Mark Tansey: The Innocent Eye Test
It's okay to laugh. It's so wry I could make a pastrami sandwich with it.
Mark Tansey has a set of paintings (these are from the 1980's) with comments on modern art scholarship - the equally funny and god forbid informative "Triumph of the New York School,"
should appeal to Dr. X in particular, but it requires this key code of famous figures in the aesthetic struggle between Picasso, the brilliant fauvists and musty surrealists and the rise of post-war American art lead by Pollack under the useful but asinine (as my father would say, with his contempt for pretentious, broadly declarative sentences posing as scholarship) critic Clement Greenberg.
Greenburg, correctly promoting an exciting group of American painters post-war: De Kooning and Motherwell among them, was simply wrong about how space functioned in these paintings- his central thesis about good art being that which was honest by destroying the illusion of space was a conceit that had little to do with the actual paintings. They're abstract, but they ain't flat, kids. They use every other trick in the book to establish space - overlapping, focus, line weight, physical mass, particular color fields.
And yet as enjoyable and smart as Tansey's pieces are, they're kind of problematic, because they feed into the corrosive tendency of art historians to give primacy to the word - they feel like illustrations of the debates of art historians rather than the art itself. Whatever that might be. It feels a little like the comments of a jester, captured in war and sold to the court.
posted by JAB at 10:09 AM
2 Comments:
"...because they feed into the corrosive tendency of art historians to give primacy to the word - they feel like illustrations of the debates of art historians rather than the art itself. "
I was thinking about this the other day:
Much as I love Marselle Duchamp, I basically blame him for for the primacy of "word" over "art" thing.
Ah well, at least he had a sense of humor about it.
A great artists, but Duchamp has much to be blamed for, for unsupportable manifestos (like art should be "non-retinal) seized on, overmuch, by the mountains of cotton-mouthed critics. A caricature of his ideas has become what I started calling a "Duchampian orthodoxy" in contemporary art, that until recently conflated with Warholian fashionism (see that word - I like that) to become a bureaucracy of art criticism, which seemed, all told, to wholly, though critically, embrace material culture and yet oppose material experimentation as legitimate art-making. It threatened to turn art into mere intellectual illustration, and seemed, in a kind of jealous cynicism, to want to destroy humanistic art with a kind of humorless jokeiness.
The apex of that time is past. Quasi-Duchampian strategies after all date from when racoon coats were 23 Skidoo. The beast of the French Academic painting is thoroughly dead, and so are Warhol and Duchamp; their artistic strategies of course DEPENDED on the ritual slaughtering of that beast to function. But it's worth noting that in his waning days in the late 50's, Duchamp complained that the problem with modern painting was a lack of high quality paints and a dearth of applied skill.
Art at the moment is healthy, in critical paralysis -good for artists- and a vast productive revival, respecting and exploring and skewering every tradition, high and low and middle.
I haven't read more than a few snippets of Tomkins - my New Yorker subscription ran out in 1983. I generally liked fellow humanist curmudgeon Robert Hughes, and am a fan of Edward Lucie-Smith. As a professor friend said to me: "I love art, and I love history. I hate art history." Six pages of any critic is usually enough to stop painting and start drinking.
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