Art Lies, Volume 31, Summer 2001 Page: 24
This periodical is part of the collection entitled: ArtLies and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the UNT Libraries.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
educational and profit-making enterprises: color reproduc-
tions, design adaptations, human-interest stories"). But if
art today really does appear too dominated by a kind of pro-
fessional patois of cobbled theorizing, by overly institution-
alized modes of address and reception, it still seems ques-
tionable whether rapt silence is the best alternative avail-
able, especially when the need for some sort of compelling
dialog about art feels so pressing. Beauty as a means of
renewing symbolic connection in the end could be a cure
that does more harm than the disease.
Hickey himself has pointed a way out of this dilemma. In
his writing he characterizes beauty less in relation to 18th-
century aesthetics than to the classical tradition of rhetoric
that preceded and informed the early modern discourse on
taste; for him, beauty is not about evoking the Ideal through
pictorial unity so much as it involves the use of "tropes and
figures" for the purposes of persuasion. Oddly enough, this
view aligns the pro-market Hickey with certain Marxist
social art historians like Clark and Fred Orton, both of
whom have also made recent appeals to rhetorical analysis
in an effort to more fully flesh out the social dimensions of
aesthetic experience. Aesthetics and rhetoric complement
each other in that, while the former is about appreciation,
the latter analyzes and categorizes all the various modes of
appreciation. Rhetoric deals with not only how things are
presented for understanding--with how to build arguments
and make them persuasive-but with how understanding
treats those things presented to it, with how things like
arguments and artworks are received. Hickey, Clark and
Orton are of course very strange bedfellows, and not just
because of their differing politics: Hickey, who often cites
Cicero, denies any interest in irony, while Clark and Orton
refer mostly to Paul de Man, whose favored figurative
modes are irony and allegory. More problematic still, none
of them seem at all sympathetic to early '60s abstraction-
exactly the kind of work a lot of artists today are drawing
inspiration from.
Hickey, for instance, sees the "anti-rhetorical flatness" of
'60s color-field painting as "visually impoverished," as pro-
hibiting all "the linguistic properties implicit in illusionistic
space." And yet it can be argued that rhetorical strategies
were very much mobilized by the art of the '60s, and that
without an awareness of such strategies our discussion of
that art remains incomplete. By the early '60s a kind of art
was flourishing in New York-not only color-field painting
but certain minimalist work and pop art as well-that
wagered everything on how it looked: how it looked to or at
or even away from the viewer, and how the viewer in turn
looked back at it. And this at a time when the number of
galleries and amount of media hype and college art courses
and government interest in art-all the "bureaucracies" andother presumed agents of misappropriation-were increas-
ing at what seemed an exponential rate. By the end of the
decade, with the rise of process and conceptual art, anotherwave of iconoclasm, 15 years after Rosenberg's call for sov-
ereign acts over consumable images, would demote static
imagery once more. And yet it's this in-between period,
during the reign of artworks that emphasized looking
despite the sense of crisis embroiling it, that many of today's
artists are returning to. And aspects of that work can't be
appropriated by younger artists without them also borrow-
ing from its rhetorical maneuvers.
According to modern-day theories of rhetoric, there exist
four main modes of address, or what are called "master
tropes": beside metaphor, there are synecdoche, metonymy
and irony. It's possible to see much of the visual art made in
the early '60s-that is, made in the wake of Pollock's attack
on metaphor-as adopting the last three of these master
tropes. Within this scheme, color-field painting can be seen
as an attempt to move beyond metaphor toward synec-
doche. If what distinguishes metaphor is the awareness it
maintains of a difference between the two things it never-
theless associates, synecdoche is that mode of representa-
tion that stresses not difference but proximity, identification
and sameness between entities. It's that class of tropes or
figures in which "part stands for whole, container for con-
tained, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing
made," that "impl[ies] an integral relationship...proclaiming
the identity of microcosm and macrocosm" (to quote from
Kenneth Burke's influential writings on rhetoric). The
paintings of Noland, Olitski and Morris Louis, with their
colors spread evenly across or soaked into expanses of can-
vas, emphasize their constituent materials but only to
equate those materials with the vital, exacting capabilities of
modernist viewing. By denying the importance of brush-
work and minimizing traces of the artist's labor, all three
artists can be said to have privileged the act of reception
over production, looking over making. But that doesn't
mean they weren't also wary of the abuses that had become
associated with art's afterlife in exhibition and interpreta-
tion. All three sought directness and immediacy in their
work; for them, reception was thought of not as a locale
opposed to the studio but as having no locale at all, as hap-
pening within "eyesight alone," in the intimate proximity of
the encounter and the instant of looking that squeezed out
all surrounding space between viewer and image. Here was
a safe place where a kind of looking could occur without
threat of misappropriation and misunderstanding, where
interpretation wasn't allowed any leeway, where the viewer
either identified with the painting and fused with it or was
left at a loss, feeling distanced by so much blank linen and
spilt paint.
But this wasn't the only defense available to painters. One
could instead make paintings that purposely distanced the
viewer, gave themselves over to viewing while also deliber-ately steeling themselves against it, in which only
irrefutable fact was presented, paintings that hid themselves
behind impenetrable obduracy. "What you see is what you24 1 ARTLIES Summer 2001
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Matching Search Results
View two pages within this issue that match your search.Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Periodical.
Kalil, Susie. Art Lies, Volume 31, Summer 2001, periodical, 2001; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228061/m1/26/?q=%221964~%22: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .