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 But in the unpublished text from which the above is taken, Sylvester seems to find Cage's work as containing pathos rather than the direct challenge of some of his contemporaries.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.
Thursday, 1 January 2015
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.
Thursday, 14 August 2014
Sylvester, Agee, Bacall
The payoff of the eye-shredding microfilm research I've been doing to research Sylvester's extensive and little-documented broadcasting career, is that it has turned up some wonderful cameos. By chance, I've just come across one of these: a tribute to James Agee's film criticism from 1959. As his first example of Agee's criticism, he quotes from Agee's reviews of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. I use the plural because Agee wrote for both Time and the Nation. In the tributes to Bacall over the last couple of days, many have quoted from one of these reviews, depending on the writer's purpose. To convey the dazzling impact of Bacall's debut, the Time review gets quoted, usually from either the beginning or end of this paragraph (see the Boston Globe or the Express :
'Lauren Bacall has cinema personality to burn and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded partly of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She has a javelinlike vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With those faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence...she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while'.
Other websites like the New York Times and the Telegraph chose to quote from the Nation review instead:
'Whether you like the film will depend I believe almost entirely on whether you like Miss Bacall. I am no judge. I can hardly look at her, much less listen to her- she has a voice like a chorus by Kid Ory- without getting caught in a dilemma between a low whistle and a belly laugh. It has been years since I have seen such amusing pseudo-toughness on the screen'.
The point for Sylvester is that Agee was writing for two publications with different audiences and different requirements:
'In The Nation he was writing for a small, intelligent left-ish audience who, he could assume, shared his values and standards. In Time he was writing for the American people at large, and couldn't take as much for granted...In The Nation, Agee is more expansive, less glittering, more relaxed than in his unsigned piece in Time: he takes the reader into his confidence, he writes about himself: this is his column. In Time he is the brilliant journalist, in The Nation, the evocative, ruminative essayist'.
I haven't quoted from Agee to the extent that Sylvester did, but the difference is still clear, both in style and in judgement. Compare, for example 'the toughest girl...' with 'pseudo-toughness'. And there is a strange echo of Sylvester's point in the obituaries of Bacall, in whether they chose to quote from the safety of the Time review or to risk selecting from the more nuanced Nation piece.
This piece is relevant to me is because Sylvester was in the same situation. At around this time he was writing for various different publications, in the US as well as the UK, and making broadcasts across the Third Programme, Home Service and Light Programme (occasional film reviews on 'Woman's Hour'). I'm often asked, and often ask myself, how much of a difference this made to his writing, and I think this broadcast on Agee is proof that he was very much concerned with the question of readership. It would have been more obvious to just talk about how brilliant Agee was, regardless of who he was writing for, but Sylvester deliberately distinguishes between the outlets Agee was writing for, as if I were to make the same distinction in Sylvester's own work.
The second extract Sylvester chooses to discuss is Agee on Buster Keaton. The quotation is long, again, the length of quotation that goes beyond its illustrative requirement and starts to seem like Sylvester was enjoying the words so much that he didn't want to stop. This is just part of it:
'No other comedian could do as much with the dead pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity' mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances: how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue. His short-legged body was all sudden, machinelike angles, governed by a daft aplomb. When he swept a semaphorelike arm to point, you could almost hear the electrical impulse in the signal block. When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jogtrot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint- always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face- were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift'.
Sylvester chose this extract to show that as a critic Agee stays on the surface- he doesn't try to establish general principles about cinema, but 'he was a supremely sensitive reactor'. In a reliably brilliant review for Hyperallergic recently, Barry Schwabsky begins:
'I have a habit, when reading a good book of poetry, of looking for the places where the poet seems to be reflecting on his or her own sense of what poetry is'.
I'm a bit like that with Sylvester's broadcasting. In these hundreds of programmes which aren't about art, what I'm hoping for is something that, however obliquely, is going to illuminate the art criticism which I'm primarily focused on. And that's what I get from Sylvester's conclusions about Agee. 'He doesn't try, as Warshow does, to work out general principles about the nature of our experience of the movies. He evokes, he translates the images on the screen into verbal images'. I don't think it would be right to say Sylvester identifies with Agee, and certainly not that he is identifying himself in opposition to him. But he does, at least, show he has formed these categories. Sometimes Sylvester produces verbal images, sometimes he seems to have some general principles, but it's useful to think he was aware of himself drifting between those two poles.
'Lauren Bacall has cinema personality to burn and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded partly of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She has a javelinlike vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With those faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence...she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while'.
Other websites like the New York Times and the Telegraph chose to quote from the Nation review instead:
'Whether you like the film will depend I believe almost entirely on whether you like Miss Bacall. I am no judge. I can hardly look at her, much less listen to her- she has a voice like a chorus by Kid Ory- without getting caught in a dilemma between a low whistle and a belly laugh. It has been years since I have seen such amusing pseudo-toughness on the screen'.
The point for Sylvester is that Agee was writing for two publications with different audiences and different requirements:
'In The Nation he was writing for a small, intelligent left-ish audience who, he could assume, shared his values and standards. In Time he was writing for the American people at large, and couldn't take as much for granted...In The Nation, Agee is more expansive, less glittering, more relaxed than in his unsigned piece in Time: he takes the reader into his confidence, he writes about himself: this is his column. In Time he is the brilliant journalist, in The Nation, the evocative, ruminative essayist'.
I haven't quoted from Agee to the extent that Sylvester did, but the difference is still clear, both in style and in judgement. Compare, for example 'the toughest girl...' with 'pseudo-toughness'. And there is a strange echo of Sylvester's point in the obituaries of Bacall, in whether they chose to quote from the safety of the Time review or to risk selecting from the more nuanced Nation piece.
This piece is relevant to me is because Sylvester was in the same situation. At around this time he was writing for various different publications, in the US as well as the UK, and making broadcasts across the Third Programme, Home Service and Light Programme (occasional film reviews on 'Woman's Hour'). I'm often asked, and often ask myself, how much of a difference this made to his writing, and I think this broadcast on Agee is proof that he was very much concerned with the question of readership. It would have been more obvious to just talk about how brilliant Agee was, regardless of who he was writing for, but Sylvester deliberately distinguishes between the outlets Agee was writing for, as if I were to make the same distinction in Sylvester's own work.
The second extract Sylvester chooses to discuss is Agee on Buster Keaton. The quotation is long, again, the length of quotation that goes beyond its illustrative requirement and starts to seem like Sylvester was enjoying the words so much that he didn't want to stop. This is just part of it:
'No other comedian could do as much with the dead pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity' mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances: how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue. His short-legged body was all sudden, machinelike angles, governed by a daft aplomb. When he swept a semaphorelike arm to point, you could almost hear the electrical impulse in the signal block. When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jogtrot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint- always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face- were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift'.
Sylvester chose this extract to show that as a critic Agee stays on the surface- he doesn't try to establish general principles about cinema, but 'he was a supremely sensitive reactor'. In a reliably brilliant review for Hyperallergic recently, Barry Schwabsky begins:
'I have a habit, when reading a good book of poetry, of looking for the places where the poet seems to be reflecting on his or her own sense of what poetry is'.
I'm a bit like that with Sylvester's broadcasting. In these hundreds of programmes which aren't about art, what I'm hoping for is something that, however obliquely, is going to illuminate the art criticism which I'm primarily focused on. And that's what I get from Sylvester's conclusions about Agee. 'He doesn't try, as Warshow does, to work out general principles about the nature of our experience of the movies. He evokes, he translates the images on the screen into verbal images'. I don't think it would be right to say Sylvester identifies with Agee, and certainly not that he is identifying himself in opposition to him. But he does, at least, show he has formed these categories. Sometimes Sylvester produces verbal images, sometimes he seems to have some general principles, but it's useful to think he was aware of himself drifting between those two poles.
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
Sylvester and Hamilton
One of the puzzling lacunae in Sylvester's criticism of the 50s and early 60s is the lack of references to Richard Hamilton. For one thing, Hamilton was one of the first artists Sylvester met on the West End drinking circle which provided him with so much of his education:
'We met in 1941, when I was seventeen and he was nineteen and, having done two years at the Royal Academy Schools, was working as a jig and tool draughtsman [...] The place where we met was not one of those Soho pubs- known as the Swiss and the French- which a lot of artists used at the time but a nearby club, the Nightlight, located in a basement in Little Newport Street, which stocked sloe gin and had cabaret in which performers such as Vida Hope and Peter Ustinov appeared. Richard was often there, accompanied by an older woman called Inge [Osterly] who looked every inch an Inge. They invited me one evening to a flat off Baker Street and Richard showed me a portfolio of etchings [...]'
This passage is taken from the long introduction which Sylvester wrote for the major Hamilton exhibition at the d'Offay gallery in 1991, but after that early acquaintance, he features little during Sylvester's work in the 1950s. And it's not as if they weren't moving in the same circles- both were closely affiliated with the ICA in the early fifties. Sylvester was on the exhibitions committee before resigning in 1952, later claiming it was because the meetings were so boring. He also helped organise exhibitions there such as 1952's 'Recent Trends in Realist Painting'. Indeed, four works by Hamilton were included in the 1953 ICA exhibition 'Young Painters' for which Sylvester was on the hanging committee and wrote the introduction.
But after that there is very little. Sylvester didn't review most of the key exhibitions Hamilton was involved with in the 1950s, such as 'Growth and Form' and 'Man, Machine and Motion' (which he recalled as 'remarkable' in the d'Offay text). He did comment upon another celebrated ICA exhibition, 'Parallel of Life and Art' at the time, but criticised the 'inconsequentiality' of the display, and described it as 'an exhibition whose meaning and purpose seem as obscure and muddled as its title'. This and other more indirect comments scattered throughout his criticism in that decade show a wariness about the Independent Group's approach to mass-media and new forms of exhibition making.
In an article about artist's statements in 1961, Hamilton was singled out (alongside Auerbach and Denny) as demonstrating in their writings 'that artists get their information not from reading books but from conversations in bars. Most of them write, that is to say, with an embarrassing lack of historical perspective' (Hamilton was taken to task for claiming 'affirmation propounded as an avante [sic] garde aesthetic is rare').
Sylvester did review one of Hamilton's 50s exhibitions at length, 'an Exhibit' (recently revived again upstairs at the ICA), which he wrote about enthusiastically in a review 'which I think I wrote for the New Statesman' which was not published at the time (I wish I knew why) but which appeared in Modern Painters following the death of Victor Pasmore in 1998, as a tribute to the artist (I wrote a little more about that review here. But then the 'kind of earthly paradise' of 'an Exhibit' was an entirely different proposition to 'This is Tomorrow' or 'Man, Machine and Motion'. Sylvester's affirmation for this most classical of Hamilton's ventures only reinforces, perhaps his distance from most Independent Group projects at the time.
But I'm not trying to show that Sylvester was slow to catch onto Hamilton. Rather, without having done the necessary research, I'm pondering how visible Hamilton's own work was at the time. Without a one-man show to his name between 1955 and 1964 (when he showed the 'tabular paintings' as a group at the Hanover Gallery), I wonder how widely-known his work was outside the IG (and of course Hamilton and his associates were prolific writers anyway). Sylvester at least illustrated Hamilton's work and described him as a 'committedly Pop artist' in his well-known Sunday Times Magazine article 'Art in a Coke Climate' in 1964, but even there, he receives no further comment in an article dominated by artists such as Lichtenstein and Johns. In the long bibliography in the catalogue for the recent Tate Modern show, hardly anything before 1964 is listed, apart from writing by Independent Group associates. My idle question is simply whether Sylvester's silence on Hamilton at the time was one of active avoidance or simply, as with Lucian Freud during the same period, part of a critical consensus.
'We met in 1941, when I was seventeen and he was nineteen and, having done two years at the Royal Academy Schools, was working as a jig and tool draughtsman [...] The place where we met was not one of those Soho pubs- known as the Swiss and the French- which a lot of artists used at the time but a nearby club, the Nightlight, located in a basement in Little Newport Street, which stocked sloe gin and had cabaret in which performers such as Vida Hope and Peter Ustinov appeared. Richard was often there, accompanied by an older woman called Inge [Osterly] who looked every inch an Inge. They invited me one evening to a flat off Baker Street and Richard showed me a portfolio of etchings [...]'
This passage is taken from the long introduction which Sylvester wrote for the major Hamilton exhibition at the d'Offay gallery in 1991, but after that early acquaintance, he features little during Sylvester's work in the 1950s. And it's not as if they weren't moving in the same circles- both were closely affiliated with the ICA in the early fifties. Sylvester was on the exhibitions committee before resigning in 1952, later claiming it was because the meetings were so boring. He also helped organise exhibitions there such as 1952's 'Recent Trends in Realist Painting'. Indeed, four works by Hamilton were included in the 1953 ICA exhibition 'Young Painters' for which Sylvester was on the hanging committee and wrote the introduction.
But after that there is very little. Sylvester didn't review most of the key exhibitions Hamilton was involved with in the 1950s, such as 'Growth and Form' and 'Man, Machine and Motion' (which he recalled as 'remarkable' in the d'Offay text). He did comment upon another celebrated ICA exhibition, 'Parallel of Life and Art' at the time, but criticised the 'inconsequentiality' of the display, and described it as 'an exhibition whose meaning and purpose seem as obscure and muddled as its title'. This and other more indirect comments scattered throughout his criticism in that decade show a wariness about the Independent Group's approach to mass-media and new forms of exhibition making.
In an article about artist's statements in 1961, Hamilton was singled out (alongside Auerbach and Denny) as demonstrating in their writings 'that artists get their information not from reading books but from conversations in bars. Most of them write, that is to say, with an embarrassing lack of historical perspective' (Hamilton was taken to task for claiming 'affirmation propounded as an avante [sic] garde aesthetic is rare').
Sylvester did review one of Hamilton's 50s exhibitions at length, 'an Exhibit' (recently revived again upstairs at the ICA), which he wrote about enthusiastically in a review 'which I think I wrote for the New Statesman' which was not published at the time (I wish I knew why) but which appeared in Modern Painters following the death of Victor Pasmore in 1998, as a tribute to the artist (I wrote a little more about that review here. But then the 'kind of earthly paradise' of 'an Exhibit' was an entirely different proposition to 'This is Tomorrow' or 'Man, Machine and Motion'. Sylvester's affirmation for this most classical of Hamilton's ventures only reinforces, perhaps his distance from most Independent Group projects at the time.
But I'm not trying to show that Sylvester was slow to catch onto Hamilton. Rather, without having done the necessary research, I'm pondering how visible Hamilton's own work was at the time. Without a one-man show to his name between 1955 and 1964 (when he showed the 'tabular paintings' as a group at the Hanover Gallery), I wonder how widely-known his work was outside the IG (and of course Hamilton and his associates were prolific writers anyway). Sylvester at least illustrated Hamilton's work and described him as a 'committedly Pop artist' in his well-known Sunday Times Magazine article 'Art in a Coke Climate' in 1964, but even there, he receives no further comment in an article dominated by artists such as Lichtenstein and Johns. In the long bibliography in the catalogue for the recent Tate Modern show, hardly anything before 1964 is listed, apart from writing by Independent Group associates. My idle question is simply whether Sylvester's silence on Hamilton at the time was one of active avoidance or simply, as with Lucian Freud during the same period, part of a critical consensus.
Tuesday, 3 June 2014
Steinberg on Picasso
I've been reading Leo Steinberg's Other Criteria, Steinberg being one of Sylvester's acknowledged heroes amongst art writers. Steinberg's book covers several of Sylvester's favoured artists- Pollock, de Kooning, Rodin (who Sylvester greatly admired even if he hardly wrote a word about), Johns. The centrepiece of the book, however, is the three articles on Picasso- short pieces on 'sleepwatchers' and skulls in his work, followed by the wonderful long essay 'The Algerian Women and Picasso At Large'.
I'm interested by Sylvester's developing attitude towards Picasso, as he was initially perplexed by much of Picasso's late work. Looking back, he recalled that he 'started being hostile to Picasso in print in 1948', and that while reviewing Matisse in 1953 he 'made a resolve that my career as a critic was to be dedicated above all [...] to establishing that Matisse was a greater artist than Picasso'. Visting the show of Matisse papiers découpés at Tate Modern I wonder what he would've thought of it.
Steinberg's essay has drawn my attention to two rather obvious things, but ones which, given Sylvester's early enthusiasms, I'm surprised he didn't reflect upon in his writing of the time. Firstly, how Picasso, like Francis Bacon, didn't just focus his attention upon the figure, but often seemed to disregard everything beyond it: 'One can look at a hundred Picasso paintings of seated figures with conflated faces; the near-neutral backgrounds suggest that the artist does not consider backgrounds important. To a modern esthetic concerned with the "field," this can look like an obsolete academic attitude'.
This is one reason why, with the emphasis Sylvester placed upon representations of the human body in the fifties (not just Bacon but also Giacometti, de Kooning and Dubuffet) Picasso might've appealed to him more on that basis than was the case.
Another is the multiple perspectives of Picasso's wartime still-lives and most abstract drawings such as his Study for L'Aubade (May 5, 1942) which Steinberg describes thus:
'It is a controlled grid of multiple spatial directives. The lines moving in parallels define intersecting space lanes- like star trails, directions for indoor galaxies. But each single line also converges somewhere with another- the sets of convergences being programmed to convey vanishing points to dispersed destinations. A counterpoint, then, of two merging themes- indoor space lanes and lines of sight, criss-crossing in a kind of charted ubiquity. It is this space, with its invertible depths and its linear events generated by optical capabilities, which ideally enfolds Picasso's simultaneity images. It is a space inside a cat's cradle, every tensor in readiness for instant transfer; a contractile, expansive, collapsible space'.
Compare this with Sylvester's early writing on Klee and the similarities with the restless, all-over quality he writes about in Klee's late paintings is striking. Given Sylvester's friendship with Picasso's dealer Kahnweiler it's fair to assume he must've known Picasso's work reasonably well, and he certainly wrote about it often enough. I suspect the variety of Picasso's work might've been an issue. Syvlester identified Picasso as a great sculptor early on, but took some time to see, as he did after the 1960 Tate exhibition, that unlike a painter of masterpieces such as Matisse, Picasso's greatness lay in the spaces between the works.
I'm interested by Sylvester's developing attitude towards Picasso, as he was initially perplexed by much of Picasso's late work. Looking back, he recalled that he 'started being hostile to Picasso in print in 1948', and that while reviewing Matisse in 1953 he 'made a resolve that my career as a critic was to be dedicated above all [...] to establishing that Matisse was a greater artist than Picasso'. Visting the show of Matisse papiers découpés at Tate Modern I wonder what he would've thought of it.
Steinberg's essay has drawn my attention to two rather obvious things, but ones which, given Sylvester's early enthusiasms, I'm surprised he didn't reflect upon in his writing of the time. Firstly, how Picasso, like Francis Bacon, didn't just focus his attention upon the figure, but often seemed to disregard everything beyond it: 'One can look at a hundred Picasso paintings of seated figures with conflated faces; the near-neutral backgrounds suggest that the artist does not consider backgrounds important. To a modern esthetic concerned with the "field," this can look like an obsolete academic attitude'.
This is one reason why, with the emphasis Sylvester placed upon representations of the human body in the fifties (not just Bacon but also Giacometti, de Kooning and Dubuffet) Picasso might've appealed to him more on that basis than was the case.
Another is the multiple perspectives of Picasso's wartime still-lives and most abstract drawings such as his Study for L'Aubade (May 5, 1942) which Steinberg describes thus:
'It is a controlled grid of multiple spatial directives. The lines moving in parallels define intersecting space lanes- like star trails, directions for indoor galaxies. But each single line also converges somewhere with another- the sets of convergences being programmed to convey vanishing points to dispersed destinations. A counterpoint, then, of two merging themes- indoor space lanes and lines of sight, criss-crossing in a kind of charted ubiquity. It is this space, with its invertible depths and its linear events generated by optical capabilities, which ideally enfolds Picasso's simultaneity images. It is a space inside a cat's cradle, every tensor in readiness for instant transfer; a contractile, expansive, collapsible space'.
Compare this with Sylvester's early writing on Klee and the similarities with the restless, all-over quality he writes about in Klee's late paintings is striking. Given Sylvester's friendship with Picasso's dealer Kahnweiler it's fair to assume he must've known Picasso's work reasonably well, and he certainly wrote about it often enough. I suspect the variety of Picasso's work might've been an issue. Syvlester identified Picasso as a great sculptor early on, but took some time to see, as he did after the 1960 Tate exhibition, that unlike a painter of masterpieces such as Matisse, Picasso's greatness lay in the spaces between the works.
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