Art Criticism - The State University of New York

mortify into hard edges and mushy centers forms overburnished and many
times removed from the insights of Earth's profligacy, soft-edged with gemmed
cores?
Paul Klee made the terrifying journey into another person's consciousness
a hilarious, though jittery adventure, a "panicky sweet morning". He left
doors open for us to follow, but few are risking the shoals glimpsed there,
flowering orchards of bloody foam.
When M. Duchamp launched Urinalism the shameful psychotic devices
of thousands of outsiders, furtive plastiquers, suddenly were sanctioned
as museum-worthy. The pornography that does the most damage is that which
is redeemed by its artistic value. The warmth of the intimate voices of shared
insight doesn't linger around such sterilities, in spite of their undeniable usefulness
in blowing up herbivores. One of the "pop" artists explained that
celebrating the crass and banal in commerce was the only way they could
shock their jaded clientele. Why should the carefully tended fabric of the
accretions of our culture be torn apart every time some experimenter wants to
delight his friends by playing pranks on bewildered people he feels contempt
for?
Someone who genuinely enjoys astringent atonality or a wounding
Piccassoid edge must have a rather Spartan, if not puritanical tolerance of
discomfort, satisfaction of iconoclasm here being stronger than calnie, luxe et
volupte. This is a perversion comparable to J. Calvin's remonstrance that since
God had created flowers we didn't need painting, Modern art has perfected
superior mortifications for those whose self-flagellating frenzy is stronger than
any love. What began as refreshing bitter uprooting of complacencies now
shrivels for lack of warmth, since hatred does not temper art as they had
expected. This vicarious murder was part of an impatience with abstract blandness,
with the colored blanks we were allowed to fill in with an intolerable
permissiveness.
Like cautious novelists who create colorless characters in their Romans
a clef by combining the attributes of too many friends, the bulk of the
abstract expressionists did not wish to make their forms too recognizable or
intrusive, lest they break the code of the picture plane an~ alloverness set up
by valued estheticians. And if one became a little too popular with the middle
class he was sent to a Siberia of journalistic neglect.
What amazed us most when we first saw the abstract expressionists'
originals was, I believe, their tentativeness writ large, tender hesitancies blown
up to overwhelming proportions, giving us the feeling of some tremulous
evanescent religious miracle about to occur, genuine because of the humility
of emendation, the brush still searching and, because of the all-important hugeness
of the sparsely inhabited (except perhaps by angels) acreage, almost
ecclesiastical. Like listening to atonal music or gulping down incomprehen-
26
Art Criticism