Art Criticism - The State University of New York

And yet I can imagine these atrocities being given a poetic raison d'etre in a
panoramic painting with a tragic intention. Perhaps this is what these wellrewarded
artists want to do and are failing to do; but except for the Pompeian
life-casts of G. Segal none seem serious enough to have been moved by that
view of life. And the critics and collectors (by using these works for conversational
self-gratification), museum-goers (by their reality-testing compulsions
via verisimilitude) and art crooks (by their speculative greed), these careless
eyes have helped to return the artist to his old role· as clown entertainer,
pyrotechnical moron, closing the exits from bondage that were opened momentarily
with the appearance of the liberating abstract expressionist mystique
after World War II.
The oversensitive confront this septic sludge in the landscape at
their own risk and the overinsensitive are themselves finally driven mad by a
universal warning of apocalypse no one can ignore. Trained to be perceptive,
the painter has had to close too many valves to have enough fuel to transform
this wreckage into art. J. Johns' off-register duplications relate to a rhyming
compulsion or echolalia out of shock, banal vacuities raised to the level of
hypnotic symbolic vessels representing nothing to us anguished idlers, hollow
dummies of Baudelaire 's flaneur.
Having a shrewd idea of what constitutes beauty in painting will help
an artist even if he does not want to paint pictures that beguile one. Amalgamating
uglinesses from his observed world, he employs them as fertilizer. Lesser
eyes are carried away by this ephemeral garbage, which only seems to be
cauterizing anti-poetry as long as one keeps one's nose to the catalog. (Why is
it that it is usually those painters who have most painstakingly built up their
skills who go out of their way to offend us?)
Perhaps painting and sculpture should be no more than constant
thanksgivings for the gift of sight and a discovery of new delights in our
landscape. (If I pay my debt to humanism in this picture may I, as a reward,
paint a pure landscape next?) But we want it to be a key to help us into a new
state of mind, like the pleas of weaponless animals who are continually praying
for a mutation, protective coloring, a longer claw. Perhaps if there were only
one idea of order instead of these sects that erase each other an indifferent God
would dispense something more exciting than serenity.
Neither the id's scrawl nor the superego's geometry is of any use to
our art-starved millions.
The stern, prickly morals of a Durer, a painter who appeals less to
artists than to writers and political leaders, arms them for life's battles, helps
them to strike accurately at their exact enemies. Can we expect to see our sick
esthetic someday embedded in a larger message or are those times forever
past? Now we are nerved by the most inexplicable talismans, blown-up fragments
of some forgotten saga, their painterly magic unalloyed by stodgy mo-
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Art Criticism