The Young Artist, 1968
Photo by Roger Benham
Photo by Roger Benham
The Young Artist
The "artist statement" is one of the most wretched forms of literature to ever appear in urban culture. Artists should never be permitted to write one. If they do, they should be shot. Guess someone should shoot me.
The babble-monster is born in nonsense: artists must speak with the same strength as they create; artists who don't hold and formulate deep ideas are condemned to unimportance; noetic (gotcha!) modeling is the key to artistic success; context is all.
I was theory friendly in my early years - the Norman years, let's call them. Make that Norman, Oklahoma. The temper of those days had just started favoring rhetoric over basic visual "reality". I could talk the new talk, so I did, though my studio instincts pointed a different way, which I usually took. My sophisticated colleagues in graduate school would say my talking was neat, but my work questionable, especially for one skilled in the talk-down of art. One teacher said my portraits looked too much like the sitter, instead of the sitter's essence. I replied that the way people look is their essence. How could I stoop to that? Even if it was labelled aesthetic empiricism, it meant drawing skills. That particular guy didn't favor drawing skills. You wouldn't think someone like that could be a full professor at the University of Oklahoma in 1965, would you?
The best work I did then was backward looking. "Modernist" would have been a good word. Then it seemed simply "abstract", certainly not very radical. My graduate colleagues continued their friendly criticism. Advanced ideas, retrograde but sometimes interesting work.
Whatever else that scene in Norman was during the late 60s, it was passionate and cocky, filled with considerable pressure, an unlikely development inspired by a young School of Art director named Joe Hobbs. There was hokie cowboy stuff sitting beside ambitious international styles in our art school museum. We had combine paintings in the faculty show, Warhol films to take our girlfriends to, George Segal foundation projects, abstract watercolor in the classroom, and tightly thrown pots that would hold just one weed in their scrawny elegant necks that you could rent from the museum dirt cheap. There were no warning signs or hearing protectors in the woodshop, the dark rooms were unventilated, but the sinks in the painting room were clean. It was a great place to work, talk with Tony Smith, hang out with Billy Al Bengston, and remain niave.
I worked my way through abstract expressionism. AE was just about the only thing in art that anyone seriously challenged. It was exactly the wrong period. Not current enough, not old-timey enough either. Still seems that way (except now it IS old-timey) and I still love that work.
Avant-Garde Ambition
Everyone who was ambitious wanted to get out of Norman. I made it to Carbondale to teach art at Southern Illinois University. That place was not as sophisticated as the University of Oklahoma, so it was easier to be avant-garde there. "It's about time," I thought. I did plastic bags full of symbolic stuff. I stuck theories of time and cosmology on these projects, as I filled them with shredded university records and photographs. I got the obligatory grant. At the end I migrated to paintings that were too dark to see but textured enough to yield limited pleasure. Meantime the university gallery director had to bring copies of Artforum to show the Dean every time I exhibited in public. The Chancellor got upset when some of my students painted, then burned, the university's President in effigy. I began to realize that without vulgarians to offend, the avant-garde is nothing.
Art Bureaucrat
Most academic studio artists read, but many have trouble writing. Very few can add and subtract. I could do all four. The next step was to become an art bureaucrat. All it took was some well chosen words, a typewriter, and a tie. I got out of Carbondale almost as easily as I got out of Norman, landing in Kalamazoo. I was 34 - a little older on the outside, a little younger inside.
There is no doubt that even low level administrative jobs in the modern university are difficult to reconcile with making art. A "Departmental Executive Officer" must absorb bad feelings so that professional colleagues can feel better. Feeling nervous is a good condition for making art. That DEO drained feeling is not.
This predicament added more perspective to the whole business of avant gardism. In truth, there is little difference between the university system and the avant-garde system. Each has its rules and regulations, each knows the expected outcome of every project before it begins, and each drains its membership of every inspiration in favor of marching in orderly circles. Academic artists are sheep in sheep's clothing. Avant-garde artists had become sheep in wolves' clothing.
The sobering life of an art bureaucrat coincided with backing away from paintings that were too dark to see. Instead, my paintings began looking like paintings - once again retrograde, gloriously so. That this constituted a step forward was contrary to the professional consensus that the more freakish the better. Going backward to go forward probably applied.
Clement Greenberg
The most important event during my service as an art bureaucrat was meeting Clement Greenberg. He spoke at the first Mountain Lake Symposium that I had helped organize. The resonance and cadance of his voice; the durability of what he said; all of it was a revelation to me. He didn't bother with glitz - a great lesson in itself. He spoke for serious art while most members of his profession spoke for themselves. He described art where others issued prescriptions. The thunder of his perfectly measured words can scare you or piss you off until you see what he describes for yourself. Then it seems like he puts it too kindly, too sweetly almost, because it is so obvious that he just nails it.
Contrarianism
With all those Duchamp Juniors out there running the art system, I am proud to be a Greenberg Junior. A student once wrote a note in the middle of an essay test that I was jealous of David Salle and all the other PoMos. I wrote back that I was jealous of Jules Olitski. It was Clem who pointed me to Olitski. I might never have noticed, were it not for that, because Olitski had already been consigned to ancient history. But the notice was mine, not Clem's. That's how he always laid it out. He didn't do anybody's looking for them and he worried whenever someone seemed to "like" an artist just because he did. In fact, liking on just Clem's word was a sure way to lose his respect.
Clem also put me in front of work by artists most have never heard of: Darby Bannard, Darryl Hughto, Susan Roth, and others. Some of that stuff took considerable getting used to, but what seemed tough at first turned out to be the directness of its beauty, not freakishness. These artists had learned to persist in the face of the rip tide that began in 1962 towards art that "transcended" old-hat Modernism. They were forming a rear guard, whether they liked the term of not. In its usual "malicious" way (Clem's word), art was making sure its most serious efforts would take place under the most unlikely circumstances.
Duchamp Juniors plan their art activities around a theory that was fully developed 85 years ago. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, except the dishonesty of saying that the freakish facsimile it generates is something new. What is truly new in our time is that the rear guard has supplanted the avant garde as the source of serious art. A mousy painting by Norman Rockwell pushes a Jeff Koons sculpture aside, surgically and with finality. And a Helga painting by Andrew Wyeth destroys them both. The secret here is that being too attached to the past because of good taste is a better circumstance for making pictures than self indulgence, no matter how tough or raw or sophisticated that indulgence gets.
The best of the rear guard finesses the dialog between the compelling past and their instinct to follow taste into an unknown. Morris Louis, for example, did his best pictures in 1954 two years before he broke through into his signature series of styles. Louis himself, along with many others, considered the Unfurleds to be his crowning achievement. How they advanced Western composition has been well demonstrated. Yet the earlier work satisfies even more, just as a rose is prettiest the day before it reaches full bloom.
© John Link, 2000-6| Home | More Writing |
