play of multi-coloured allurements. After Noah’s flood, that arc may have signified God’s forgiving covenant with man. But for Goethe, it is not God who stretches the iridescent bow across the sky; it is sparked by the meeting of sunlight and water vapour, and exists only in the eye that sees it.

Turner put it more brazenly when he said, “The sun is God.” He made the remark, according to Ruskin, shortly before his death. It was his admission of his vocation’s hubris: the painter, staring at the sun, daringly looks God in the eye.