Art Criticism - The State University of New York

expects the artist not only to fill his void but to be flattered by his attentions.
Associating painting, music, dance with physical love, we are not trained to
put them to more philosophic use as we age beyond sex's tyranny. If
Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night" had been written by an old man instead of
a man in his twenties we would have to admit that we were faced with a force
resembling erotic anguish, yet wider, a rejuvenating headlong harnessing of
the elan vital, a new kind of joy not easily tarnished. We don't expect this kind
of youthful onslaught from maturity, as in Zen Buddhism's exciting serenity. If
we did we would have more satisfying paintings, not the degrading nerve-end
novelties we associate with thoughtlessness' and physical delight's gratification.
Sublimation is talked about but rarely investigated or practiced. Transparency
is the reward.
The rarified and meager atmospheres that so many artists inhabit
lately and attempt with such far-fetched arcane symbols to communicate are, in
reality, easily attained but with difficulty survived in. Those landscapes of
palpable forms that we luxuriate in without effort came about with great effort
on the pioneer artist's part. We inheritors pay the price offrustrating obscurity
for their irresponsible adventure, self-gratifying, that is dogma today, driving
us apart in the name of experiment that belongs in science, not art.
These rather unsanitary haut-reliefs the latest experimenters hope to
pass off as paintings are really sculptures, Paintings have mutated in this
monumental direction away from poetic illustration because we want to rival
the mysterious inchoate machinery around us. (This kind of mechanized trivia,
deadly to me, nourishes others but that doesn't keep me from warning those
who have my allergy.)
When the scientific painters say they love the act of painting it's not
a sloppy wet embrace but a strenuous leaping into a puzzle, with a kind of dry
satisfaction that a romantic never can share. Let us keep these two worlds
apart for the sake of the intensity of each; only by avoiding scientific adulteration
will the painter rival the miracles of the laboratory. If the intuitive are to be
allowed to enhance the quality ofrationalism for our survival, they should go
further into their foolish insight's logic before being commandeered.
The artist who has learned to make do with despair isn't a favorite of
those in the grip of busy euphoria. We need such opposites now, with a
minimum of congress between them. Poets shun all who recommend a united
front in esthetics, ignore the subtle tempting melodies of technological ephemera
onl y experts can remember!
Just because we were surrounded in childhood with nauseating popular
songs, commercial art, soap operas, grade "e" movies, loud cars, patriotic
parades, dance marathons, institutionalized wet dreams, bubble gum, singing
commercials, auto accidents, etc., doesn't mean we will salivate with nostalgia
when they are exhumed and exhibited in the makeshift theatre of "pop" art.
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