The Painted Word

by Tom Wolfe

  The Conceptualists liked to propound the following question: Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for—and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Winsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.

  Conceptual Art divided into two sorts: things you could see, but not for long (like the Great Man’s water picture), and things you couldn’t see at all. From the first category came Peter Hutchinson’s Arc. He filled some plastic bags with gas and pieces of rotten calabash or something of the sort, which was supposed to create more gas, tied the bags to a rope, put weights on either end of the rope, threw the whole business into the ocean, where the weights hit the bottom and the gas bags rose up, lifting the rope in an arc. An underwater photographer took pictures of the installation and then came back periodically to record the decay of the garbage and the eventual bursting of the bags and collapse of the arc—the disappearance of the art object, in short. Genius and process—process and genius! The photographs and quite a few lines of off-scientific prose provided the documentation, as it is known in Conceptual Art—which Hutchinson thereupon sold to the Museum of Modern Art for … well, today Museum officials prefer not to talk about how much they paid for Arc. One assumes that they paid no more than was necessary to remain buoyant in the turbulent intellectual waters of the late 1960s.

  As for the second category—one of the great outposts of invisible Conceptual Art was the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California, when Tom Marioni was its director. It was there that I came upon the fabulous Beautiful Toast Dream, by a woman whose name I can’t remember. The documentation, which was typed, described how she woke up in the dark at about four in the morning and had a sudden craving for a piece of toast. The craving was so strong, in fact, that she could see it, a crust of Wonder Bread done light brown, and she could already visualize herself taking the crust out of the toaster and spreading Nucoa margarine on it with a serrated knife with a wooden handle, one of those slender numbers with little teeth on the blade that are good for cutting tomatoes or grapefruit, and she can see herself putting the Nucoa on the toast and then sprinkling some white sugar, the usual kind, on top of that and then shaking some cinnamon on it and then spreading it all on with the serrated knife until the heat of the toast begins to melt the margarine and the teeth of the knife begin to dig little furrows in the bread and the molten margarine begins to build up ahead of each tooth and then runs off between the teeth and into the furrows—but not by itself!—no, the margarine and little ripped papillae of bread run together carrying with them on the surface of the tide granules of sugar that absorb the molten margarine and turn yellow and disappear in this viscous flood of heat, steel, and fragmented bread papillae while the cinnamon maintains its spreckled identity except when bunching up on the oleaginous surface of the flood like a stain and the crest keeps building but becomes neither fluid nor solid but more of a blob existing only as a kinetic wobble swelling into one final macerated mulled mass reflected in the stainless steel face of the blade as a tawny cresting wave bound by an unbearable surface tension until—all at once!—it is ripped, raked, ruptured by the blade and suddenly leaks as if through deflation between the teeth and into the lengthening furrows behind the blade sinking lamely into a harrowed and utterly swamped tan bread delta and she knows it is time to bite off a corner of the crust with yellow Nucoa-soaked sugar grains scraping the ridges of her teeth and caking in the corners of her mouth—but there were no crusts to be found—and she could have no toast—and she had to have a swig of Diet-Rite Cola instead—and, well, I mean I can only hint at the tension, the velocity, the suspense, the meth-like electron-microscopic eye for detail and le mot juste that this woman’s documentation had—it went on and on; a certain Frenchman would have given up the silence of his cork-lined studio to have had one-tenth of this woman’s perception of the minutiae of existence or, in this case, nonexistence, one-twentieth of her patience, one-hundredth of her perseverance to stay with the description until the job is truly done—in short, I was in the presence of … superb post-Proustian literature!

  With works such as that, late twentieth-century Modern art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple. But the destined terminus had not yet been reached. After all, the artist of Beautiful Toast Dream had first gone through a visual experience, even if only imagined. After all, what about the whole business of “the visual imagination”? Came the refrain: How very pre-Modern.

  David R. Smith (not the sculptor) tried to get rid of this, one of the last pieces of the old bourgeois baggage, through a piece called “Vacant”:

  COLLECTION, MUSEUM OF CONCEPTUAL ART

  —which was calculated to make the viewer concentrate on the utter emptiness between the letters. But he failed. He had still committed an act of visual imagination, even though in the service of invisibility, emptiness, nihilism. He had not gotten rid of the fundamental, the primary, the indigenous, the intrinsic, the built-in, the unitary and atomic impurity of the whole enterprise: namely, the artistic ego itself.

  So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine—as a work of art—with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

  The artist may construct the piece

  The piece may be fabricated

  The piece need not be built

  Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

  WITH PERMISSION, ARTS MAGAZINE

  And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a “receiver” that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just “the artist,” in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded of him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode—and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture … and came out the other side as Art Theory! … Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

  * This was also an implicit criticism of his old rival, Rosenberg, the original prophet of the expressive brushstroke.

  EPILOGUE

  FOR ABOUT SIX YEARS NOW, REALISTIC PAINTERS OF ALL SOR
TS, real nineteenth-century types included, with 3-D and all the other old forbidden sweets, have been creeping out of their Stalags, crawl spaces, DP camps, deserter communes, and other places of exile, other Canadas of the soul—and have begun bravely exhibiting. They have been emboldened by what has looked to them, as one might imagine, as the modern art of Art Theory gone berserk.

  The realist school that is attracting the most attention is an offshoot of Pop Art known as Photo-Realism. The Photo-Realists, such as Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes, take color photos of Pop-like scenes and objects—cars, trailers, storefronts, parking lots, motorcycle engines—then reproduce them precisely, in paint, on canvas, usually on a large scale, often by projecting them onto the canvas with a slide projector and then going to work with the paint. One of the things they manage to accomplish in this way, beyond the slightest doubt, is to drive orthodox critics bananas.

  Such denunciations! “Return to philistinism” … “triumph of mediocrity” … “a visual soap opera” … “The kind of academic realism Estes practices might well have won him a plaque from the National Academy of Design in 1890” … “incredibly dead paintings” … “rat-trap compositional formulas” … “its subject matter has been taken out of its social context and neutered” … “it subjects art itself to ignominy” … all quotes taken from reviews of Estes’s show in New York last year … and a still more fascinating note is struck: “This is the moment of the triumph of mediocrity; the views of the silent majority prevail in the galleries as at the polls.”

  Richard Estes, Bus Reflection, 1972. Perhaps the leading Photo-Realist, or at any rate the most richly denounced; if the power to cause cortical blowouts in critics is any recommendation, he can’t miss

  Marvelous. We are suddenly thrust back fifty years into the mental atmosphere of Royal Cortissoz himself, who saw an insidious connection between the alien hordes from Southern Europe and the alien wave of “Ellis Island art.” Only the carrier of the evil virus has changed: then, the subversive immigrant; today, the ne kulturny native of the heartland.

  Photo-Realism, indeed! One can almost hear Clement Greenberg mumbling in his sleep: “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first… but there is ugly and there is ugly!” … Leo Steinberg awakes with a start in the dark of night: “Applaud the destruction of values we still cherish! But surely—not this!” And Harold Rosenberg has a dream in which the chairman of the Museum board of directors says: “Modernism is finished! Call the cops!”

  Somehow a style to which they have given no support at all (“lacks a persuasive theory”) is selling. “The New York galleries fairly groan at the moment under the weight of one sort of realism or another” … “the incredible prices” … Estes is reported to be selling $80,000 a crack … Bechtle for £20,000 at auction in London … Can this sort of madness really continue “in an intellectual void”?

  Have the COLLECTORS and artists themselves abandoned the very flower of twentieth-century art: i.e., Art Theory? Not yet. The Photo-Realists assure the COLLECTORS that everything is okay, all is kosher. They swear: we’re not painting real scenes but, rather, camera images (“not realism, photo systems”). What is more, we don’t show you a brushstroke in an acre of it. We’re painting only scenes of midday, in bland sunlight—so as not to be “evocative.” We’ve got all-over “evenness” such as you wouldn’t believe—we put as much paint on that postcard sky as on that Airstream Silver Bullet trailer in the middle. And so on, through the checklist of Late Modernism. The Photo-Realists are backsliders, yes; but not true heretics.

  In all of Cultureburg, in fact, there are still no heretics of any importance, no one attacking Late Modernism in its very foundation—not even at this late hour when Modern art has reached the vanishing point and our old standby, Hilton Kramer, lets slip the admission: Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.

  “Lets slip,” as I say. We now know, of course, that his words describe the actual state of affairs for tout le monde in Cultureburg; but it is not the sort of thing that one states openly. Any orthodox critic, such as Kramer, is bound to defend the idea that a work of art can speak for itself. Thus in December 1974 he attacked the curators of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition “The Impressionist Epoch” for putting big historical notes up on the wall beside the great masterworks of the Impressionists. But why? What an opportunity he missed! If only he could have drawn upon the wisdom of his unconscious! Have the courage of your secret heart, Hilton! Tell them they should have made the copy blocks bigger!—and reduced all those Manets, Monets, and Renoirs to the size of wildlife stamps!

  Twenty-five years from now, that will not seem like such a facetious idea. I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!) to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75, the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and Johns—but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg. Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of the period … a little “fuliginous flatness” here … a little “action painting” there … and some of that “all great art is about art” just beyond. Beside them will be small reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of the Word from that period, such as Johns, Louis, Noland, Stella, and Olitski. (Pollock and de Kooning will have a somewhat higher status, although by no means a major one, because of the more symbiotic relationship they were fortunate enough to enjoy with the great Artists of the Word.)

  Every art student will marvel over the fact that a whole generation of artists devoted their careers to getting the Word (and to internalizing it) and to the extraordinary task of divesting themselves of whatever there was in their imagination and technical ability that did not fit the Word. They will listen to art historians say, with the sort of smile now reserved for the study of Phrygian astrology: “That’s how it was then!”—as they describe how, on the one hand, the scientists of the mid-twentieth century proceeded by building upon the discoveries of their predecessors and thereby lit up the sky … while the artists proceeded by averting their eyes from whatever their predecessors, from da Vinci on, had discovered, shrinking from it, terrified, or disintegrating it with the universal solvent of the Word. The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.

  What happy hours await them all! With what sniggers, laughter, and good-humored amazement they will look back upon the era of the Painted Word!