'The figurative artist [my italics] is now competing with all the art of the past. In the Renaissance he was only competing with the Romans and copies of the Greek.
Giacometti was competing with the Egyptian, the Sumerian, the Cycladic, the Byzantine, the Romanesque.
And there was also Cézanne to deal with [...]'
This comes from a notebook compiled by David Sylvester around 1992, possibly after having seen the major Giacometti exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (November 30, 1991-March 15, 1992). Compare this with an earlier (c.1960) comment that Abstract Expressionism, like Surrealism, was an attempt to 'see what could be salvaged from the wreck' of Duchamp and Dada. Neither note made it into the book they both relate to, Sylvester's Looking at Giacometti 1994, but they both reinforce the point that Sylvester was above all an advocate of figurative art. This allegiance is easily exaggerated or misinterpreted, because Sylvester's interests were much wider than this, and in 1960 he was at his most energetic in promoting Abstract Expressionism.
But reading the comments above I was reminded of Francis Bacon's well-known outburst against abstract art in his second (1966) interview with Sylvester. Sylvester would lament Bacon's closed-mindedness to abstract art and the arguments they had as a result, but what Sylvester and Bacon shared was a strong sense of tradition and dialogue with the art of the past. However you feel about the Francis Bacon and the Masters exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, it does approach this question of the grand tradition head-on. And Sylvester, like Bacon, was a quintessentially European in his regard for the integrity of a figurative tradition, as shown by his choice of artists- Moore, Giacometti, Bacon, de Kooning. And much of his advocacy of Bacon and Giacometti has to do with the fish-out-of -water character of their art. Bacon and Giacometti were for Sylvester the closest he got to finding his own Picasso and Braque. But where Picasso and Braque in their Cubist years were like mountaineers roped together, Sylvester saw Giacometti as more like a high-jumper. The mountaineer knows when he's reached the summit, but however much the high-jumper achieves, he fails in the end.
Thursday, 21 May 2015
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
Henry Moore and Nature
A 1992 interview with Anthony Caro included in Richard Cork's recent book Face to Face: Interviews with Artists includes the following comment from Caro on his time as an assistant to Henry Moore:
'At Much Hadham, where I was living at this period when I was with him [Moore], we [Moore's assistants] would find things there and put them on the path where he walked, and he'd pick them up and he'd say: 'Look what I've found!' [laughs]'
The obvious way of reading this mischievous play is that of a critique of Moore's fondness of using stones, bones and shells as source material, examples of the 'principles of form and rhythm' he sought to incorporate into his sculpture as outlined in his essay in Unit 1 (1934). Caro and his colleagues, then, cracked the code, planting objects in Moore's path which, when selected by him, demonstrated that his apparent trust in serendipitous encounters with nature was in fact a predictable system. Caro was demonstrating the same sort of thinking that makes Ryan Gander prefer van Doesburg to Mondrian (Ampersand: Notes on a Collection, pp.129-31) as the less deceived.
David Sylvester, in a note on Moore from 1960 made clear what he felt were the limits of Moore's use of natural forms:
'There is something too passive about Moore's acceptance of nature's way of working stone and so on. What we ask of the artist is that he should have a kind of love-hate relationship with nature and that the very intensity of his love should be a motive for destruction [...]'
This was written at a time when Sylvester felt that Moore's adherence to natural processes betrayed a naivety, a lack of rigour. I suspect that he felt this way about Hepworth's work, although his complete indifference to it meant he never wrote enough about it to be sure of that.
By 1968, when Sylvester curated Moore's major 70th birthday exhibition at the Tate, his opinion had changed. Here, in the section 'Stones, Bones, Shells' in the monograph/catalogue for the exhibition, he suggests that Moore's fixation with these objects was to some extent an alibi, which fulfilled 'a need to tell himself that his abstract forms were obeying some authority beyond that of his own instincts'. Particularly in the climate of hostility to abstract art in which Moore developed, Sylvester claims Moore 'was painfully anxious to allay any suspicion that his abstract direction meant a retreat from reality [...] nevertheless, he protests like a man conducting an argument with himself'.
The change in Sylvester's thinking is clear: in 1960 Moore was too content in his ruralism to take entirely seriously; in 1968 he is seen as more complex and conflicted, a man who both wants to express his personal taste and fantasy, but lacks the absolute confidence to do so of a Picasso (hampered in part by a particularly English timidity). The question I couldn't help asking, then, was: if Moore had known that the stones were placed there by Caro rather than appearing by nature's good offices (or if, for argument's sake, if Caro had fashioned a similar-looking object and left it amongst the stones), would that have made them any less worthy of his attention? Maybe Caro (to his own surprise) would have been just as good an alibi as nature.
This need for a 'love-hate' relationship with nature can be found all over Sylvester's writings, and probably has something to do with growing up amongst the earnest neo-Romanticism of the 1940s. Mondrian was for Sylvester the classic case of an artist who approached nature with eyes wide open:
'One of the great landscape-painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters of his generation, comes to find trees monstrous, green fields intolerable'.
More recently, I think this is the reason why Richard Long rejected the catalogue preface which Sylvester wrote for the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial. Long, in a piece published several years later, said of Sylvester:
'he just didn't get my work. It was a classic case of an urban intellectual who didn't have a clue of what it was to walk in the Andes or getting wet in thunderous rain on a Scottish hillside'.
No doubt, and Sylvester's reading of Long's work is more indebted to Jasper Johns than anyone else. In their 1965 interview Sylvester and Johns memorably confronted Johns' claims of impersonality, and the same questions of acceptance and decision resurface in Sylvester's writing on Long.
'At Much Hadham, where I was living at this period when I was with him [Moore], we [Moore's assistants] would find things there and put them on the path where he walked, and he'd pick them up and he'd say: 'Look what I've found!' [laughs]'
The obvious way of reading this mischievous play is that of a critique of Moore's fondness of using stones, bones and shells as source material, examples of the 'principles of form and rhythm' he sought to incorporate into his sculpture as outlined in his essay in Unit 1 (1934). Caro and his colleagues, then, cracked the code, planting objects in Moore's path which, when selected by him, demonstrated that his apparent trust in serendipitous encounters with nature was in fact a predictable system. Caro was demonstrating the same sort of thinking that makes Ryan Gander prefer van Doesburg to Mondrian (Ampersand: Notes on a Collection, pp.129-31) as the less deceived.
David Sylvester, in a note on Moore from 1960 made clear what he felt were the limits of Moore's use of natural forms:
'There is something too passive about Moore's acceptance of nature's way of working stone and so on. What we ask of the artist is that he should have a kind of love-hate relationship with nature and that the very intensity of his love should be a motive for destruction [...]'
This was written at a time when Sylvester felt that Moore's adherence to natural processes betrayed a naivety, a lack of rigour. I suspect that he felt this way about Hepworth's work, although his complete indifference to it meant he never wrote enough about it to be sure of that.
By 1968, when Sylvester curated Moore's major 70th birthday exhibition at the Tate, his opinion had changed. Here, in the section 'Stones, Bones, Shells' in the monograph/catalogue for the exhibition, he suggests that Moore's fixation with these objects was to some extent an alibi, which fulfilled 'a need to tell himself that his abstract forms were obeying some authority beyond that of his own instincts'. Particularly in the climate of hostility to abstract art in which Moore developed, Sylvester claims Moore 'was painfully anxious to allay any suspicion that his abstract direction meant a retreat from reality [...] nevertheless, he protests like a man conducting an argument with himself'.
The change in Sylvester's thinking is clear: in 1960 Moore was too content in his ruralism to take entirely seriously; in 1968 he is seen as more complex and conflicted, a man who both wants to express his personal taste and fantasy, but lacks the absolute confidence to do so of a Picasso (hampered in part by a particularly English timidity). The question I couldn't help asking, then, was: if Moore had known that the stones were placed there by Caro rather than appearing by nature's good offices (or if, for argument's sake, if Caro had fashioned a similar-looking object and left it amongst the stones), would that have made them any less worthy of his attention? Maybe Caro (to his own surprise) would have been just as good an alibi as nature.
This need for a 'love-hate' relationship with nature can be found all over Sylvester's writings, and probably has something to do with growing up amongst the earnest neo-Romanticism of the 1940s. Mondrian was for Sylvester the classic case of an artist who approached nature with eyes wide open:
'One of the great landscape-painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters of his generation, comes to find trees monstrous, green fields intolerable'.
More recently, I think this is the reason why Richard Long rejected the catalogue preface which Sylvester wrote for the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial. Long, in a piece published several years later, said of Sylvester:
'he just didn't get my work. It was a classic case of an urban intellectual who didn't have a clue of what it was to walk in the Andes or getting wet in thunderous rain on a Scottish hillside'.
No doubt, and Sylvester's reading of Long's work is more indebted to Jasper Johns than anyone else. In their 1965 interview Sylvester and Johns memorably confronted Johns' claims of impersonality, and the same questions of acceptance and decision resurface in Sylvester's writing on Long.
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
A Certain Doubt
I've always loved the end of Sylvester's autobiographical essay 'Curriculum Vitae' (in About Modern Art, first published 1996), which confronts Sylvester's disappointment at seeing a Giacometti retrospective in 1978, when it occurred to him that:
'Seeking had become- what it never had with Cézanne, say, or with Mondrian- fetishistic.
One day (according to Maurice Jardot) Picasso told Michel Leiris that he felt that the work of their old friend Giacometti was becoming increasingly monotonous and repetitive. Trying to explain and excuse this, Leiris spoke of Giacometti's consuming and intense desire "to find a new solution to the problem of figuration". Picasso answered: "In the first place there isn't any solution, there never is a solution, and that's as it should be.'
This comes, of course, from someone who did perhaps more than anyone else to establish Giacometti's reputation in Britain and whose monograph on the artist (Looking at Giacometti, 1994) was thirty-five years in the making. It's nothing like a loss of faith but an acceptance that opinions change over time.
I quote this because it complements something John Ashbery wrote in 1971 which I recently read, reprinted in Jed Perl's anthology Art in America, 1945-1970. Ashbery notes similarities between Giacometti and Leland Bell, with the caveat that:
'where the latter artist [Giacometti] seems sometimes to have embarked on a hopeless mission, a sort of Penelope's web created only to be rubbed out and rebegun, Bell is not afraid to contemplate completeness [...]'
Ashbery, like Sylvester, knew something about doubt and uncertainty, and like Sylvester, realized that for that uncertainty to become permanent is a parody of itself, a strange kind of certainty.
Of course, there are many similarities between Giacometti and another of Sylvester's passions, Francis Bacon, not the least of which is the knowledge one has in looking at their works that they could so easily have been destroyed, or are perhaps inferior to works which didn't survive. I often think of their surviving works like the fortunate survivors from ancient civilizations, which managed to escape all the opportunities for their destruction (this of course applies in different degrees to all art), with this exchange from Giacometti's interview with Sylvester (in Looking at Giacometti) an indication as to why:
DS: So when we see, say, a standing woman, this sculpture cast in bronze has possibly been made in a couple of hours but had already been done perhaps fifty or a hundred times.
AG: Yes, certainly.
DS: Do you know whether you need this constant repetition for personal reasons or for artistic reasons? And when you've redone something fifty times, is it decidedly better the fiftieth time than it was the twentieth?
AG: Absolutely not. Maybe no better than the first time.
There's always the risk of romanticising the destructive element in Giacometti and Bacon, and no doubt many other artists have gone through the same process without it becoming part of their mystique in this way. But to go back to Giacometti's doubt, one of his differences from Bacon is that I can't imagine Bacon saying this (again from the Looking at Giacometti interview):
'It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether a work is a success or not [...] A failure interests me just as much as a success. And we ought to exhibit our less good works rather than choose the best [...] because if there are others hidden away that aren't so good and don't hold up, even if you don't show them they still exist. And if someone looks very carefully he can see weaknesses even in the best of them. So we should start with the poorest.'
Bacon, the gambler, took risks in his work because he was constantly hoping for the marvellous accident that would produce a masterpiece and define his career, make his time on earth mean something. He took an impersonal view of luck and was happy to accept it. Giacometti, in this statement at any rate, saw every piece as one more plus or minus in the overall tally. The question with Giacometti, which the Picasso anecdote above sums up wonderfully, is this: if Bacon was concerned with 'deepening the game' he thought art had become, was Giacometti refusing to play it? Marla Daniels has that great line from The Wire: "you cannot lose if you do not play".
'Seeking had become- what it never had with Cézanne, say, or with Mondrian- fetishistic.
One day (according to Maurice Jardot) Picasso told Michel Leiris that he felt that the work of their old friend Giacometti was becoming increasingly monotonous and repetitive. Trying to explain and excuse this, Leiris spoke of Giacometti's consuming and intense desire "to find a new solution to the problem of figuration". Picasso answered: "In the first place there isn't any solution, there never is a solution, and that's as it should be.'
This comes, of course, from someone who did perhaps more than anyone else to establish Giacometti's reputation in Britain and whose monograph on the artist (Looking at Giacometti, 1994) was thirty-five years in the making. It's nothing like a loss of faith but an acceptance that opinions change over time.
I quote this because it complements something John Ashbery wrote in 1971 which I recently read, reprinted in Jed Perl's anthology Art in America, 1945-1970. Ashbery notes similarities between Giacometti and Leland Bell, with the caveat that:
'where the latter artist [Giacometti] seems sometimes to have embarked on a hopeless mission, a sort of Penelope's web created only to be rubbed out and rebegun, Bell is not afraid to contemplate completeness [...]'
Ashbery, like Sylvester, knew something about doubt and uncertainty, and like Sylvester, realized that for that uncertainty to become permanent is a parody of itself, a strange kind of certainty.
Of course, there are many similarities between Giacometti and another of Sylvester's passions, Francis Bacon, not the least of which is the knowledge one has in looking at their works that they could so easily have been destroyed, or are perhaps inferior to works which didn't survive. I often think of their surviving works like the fortunate survivors from ancient civilizations, which managed to escape all the opportunities for their destruction (this of course applies in different degrees to all art), with this exchange from Giacometti's interview with Sylvester (in Looking at Giacometti) an indication as to why:
DS: So when we see, say, a standing woman, this sculpture cast in bronze has possibly been made in a couple of hours but had already been done perhaps fifty or a hundred times.
AG: Yes, certainly.
DS: Do you know whether you need this constant repetition for personal reasons or for artistic reasons? And when you've redone something fifty times, is it decidedly better the fiftieth time than it was the twentieth?
AG: Absolutely not. Maybe no better than the first time.
There's always the risk of romanticising the destructive element in Giacometti and Bacon, and no doubt many other artists have gone through the same process without it becoming part of their mystique in this way. But to go back to Giacometti's doubt, one of his differences from Bacon is that I can't imagine Bacon saying this (again from the Looking at Giacometti interview):
'It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether a work is a success or not [...] A failure interests me just as much as a success. And we ought to exhibit our less good works rather than choose the best [...] because if there are others hidden away that aren't so good and don't hold up, even if you don't show them they still exist. And if someone looks very carefully he can see weaknesses even in the best of them. So we should start with the poorest.'
Bacon, the gambler, took risks in his work because he was constantly hoping for the marvellous accident that would produce a masterpiece and define his career, make his time on earth mean something. He took an impersonal view of luck and was happy to accept it. Giacometti, in this statement at any rate, saw every piece as one more plus or minus in the overall tally. The question with Giacometti, which the Picasso anecdote above sums up wonderfully, is this: if Bacon was concerned with 'deepening the game' he thought art had become, was Giacometti refusing to play it? Marla Daniels has that great line from The Wire: "you cannot lose if you do not play".
Thursday, 1 January 2015
Cage
Irving Sandler suggested that John Cage was, apart from everything else he was, 'arguably the most influential critic/theoretician of the second half of the twentieth century'. Sylvester became interested in Cage's work and interviewed him twice (1966 and 1987), as well as writing about his work.
That Sylvester took an interest in Cage is not surprising- Cage's links to artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg played a part, as did his visual arts background and the visual appeal of his scores (the subject of an essay by Sylvester). But what is more interesting is the challenge to Sylvester's own position that represented, because as he stated in a radio discussion in the early 1970s, Sylvester needed the filter of an artist's intelligence to stimulate him. The example he gave was that he couldn't find a fork as found, as interesting as one presented or represented in the terms of an artwork. I expect that a fairly high percentage of those interested in contemporary art would be sympathetic to this view, because of the sense of a discussion or exchange which comes with it.
The irony of Cage's work is that it seeks to undo itself. It is a body of work created by an individual that is dedicated to breaking down the barriers between itself and everything outside itself. As Sylvester wrote of him,
'he is trying to create art that operates like nature- that leaves us to operate on it as we have to on nature. To look harder than art demands because art presents us with a vision, with nature we have to use our own'.
Experiencing Cage's art might then implicitly critique its audience, like an advertisement for a gym on TV. But in the unpublished text from which the above is taken, Sylvester seems to find Cage's work as containing pathos rather than the direct challenge of some of his contemporaries. What I think Sylvester takes from Cage's work is a temporary absorption in nature. In experiencing Cage's work we might have that feeling of being more aware of our surroundings, and wonder why we aren't always (or at least more often) in that state. But soon after the performance ends we go back to normal.
Sylvester was conscious of the way in which art focussed his attention, and wondered what would happen 'if we all went fishing and none of us made works of art'. This again chimes with the interview in which Cage reports that Johns had told him 'that he could imagine a world without any art in it and that he saw no reason for thinking that it would not be a better world than the one we're living in'. The paradox is that it's knowing what we get from art that makes us think that we should be able to get along fine without it.
That Sylvester took an interest in Cage is not surprising- Cage's links to artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg played a part, as did his visual arts background and the visual appeal of his scores (the subject of an essay by Sylvester). But what is more interesting is the challenge to Sylvester's own position that represented, because as he stated in a radio discussion in the early 1970s, Sylvester needed the filter of an artist's intelligence to stimulate him. The example he gave was that he couldn't find a fork as found, as interesting as one presented or represented in the terms of an artwork. I expect that a fairly high percentage of those interested in contemporary art would be sympathetic to this view, because of the sense of a discussion or exchange which comes with it.
The irony of Cage's work is that it seeks to undo itself. It is a body of work created by an individual that is dedicated to breaking down the barriers between itself and everything outside itself. As Sylvester wrote of him,
'he is trying to create art that operates like nature- that leaves us to operate on it as we have to on nature. To look harder than art demands because art presents us with a vision, with nature we have to use our own'.
Experiencing Cage's art might then implicitly critique its audience, like an advertisement for a gym on TV. But in the unpublished text from which the above is taken, Sylvester seems to find Cage's work as containing pathos rather than the direct challenge of some of his contemporaries. What I think Sylvester takes from Cage's work is a temporary absorption in nature. In experiencing Cage's work we might have that feeling of being more aware of our surroundings, and wonder why we aren't always (or at least more often) in that state. But soon after the performance ends we go back to normal.
Sylvester was conscious of the way in which art focussed his attention, and wondered what would happen 'if we all went fishing and none of us made works of art'. This again chimes with the interview in which Cage reports that Johns had told him 'that he could imagine a world without any art in it and that he saw no reason for thinking that it would not be a better world than the one we're living in'. The paradox is that it's knowing what we get from art that makes us think that we should be able to get along fine without it.
Thursday, 18 December 2014
8 words about Lichtenstein
I've just come across a text Sylvester wrote about Roy Lichtenstein in 1997 (soon after the artist's death, I believe), which prefaced a slim volume containing his two interviews with the Pop artist (from 1966 and 1997). I wanted to write something quickly about the last sentence, because it's one of those instances where I'm reminded again what I like most about Sylvester. To put it in context, it concludes a paragraph discussing Lichtenstein's 'constant tentativeness'. I'll give the final few sentences:
With Pop Art, where, as Lichtenstein says, "before you start painting the painting, you know exactly what it's going to look like", it might be supposed that the artist, before he starts painting any painting, knows exactly what he's trying to do. But Lichtenstein did not know exactly what he was trying to do- for all the acuity of his intelligence- did not quite know what he was aiming to achieve in terms of form, was far from being sure what his attitude was towards his subject matter. He says that Cubism was the main source of his style. Among the Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger knew exactly what they were trying to do. Braque and Picasso were working in the dark. It probably always is like that in art.
What I like about it is how Sylvester demonstrates such precision and conciseness but doesn't get carried away by it. For argument's sake, imagine that by some miracle I'd managed to write the sentences above, bar the last. At that point, I would be feeling so pleased with myself for having written the sentences 'Among the Cubists...in the dark' that I'd be thinking 'now for the final flourish', the same way I sign my name with an ostentatious swipe at the end. I can imagine myself, or many other lesser writers for that matter, concluding with either 'That's how art is' or 'That's how it goes'.
What I definitely wouldn't do is put two adverbs together- 'probably always'? Anyone who does that isn't putting style first. I expect Sylvester could've come up with something more emphatic and elegant, even by just leaving out 'probably', which would fit better in a sense. But like Lichtenstein, he wasn't certain. Even as he puts his case so persuasively, he doesn't preclude the chance someone will come back with a counter-example. He doesn't try to dazzle you with his style, even if he nonetheless does.
Monday, 8 December 2014
not writing
The inverse of looking at Sylvester's writings is the shape of all the things he didn't write about. I started thinking about this when looking at the contents of his selected essays, About Modern Art and considering the decisions made to arrive at that selection. Very few writings about British artists, for example (as with the Tate Modern show he was working on at the end of his life, and which opened posthumously).
I started listing all the artists who were significant to Sylvester at one point or another in his career but were absent from the final selection- Freud, Nolan, Paolozzi, Laurens, Richier, etc. And of course the compilation of About Modern Art is significant as a combined verdict on the artists Sylvester wrote about, and his opinion of his own writing on them. I don't doubt, for instance, that he would have refuted any suggestion that the selection was purely based on either the quality of the artists, or the quality of his writing.
But at this moment, having stumbled upon an unpublished declaration from him that 'Velasquez is the greatest painter' (as Francis Bacon would surely have agreed), the more interesting question is: why did a critic of Sylvester's calibre write so little about Velasquez and the old masters he admired so much? In the preface to About Modern Art he expresses regret over this 'silence' on so many subjects- antiquities, pre-nineteenth century art, modern architecture.
Since critics make a living from giving their opinions, it's unsurprising that many are willing to hold forth on any given subject. Listening to the New York Times' Roberta Smith at Tate Britain recently, I was deeply impressed but her commitment and pragmatism to the metier of the critic. Among my list of quotes from the event is something about
'cyclical pain + enforced amnesia of criticism, always the next deadline > continual redemption'
although some of those words should perhaps be attributed to Adrian Searle of the Guardian, who was in the audience and spoke in relation to this.
Sylvester spent a decade or so writing regular criticism for weekly magazines and was no doubt familiar with the pain of quick and partial judgments. For one type of critic, this pain is alleviated by the continual cycle of constant redemption (the old canard about try-fail-try again-fail better might apply). And certainly the abiding impression left by Smith's talk recently was how inevitable she made her work sound. When the questions from the audience included a couple of familiar concerns about the method behind her work, she brushed them aside effortlessly. (The most memorable moment was when she answered a question about the criticism's relation to market forces with an eloquent pause which said all she needed to. What she subsequently said was merely a reiteration). But Sylvester wrote that working for the New Statesman 'was by its nature using me up'. Entropy set it. Over time the writing got harder, not easier, and while he continued to write regularly (particularly in the 1990s), it tended to focus in on a select group of artists whose work he knew well. He turned down invitations to write about artists whose work he knew inside out if he had nothing new to add, and wrote that it could take him twenty years to find something to say about an artist. In many cases that day never came.
Certainly, one way of considering the critic is someone who can turn their hand to anything, and Sylvester's radio broadcasts show that he could perform admirably in a Front Row/Culture Show setting for a time, although again over time his pauses became longer, and he became increasingly resistant to the quick-draw sport of TV and radio panels. I've been told that for Sylvester, taking everything equally seriously was a way of coping with the world, but if so that didn't cause him to think he could write about everything.
Some people would see that as a weakness, but I see it as Sylvester's recognition of his abilities and place in the world which is deeply serious and reasonable. I can't imagine the frustration it must have caused him not to have written a remarkable essay about Velasquez or Michelangelo, and to have reconciled all of those fragmentary affirmations found throughout his writings. But he seemingliy preferred to regret the things he hadn't written to those he had.
I started listing all the artists who were significant to Sylvester at one point or another in his career but were absent from the final selection- Freud, Nolan, Paolozzi, Laurens, Richier, etc. And of course the compilation of About Modern Art is significant as a combined verdict on the artists Sylvester wrote about, and his opinion of his own writing on them. I don't doubt, for instance, that he would have refuted any suggestion that the selection was purely based on either the quality of the artists, or the quality of his writing.
But at this moment, having stumbled upon an unpublished declaration from him that 'Velasquez is the greatest painter' (as Francis Bacon would surely have agreed), the more interesting question is: why did a critic of Sylvester's calibre write so little about Velasquez and the old masters he admired so much? In the preface to About Modern Art he expresses regret over this 'silence' on so many subjects- antiquities, pre-nineteenth century art, modern architecture.
Since critics make a living from giving their opinions, it's unsurprising that many are willing to hold forth on any given subject. Listening to the New York Times' Roberta Smith at Tate Britain recently, I was deeply impressed but her commitment and pragmatism to the metier of the critic. Among my list of quotes from the event is something about
'cyclical pain + enforced amnesia of criticism, always the next deadline > continual redemption'
although some of those words should perhaps be attributed to Adrian Searle of the Guardian, who was in the audience and spoke in relation to this.
Sylvester spent a decade or so writing regular criticism for weekly magazines and was no doubt familiar with the pain of quick and partial judgments. For one type of critic, this pain is alleviated by the continual cycle of constant redemption (the old canard about try-fail-try again-fail better might apply). And certainly the abiding impression left by Smith's talk recently was how inevitable she made her work sound. When the questions from the audience included a couple of familiar concerns about the method behind her work, she brushed them aside effortlessly. (The most memorable moment was when she answered a question about the criticism's relation to market forces with an eloquent pause which said all she needed to. What she subsequently said was merely a reiteration). But Sylvester wrote that working for the New Statesman 'was by its nature using me up'. Entropy set it. Over time the writing got harder, not easier, and while he continued to write regularly (particularly in the 1990s), it tended to focus in on a select group of artists whose work he knew well. He turned down invitations to write about artists whose work he knew inside out if he had nothing new to add, and wrote that it could take him twenty years to find something to say about an artist. In many cases that day never came.
Certainly, one way of considering the critic is someone who can turn their hand to anything, and Sylvester's radio broadcasts show that he could perform admirably in a Front Row/Culture Show setting for a time, although again over time his pauses became longer, and he became increasingly resistant to the quick-draw sport of TV and radio panels. I've been told that for Sylvester, taking everything equally seriously was a way of coping with the world, but if so that didn't cause him to think he could write about everything.
Some people would see that as a weakness, but I see it as Sylvester's recognition of his abilities and place in the world which is deeply serious and reasonable. I can't imagine the frustration it must have caused him not to have written a remarkable essay about Velasquez or Michelangelo, and to have reconciled all of those fragmentary affirmations found throughout his writings. But he seemingliy preferred to regret the things he hadn't written to those he had.
Friday, 26 September 2014
Koons
Living in London, I've not seen the major Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney, but I've felt the reverberations. Every few days, I'd notice another review, many of which were very positive. Jerry Saltz was as good as always, but I was more interested in a couple of very negative reviews, by Jed Perl and Travis Diehl. This was because they seemed to share one belief: that you can damn Koons' art without really saying anything about it as art. There is next to nothing in either piece about responding to Koons' art in any particularity, no sense of anything beyond a disgusted flick through the catalogue. And in a sense, maybe it's not needed. Koons' art is about as well-known as it gets, and Diehl certainly takes the position that it's up to the essayists in the exhibition catalogue (who he takes to task one by one) to convince him that Koons is worth all the fuss. At this juncture, the combination of David-facing-Goliath pluck and Emperor's New Clothes certainty seems as good as any, and the conclusions don't surprise me. What I think deserves a mention, however, is their open hostility whenever the matter of engaging with Koons' art as art objects arises.
Take Diehl disregarding neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's essay on Koons and our fascination with shiny surfaces. Without having read the essay, I thought the passage quoted sounded like a promising approach to what happens when we look at Koons' work. But no, 'although his [Damasio's] essay may have something to say about the nature of creative activity, it adds little to our thinking about Koons'. But Perl is much stronger in disregarding individual responses to Koons' art. For instance:
"In the very first paragraph of his catalog introduction, Scott Rothkopf quotes the late Robert Rosenblum, a distinguished student of nineteenth-century neoclassicism who doubled as a critic of contemporary art, declaring in 1993 that “Koons is certainly the artist who has most upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the last decade.” Later in the Whitney catalog, the art historian Alexander Nagel recalls his first encounter with Koons’s work—the “Banality” series at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1988—and explains that it “made me a little sick, even as I felt an almost irresistible invitation to submit to it.”
I would have hoped that by now everybody agreed that not all unease is equal. Why should we imagine that because once upon a time certain gallerygoers were troubled by something that they later came to admire, then it follows that anything that troubles a gallerygoer is necessarily worthy of admiration? Just because it makes you sick doesn’t mean that it’s any good. I am not saying that either Rosenblum or Nagel, both scholars widely admired for their erudition, would take this view. But there is no doubt in my mind that Koons is alert to a tendency on the part of the art audience to submit—to submit to something (to anything) that exerts a certain discomfiting power. This is the S&M of the contemporary art world, with the audience angling for an opportunity to grovel at the feet of the superstar."
So Rosenblum and Nagel (who is also treated condescendingly by Diehl for his catalogue essay) are basically shot down for trying to articulate something specific, and it seems to me that, while being terribly polite about it, Perl is saying that they have been duped by someone with a grasp of what people want, as if Koons were the porn baron of the art world. All of this is pretty exciting, because it really invites questions about our responses to artworks and where the meaning lies. The passages I've quoted both touch on the question of how much our feelings about these works should be interrogated or even trusted- how much in doing so we would be simply participating in 'the S&M of the contemporary art world'.
But of course there is a Sylvester connection here, as Sylvester interviewed Koons twice 2000 (the interview was published in Sylvester's Interviews with American Artists). Naturally, for a critic whose writing on art spans from World War II up to the start of the 21st century, Sylvester saw many changes in the art world, and his enthusiasm for Koons surprised me at first. This from a man who learnt about sculpture from watching Moore and Giacometti at work! The author of a perhaps the most famous series of artist interviews ever (with Francis Bacon) wanting to interview Jeff Koons?! (In fact, as Perl reminds us, the curator Norman Rosenthal has just completed a book of interviews with Koons 'in which the artist at moments imagines himself a sort of philosophe of the twelve-step program'.) But Sylvester, who had interviewed Duchamp, had co-authored the Magritte catalogue raisonné, knew what he thought. Reading a review of Interviews with American Artists somewhere, I distinctly remember how, in a generally very positive article about the book, the author picked up on Sylvester's comment to Koons that 'The chocolate-chip cookies [in Hair] are a very erotic image or an alternative to a very erotic image' was a sign of how the interviews became a little ridiculous in places, or something to that effect.
Take Diehl disregarding neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's essay on Koons and our fascination with shiny surfaces. Without having read the essay, I thought the passage quoted sounded like a promising approach to what happens when we look at Koons' work. But no, 'although his [Damasio's] essay may have something to say about the nature of creative activity, it adds little to our thinking about Koons'. But Perl is much stronger in disregarding individual responses to Koons' art. For instance:
"In the very first paragraph of his catalog introduction, Scott Rothkopf quotes the late Robert Rosenblum, a distinguished student of nineteenth-century neoclassicism who doubled as a critic of contemporary art, declaring in 1993 that “Koons is certainly the artist who has most upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the last decade.” Later in the Whitney catalog, the art historian Alexander Nagel recalls his first encounter with Koons’s work—the “Banality” series at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1988—and explains that it “made me a little sick, even as I felt an almost irresistible invitation to submit to it.”
I would have hoped that by now everybody agreed that not all unease is equal. Why should we imagine that because once upon a time certain gallerygoers were troubled by something that they later came to admire, then it follows that anything that troubles a gallerygoer is necessarily worthy of admiration? Just because it makes you sick doesn’t mean that it’s any good. I am not saying that either Rosenblum or Nagel, both scholars widely admired for their erudition, would take this view. But there is no doubt in my mind that Koons is alert to a tendency on the part of the art audience to submit—to submit to something (to anything) that exerts a certain discomfiting power. This is the S&M of the contemporary art world, with the audience angling for an opportunity to grovel at the feet of the superstar."
So Rosenblum and Nagel (who is also treated condescendingly by Diehl for his catalogue essay) are basically shot down for trying to articulate something specific, and it seems to me that, while being terribly polite about it, Perl is saying that they have been duped by someone with a grasp of what people want, as if Koons were the porn baron of the art world. All of this is pretty exciting, because it really invites questions about our responses to artworks and where the meaning lies. The passages I've quoted both touch on the question of how much our feelings about these works should be interrogated or even trusted- how much in doing so we would be simply participating in 'the S&M of the contemporary art world'.
But of course there is a Sylvester connection here, as Sylvester interviewed Koons twice 2000 (the interview was published in Sylvester's Interviews with American Artists). Naturally, for a critic whose writing on art spans from World War II up to the start of the 21st century, Sylvester saw many changes in the art world, and his enthusiasm for Koons surprised me at first. This from a man who learnt about sculpture from watching Moore and Giacometti at work! The author of a perhaps the most famous series of artist interviews ever (with Francis Bacon) wanting to interview Jeff Koons?! (In fact, as Perl reminds us, the curator Norman Rosenthal has just completed a book of interviews with Koons 'in which the artist at moments imagines himself a sort of philosophe of the twelve-step program'.) But Sylvester, who had interviewed Duchamp, had co-authored the Magritte catalogue raisonné, knew what he thought. Reading a review of Interviews with American Artists somewhere, I distinctly remember how, in a generally very positive article about the book, the author picked up on Sylvester's comment to Koons that 'The chocolate-chip cookies [in Hair] are a very erotic image or an alternative to a very erotic image' was a sign of how the interviews became a little ridiculous in places, or something to that effect.
But actually, reading Sylvester's interview after these 'conservative harangues' (to take one of James Elkins' seven categories of art criticism) it was comments like these that I enjoyed most. Sylvester wrote that one of the most important things about an interview was that the interviewer shouldn't be afraid to look silly, and it's his engagement with the works rather than an idea of the works which is what sets him apart. Not that I'm a particular fan of Koons' work (although I thought his Bear and Policeman stood out a mile from most of the work in the lacklustre 'The Human Factor' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery recently), but if he is to be critiqued, it ought to be more specific than the sort of criticism that takes him as a symbol of all the art world's ills.
But I did enjoy the question of 'acceptance' which comes up in Diehl's review (he uses the word fourteen times) and which does seem to relate to something more widely. Because Sylvester had written early on about the acceptance, the democracy of vision in Rembrandt and Cézanne. This, you could say feeds into Pop Art and its exponents looking to use the most striking visual material around them and in Lichtenstein's words 'to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different'. Now for Diehl, 'acceptance' is synonymous with 'uncritical', it means that Koons work short-circuits criticism by implicitly mocking its refusal to accept. This is the language of self-help books. But I think there must be more to it than this. Look up how many senses of the word there are in a good dictionary. I particularly like the duality of accepting in an active sense (I accept your invitation) and in a more resigned sense (I accept your criticism was valid). If there is something to be said about Koons and acceptance, I think it lies somewhere in this strange double meaning.
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