The new American vigilantes ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
In a short story by Arthur C. Clarke which sets out one of the ideas he developed later in 2001, a mysterious pyramid-like object is discovered on the moon with an invisible barrier round it like an anti-magnetic field. This object is later found to be one of a network of equally mysterious pyramids scattered around the planets by an unknown agency at an undisclosed time in history. It is felt that they appear in a vaguely accusatory or anticipatory light. The story is called 'The Sentinels.' In the film, the prototype for the mysterious object was a vast, silkily polished rectangular slab, looking like a greatly enlarged John McCracken (a West Coast artist who makes big, coloured, shallow, rectangular slabs or slats which stand on the floor and lean indolently against the wall). This artist is represented (by a blue slab) in 'The Art of the Real,' an exhibition devised by E. C. Goossen for the Museum of Modern Art and which now appears at the Tate under the auspices of the Arts Council.
'The Art of the Real' is a very good and use- ful assembly of a particular strand in recent American art—much of it what is loosely called Goossen is in charge of the visual arts programme at Hunter College: an educa- tionalist and writer, he is close to artists and what they are doing and is one of the most dedi- cated men in the New York art world. Apart from planning the show, he has contributed a modest and sensible essay to the catalogue. But what London needs badly, and at once, are large one-man shows by the sculptors Judd, Morris, Smith, Andre, McCracken and Smith- son, together with a few painters of the calibre of Ellsworth Kelly and the late Paul. Feeley. Shows by Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still are historically long overdue.
All these artists are represented in the Arts Council show, and the common denominator running through their work, especially by the younger generation, is a compression which questions all our habits of visual perception and makes one re-examine basic principles. The intransigence of this work in general, and its lack of any outward-going or obvious seduction, its comparative blankness in fact, brings those space fiction 'sentinels' to mind; it is tempting to refer to the puritan strain in the American character and see these American artists as the true keepers of a present-day, self-denying, aesthetic conscience. Certainly, there is a did- actic note in much of this work which extends beyond the cerebral shapes and anonymous sur- faces of the painting and sculpture itself, and which touches on what has become increasingly familiar in recent years: the idea of the work of art which is also a tangible, physical com- ment on art itself, or art-as-comment. The factors themselves, in any given analysis, are presented as art objects in their own right.
Work of this sort lends itself very happily to exhibition, where a cumulative build-up of elements makes for a barely stated, almost, subliminal drama stemming from the direc- tional flow of these elements, as separate works—severely horizontal or vertical paintings, for example—as well as from their intrinsic actions. In this sense, they are as gestural in what they describe as the abstract expression- ism they have superseded. It is interesting here to note that Robert Morris, a sculptor of great intellectual probity, has now passed from the severely formal phase represented in this show (and exemplified by some I beams joined to-
gether to make a square 'up-tilted at one side
by two vertical, shorter I beams) to a series of exercises in informal 'soft' sculpture made of felt, cotton waste, etc, frequently piled in seem- ingly haphazard heaps around the floor. This is called 'anti-form' and appears to be a latter-day comment on abstract expressionism.
But if much of the work in this show is ideal for demonstration purposes, it would be unfair to suggest that it is individually without pre- sense or flavour. Johns, Louis and Noland are all known and enjoyed in London: there is much else, and one of the great values of the exhibi- tion is to trace a historical thread from Georgia
O'Keeffe's 1929 Lake George Window painting, for example, through to Ellsworth Kelly's 1949 Window picture. O'Keeffe is one of the seminal figures in modern American art and it is good to see her properly included at last in a radical survey. Kelly is one of the most beautiful artists alive and, for a later generation, as prophetic and absolute a figure as 4Keeffe. His While Relief --Arch and its Shadow (Pont de la Tour- 'wile) is exactly what the title states, and a per- fect example of the reality-illusion interplay present in many of these paintings and sculp- tures, however concretely abstract the final form.
The instability of perspective, obviously enough a- changing phenomenon, also plays a large part here. As you walk into the show, a long Noland painting of thin horizontal stripes is on one side, facing a twenty-tight feet long painting by Patricia Johanson of a single hori- zontal blue band, placed centrally on an other- wise bare white canvas, and interrupted by fOur equally spaced orange sections. A side view, the only one possible here, gives a foreshortened reading of the alternating orange and blue sec- tions which thus appear not only to recede but to compress into smaller sections.
The point I want to make, given the roles here of gesture and illusion-via-scale, is that if the declared intentions of the work by the younger artists in this show are rigorously pure and restrictive, certainly eschewing the pieties of constructivism, then they do not altogether avoid a paradoxically romantic connotation— romantic in the way that simple 'found' objects were romantic when Duchamp re-presented them to us. If McCracken is giving us the essence of colour, like a disembodied perfume, in his leaning slabs of colour, then this seems to me just as romantic a way of presenting colour as to encounter 'blue' pegged down to the rendering of sky, or green ascribed unmis- takably to foliage. McCracken's colour is free of descriptive function or literary reference but it is still trapped tightly inside a device, and this can be seen as another form of romanticism, The difference is that we •bring the romantic connotations to bear on a work of art which; in itself, is merely a simplified vehicle for auto.: suggestion. The constant fact, throughout the
show, is that the suggestiveness, the possi- bilities, the implications, are all there. This is art by remote control and a very suitable art for a generation suspicious of easy emotion or the ready striking of outworn attitudes.
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