I have taken this title from the lecture Clive Bell gave to a literary society in Hampstead, England, in 1914. Bell was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the novelist Virginia Woolf and the painter Duncan Grant. Though he was also a painter, their fellow Blooomsburyan Roger Fry made his strongest mark as an aesthetician.
Note that Artforum asked only male artists in New York. Hardly a representative sampling.
The response from female artists probably would have been different.
By 1968 social/political activism was sweeping through the nation.
Other factors are in play today. We're Balkanized and echo chambered, gaslighted and anesthetized by social media 24/7. Art and its critical corollary under these circumstances are not escapist pleasures but
necessary restoratives for the psyche under stress.
Two women replied to the Artforum question about art and politics--Jo Baer and Rosemarie Castoro. Baer said that art-amking and politics are different but not incompatible, and that artists, like everyone else, should protest the war. Castoro took a more quietist position, while calling for more government support for artists. Artforum has a great archive, which means that all the artists reponses can be found in the Septermber 1970 issue. I agree that art is restorative and, as I implied, can have the further power of improving the world, though I don't know how, exactly. I'm trying to figure that out.
Your entries keep centering the questions that matter in art with clarity and no dogmatic prescriptions. It is refreshing to read you after 12 decades of polarizing stances even on the part of art people I agree with.
- Having started thinking of art in Italy before becoming American and a New York artist, I grew up torn between the ever-renewed opposite opinions about art's role in the dysfunctional modern world. On the one hand I feel I should not feel guilty if I paint a flower painting, on the other, the despair of the permanent injustice of our global order and knowing that my privilege is often protected by the very forces I oppose make me feel I am a hypocrite. But I find it too easy to be dogmatically assertive only in favor of aesthetics or only in favor of militant engagement. My instrument has been what I call Operational Dilemma, i.e. if we operate without fettering ourselves to general preliminary choices but allow a wide range of possibilities, each exactly formed within its terms, we may one day produce a decorative surface and the next day make a work that denounces an abuse - a much more demanding approach than being adamantly sure of one or another stance.
In other words, while we moderns are still looking for general final solutions which inevitably lead to paralysing polarizations, we may instead nurture the many languages available that allow us to apply inspiration and pressure where we wish. The sensibility, being unequivocally true to ourselves, that links our diverse doings is where the art may be.
Thank you, Lucio, for your response. And your policy--or non-policy--of avoiding dogmatically rationalized positions is what we need now, if we are to be true to ourselves and to our responsibilities to one another. Your openness to art's possibilities is exemplary.
Philip Guston addressed Pop Art (which he hated) in the late 60’s with an antiquated comic form. He wanted to do something seriously, socially responsible and not just make pretty pictures. His graphic attacks on Richard Nixon were passionate and brutal. He addressed Fry’s notion of artistic purity as well.
I can buy Bell’s and Fry’s view that serious works of the imagination transcend ordinary life and owe their value to this transcendence. I don’t think they disdained the ordinary. The ordinary can also be the familiar and what would the history of genre and still life painters be without it? Perhaps they saw themselves as guardians at a crucial time? I have my own concerns going around to galleries, that aestheticism and connoisseurship may be dying. And you can still be a monomaniacal elitist without being sensitive to art.
And I don’t think artists can shut out the world - you can oniy put your finger in the dike for so long. But what’s maybe more important about that metaphor is that the world (or the ocean) will eventually seep in to the subconscious, whether you like it or not.
I’d like to hear more about what you think gives things value.
I also worry that many gallery-goers don't really look at paintings as paintings. They're looking for an extractable message or news about what's hot. As for the larger world, it is in art, somehow, or it might be better to say that strong art always engages with the world. I'm trying to understand what that engagement is in all its subtlety and how it might affect the world for the better.
Please pursue the question about something "more substantial than some vague, transcendent notion of culture." Aesthetic Monomania ( or is it Megalomania ? ) is a fine way to express the isolated stance of Bell.
My own views follow those expressed by Tony in the Stack: participate as a Citizen, as your free will so determines. In many ways the Lockean Principles are consistent. Artistic people can participate with Craftsmen, Investors, Doctors, Lawyers, Welders, Socialites, altogether, in political matters... and we should in times of crises.
And we have: How did George Gordon, Lord Byron die ?
Most interested in the "something more substantial" ( perhaps revelations of variable meanings ? )
Thank you Carter !
FOOTNOTE: Don Judd married a woman from a pacifist family, objecting to WWI, WWII, and all ( I cannot recall if that family was Quaker ). Don probably objected more than he expressed, without disturbing his work pattern or abstractionist purity. Indeed, even beyond the grave, his Foundation has an Anti-War Exhibition now, probably thanks to his children.
I will be pursuing art's larger meanings, though I admit I don't have a clear path forward. So I will be circling around that more substantial something, always trying to get closer to it, consoling myself with the thought that everyone from Kant to Baudelaire to the modern formalists were satisfied with transcendence didn't even try to find anything more substantial.
I also struggled with this question, and have resolved it by saying that I participate as a citizen (vote, give money, attend meetings, etc) but not as an artist. Turning my art into propaganda is the opposite of self-realization.
I agree, this is the best policy. Art has to be free of political and another assignments in order to generate the meanings that I believe have a potentially redemptive force. Barnett Newman said that if the audience fully understood his art it would mean the end of "state capitalism and totalitarianism."
A puritan culture got the exact art that reflected it, and that was considered radical... I say we are living in a time of opening, (though it looks like a time of closing). The opening is primarily of the heart. There is a war to keep it closed. Thank you for your thoughtful and honest essay which really is about opening to me. Eric Holzman
Yes, openness is the issue or the point. In my reply to Tony Robbin I mentioned that Barnett Newman said an understanding of his art would bring about the end of "state capitalism and totalitarianism." He believed this because he saw his imagery as open--or, I would say, open in an exemplary, inspiring way--and so it has the power, potentially, to defeat closed, oppressive sysems.
The question of ‘responsibility to something larger than the individual maker and more substantial than the vague notion of culture’ was/is the threshold from which my practice and artforms precipitated. I distinctly remember reaching my end with a rather singular aesthetic practice - how it became a strangely disembodied pursuit. I remember Who/what I was reading outside the discipline of art and the frustrations I felt with the hegemony of art’s concerns - this was the mid late 80’s. And I was really bristling at Judd et al. I’m grateful for your questions and framing in this essay - for the reflection it invites of myself as reader and of your self and the summoning of perspective on things I hadn’t thought about in too long.
The hegemony you mention is that of the professional art world, and it makes complete sense that you were frustrated by it and went on to become the artist you are now, immersed in the fullness of time and the light that fills space in its revelatory way.
Serious art begins when the intention to pursue a personal vision is not compromised.
Political art becomes problematic when an overemphasis on the message diminishes the work’s agency.
The argument that all serious art is political was proven to be true in NAZI Germany.
The dialectic between apolitical and political content should and will provoke questions within the boundaries of aesthetic inquiry.
The work of Picasso’s Guernica, the murals of Diego Rivera, and the work of Ad Reinhardt and Giorgio Morandi are equally valid and essential in the critical dialogue within the Great Tradition of Western Art.
I admire your intellectual honesty. If this is guilt you are feeling for being a poet, then may I say how this could be the result of our culture’s endless debriding of the artist’s soul. I remember the chosen method of execution for the Mapplethorpe exhibition. Our country was not yet Trumpian enough to say they hated homosexuals and so the idea that Helms and his prepubescent demagogues actually cared about the NEA was the best they could come up with. Of course, there was never any comparable condemnation of the obscene conflicts you itemized. Artists and poets then, are left to destroy themselves.
Note that Artforum asked only male artists in New York. Hardly a representative sampling.
The response from female artists probably would have been different.
By 1968 social/political activism was sweeping through the nation.
Other factors are in play today. We're Balkanized and echo chambered, gaslighted and anesthetized by social media 24/7. Art and its critical corollary under these circumstances are not escapist pleasures but
necessary restoratives for the psyche under stress.
Two women replied to the Artforum question about art and politics--Jo Baer and Rosemarie Castoro. Baer said that art-amking and politics are different but not incompatible, and that artists, like everyone else, should protest the war. Castoro took a more quietist position, while calling for more government support for artists. Artforum has a great archive, which means that all the artists reponses can be found in the Septermber 1970 issue. I agree that art is restorative and, as I implied, can have the further power of improving the world, though I don't know how, exactly. I'm trying to figure that out.
Hello Carter,
Your entries keep centering the questions that matter in art with clarity and no dogmatic prescriptions. It is refreshing to read you after 12 decades of polarizing stances even on the part of art people I agree with.
- Having started thinking of art in Italy before becoming American and a New York artist, I grew up torn between the ever-renewed opposite opinions about art's role in the dysfunctional modern world. On the one hand I feel I should not feel guilty if I paint a flower painting, on the other, the despair of the permanent injustice of our global order and knowing that my privilege is often protected by the very forces I oppose make me feel I am a hypocrite. But I find it too easy to be dogmatically assertive only in favor of aesthetics or only in favor of militant engagement. My instrument has been what I call Operational Dilemma, i.e. if we operate without fettering ourselves to general preliminary choices but allow a wide range of possibilities, each exactly formed within its terms, we may one day produce a decorative surface and the next day make a work that denounces an abuse - a much more demanding approach than being adamantly sure of one or another stance.
In other words, while we moderns are still looking for general final solutions which inevitably lead to paralysing polarizations, we may instead nurture the many languages available that allow us to apply inspiration and pressure where we wish. The sensibility, being unequivocally true to ourselves, that links our diverse doings is where the art may be.
Be well, Lucio.
Thank you, Lucio, for your response. And your policy--or non-policy--of avoiding dogmatically rationalized positions is what we need now, if we are to be true to ourselves and to our responsibilities to one another. Your openness to art's possibilities is exemplary.
Philip Guston addressed Pop Art (which he hated) in the late 60’s with an antiquated comic form. He wanted to do something seriously, socially responsible and not just make pretty pictures. His graphic attacks on Richard Nixon were passionate and brutal. He addressed Fry’s notion of artistic purity as well.
I can buy Bell’s and Fry’s view that serious works of the imagination transcend ordinary life and owe their value to this transcendence. I don’t think they disdained the ordinary. The ordinary can also be the familiar and what would the history of genre and still life painters be without it? Perhaps they saw themselves as guardians at a crucial time? I have my own concerns going around to galleries, that aestheticism and connoisseurship may be dying. And you can still be a monomaniacal elitist without being sensitive to art.
And I don’t think artists can shut out the world - you can oniy put your finger in the dike for so long. But what’s maybe more important about that metaphor is that the world (or the ocean) will eventually seep in to the subconscious, whether you like it or not.
I’d like to hear more about what you think gives things value.
I’m always thankful for the issues you bring up.
I also worry that many gallery-goers don't really look at paintings as paintings. They're looking for an extractable message or news about what's hot. As for the larger world, it is in art, somehow, or it might be better to say that strong art always engages with the world. I'm trying to understand what that engagement is in all its subtlety and how it might affect the world for the better.
Please pursue the question about something "more substantial than some vague, transcendent notion of culture." Aesthetic Monomania ( or is it Megalomania ? ) is a fine way to express the isolated stance of Bell.
My own views follow those expressed by Tony in the Stack: participate as a Citizen, as your free will so determines. In many ways the Lockean Principles are consistent. Artistic people can participate with Craftsmen, Investors, Doctors, Lawyers, Welders, Socialites, altogether, in political matters... and we should in times of crises.
And we have: How did George Gordon, Lord Byron die ?
Most interested in the "something more substantial" ( perhaps revelations of variable meanings ? )
Thank you Carter !
FOOTNOTE: Don Judd married a woman from a pacifist family, objecting to WWI, WWII, and all ( I cannot recall if that family was Quaker ). Don probably objected more than he expressed, without disturbing his work pattern or abstractionist purity. Indeed, even beyond the grave, his Foundation has an Anti-War Exhibition now, probably thanks to his children.
I will be pursuing art's larger meanings, though I admit I don't have a clear path forward. So I will be circling around that more substantial something, always trying to get closer to it, consoling myself with the thought that everyone from Kant to Baudelaire to the modern formalists were satisfied with transcendence didn't even try to find anything more substantial.
I also struggled with this question, and have resolved it by saying that I participate as a citizen (vote, give money, attend meetings, etc) but not as an artist. Turning my art into propaganda is the opposite of self-realization.
I agree, this is the best policy. Art has to be free of political and another assignments in order to generate the meanings that I believe have a potentially redemptive force. Barnett Newman said that if the audience fully understood his art it would mean the end of "state capitalism and totalitarianism."
I am so impressed by the range and depth of your references.
A puritan culture got the exact art that reflected it, and that was considered radical... I say we are living in a time of opening, (though it looks like a time of closing). The opening is primarily of the heart. There is a war to keep it closed. Thank you for your thoughtful and honest essay which really is about opening to me. Eric Holzman
Yes, openness is the issue or the point. In my reply to Tony Robbin I mentioned that Barnett Newman said an understanding of his art would bring about the end of "state capitalism and totalitarianism." He believed this because he saw his imagery as open--or, I would say, open in an exemplary, inspiring way--and so it has the power, potentially, to defeat closed, oppressive sysems.
The question of ‘responsibility to something larger than the individual maker and more substantial than the vague notion of culture’ was/is the threshold from which my practice and artforms precipitated. I distinctly remember reaching my end with a rather singular aesthetic practice - how it became a strangely disembodied pursuit. I remember Who/what I was reading outside the discipline of art and the frustrations I felt with the hegemony of art’s concerns - this was the mid late 80’s. And I was really bristling at Judd et al. I’m grateful for your questions and framing in this essay - for the reflection it invites of myself as reader and of your self and the summoning of perspective on things I hadn’t thought about in too long.
The hegemony you mention is that of the professional art world, and it makes complete sense that you were frustrated by it and went on to become the artist you are now, immersed in the fullness of time and the light that fills space in its revelatory way.
Serious art begins when the intention to pursue a personal vision is not compromised.
Political art becomes problematic when an overemphasis on the message diminishes the work’s agency.
The argument that all serious art is political was proven to be true in NAZI Germany.
The dialectic between apolitical and political content should and will provoke questions within the boundaries of aesthetic inquiry.
The work of Picasso’s Guernica, the murals of Diego Rivera, and the work of Ad Reinhardt and Giorgio Morandi are equally valid and essential in the critical dialogue within the Great Tradition of Western Art.
jg
I admire your intellectual honesty. If this is guilt you are feeling for being a poet, then may I say how this could be the result of our culture’s endless debriding of the artist’s soul. I remember the chosen method of execution for the Mapplethorpe exhibition. Our country was not yet Trumpian enough to say they hated homosexuals and so the idea that Helms and his prepubescent demagogues actually cared about the NEA was the best they could come up with. Of course, there was never any comparable condemnation of the obscene conflicts you itemized. Artists and poets then, are left to destroy themselves.