The 60s
Page 63
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When the plans for the embassy were made public, it appeared that a dominant feature of a purely decorative order, trite but overwhelming, had indeed been provided, in the form of a seemingly huge golden eagle with outspread wings perched high above the main entrance, and a great deal of criticism was aroused in London, even in usually friendly circles, over this flaunting of our national bird. But when this pale eagle finally materialized it had shrunk into tame inoffensiveness, and now blends quite innocuously into the anodized aluminum of the rest of the decoration. What still causes resentment among many Britons—justifiably, it may as well be said—is the embankment of concrete. For this feature, I have been told, the State Department is responsible, unbelievable as that may seem. This device is a far remove from the Renaissance habit of placing a free-standing building on a plinth or base whose bold intervention between the ground and the structure not merely raised the building but set it off without violating its aesthetic composure. Many far less offensive barriers were available, even under the conditions Saarinen faced. One that instantly suggests itself is the cheerful London fashion of a bastion of flower boxes, which offers at most seasons the touch of color and organic form that is now lacking at every point in this building. Even for an embassy in Moscow, this quasi-military design would have been an unfriendly, if perhaps prudent, gesture; among our British friends and allies it is much worse. At the moment the State Department is urging people to smile in their passport photographs, our London embassy presents a cold, unsmiling face, a face unfortunately suggesting national arrogance and irresponsive power. We should amend this concept even if this demands that we take a long look at ourselves, to find out why the official Face of America and the Voice of America today so often contradict our historic character and our present professions of idealism.
No architect can solve that problem singlehanded.
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I do not wish to leave this discussion of the work of a dead man, who cannot defend himself, without citing a quite different appraisal, from a contemporary English architect who is full of admiration for this building. Though dubious about the pallid metal trim, he praises the use of the Portland stone and the effort to achieve a strong, characterful façade. He feels that the decorative treatment of the interior is exquisitely chaste—read “hospital coldness” in my report—and he regards the detailing of the structure and the craftsmanship as setting a standard well above most contemporary work in his country. He is charitably willing to overlook the sidewalk barricade—though he winces at it—and he thinks that the building will settle down into the townscape of Grosvenor Square as a happy addition, full of character, if not charm. Since he is one of the most English of Englishmen, this is a most objective judgment, if not a representative one. I wish I could share his sentiments. But to me the whole style and message of the building seem as ominous as the depersonalized sort of thinking that comes out of our Air Force research centers. By the very perfection of its technique and the emptiness of its performance, it seems to say—as, indeed, our newer technologies often seem to say—that, quite apart from possible nuclear catastrophes, our civilization has come close to a dead end. At this juncture, we shall have to surrender what is left of our more humane values or retrace our steps to the point where we took the wrong road. One is not as yet easily persuaded that this blank, bureaucratic-military mask is the true face of America; certainly it does not represent the America we love, the America that other countries once found both enviable and lovable.
HAROLD ROSENBERG
JUNE 29, 1967
THE EXHIBITION AT the Museum of Modern Art entitled “The 1960s” avoids making any overt critical or philosophical assertion about the decade or the art produced in it. Possible disagreement regarding the selections is turned aside by the subtitle of the show, “Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collections,” which suggests an institution’s summer inventory of its acquisitions of recent works. In contrast to such aggressive critical sorties of the past few years as the “Responsive Eye” show at the Museum of Modern Art, the “Primary Structures” show at the Jewish Museum, the “Post-Painterly Abstraction” show at the Los Angeles County Museum, the “Systemic Painting” show at the Guggenheim, “The 1960s” is in the passive mood. It is offered without catalogue or preface, and all the exhibitions just mentioned, together with others that have been much discussed, are reflected in it. Two-fifths of its hundred and twenty-seven paintings and sculptures emanate from two sources—Philip Johnson and the Larry Aldrich Foundation—so the concept of the decade presented by the show owes much to their judgment; only a handful of the works were bought by the Museum itself. Faced by this built-in disclaimer, I was curious to know whether the omission of artists who seem to me of current importance—they range from Gottlieb and de Kooning, through Alex Katz and Lester Johnson, to Saul Steinberg and Fairfield Porter—is to be attributed to the circumstance that no works done by them in the 1960s had been acquired by the Museum. On inquiry, I learned that paintings done in the sixties by most of these artists were available, as were sixties paintings by Rothko, Hofmann, Motherwell, and others, but that the “1960s” exhibition was selected, as a Museum release put it, “to illustrate the contemporary movements, styles, and the forms of expression which seem most characteristic of the current decade,” and that therefore these artists were all left out. Evidently some contemporary “styles and forms of expression” are (or seem) not “characteristic” of the decade, while others are. Artists like Gottlieb or de Kooning, it was explained, were typical of the 1950s rather than of the sixties, and their work was on display in another part of the building. This all seemed well intentioned, yet when I heard it I felt that all modesty had departed from the exhibition, since verdicts of the utmost gravity were being delivered. That living artists were being expelled from the present and relegated to the Museum proper—that is, to the past—was hardly to be taken lightly, however lightly intended. Not so long ago these painters stood large in the sunlight, but though they continue to produce works and exhibit them, they—like spirits in Hades—no longer cast a shadow. Nor is it the relentless stream of time that has brought them to this pass, for other artists, of the same age group and even older—Reinhardt, Calder, Nevelson, Fontana—are represented in the exhibition. It is their affiliation with the “styles and forms of expression” that the Museum now judges to be obsolete that deprives them of relevance to the living.
I noted, too, the names of some who, never prominent in the past, were also denied access to the present and were conveyed directly into the limbo of the Museum’s general collection—artists such as Lester Johnson and Fairfield Porter, who have come into the foreground only in the past few years yet have apparently failed to be characteristic of the 1960s. And what of Nakian and Saul Steinberg, who have been well known for three decades yet have not been characteristic of any? By the measure of the “1960s” exhibition, none of these belong in the present. A concept of time different from that of the calendar has obviously been at work in the Museum, though no one there seems to be aware of it. For all its reticence, the Museum has, by its acts of choice, proclaimed a theory about the Now in art. Inasmuch as some artists have been dropped from the decade and others denied admission, the decade itself as a living span of time has been redefined as consisting of a set of characteristic traits. As described in the Museum’s release, these consist of “assemblage technique; ‘stain’ or ‘color field’ painting; systemic painting; hard-edge abstraction and the shaped canvas; optical and kinetic art; ‘primary’ sculpture; and various forms of realism and ‘pop.’ ” In sum, the decade has been stretched over a conceptual framework. When necessary, it has even been pulled over the edge into the fifties; for example, two paintings and a collage by Jasper Johns, one dated 1954 and two 1955, are included, obviously to make the point that Johns’ flags, targets, and objects in wooden frames assimilate themselves into the stripes and boxes prominent in Optical and systemic painting
and assemblage. There are also a 1959 Ellsworth Kelly, a 1957 Yves Klein, a 1958 Jean Tinguely, and 1959 paintings by Morris Louis and Frank Stella, all of whom are considered 1960s personalities. But the Museum’s 1962 Hofmann, 1963 Tworkov, 1958 Sam Francis, 1959 Porter, 1962 Johnson, and similar nonconforming items have been placed outside the “1960s” compound. Albers, Newman, and Cornell are also among the missing, and in a room where Frankenthaler, Louis, and Olitski are gathered, one misses their inevitable companion, Noland. Yet the presence of each of these is invoked in the appropriate chamber—Albers by the hard-edge, Newman and Noland by the color field, Cornell by the assemblage. They are present in their absence. But the absence of the Abstract Expressionists, and of landscape and figure painters, no matter how unorthodox, is an absolute absence. In the outdoor sculpture court a bit of air is, appropriately, let in between the categories by the inclusion of Calder and Ipousteguy. On the whole, however, “The 1960s” is as strict a survey of our ongoing history-making as one would expect to find in a freshman outline. Whatever the works started out to mean, here they are embodiments of the formulas and phrases by which the collective opinions of the art world have been shaped in this decade. Time in the Museum is a grocery list of the most actively publicized names, labels, and events.
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It is precisely the collective thinking represented in “The 1960s” that makes it (and its exclusions) significant as a reflection of current trends in the public life of art. Between the 1959 junk sculpture of Richard Stankiewicz or the 1960 kitchen-litter assemblage of Daniel Spoerri and the glass-and-chromium cube of Larry Bell or the painted-aluminum sections of Ronald Bladen, drastic changes have taken place in the selection and handling of materials, as well as in prevalent feeling, attitudes, and ideas. Most obviously, painting has been steadily deemphasized in favor of sculpture, craft, and technological constructions. The paintings in the exhibition are sandwiched between rooms of early-sixties assemblages and sculptures (among them a Rauschenberg, an Ossorio, a Bontecou, an Arman, a Dine, and a genuine slum artifact by Ortiz—a burnt mattress) and rooms of current kinetic inventions and light displays. Compared to the all-out associations of the assemblages with Happenings and of the motorized and electrified constructions with science and industry, painting itself here takes on a middle-of-the-road quality, which is enhanced by the fact that all the canvases on display are not only familiar but thickly overlaid with art-historical justifications. In terms of number and variety, the paintings are a skimpy collection, arranged according to their ideological and technical affinities. After an overture of two blown-up silk-screened Warhol Art Nouveau Campbell Soup labels in luscious lavender, cherry, and orange, and the three Johns, comes a group that might be labelled the Bennington acrylics—Frankenthaler, Louis, Olitski, Feeley—all of whom paint, or painted, with synthetics on unsized canvas. They are followed by painters of reiterated elements (Poons, Stella, Reinhardt, and Agnes Martin), then by Optical painters and a few assorted borderline cases (Dorazio, Kawashima); in one of the last rooms there is a swing back to some Pop and pre-Pop painters—Rivers, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann. As colored images, the canvases of Frankenthaler, Louis, and Olitski are arresting, especially as one comes upon them after two or three roomfuls of assemblages. Miss Frankenthaler’s abstract shapes have become more definite and emphatic than they used to be, and the Olitski and the larger Louis (I find his stripe paintings tiresome) are fairly daring, though in conventional terms. The weakness of these paintings is in the quality of their absorbed color, which they all share on a didactic basis. While the soaked-in paint produces a uniform transparency, it results in a thinness that diffuses the eye instantaneously across the entire surface of the picture. As a result, the image in these paintings is all there is to them. Their quality is akin to that of the photograph or color reproduction; they could be cast on a screen without much loss. Perhaps this is what endears the work of these artists to art-historian curators, who are habituated to thinking of paintings as they appear in slides and reproductions.
Paul Jenkins, a pioneer in rolling luminous pigment on tilted canvases, is, to the credit of the Museum, given a place among the thin-paint contingent, though his metaphysical sensibility differentiates his work from their art-for-art’s-sake purposefulness. Among the other “pure” painters, Poons and Stella are the most interesting. In completely different ways, both raise the traditional problem of the expressive scope of an art built entirely on the placement, reiteration, and variation of uniform elements. Musical-mathematical experimentation is a continuing strain in abstract art, and Poons is one of its most gifted younger practitioners. His two paintings in the “1960s” exhibition are not of his eye-jumping phase, and their carefully bunched ovals, though they are all equal in size, brought to my mind the object-spotting on a bright one-color ground of certain Mirós. In the jutting angles of his shaped stretchers, Stella achieves a drama, essentially structural, that is lacking in his parallel-line exercises.
In all aspects of the recent art, materials assume priority in determining effects. The inherent luminosity of synthetic pigments parallels the qualities gained by the electrification and motorization of sculptural constructions. The complex mechanism of Pol Bury’s slow-motion 31 Rods Each with a Ball is an invisible element that projects the elegant aura of nineteenth-century music boxes. By contrast, the use of pencil and oil paint by Agnes Martin supplies in itself a traditionalist overtone that tempers the extremist reductionism of her graphlike compositions. That aluminum, chromium, stainless steel, and plastics are replacing older art materials, including junk and battered found objects—Louise Nevelson exemplifies the trend in her recent switch from wood to aluminum—represents an alteration in the social and psychological content of art as well as in its tonality and visual organization. The spread of new industrial products into the studios and workshops has brought with it the habits and moral outlook of the model manufacturing plant. An aesthetic of neatness, of clean edges, smooth surfaces, efficient construction, supervenes above the various styles to blend together color-field painting, hard-edge, shaped canvases, Optical and minimal art—in fact, all of the modes identified with the latter part of the still incomplete 1960s. From Stankiewicz’s sinister 1959 Natural History, a package consisting of iron pipes and a boiler barely visible through a wrapping of rusty iron mesh, to the aseptic chromium-plated bronze effigies of Ernest Trova’s continuing Falling Man series, a stride has been taken much longer than the one from Rauschenberg’s First Landing Jump to an absent de Kooning like Gotham News. Works of the early sixties composed of materials from the street and the junk yard participate in the city spirit of Abstract Expressionist painting; as the decade wears on, bohemia and the slums give way to the laboratory, and the measure of its span is from Oldenburg’s plaster hamburgers to Flavin’s fluorescent tube.
Unfortunately, change refuses to take place in an orderly succession of phases, and some artists did in 1960 what others are emphasizing now. But if decades are to be denominated in terms of qualities, the Museum of Modern Art’s hunt for the currently characteristic should have led it to start the decade around 1962. By deleting from “The 1960s” all that junky stuff of Arman, Bontecou, César, Chamberlain, Latham, Gentils, Lindner, Mallary, Ortiz, Ossorio, Spoerri, Tinguely, and half a dozen “soft” (i.e., psychologically or technically tentative) paintings, those by Rivers, Copley, Kitaj, Rosenquist, Dine, Oldenburg, a much more unified—hence forceful—statement of the new taste and the values that support it could have been presented. Neatness is a physical manifestation of intellectual and social order; anarchists, bohemians, hipsters, tramps are presumed to be slovenly. The immaculate sculptures of Bell, Trova, Bladen, Morris, Flavin, Schöffer, and the equally tidy paintings of the Bennington acrylics (Frankenthaler et al.), the Op painters, and Reinhardt, Kelly, D’Arcangelo not only immerse the spectator in a sheath of prophylaxis but reassure him of the operation in art of a rationale of conception, practice, and utility. The aesthetic of cleanlin
ess has a political dimension; the fuss about thick paint, or “painterliness,” banned from “The 1960s,” derives from the wish to affirm middle-class tidiness and security produced by washes of color upon stretched fabric. In contrast, an artist like di Suvero, who continues to build sculptures out of stained, broken beams and twisted iron, identifies himself with social intransigence and resistance to the war in Vietnam. It is consistent with 1960s orderliness that sculptures should not be made “by hand” in the sculptor’s studio but fabricated for him in a machine or carpentry shop, and that paintings should be blown up and manufactured for the artist in plastic and silk-screen. The gesture of Barnett Newman in covering with a patina of rust a sculpture made for him in a machine shop may be regarded as a protest against both the shiny surfaces and the rationalism of the kind of art with which he is usually identified. Critical catch phrases such as “color field,” “hard edge,” “primary,” “systemic,” though they are used to describe different modes of painting and sculpture, overlap to denominate a general movement in art in which sensibility is subordinated to aesthetic and technical systems. The art of the sixties is not worked—it is done according to plan.