7 Clement Greenberg publishes "Modernist Painting"

6
-<7 1960. Clement Greenberg publishes "Modernist Painting": new guise shapes thedebates of thesixties. rom the late forties through the early sixties,the Americar.r critic Clement Greenberg workedto forge a descriptive vocab- ulary, a setof terms that would address with greatprecision and muscularify those features thatcounted as newin thepostwar art he admired. One of these wasthe term "allover," which he used to describe the uniformify of surface of certain Abstract Expressionist rpainting, mostconspicuously Iackson Pollock's, in its conditionasa tight mesh of repetitions [1 ]. To make this term count, Greenberg contrasted it with the idea of the "easel picture"in which the illusion of a boxlike cavityis cut into the wall behind it to create the stage for some kindof dramatic, and thus focused, event; the allover surface, bycontrast, organizes its contents in terms of flatness, frontality, and lackofincident ("The Crisis ofthe Easel Picture" [ 1948] ). Another term was "homeless representation," which Greenberg invented to account for the paradox of abstract painting that nonetheless seemed to describe the kinds of shallow hills and valleys generally used to model the illusion of a three-dimensionai object; it was asif the tonal modulationsof de Kooning'ssmeared paint (and later, lasperJohns's encaustic "touches")were waiting for a representational object to return to them. In opposition to this, Greenberg pitted the idea of "color-space," as in the work of rBarnett Newman("After Abstract Expressionism" lI962l), a lumi- nous openness he was alsoto qualify as "optical," here following hiscriticism reorients itself and in its the lead of early art-historical writing where "haptic" or tactile qualities wereopposed to "optic" ones-the art historian in ques- r tion wasthe nineteenth-century Austriar-r Alois Riegl. Given this effort at accurate, formal characterization, it is not surprising that Greenberg shouldhave exploded into the exaspera- tion of an essay such as "How Art Writing EarnsIts Bad Name" (1962).lt is already the mark of the simplicity and directness of Greenberg's prosethat he should have avoided the term "criti- cism" and adopted the workmanlike connotations of "art writing" instead. But his target was not verbal archness or preciosity. Rather, it wasthe position,first enunciated by Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" (i952) but takenup in England a few years later by critics such as Lawrence Alloway, that the avant-garde is r.ro longer concerned with making art but rather in perforn-ring a kind of self-revealing gesture, or "event," the by-product ofrvhich (the painting)is ofno realconcern to either artist or onlooker. As Rosenberg had put it: "The newpainting has broken down everydistinction between art and life." For Green- berg, however, the scandal of such a remark'sclaim to being criticism is that it hasno way of explaining why the "painted 1eft- overs of'action'should be looked at and even acquired by others." It wasGreenberg's sense that in its jettisoning of art, the avant- garde had cometo stand for a positionhe characterized, r-regatively, l,Jackson Poffock, Number 13A,1948: Arabesgue, 1948 Oiland enamel on canvas, 94.6x 295,9 (37'l x 116'l) ,A lntroductlon 3 Greenberg's modernism | 19601t

Transcript of 7 Clement Greenberg publishes "Modernist Painting"

-<7

1960.Clement Greenberg publ ishes "Modernist Paint ing":

new guise shapes the debates of the s ixt ies.

rom the late forties through the early sixties, the Americar.r

critic Clement Greenberg worked to forge a descriptive vocab-

ulary, a set of terms that would address with great precision

and muscularify those features that counted as new in the postwar arthe admired. One of these was the term "allover," which he used to

describe the uniformify of surface of certain Abstract Expressionistrpainting, most conspicuously Iackson Pollock's, in its condition as atight mesh of repetitions [1 ]. To make this term count, Greenbergcontrasted it with the idea of the "easel picture" in which the illusion

of a boxlike cavity is cut into the wall behind it to create the stage for

some kind of dramatic, and thus focused, event; the allover surface,

bycontrast, organizes its contents in terms of flatness, frontality, andlackofincident ("The Crisis ofthe Easel Picture" [ 1948] ).

Another term was "homeless representation," which Greenberginvented to account for the paradox of abstract painting thatnonetheless seemed to describe the kinds of shallow hills andvalleys generally used to model the illusion of a three-dimensionai

object; it was as if the tonal modulations of de Kooning's smearedpaint (and later, lasper Johns's encaustic "touches") were waiting

for a representational object to return to them. In opposition to

this, Greenberg pitted the idea of "color-space," as in the work ofrBarnett Newman ("After Abstract Expressionism" lI962l), a lumi-

nous openness he was also to qualify as "optical," here following

his cr i t ic ism reor ients i tse l f and in i ts

the lead of early art-historical writ ing where "haptic" or tacti lequalit ies were opposed to "optic" ones-the art historian in ques-

r tion was the nineteenth-century Austriar-r Alois Riegl.

Given this effort at accurate, formal characterization, it is notsurprising that Greenberg should have exploded into the exaspera-

tion of an essay such as "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name"(1962).lt is already the mark of the simplicity and directness ofGreenberg's prose that he should have avoided the term "crit i-

cism" and adopted the workmanlike connotations of "art writ ing"

instead. But his target was not verbal archness or preciosity.

Rather, it was the position, first enunciated by Harold Rosenberg's"The American Action Painters" (i952) but taken up in England

a few years later by critics such as Lawrence Alloway, that theavant-garde is r.ro longer concerned with making art but rather

in perforn-ring a kind of self-revealing gesture, or "event," theby-product ofrvhich (the painting) is ofno real concern to eitherartist or onlooker. As Rosenberg had put it: "The new painting hasbroken down every distinction between art and life." For Green-

berg, however, the scandal of such a remark's claim to beingcriticism is that it has no way of explaining why the "painted 1eft-

overs of'action' should be looked at and even acquired by others."

It was Greenberg's sense that in its jettisoning of art, the avant-garde had come to stand for a position he characterized, r-regatively,

l,Jackson Poffock, Number 13A, 1948: Arabesgue, 1948Oi land enamel on canvas, 94.6 x 295,9 (37' l x 116' l )

,A lntroductlon 3

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2. Mor r is Lou is , Saraband, 1959r , , , , 1 A 9 | : t c | , , . i i l t . t . t l i r , i t i t \ , ] , E . a i l ! l x l - : _ l

as nereh"'si l l ) \ 'crsivc arlcl t i i t luist ic" ancl thrt, on the contr irr\ ' , i l r t

\ \ ras l rcccssr l r i lY thc renetva l (n ( ) n ra t tc I h0$ 'sc t ' r - t - t inq l r r i r r l cn t ) , r l

a cont inuous p ic to r ia l t rac l i t ion . Such is thc v ie r ' r , tha t seenrs to

ba l las t h is u ros t l i rn rous ess i ry , "Mo( lc rn is t l )a in t ine" (1960) .

Areas o f competence

Bv charac tc r iz ing thc e igh tcenth-ccu tur ' \ ' ( ,emran ph i losop i rc r

Immanuel l( i rnt irs "t l-re f irst real \ lor lclnist," Cireenbers's cssi lv

annoLlnccs h'onr i ts \ ,erv oLltsL't t l -r ir t thc phcnonrenon he is irr ldrcss-

ing , no nr r r t t c r horv much o f "a h is to r ica l novc ' l t r ' " i t n r i , {h t be .

sinks i ts roots at lcirst i rs fhr bacl i as thc cightecnth century rrncl thc

hn l iqh tc r rn rcn t . [ ) r ' . r r r ing a para l le l bc t l ' cc r . t thc l lav " l ( i rn t t rscc l

log ic to es tab l i sh the l in r i t s o f Iog ic " i rnd wh i t t GreenLrerg ca l l s thc

self-cr i t ical proceclures of the n-rodclnist irr ts, he sees thesc as r.rsins

"the charirctcrist ic n.ret l .rocls clf a cl iscipl inc to cri t ic ize the cl iscipl inc

itself ," not he irci t is, " in orcler to snbr,crt i t , bLrt to cntrench i t nrorc

f irm[r. in i ts area of con-rpetence."

For: the arts, hc arguccl, this irrea of conrpctcncc, this cionrain that

is specihc to cvcry scpirr ir te tresthetic t l iscipl inc, u,as histol icr l lv to

be foLrntl i rr rvhirt rr 'as unique in thc nattrrc of the nrecl ir"u-r-r o1'circh.

Ancl in orcler to rrrr i lc rt t t l -r : , c.rch .r l t h.rt l [r . 'qur-t to ci ivest i tsclf ol

those convcr-rt ions thirt cori lcl be shorvr-r to bc dispensrrble, mainh

bccause sl lcir couvcnt ions hacl been borron'crl h'onr iu-tother art: the

narrat ive in l-r istory paint ing, tbr examplc, hirving Lreen borror,ed

fl 'or.n l i teraturc; or thc stage' l ike depth in i l lLrsionist paint ing, having

been taken ovcr 1l 'onr thc theater. Beginning rvith l .r lor-r lr ' .1 tr l lnet 's

paint ir .rg in thc carlr ' l t l60s, this logic bcgan to rocrr l thc e-\tcntt0

rvh ich thc onc c l ru r r tc tc r i s t i c i rbso l r - r tc lv un ique to p .u r r t ing r r . r : t l t c

t l .r tntss rrf the nictru t nlane i tself . "Beci ir-rsc f lr t tncss t ' i rs the onh'' " 1 '

cor.rdit ior.r print ing slrarcd u' i th no othcr rrrt , Nloclelr.r ist paint ing

orientccl i tsclf to f latncss i ls i t (1i( l to nothin{r clsc."

I t rnay sor,rncl rs thoush "N,{oclernist Paint iug" is sin'rplv a reprise

o1- thc argunreuts (;r-ccu[)crg ]racl clevelopccl tu'o clccaclcs earl ier,

a t the oL l tse t o f h is carcc l as an "a r t n l i te r " x ,hcn in 1919 and 1940

hc publishecl "r\r ' rurt ( ' rrr t le irncl i ( i tsch" anrl " ' l 'orvrrrcls a Nerr 'er

Laocoo i r . " ln thc la t tc r ' , hc l . rac l a lso se t thc h is to rv o f n ro i le rn isnr

rv i th in the contc \ t o1 ' the F-n l igh ter ]meut , ca l l ing upon Got tho ld

L.phrairn I-essinc's l7(r(r tract Loocoii tr : r l r i l i -s-vr,r, upotl l l tc Linitsol

Pot ' try ond Ptt i l I i i rg l i rr thc theorizatior.r o1'thc ncce ssrrr '1- seplr,rt iorr

of the 'n,arious art ist ic nrccl innrs. The cl i t l 'e lcncc, Irolvever, l ies in the

ir iston. he proiccts ol 'al t 's clevelopr.ncr.rt thcr.crrI ' tcr. In "Nlodcrnist

[ )a i r . r t ing" th is h is to rv i s pure lv in tc lna ] , c r rch ar t s t r i r in { to .1 . '11 i , t . '

i t s o rvn "pn l i t r ' . " ' l hc on l r ' ( r 'e i lec l ) re te lcncc to . rnv t l r i rg o rL t r id t

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3. Morr is Louis, Eeta Kappa, l lAcry l ic resin on canvas, 262.3 \ , 129.4 (103r, x 173)

the aesthet ic domain is a sentence acknowledging that i t seemecl as

if the arts were to be assir-nilatecl to entert:rinment, and as iin escape

f iom this they set themselves to "demonstrating that the experi-

ence they provided rvas valuable in its orvn right."

But in the "Newer Laocoon" the history, far more detailed, relates

to the social conditions under which modernism evolved as first

an authentic conveyor of bourgeois values and then, as c:rpitalisn.r

advanced, .rn ever more vehernent der.rial of and flight from ar-r

increasingly rnaterialist trnd pl-rilistine society into the dorlain

known as Bol'remia. Thus in the forties Greenberg wls projecting

this history specifically in the name of the avar.rt-garde as a project"to perform in opposition to bourgeois society the fi-rnction offlnding new and adequate cultural forrns for the expressior.r of tl-rat

same societl'," n'ithout, he adcls, "at the same titrre succumbing to

its ideological divisions and its refusal to permit the arts to be their

own justification." This notion of tl-re arts as self-justifl;ir-rg, however,

is itself qr"ralified in terms that bring tl.re aesthetic and the socialdomains together, since Greenberg sarv modernism's ircknowledg-ment of its n.redium as :r fornr of materialist objectivity that this kind

of painting shared with contemporary science. Indeed, he viewed

modernism's focus on n.rethod and its striving for detachment trsfurther instances of the relation to science, and when he came tosummarize the findings of the visual arts in their search for theirmedium, he wrote that this "is discovered to be physical."

This emphasis carries ir.rto the terms of Greenberg's criticism

during the forties in, for exan-rple, his ideas abor.rt the easel picture's

replacement by mural pair-rtir-rg. For the latter is a fonn that car.r

cleclare the wall 's irnpern'reable surface in all the "positivity" of its

observable fact, a contir.tuous planar object that will function as ar.r

analogue for positivist science's continuous space offact.

The orier.rtatior.r to science in this account connects back to the

idea of the avant-garde's relation to the Enlightenlrrent project;

for it was to physics that philosophers such as I(ant had looked for a

model of critical tl-rinking and rnerciless refinement of n.rethod.

An orientation to science .ls a vangllard project couid, ther-r, be

seen to be natural to an avant-garde that rvas bent on keeping alive

what was valid in cultural experience. And indeed tl're social ar-rd

materialist dirnension of Greenberg's rrccount of this history of the

modernist arts becomes most obvious when he charts its course

specifically in terms of tl-re avant-garde. For it is to the avant-garde,

he argues, tl-rat the task has fallen to preserve culture, in any form

lve could call genuine, from its ersirtz-, fake, dissembling versionproduced by modern consunrer societies, a version to which Green-

berg attached the word kitsch ("Avant-Garde and Kitsch").

If these early argun.rents were made in the name of socialisrn("Today we look to sociaiisr.n simply for the preservation of what-

ever l iving culture we have") and ofthe avant-garde, twenty years

later "Modernist Painting" not only drops the social dimension of

the acconnt but now sees the avant-garrde (a1ong with the positivist

science it avowed) as the enemy of art. Turning on science

by saying that its "kind of cor.rsistency promises nothing in the way

of aesthetic qr.rality," Greenberg now qualif ies the materialist,

441G r e e n b e r g ' s m o d e r n i s m | 1 9 6 0

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Leo Steinberg (born 1920): the flatbed picture plane

I n 1968, at a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, art historian

I Leo Steinberg first raised his voice against Clement Greenberg's

dogmatic account of the power of modernist painting. Himself

a historian ofRenaissance art, Steinberg bristled at the idea thatmodernism's canny revelation of painting's own medium (the

flatness of its support) contrasted with the supposed naivety of

Old Master painting. For while "Modernism used art to call

attention to art," Greenberg deplored that "Realistic, illusionist

art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art."

Arguing that great art never masks its own process, covering it

over with illusionism, Steinberg pointed to the absurdity ofmaintaining that Rembrandt was not formally self-conscious.

He wrote in his essay "Other Criteria," "The notion that OldMaster paintings in contrast to modern dissemble the medium,

conceal the art, deny the surface, deceive the eye, etc., is only truefor a viewer who looks at the art like those ex-subscribers to I/emagazine." Summarizing the modernist idea of a progressive

mainstream in terms of Greenberg's notion of the "allover"

composition (generated in relation to Abstract Expressionism)

he wrote: "In formalist criticism, the criterion for significantprogress remains a kind ofdesign technology subject to one

compulsive direction: the treatment of the whole surface as asingle undifferentiated field ofinterest. Arguing thatmodernism's cherished idea of flatness needed considerablecomplication since the imaginative experience of Dubuffet's

graffitiJike effects or Jasper Johns's Flags and Targetswhich"relegated the whole maintenance problem offlatness to 'subject

matter'," Steinberg went on to develop a conception ofimagrnatrVe expenence; wfticfi is to say Ifte on'entation a grven

picture assumes toward a viewer standing in front of it.Most painting, no matter how radical, he wrote, operates

with "the conception ofthe picture as representing a wor1d,some sort of worldspace which reads on the picture plane in

correspondence with the erect human posture." Further,"A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data

which are experienced in the normal erect posture. Thereforethe Renaissance picture plane affirms verticality as its essential

condition." But beginning in 1950, in the work of Dubuffet and

Rauschenberg, he went on, something happened to challenge this

verticality, since their pictures "no longer simulate vertical fields,

but opaque flatbed horizontals." Steinberg drew his term"flatbed" from the print-shop, since tlpographers must arrangetheir separate lines oftype into forms that hold the fragile pieces

of metal together. This newkind ofpicture, he added, "no moredepends on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture

physical implications of pictorial flatness in a way that will have

great resonance for the critical debates of the sixties, as it both

reorients his own writing and spawns that of a younger generation.

For here, suddenly lodging his idea of the medium of painting

not on the physical properties of its support but on the specific

nature ofits perceptual experience as it is encountered by a viewer,

Greenberg exchanges the physical for the phenomenological.

than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its

symbolic allusion to tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin

boards-any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on

which data is entered, on which information maybe received,

printed, impressed-whether coherently or in confusion."

Steinberg's next move was decisive, hooking as it did into one

ofthe central binaries ofstructuralist anthropology: "To repeat:

it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts,

There is no law against hanging a rug on a wall, or reproducing

narrative picture as a mosaic floor. What I have in mind is thepsychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative

confrontation, and I tend to regard the tilt ofthe picturg plane

from vertical to horizontal as expressive ofthe most radical shiftin the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture."

Although this cataclysmic shift may have been prepared by awork like Duchamp's Tu m' (1918), it was currently being

exploited by Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings in which avariety of printed material-from color reproductions to

newspaper photos, to maps or calendars-gathered. "To hold allthis together, Rauschenberg's picture plane had to become asurface to which anlthing reachable-thinkable would adhere. Ithad to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is, and everythingaprojection screen is, with further affinities for anything that isflat and worked over-palimpsest, canceled plate, printer'sproof, trial blank, chart, map, aerial view. Any flat documentarysurface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue ofhispicture plane-radically different from the transparent

projection plane with its optical correspondence to man's visualfield." And it seemed at times that Rauschenberg's work surfacestood for the mind itseli-dump, reservoir, switching center,abundanf wifir cuncr'efe refrnmcw fiiarrly'assrcclafaj as r'fl aninternal monologue-the outward symbol of the mind as arunning transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting

incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overchargedfield. Ifthe vertical, optical picture addressed a vieWing subjectimagined as a Romantic, seeking to immerse him or herself intoa turbulent landscape, the horizontal flatbed picture imagined

an entirely different subject since the pictorial surface was now"as hard and tolerant as a workbench. . . . The 'integrity of thepicture plane'-once the accomplishment of good design-was

to become that which is given. The picture's 'flatness'was to beno more ofa problem than the flatness ofa disordered desk oran unswept floor." The subject this new type ofpictureaddressed was no longer the Romantic but the denizen ofurbanspaces, both receMng and programmed by the fragmentedmessages processed by the media-radio, TV, advertising-orslipped into his or her domestic spaces through the mail slot.

Eyesight itself, he reasons, is projective. Thus "the first markon a canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness," meaningabsolute flatness is never possible for a field that opens itselfvision. What ls possible, Greenberg maintains, is a special kindspatiality which, like flatness, denies the viewer imaginedentry, as though he or she were able to walk through the de

442 1960b I G reenbe rg ' s mode rn i sm

space. What it substitutes for this is a sense of space that is

7

tovisuality-rvhat Greenberg calls a specifically "optical i l lusion"-somethir.rg that "can be traveled through, literally or figuratively,

onlywith the eye."

The date of "Modernist Painting," init ially broadcast in 1960 by"The Voice of America," coincided with ar.r essay Greenbergdevoted to two emerging artists-Morris Louis (1912-62) 12,31and Kenneth Noland (born 1924) J 4.1-in whom he saw fhe notron

of "optical space" take or.r both a ner'v dimension and the begin-nings of something }e could idenli$'as a nel{/ schoo.l of,{merjcanart. Throughout the fifties Greenberg had been changing the terms

his own appreciation of Pollock's drip paintings to correspondto the character of a space available to eyesight alone. It was in thework of these younger pait.rters, and in that of their contemporaryHelen Frankenthaler (born 1928) t5l, that he saw the luminosityproduced by Pollock's linear (and relatively monochrome) webtranslated into ranges of intense color, color now identified asthe most r.rontactile aspect of the visual fie1d. In Louis's hands,Pollock's use of liquid paint spilled onto unsized canvas had beenadopted into a far more general form of staining, so that the color isboth identified with the woven canvas of its support but alsomanages to dematerialize that support into a series of shimmer-ingly "optical" veils that "open and expand the picture plane"("Louis and Noland" ) .

The power broker

It must be said that during the fifties Greenberg had identifiedhimselfwith two aspects of the social fieid that his writing of theearly forties might have seen as inimical to the avant-garde'scultural (and polit ical) mission. One of these was the US State

Department, which spor.rsored various speaking tours by Green-

berg to both Europe and Asia in a promotion of Arnerican culture

that many have identified with a concerted policy of Cold War pro-

paganda. Another was the :rrt market: buoyed by the prescier.rce of

r his early support for lackson Pollock urnd Davicl Smith, Green-

berg's reputation as a crit ic had attracted the attention of t l.rose,

frorn museum directors to magazirre editors, who wished to trade

in emerging talent. Beginning in 1959, Greenberg organized exhi-

b i t ions lbr the gal lerv Fret tc l t & Lo. r r r Neiv York i t ts t ar he rvat .

around the same time, advising other dealers. In ri l l of this he could

be seen to have a stake in a kind of An-rerican jingoism that took a

delight in the demise of European pirinting and the "triumph" of

a specihcally American art. For Greer.rberg this meant "post-Cr.rbist

. painting," Cubism being a category into which he not only put

everything produced in Europe in the twentieth century but also irll

r of.Abstract Expressionisn, elren including Pollock, t.t'hose It,ork, he

had said in "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name" I-ras "an almost

cornpietely Cubist basis." Thus the "exclusively visual" terms of

r'vhat he r'vould norv call "post-painterly abstraction" and also"color-field painting" r'r,ere both nelv i.tnd Americar-r. Further, in

their opening and expanding ofthe picture plane they could also,

self-evidently, be connected lvith the tradition that Greenberg saw

modernist painting as contirrually rer-rerving. In this they rvere

clearly opposed to the avant-garde.

That the avilut-garde had transformed itself in Greenberg's eyes

frorl the upholder of cultural value to its enemy rvas a functior.r of

the emergence of "neo-Dada," rvhich in his vierv cheapened ar.rd

confused the modernist project in an embrace of the very commer-

clirl s;..[s.rs from which Jhe,'ranl-Si'rde, ]o hc ar-ilrc\], had cltrJit',"I fled. Dismissir-rg that aspect of fasper Jol.rr.rs's rvork that trafficked

ruirh the readl'rnade, he spoke od for cxarnple, "rhe liferary irony

that results from representing flat and artiltcial configurations

which in actuaiity can onl1, be reproclucerl" as having a merelyjournalistic, not formal or plastic, interest ("After Abstract Expres-

sionism"). In the same context he spoke of the threat tomodernism of a generalized infection of painting by the logic of thereadymade: if flatness ar-rd the delimitation of flatness are the twoconstitutive norms that forrn the essence of painting. then "a

stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a pictr-rre "-ready-

made-"though not necessarily as a successful one."Greenberg's closest ally arnong a youltg generatiolr of crit ics

deeply affected by him deepened this obsen,ation. "lt is not quiteenough to say that a bare canvas tacked to a wall is not 'necessarily'

a successful picture," Michael Fried rvrote in 1967, "it rvould,I think, be more accurate to say that it is not conceiyably one" ("Art

and Objecthood"). For Fried, any future circumstances that mightlead one to believe that it could be successful would so radicallychange the enterprise of painting "that nothing urore rhan thename would remain." Carrying on Greenberg's attack on tl.reavant-garde's obliteration of the distinction betweer.r art and life,"Art and Objecthood" staked the coherence of art on the possibil i-t ies and conventions generated by and lvithin the l intits of the

, Whirl,196078.1 x 176.5 (7Ort x 69 / l (o

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individual rnediunr. What exists between these. Fried said. is

tireater and "theater is now the negation ofart." In fact, he insisted:"The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to

depend on their ability to defeat theater." In this argument, Fried's"theatre" parallels Allorvay's "event."

From Greenberg's notion, in 1940, that the survival of culture

depenclecl on the avant-garde's ability to clef'eat the bor-rrgeoisie's

stripping art of value, to his idea that it depended on modernist

logic's securing the project of art as self-validating, one lrrives ir.r

1967 at Fried's notion that that survival now depends on defeating

the avant-garde itself. Fried's aim now generalized the avant-

garde's "neo-Dada" manifestation tcl those aspects of the

r. readymade to be found in Minimalisrn, such as the use of found,

industrial materials ancl parts or the deskilling of the work's fabri-

cation by having it made in series, in a factory.

The resr"rlt of his and Greenberg's position was that by the late

sixties color-fie1d painting and "opticality" stood on one side of a

clivide, l ined up rvith r'vhat Greenberg had founcl missing in scien-

tilic methodicalness, namely "aesthetic quality";rvhile on the other

side ranged all those practices for rvhich the logic of moclernism

had led either to a recluction to the literal or physical natr-rre of the

support-Minimalism-or to a tar-rtoiogical notion of art as self-

r definition-as in some forms of Conceptual art.

F U R T I E R F E A D N G

T. J. Clark "[,/]ore or the Dfferefces hpt^pFf C.m adF Grepfbprq afd Ourselves ;n Serge

GL baut, Benlamlr !. D BLrch oh and DJ'. d So l. r 1ed5l. Mode/nrs/n drd Modelnil_!/ lFla ifax:The

Press of the Nova Scot a Co elle oi Art and Des gn. 1 983)

Thierry de Duve, The N/lonochrome and the B af k Caf,/as," Karl alter Ducha/np (Cambrdle

N4ass : [,/] T Press 1996)

Michael Fried "Tlrrcc Arrcr caf Painte rs," Afl ard Olrlecthood (Chicago Un versity ol Clr cago

P r e s s . 1 9 9 8 )

Clement Greenberg. Thc Callected Essays ard Crit lclsm vols I and 4, cd. John O Briaf

(Ch cago: Ufivers ty of Ch cago Press, I 986 afd I 993)

Serge Guilbaut, Havr' l. le\u Yark Stale the ldea af Modern Art: Abstract Expressianism

Freedan) . . tnd theCoid f4 l . r r (ChoagoandLondon Unvers l tyo fCh icagoPress l9B3 l

444

^. TgEEb 1 9 6 2 c , 1 9 6 5

1 q 6 n I G . p a n n p r n c m n . l c r n i s m