Art Lies, Volume 31, Summer 2001 Page: 23
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concern with cultural communities and their social dynam-
ics, with how and why audiences might or should gather
around artworks. It definitely concerned Greenberg and
Fried: in their eyes, an artwork that wagers everything on
material intensity (whether a Pollock or a Judd) threatens
not only to privatize experience but to do so for too wide an
audience, offering up cheap sensory thrills to be had by any
shock-craving viewer. On the other hand, an artwork more
RIFORUMBEETLE
sk;'pI
exacting in the kind of audience it summons and antici-
pates, that tightly specifies a cogent set of communal values,
runs the risk of being overly narrow and exclusive (an accu-
sation leveled at Noland and Olitski and the modernist
hero-worship heaped on them during the '60s). Indeed, this
dilemma can be seen as informing much of modern art (or
at least its historical and theoretical representations) and its
constant questioning of convention, its calling into doubt
the viability of certain modes of address, its avoidance of any
metaphors or ways of figuring experience overly vulnerable
to instrumentalization, to misappropriation as vehicles for
dulled, dominant, unexamined meanings. Generally, artistshave tried to perpetually strike new conventions each more
demanding of their audience (a modernist goal perhaps), or
they have instead thrown emphasis onto the questioning
and undermining of established, popular tropes (perhaps a
more postmodern approach, what Foster called "a new strat-
egy of interference" back in 1983). Or some have tried to
resist meaning altogether, to avoid any sort of figural read-
ing of their work. In the end, this might have been what
Pollock was after; "his painting," at least according to T. J.
Clark, "is a work against metaphor." (Ditto Harold
Rosenberg, who saw Pollock as attempting not to paint an
image-a figure or symbol or statement or anything the
viewer could consume-but rather "to paint...just to paint.")
For over three decades now much compelling criticism
has valorized a kind of iconoclasm not entirely unlike the
one Rosenberg advocated-we have had anti-form, the
informe, the index, the aleatory, the horizontal versus the
vertical, the operative or performative as opposed to the
thematic, and so on. We've also had generous portions of
postmodernist debunking. So does the renewed interest
today among younger artists in early '60s abstraction, or the
clamor among critics for beauty, signal a return to metaphor,
to the coining of effective, embraceable images? One thing's
for sure: what isn't being revived is an interest in aesthetics,
which the ahistorical and seemingly less conflicted term
beauty preempts. "Beauty . . .is a common word," writes
Peter Schjeldahl; it "is-or ought to be-no big deal."
Whereas aesthetics can be seen as arcane and elitist (since it
studies beauty too much), beauty itself is straightforward,
plain and populist. From this angle beauty appears at once
wide-open and inclusive-you know it when you see it-
and also incredibly narrow: while everyone can experience
it, it leaves no room for disagreement. Beauty disarms lan-
guage and silences argument: it "presents a stone wall to the
thinking mind," Schjeldahl continues; it elicits "involuntary,
bodily consent and approval," according to Hickey. Rather
than preceding, perhaps even spurring thought and discus-
sion (a more 18th-century view), beauty now comes after,
turns back on the intellect as a vehicle of resentment and
revenge: "it suppresses intellect altogether," proclaims
Schjeldahl, "to the understandable horror of theorists and
scholars."
Advocating beauty has become a defensive strategy that
wants to avoid being seen as such; it's yet another means of
protecting art against some apparently waiting misappropri-
ation-this time, misappropriation by what Hickey calls
"the therapeutic institution" (meaning, he says, "a cloud of
bureaucracies...museums, universities, bureaus, foundations,
publications and endowments," which sounds like a
Reaganite updating of what Rosenberg, when calling on
painters "just to paint," denounced as "the taste bureaucra-
cies of Modern Art" that were encouraging a "mode of pro-
duction...all too clearly rationalized," in which art was
"employed not wanted... used in its totality as material forARTL!ES Summer 2001 I 23
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Kalil, Susie. Art Lies, Volume 31, Summer 2001, periodical, 2001; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228061/m1/25/?q=%221964~%22: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .