The Painted Word

  Pop Art absolutely rejuvenated the New York art scene. It did for the galleries, the COLLECTORS, the gallery-goers, the art-minded press, and the artists’ incomes about what the Beatles did for the music business at about the same time. It was the thaw! It was spring again! The press embraced Pop Art with priapic delight. That goddamned Abstract Expressionism had been so solemn, so grim … “Shards of interpenetrated sensibility make their way, tentatively, through a not always compromisable field of cobalt blue—” How could you write about the freaking stuff? Pop Art you could have fun with.

  Avant-gardism, money, status, Le Chic, and even the 1960s idea of sexiness—it all buzzed around Pop Art. The place, without any question, was Leo Castelli’s gallery at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Castelli had Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, most of the heavies. It was there that the Culture buds now hung out, beautiful little girls, with their hips cocked and the seams of their Jax slax cleaving them into hemispheres while they shot Culture pouts through their Little Egypt eyes.

  God knows, the Pop artists themselves entered into the spirit of the thing. Whereas the Abstract Expressionists had so many disastrous problems double-tracking from the Boho Dance to the Consummation—whereas Pollock, Newman, Rothko, the whole push, in fact, had their own early antibourgeois boho ideals hovering over them forevermore like the most vengeful and vigilant superego in the history of psychology—the Pop artists double-tracked with about as much moral agony as a tape recorder. They came up with a new higher synthesis of personal conduct: to wallow in the luxuries of le monde, to junk it through with absolute abandon, was simply part of the new bohemia. Nothing to it! The artists used to hang around the apartment of Robert Scull, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, like children who don’t know that you’re supposed to go home at suppertime. They’d be there all afternoon, and Bob—Bob Scull—or Spike—Bob’s wife, Ethel—he called her Spike—would go around commenting on how it was getting dark and—oh, well, how about switching on a few lights, boys—and so they’d just turn on a few lights—and by and by it would be time to eat—and the artists would still be there, like little boys, wide-eyed and ready for goodies—and Spike would say, Well, we’re going to eat now—and instead of saying, Uh, I guess I have to go home now, they’d say: Swell! Fine! Let’s eat! (Where you taking us?) The only problem they had was that many of them were poor and plebeian in origin and had grown up in bohemia, and they didn’t know even the rudimentary manners of life in le monde, but that didn’t stop them for long. At first, Andy Warhol, for example, would go out to dinner and wouldn’t know one end of that long lineup of silverware on the table from the other, and so he would sit there, at some five- or six-course dinner at the Burdens’ or wherever, without touching a morsel, not the crème sénégalaise nor the lobster cardinal nor the veal Valdostana nor the salad Grant Street nor the fresh pear halves Harry & David—until finally the lady seated to his left would say, “But, Mr. Warhol, you haven’t touched a thing!”—whereupon Andy would say, “Oh, I only eat candy.” Warhol learned fast, however, and he soon knew how to take whatever he wanted. The bohemian, by definition, was one who did things the bourgeois didn’t dare do. True enough, said Warhol, and he added an inspired refinement: nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois. True to his theory, he now goes about in button-down shirts, striped ties, and ill-cut tweed jackets, like a 1952 Holy Cross pre-med student. Warhol’s ultimate liberation of the old puritanical Tenth Street boho ego, however, came the day he put an ad in The Village Voice saying that he would endorse anything, anything at all, for money … and listing his telephone number.

  Double-tracking on all sides! Double-tracking at once naive and infinitely subtle! Underneath the very popularity of Pop Art itself, as many people knew, and nobody said, was a deliciously simple piece of double-tracking. Steinberg, Rubin, and Alloway had declared Pop Art kosher and quite okay to consume, because it was all “sign systems,” not realism. But everyone else, from the COLLECTORS to the Culture buds, was cheating!

  They were like the Mennonite who, forbidden by religious law to have a TV set in his home, props it up on the fence post outside and watches through an open window. In the middle of January he sits in his living room huddled in an overcoat and a blanket, with the window open, because Mannix is out on the fence. In short … the culturati were secretly enjoying the realism!—plain old bourgeois mass-culture high-school goober-squeezing whitehead-hunting can-I-pop-it-for-you-Billy realism! They looked at a Roy Lichtenstein blowup of a love-comic panel showing a young blond couple with their lips parted in the moment before a profound, tongue-probing, post-teen, American soul kiss, plus the legend “WE ROSE UP SLOWLY … AS IF WE DIDN’T BELONG TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD ANY LONGER … LIKE SWIMMERS IN A SHADOWY DREAM … WHO DIDN’T NEED TO BREATHE …” and—the hell with the sign systems—they just loved the dopey campy picture of these two vapid blond sex buds having their love-comic romance bigger than life, six feet by eight feet, in fact, up on the walls in an art gallery. Dopey … campy … Pop Art was packed with literary associations, quite in addition to the love scene or whatever on the canvas. It was, from beginning to end, an ironic, a camp, a literary-intellectual assertion of the banality, emptiness, silliness, vulgarity, et cetera of American culture, and if the artists said, as Warhol usually did, “But that’s what I like about it”—that only made the irony more profound, more cool.

  COLLECTORS and other culturati also liked this side of Pop Art immensely, because it was so familiar, so cozily antibourgeois, because once again it made them honorary congs walking along with the vanguard artists through the land of the philistines. Steinberg is the only theorist I know of, with the possible exception of Bernard Berenson, who ever went to the trouble of creating some theory specifically for the passive role of consumer of culture. Were you upset by the swiftness of change? Did it worry you that one moment Abstract Expressionism was it, the final style, and then, in the blink of an eye, Abstract Expressionism was demolished and Pop Art was it? It shouldn’t, said Steinberg—for that was precisely where the consumer of culture could show his courage, his mettle, his soldierly bearing. For what in the world requires more courage than “to applaud the destruction of values which we still cherish”? Modern art always “projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed,” he said. “It is always born in anxiety.” Not only that, he said, it is the very function of really valuable new Modern art to “transmit this anxiety to the spectator,” so that when he looks at it, he is thrown into “a genuine existential predicament.” This was basically Greenberg’s line, of course—“all profoundly original art looks ugly at first”—but Steinberg made the feeling seem deeper (and a bit more refined). The clincher was Steinberg’s own confession of how he had at first disliked Johns’s work. He had resisted it. He had fought to cling to his old values—and then realized he was wrong. This filtered down as a kind of Turbulence Theorem. If a work of art or a new style disturbed you, it was probably good work. If you hated it—it was probably great.

  Roy Lichtenstein, “We Rose Up Slowly …” 1964. Not realism … sign systems

  That was precisely the way Robert Scull discovered the artist Walter De Maria. Scull was walking down Madison Avenue one Saturday afternoon when he stopped in a gallery and saw some drawings that were nearly blank. They were pieces of drawing paper framed and hung, and down in one corner would be a few faint words, seemingly written by an ailing individual with a pencil so hard, a No. 8 or something, that the lead scarcely even made a line: “Water, water, water …” Scull hated these drawings so profoundly, he promptly called up the artist and became his patron. That brought De Maria his first recognition as a Minimal artist.

  SIX

  Up the Fundamental Aperture

  The Greatest Artist in the History of the World collapses at the Automat

  MINIMAL ART WAS PART OF A COMEBACK THAT ABSTRACT ART began to make, even while Pop Art was still going stron
g. This time around, theory was more dominant than ever.

  I can remember the Museum of Modern Art announcing that it was going to have an exhibition in 1965 called “The Responsive Eye,” a show of paintings with special optical effects—what quickly became known as Op Art. Quickly is hardly the word for it. A mad rush, is more like it. Pop Art had been such a smashing success, with so many spin-offs, that it seemed like all of smart New York was primed, waiting to see what the art world would come up with next. By the time the Museum’s big Op Art show opened in the fall, two out of every three women entering the glass doors on West Fifty-third Street for the opening-night hoopla were wearing print dresses that were knock-offs of the paintings that were waiting on the walls inside. In between the time the show had been announced and the time it opened, the Seventh Avenue garment industry had cranked up and slapped the avant-garde into mass production before the Museum could even officially discover it. (They liked knocking off Bridget Riley’s fields of vibrating lines best of all.)

  Bridget Riley, Current, 1964. Not Op Art… Perceptual Abstraction

  Op, like Pop, was enjoyed for basically “literary” reasons. All of it, from Vasarely to Larry Poons, was reminiscent of the marvelous optical illusions in the syndicated newspaper feature “Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not.’” But the theory of Op Art was something else. The Op artists never called it Op Art; they preferred Perceptual Abstraction. Their argument was: Cubism freed art from the nineteenth-century view of a painting as a window through which you saw an illusion of the real world. Earlier abstract work, such as De Stijl or Abstract Expressionism, had advanced this good work by establishing the painting as “an independent object as real as a chair or table” (to quote from “The Responsive Eye” catalogue). We Perceptual Abstractionists complete the process by turning this art object into a piece of pure perception. By creating special optical effects (but on a flat surface!) we remove it from the outside world and take it into that terra incognita “between the cornea and the brain.”

  Theory really started to roll now … toward reductionism. In this case: real art is nothing but what happens in your brain. Of course, Greenberg had started it all with his demands for purity, for flatness (ever more Flatness!), for the obliteration of distinctions such as foreground and background, figure and field, line and contour, color and pattern. Now, in the mid-1960s, Greenberg made a comeback.

  He had learned a thing or two in the meantime about strategy. He no longer tried to defend Abstract Expressionism against the huge shift in taste that Pop Art represented. In fact, he offered what amounted to a piece of implied confession or, better said, self-criticism. All along, he said, there had been something old-fashioned about Abstract Expressionism, despite the many advances it brought. This old-fashioned thing was … its brushstrokes. Its brushstrokes? Yes, said Greenberg, its brushstrokes.* The characteristic Abstract Expressionist brushstroke was something very obvious, very expressive, very idiosyncratic … very painterly, like the “blurred, broken, loose definition of color and contour” you find in Baroque art. It was as obvious as a skid on the highway. He termed this stroke the “Tenth Street touch.”

  Lichtenstein’s Yellow and Red Brushstrokes, 1966. Brushstrokes without a single brushstroke showing; a flat picture of impasto and the old-fashioned Tenth Street past

  Lichtenstein, the Pop artist, liked this notion so much, or was so amused by it, that he did a series of Brushstroke paintings, each one a blowup of a single “Tenth Street touch” brushstroke, with every swirl and overloaded driblet represented—but rendered in the hard, slick commercial-illustration unpainterly style of Pop, with no brushstrokes of his own whatsoever to be seen.

  Greenberg was still unbending in his opposition to Pop, but now he knew better than to just denounce it. Now he added the obligatory phrase: “—and I can show you something newer and better … way out here.” This, he said, was Post-Painterly Abstraction.

  Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction has gone under other names since then: Hard-Edge-Abstract and Color Field Abstract, to name two. But all of them can be defined by the way in which they further the process of reduction, i.e., the way they get rid of something—just a little bit more, if you please! How far we’ve come! How religiously we’ve cut away the fat! In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs (Hard Edge, Color Field, Washington School).

  Enough? Hardly, said the Minimalists, who began to come into their own about 1965. Bourgeois connotations, they argued, still hung on to Modern art like a necktie. What about all those nice “lovely” colors that the Hard Edgers and the Color Fielders used? They invited as many sentimental associations as painterly brushstrokes had. So Minimalists began using colors like Tool & Die Works red and Subway I-Beam green and Restaurant Exhaust-Fan Duct Lint gray that nobody could accuse of sentimentality. And how about all those fuzzy, swampy, misty edges that Color Fielders like Olitski and Frankenthaler went for? They invited you to linger over a painting for all its emotional “evocations,” just like the worst junk of the old pre-Raphaelites. Henceforth a paint should be applied only in hard linear geometries, and you should get the whole painting at once, “fast,” to use the going phrase. (No Loitering.) Kenneth Noland, formerly of Morris Louis’s misty Washington School, was now considered the fastest painter in the business.

  Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961. Noland was known as the fastest painter alive (i.e., one could see his pictures faster than anybody’s else’s). The explanation of why that was important took considerably longer

  And how about the painting frame? Wasn’t New York full of artists who made a big thing about treating the painting as an object—and then acted as if the frame wasn’t even there? So Frank Stella turned the canvas itself into a frame and hung it on the wall with nothing in the middle. That got rid of the frames, and the era of “shaped canvases” began.

  Sure, but what about this nice sweet bourgeois idea of hanging up pictures in the first place … all in their nice orderly solid-burgher little rows? … So artists like Robert Hunter and Sol Lewitt began painting directly on the gallery walls or on walls outside the gallery window … with the faintest, most unsentimental geometric forms imaginable … Faster and faster art theory flew now, in ever-tighter and more dazzling turns. It was dizzying, so much so that both Greenberg and Rosenberg were shocked—épatés. Greenberg accused the Minimalists of living only for “the far-out as an end in itself.” Their work was “too much a feat of ideation … something deduced instead of felt and discovered.” A little late to be saying that, Clement! Rosenberg tried to stop them by saying they really weren’t far-out at all—they were a fake avant-garde, a mere “DMZ vanguard,” a buffer between the real avant-garde (his boy de Kooning) and the mass media. Very subtle—and absolutely hopeless, Harold! Theory, with a head of its own now, spun on and chewed up the two old boys like breadsticks, like the Revolution devouring Robespierre and Danton—faster and faster—in ever-tighter and more dazzling turns—let’s see, we just got rid of the little rows of hung pictures, not to mention a couple of superannuated critics, and we’ve gotten rid of illusion, representational objects, the third dimension, pigment (or most of it), brushstrokes, and now frames and canvas—but what about the wall itself? What about the very idea of a work of art as something “on a wall” at all? How very pre-Modern! How can you treat the wall as something separate from the gallery, the room, the space in which it exists?

  Tampa (1964) by Frank Stella, who stood staunchly by the Word: fast, hard, flat, and unevocative, with paradise aforethought

  And so artists like Carl André, Robert Morris, Ronald Bladen, and Michael Steiner did huge geometric (unsentimental, uncolorful, fast) sculptures designed to divide up the entire gallery into spaces, to make the very bui
lding part of the sculpture in some way. No more “hanging” an exhibition; these were “installations.”

  But what about the very idea of the gallery or museum? What about the very notion of a nice sedate sanctum where one—meaning a person of the proper gentility—comes to gaze upon Art and the Artist with a glaze of respect and silence over his mug? Wasn’t there something impossibly retrograde about the whole thing? So began Earth Art, such as Michael Heizer’s excavations in the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake.

  By now it was the late 1960s, and the New Left was in high gear, and artists and theorists began to hail Earth Art and the like as a blow against “the Uptown Museum-Gallery Complex,” after the “military-industrial complex” out in the world beyond. If the capitalists, the paternalists of the art world, can’t get their precious art objects into their drawing rooms or even into their biggest museums, they’ve had it. A few defiant notes like this, plus the signing of a few dozen manifestos against war and injustice—that was about as far as New York artists went into Left politics in the 1960s. With everyone now caught up in the spin of Theory, at such a furious velocity, the notion of putting on the brakes and doing that 1930s number again, cranking out some good old Social Realism propaganda, was too impossible to even think about. No, a few raspberries for the “museum-gallery complex” … and let’s get back to business.

  Back to business … which in the late 1960s was the monomaniacal task of reduction. What about the idea of a permanent work of art at all, or even a visible one? Wasn’t that the most basic of all assumptions of the Old Order—that art was eternal and composed of objects that could be passed from generation to generation, like Columbus’s bones? Out of that objection came Conceptual Art.