Art Criticism - The State University of New York

ground music this thorough-bass of caption, catalog and walky-talky makes
us aware of a symbiosis without which some of these fugitive art objects
would vanish. There seemed to be some doubt by the painters that the forms
would stick.
The echolalia repetitions of almost identical forms in the same canvas
by L. Rivers, J. Johns, R. Rauschenberg, A. Warhol are either a glorification of
the hesitant corrections of late expressionism, a perverse kind of humility or
else an exorcism of ghosts in a state of perpetual shock. Palimpsests on crumbling
manuscripts replace the holy scrutiny of essential objects fixed in an
unstable reality, routinely reiterated for our increasing serenity. To these speeding
victims of relativity's parallax acts are more valuable than thoughts, thus
the nervous emendations laid bare. These cool over-rehearsals little resembled
the correct guesses of intuition's heat that had initiated the movement. In their
rapt, sense-numbing jazz music and zombie dancing, I sensed in these young
artists of the late Fifties a group self-forgetfulness bordering on oblivion,
reflected in their cool close-to-home-base paintings and sculptures, centripetal,
not expanding.
There are skeptical as well as pious fools, who blindly resist all pervasive
Zeitgeists on some perverse principle of dispassion, spurning follies that
would make them wise. The steamroller of modem art was that kind of worldfaith
and only an artist who has experienced it and exhausted it can be the one
who will reassemble the scattered parts of this great destructive machine into
a new, compassionate, universal synthesis. As for the academic mercenaries
who didn't have insight or courage to take up these difficult experiments when
they were timely, their haste to do so now when all is permissive and saleable
only clutters further the field where the hoped-for deed will occur.
What is the unearthly template in the extruder of a sea shell that
orders the chitin to have the scalloped waves that another does not have, how
is the rhythm of their intervals decided upon? Like the variety of wildflowers
that aim by their diversity and spreading out in time to capture the attention of
insects by advertising allurements like our own human sales techniques, this
subject of meditation is only made fruitful to us by very delicate, exact, poetic
insights close to, but beyond the facts of scientific observation. To find this
magical realm between abstraction and reality we allow the poetic vocabulary
its own head, its own peculiar metaphors. "It takes the weight of the whole
world to make a feather fall", a scientific statement by W. Sullivan, has this
magic as does the paradox by D.H. Lawrence: "The growing crops make the
sun shine." It is as though scientific fact were trying to prove true these
outrageous fantasies, in order to be more well-balanced. But like Nature, poetry
has to sow many seeds, most of which are unprofitable and impractical.
Paint, given its own impetus, should go straight to the essence of a form that is
observed or conceived of, universalizing it beyond its local idiosyncratic acvol.
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