Leo Steinberg Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public Summary

Hilton Kramer, The Historic period of the Avant-Garde, An Art Chronicle of 1956–1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 1973), 565 Pages.

A DECADE AND A Footling more accept passed since Leo Steinberg composed, for an audition at The Museum of Modern Art, the popular lecture which characterized the situation of the public for contemporary art as a "plight."^one Postulating an immediately functional idea of a public as grounded in the about mostly shared feel of attentive beholders, Steinberg restored the artist and the critic to their places within that very large customs. Their "plight" he then described as invested with "a certain dignity." "There is a sense of loss, of sudden exile, of something willfully denied—sometimes a feeling that i's accumulated culture or feel is hopelessly devalued, leaving one exposed to spiritual destitution." This periodically renewed sense of loss, of deprivation was and then proposed as the condition of esthetic innovation in our century, and its pathos offered, in a characteristically confessional gesture, equally a guarantee of true seriousness.

We have, I think, no beholder so public within this public, so intimately acquainted with that sense of loss and its attendant grief, as Hilton Kramer. His career, extending from the editorship of Arts Magazine through his nowadays work as art editor and senior critic of the New York Times, has been roughly coextensive with the maturing and dissemination, the ascent and hegemony of American fine art. In the rising euphoria, the festive rituals bellboy upon its triumphs, he has been present, at some altitude, non equally a celebrant only as a censor, steadily articulating his sense of these by 20 years as the well-nigh problematic moment of the period nosotros call mod.

Kramer came to the work of art criticism with a number of distinct advantages. Of these, the offset was the admiring sense of a critical tradition for literature and its stylistic paradigms; the second was an ear trained by an obviously intensive commerce with those paradigms and their firsthand successors. Ruskin, James, Fry, Eliot, Stevens, and the generation of American poets and critics who reached maturity in the 1920s grade the company invoked with some regularity in his writing. They are joined by their French contemporaries, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Valéry, Cocteau, but rather rarely by their successors on either continent, so that it is with a slight outset of surprise that one encounters an epigraph past André Bazin or an allusion to Robbe-Grillet. The recurring references and allusions, then, are to a literary or belle-lettristic tradition that extends from the Victorians to the period of the entre-deux-guerres. The major art historians and theoreticians are rarely invoked, and these caesuras, like these allegiances, have undoubtedly shaped a style distinct in its concision and rhythmic balls from that of whatsoever other critic now at work. Information technology is, in fact, a style quite singular in its attribute of an instrument early mastered and consistently tuned. I therefore assume it has been for others, every bit for myself, a frequent, compensatory pleasure to come upon Kramer's stately, well-constructed periods in the welter of the Times, equally elsewhere. (One imagines, as well, his own wry response to a rap on the knuckles from Roger Shattuck, of all people, for a error of style denounced in Shattuck'southward appallingly cavalier and vulgar review in the New York Times Book Review of January 6, 1974.)

These allegiances, then, have doubtless determined the form in which Kramer consistently works: that of the short essay, thankfully innocent of footnotes, averaging most 1500 words in length and exceedingly well turned. He has assumed those journalistic restrictions of time and space which encourage the natural gift for the polemical thrust and the aphoristic parry. They do non, of grade, foster the evolution of a closely argued position, or a sustained intellectual effort and exchange. The fine art editor of the Times is somewhat removed from anything one might consider an intellectual loonshit or a space of dialectical interaction; he is propelled toward the eminence of the cathedra. The pressures, obligations, the dynamics of the relation to the vaster public and the marketplace foster a certain apodicticity of tone. Arts Mag, nether Mr. Kramer's extremely able editorship, projected a sense of shared intensity of commitment which made it considerably more than an anthological review. 1 felt the manner in which Kramer, Sidney Tillim and Sidney Geist (the latter ii are artists of unusual critical energy and skill) projected a sure lively reciprocity, strengthening the somewhat marginal status of the magazine. Forming a responsible opposition, they treated the esthetic and critical enterprise of the 1950s and early 1960s as a text for the polyphonic articulation of a critically dissident scrutiny. The Times is the concluding identify in the earth for that sort of effort, and the successive appointments of Peter Schjeldahl and John Russell, men of no visible critical commitments whatever, work toward the support of received stance.

I should imagine, however, that Kramer would neither complain of these limitations nor consider himself in any way their victim; the brusk form, the relentless periodicity, the special obligations and disciplines inscribed within this post, occupied for almost a decade now, comprise a choice. Since his appointment to the Times, Kramer has bars his extracurricular writing largely to literary or other, more general publications. The one essay, on Charles Sheeler, published in a major art journal (Artforum, January, 1969) was startling at the fourth dimension for the way in which it exemplified, with no single modification of length, form, tone, or disquisitional arroyo, the brief essay course developed for the Times. It had very much the attribute of a guest appearance; its tone and level of soapbox suddenly evoked quite another public, another historical moment. In The Historic period of the Advanced, the big volume which now reassembles the work of 15 years, it recedes into its proper place as one of Kramer's more routine efforts.

All these essays but 1 are presented, with original publication date, in sections or groupings determined variously by relations of style, school, genre or chronology. Photography and criticism have their places next to the massive sections on the nineteenth century, the Schoolhouse of Paris, German and other northerners, art in the seventies. The initial and title essay, undated, was published, to the best of my recollection, in the October, 1972 result of Commentary. I have not, within reach, the originals of these texts, nearly all of which I read every bit they appeared, merely it is my feeling that they have not been much revised. Kramer'southward stylistic assurance and ideological stability would seem to preclude this. I can, however, testify to at least one instance in which farther reflection or the passage of time has dictated the generous excision of a testy assault.

Well, then, how is ane to characterize and appraise this disquisitional enterprise in its largest and its near item senses? I begin, nigh at random, with the immediate and somewhat casual naming of some distinguishing strategies and traits, secure in the intimation that the fundamental commitments of method and of taste which underlie that assurance and stability will lead us very quickly to the middle of this piece of work. There is, then, the effort to examine, to revise existing historical canons, the qualified dissension from a number of ascendant critical evaluations which produce a consistent effort to expose to critical afterthought elements otherwise ignored or patronized. An entire generation of American figurative artists such every bit Leland Bell, Anne Arnold, Mary Frank, William King and their now somewhat more distinguished colleague Philip Pearlstein are and so considered and defended. And at that place is the parallel attempt in behalf of a contempo American by: Maurer, Dove, Friedman, Walkowitz, Romaine Brooks, Prendergast and H. Lyman Saÿen. One notes, besides, the consequent and spontaneous response to the piece of work of women artists; no critic has been for then long a time so concerned to place them, through a reviewer's constant attention quite uninflected by ideological considerations, in the center of this country's artistic life.

There is the felt commitment, articulated in a dozen or more than of these disquisitional and historical reevaluations, every bit practically everywhere else, to an fine art of "expression" equally against that of (mere) "ornament." In this somewhat vague and tenaciously invoked antonym, one senses the polarity of abstraction and representation at work in advocacy of a humanism which all the same awaits the philosophical justification of its esthetic privilege. Thus Ellsworth Kelly'south work is accommodated for the manner in which

in the Chatham paintings, certain pictorial elements persist. Sooner or later, one cannot assistance noting that the sectionalization of rectangles in these paintings, is, essentially, a division of light and shadow. . . . Oddly enough a style that at starting time glance looks totally removed from any attachment to nature is nonetheless deeply evocative of a certain naturalistic poesy.

Here at once—one need get no further—we glimpse Kramer in the posture of the plight of deprivation, simply consoled, equally he takes a second, closer glance; what had seemed to exist missing, subtracted, as it were, from a preexistent vision (work) is, upon closer inspection, restored. "Naturalistic poetry" is regained upon perception of its spatial strategy as originating in representation, and the work is rescued from "hermeticism," and restored, in a revealing phrase, to "a normal course of aesthetic response." I want, for the moment, to annotation the particularly brief and elliptical quality of this celebration, returning to that before long, and pass quickly to another of Kramer's major positions: his detachment from the major energies at work in Abstract Expressionism and its disquisitional exponents. Kramer is probably solitary in his refusal to see Pollock every bit both a seminal force and a major painter, and he is also somewhat atypical in his appraisal of de Kooning'southward work of the 1940s as unquestionably more of import than that of the '50s. The double dissent epitomizes his specially tangential relation to disquisitional opinion of the past 20 years, and his directly opposition to Rosenberg and Greenberg, the 2 American critics to whom he has devoted serious consideration.

Discerning and protesting against the Hegelian historicism still at work in Mr. Greenberg's post-Marxist stage, he has, of course, in recent years moved closer to him, equally Greenberg himself has moved abroad from the eye of critical discourse and into the position of marshaling the prescriptive dimension of that historicism in the support of a pictorial orthodoxy and its commodity value. One had been genuinely startled by Kramer's commemoration of that orthodoxy in a review, omitted here, of an exhibition of Color Field painting organized a yr or then ago in Boston by Kenworth Moffat; it involved an apparent revocation of judgment which still puzzles and disturbs. Kramer had, withal, ended his repeated attacks, during the late 1960s, on the sculpture of Morris and Andre and upon their intellectual sources and ambiance, past invoking Greenberg's embarrassingly feeble lamentations on "novelty" and "the triumph of ideas over art."

There is, in fact, a sense in which Kramer, Greenberg, and Rosenberg all begin, by the late '60s, to move much more closely together in the rhetoric of their defenses and rejections. Uneasy with the radical revision of immediately mail-Cubist sculpture and its rejection of pictorial sources, they join in a chorus of regret for the decorum and gratifications of that tradition. Kramer'due south refusal to review these "effects of mise-en-scène," his derisive dismissal of "the repertory of playlets dealing with the drama of spatial perception" echo somewhat peevishly too the shrill injunction to "Defeat Theatre!" dispensed from Cambridge in those days. There are, however, other ways, more than complex and intimate, in which Kramer'southward work demands to exist specifically reconsidered in relation to that of both Greenberg and Rosenberg.

It has, I think, been articulate to all of those who read him nigh attentively that the business relationship of Rosenberg's "eschewal of analysis of form as an inferior, if not an altogether irrelevant, involvement" applies as easily and powerfully to Kramer's own work. It is, in fact, virtually surprising that Kramer manages, quite without the help of the scrupulous and sophisticated descriptive techniques which have characterized the all-time of critical writings these concluding 15 years, to convey the relative weight, intensity, and coherence of the work that engages his sympathy. Eluding the pictorial factuality, the sculptural materiality, the spatial, formal coloristic particularities, the compositional dynamics of painting, he presents united states of america with the rounded moving-picture show, the portrait of the artist and his oeuvre equally instances, exemplary or cautionary, every bit the case may be, of the cultural and historical dilemmas of his fourth dimension. He is visibly and deeply touched by the manner in which the creative person assumes the complexities and contradictions of those dilemmas. Figures such as Trajan and Pearlstein are treated with the special respect reserved for those who work against the grain of history—and, incidentally, for those who piece of work within the figurative mode, costless from the corruption of the (merely) "decorative" impulse.

Kramer moves, in the beginning section of the book, through Impressionism and Neo-impressionism as through much of contemporary art, describing the general contours of a historical situation, the thrust and stance of esthetic enterprise, and one moves, with him, through the essays on Pissarro, Degas, Seurat, Redon, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Art Nouveau, Whistler (nosotros are at present on page 70) with barely a reference to a specific pictorial fact. The techniques of formal description practice non inflect his analytic impulse. Adjectival references inform us of "a beautifully constructed picture with a fragile, soft calorie-free . . .," "the wonderfully open and free qualities" of Seurat, the "superb pieces of draftsmanship" that is Simeon Solomon'south Anguish of Miriam. The career of a lifetime, assembled in brusque lists of titles, is subsumed in a single general phrase. Kramer is everywhere at pains to constitute the niceties of historical distinctions, but they are rarely anchored in visual or formal ones, so that an early essay on Medardo Rosso, praiseworthy for the intensity and freshness of its response to a neglected oeuvre, contains not one reference to a particular sculpture. The longish essay on David Smith, composed on the occasion of Smith's fiftieth birthday and constituting for many readers their introduction to the work of the greatest of American sculptors, is the all-time example of Kramer's awarding of these distinctions and generalities on a larger scale. The brusk essay on Picasso's Guitar of 1911–12 acknowledges the momentousness of a single source for Smith'due south mature style in an exceptional and refreshing practice in the analytic mode.

Encapsulating the careers of gimmicky artists in a series of loosely brushed portraits, Kramer is at pains to demonstrate the moral tension of the modern artist'southward central allegiance to tradition. Echoing the critical doctrine of our recent past he is, like Trilling and like Eliot earlier him, concerned to celebrate the tensions and paradoxes in the position of a modernist artist, viewed from the solidly entrenched position of immanent criticism. A reliance upon the literary source, the technique of encapsulation, the rejection of contemporary analytic techniques greatly facilitates such a view: esthetic and intellectual discontinuities are elided in the somewhat historicist generalities of these essays. Or, to put it differently, Mr. Kramer'due south Rosenbergian eschewal of analytic techniques inclines him to another version of Greenbergian historicism.

At that place is, however, some other, larger dimension of diffidence, which sets him apart from Rosenberg; information technology is an immutable resistance to any of the theoretical foundations and consequences of esthetic, political, or social innovation. Information technology is this, above all, that has insured the boggling stability of his critical positions and the isolation of his present eminence. It is this that generates his uneasy disapproval of the more than enterprising art and criticism of the past ten years.

Kramer's deep and abiding zipper to the modernist movement in France, and for the culture of which it was a supreme example, has never blinded him to the decline of its art in the menses since the Second World War. Though dissenting from the general euphoria of the American art globe as it redefined its view of European enterprise, he shares in the full general disaffection with respect to postwar French painting and sculpture. There remains, even so, the manner in which French culture has maintained and strengthened its function in the earth at large, and in our American art world in particular: there remains its theoretical productivity and its conceptual concur on American art and its criticism. One is constantly impressed, though occasionally amused, to find the manner in which the theoretical options generated in present-twenty-four hours Paris accept replaced the formal ones of an earlier menstruum. With Fauvist, Cubist, post-Cubist energy depleted by the war, information technology is existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism which take animated the adventurous art and criticism of the past ii decades. To these developments, as to those of Anglo-American philosophical discourse, Kramer has responded with a faint, generalized, ironic dismissal, refusing to confront the critical implications of these fresh avenues and methods of inquiry.

He is infinitely more respectful and tolerant of the Theosophical allegiances of Mondrian and Kandinsky. Indeed 2 manufactures, reprinted here as ane, were devoted in July, 1972, to that very problematic relation. It is true, of grade, equally Norbert Frye once remarked, that Madame Blavatsky's influence upon modern fine art has far exceeded that of Einstein. What, even so, accounts for Kramer's singularly all-around view of the affair? Disdaining to consider the major philosophical and methodological sources for the art of the 1960s and '70s, he finds, nonetheless, that "the fictions required to sustain this [Kandinsky'south] noble purpose constitute i of the about interesting chapters in the intellectual history of mod fine art."

Two reasons for this exceptional gesture suggest themselves: the piety addressed to an oeuvre which, having passed indisputably into the catechism, does indeed establish an already ended "chapter" in an established text, and the condescension appropriate to the debased idealism and the tacky religiosity of Theosophy. Piety was as inappropriate a response to the fine art of Morris and Andre as condescension was to the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and it is here that we brainstorm to discern in dismissiveness the terms of an abdication.

That admiring sense of a critical tradition Kramer as a young homo brought to the critical job constituted a capital which has simply not been renewed. The result is the depletion of belle-lettristic resources in the service of a historical sense that is curiously undialectical. It is, one feels, not so much the pace and pressures of journalism which requite to Kramer's contempo work the sense of fatigue and ennui; it is rather the sense of closure, the premature atrophy of the inquiring, speculative impulse. The contemptuous and personalized dismissal of those artists and critics who have responded, however awkwardly, to that impulse is a form of philistinism, embarrassing in this instance. Similar most forms of philistinism, information technology is psychologistic, and personalized, imputing motives of disingenuousness or airs to what are, after all, phenomena of an apparently more generally social and dynamic sort. More important, still, is the rigorously undialectical quality of such thinking on the part of one who claims, on the opposite, a special intensity and agony of dialectical consciousness. It evokes Adorno's label of an immanent cultural criticism "scarcely able to avert the imputation that information technology has the civilisation which culture lacks."

It is in his straight confrontation with the art of the avant-garde as a historically adamant and express phenomenon, it is in his endeavour to stride outside the ideological confines of that moment, that we see Mr. Kramer's deepest dilemma. The Historic period of the Avant-garde, whose problematic end is commemorated in the title essay, is characterized as a product of the bourgeoisie'south most conspicuous virtue: the "liberalism" and "permissiveness" which guaranteed the support and growth of its disruptive innovations. To encounter that permissiveness every bit the bourgeoisie'south nigh conspicuous virtue is to err, and gravely. One has not causeless the consequences of the historical dialectic if one does non run across and insist upon the manner in which, at every point, the structure and ascension of the bourgeoisie exact the most terrible price from the working class, and in then doing compromise the beneficiaries of that permissiveness. The about conspicuous virtue of the suburbia in its flow of ascendancy was its extraordinary free energy and the modes it invented for the mobilization and regeneration of that energy. It is in this sense that bourgeois civilisation is truly ambiguous, for its terrible energies and the organized violence of its rationalizations were, at the aforementioned time, productive and exploitative of scientific advance and esthetic radicalism.

For Kramer, "the normal condition of our culture has become one in which the ideology of the advanced wields a pervasive and ofttimes contemptuous potency over sizeable portions of the very public it affects to despise." The key words to our agreement of this phrase are "cynical" and "affects." For Kramer, however historically oriented his intentions, "the decline of the avant-garde," similar so many other phenomena of a deeply political nature, is still to be described in these psychologically reductive terms of pessimism and simulation. They are, of form, the terms he has used, time and over again, in his repeated attacks upon the reputation and achievement of Marcel Duchamp.

Information technology is midway through this procedure that Duchamp'south legendary assault upon the piece of work of art as traditionally conceived intervened. Demonstrating that there is no such thing as an object or a gesture that inside the magical museum context, cannot be experienced as art, and this demonstration has the effect of consigning both the idea of tradition and the museum itself to a limbo of arbitrary choices and gratuitous assertions, which is exactly what our culture has at present go.

But Duchamp's unabridged oeuvre is non but pivotal among those which reopened art to the speculative dimension, revealing the economic system of the museum-oriented culture equally protective of the pictorial orthodoxies secreted by it. Duchamp'southward gesture, one working hypothesis among others, constitutes, moreover, a step in the assay of the process of cultural fetishization.

Lamenting, in a penultimate essay on "Art and Politics," the tardy politicization of our own artists, Kramer sees them equally "political amateurs," "a pampered elite making merits to the political status and the moral imperatives of a woefully exploited underclass." Remarking that the "sacred pretensions of the so-called avant-garde have been overtaken past the actual events of history," he discerns "one tiny brilliant spot" in the situation: "the politicization of the art scene has washed up, at least for the foreseeable futurity, all those fantastic revolutionary claims which for years have dominated the give-and-take and promotion of new art."

Now, exactly what sort of thinking will accept condolement in that observation? A thinking which is, over again, reductive in its accusatory psychologism, and tin, in fact, be said to have relinquished its claim to dialectical rigor.

Information technology is certainly true that the American artist, recovering merely recently from the violence of his initial encompass by the American middle course of the postwar menses, has been tardy in his enkindling, stammering in his joint, naive and insensitive, loose and shoddy in his political action. Embarrassment and acrimony are, however, trivial responses and the analytic issues posed for the cultural critic are such that neither the accusations of cocky-deception and cynicism, nor the comfort to exist taken in 1's own supposed transcendence, through enlightened observation of those states, has the slightest importance. The dynamics of our society implicate the entire cultural superstructure of which artists and critics, like dealers and museum officials, are a role, forcing complicity in the decay and repression of the belatedly backer era. For the critic of the New York Times to imply his own exemption from that implication is unthinkable. It is again Adorno who instructs our understanding of the example at paw:

If cultural criticism, fifty-fifty at its best with Valéry, sides with conservatism, it is because of its unconscious adherence to a notion of culture which, during the era of late capitalism, aims at a form of property which is stable and independent of stock-market fluctuations. This thought of culture asserts its distance from the system in order, as it were, to offering universal security in the middle of a universal dynamic. ^two

––Annette Michelson

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NOTES

1. Entitled "Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public," it is the opening essay of Steinberg's collection of essays, Other Criteria, New York, 1972.

ii. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Club," in Prisms, translated past Samuel and Sherry Weber, London, 1967, p. 22.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/197407/contemporary-art-and-the-plight-of-the-public-a-view-from-the-new-york-hilton-37356

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