Welcome to the web
log of the L.A. Stuckist group. We are Remodernists seeking the renewal of
spirituality and meaning in art, culture and society. We wish to build an
international art movement for new figurative painting with ideas. We stand
against the pretensions of conceptual art - we are anti anti-art. www.la-stuckism.com
American author and journalist, Thomas Wolfe, is certainly one of the country’s
best writers. Over the decades he’s penned works as diverse as The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the
Vanities. He also wrote two extremely controversial histories regarding
modern art and architecture, The Painted Word (1975) and From
Bauhaus To Our House (1981). Despite Wolfe’s conservatism, it’s hard to
imagine the critique contained in his essays on art as coming from your average
garden variety reactionary. Wolfe’s critical assessment of modern art, and his
ridiculing those who defended its excesses, seems wholly prescient when viewed
from today’s vantage point. If anything, the extremes in art lambasted by Wolfe
have subsequently become worse as postmodernism ascended and took center stage.
In
The Painted Word, Wolfe began his essay by recounting a
revelatory experience he had on April 28, 1974, while reading an art review by
Hilton Kramer for the New York Times. Kramer, a leading proponent of abstract
art, had written: "Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather
conspicuously lack a persuasive theory" - a statement that provoked Wolfe
to write:
"PEOPLE DON'T READ the morning
newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too
true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April
28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa,
that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad,
that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York
Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the
thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory
deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:
I noticed something!
Yet another clam-broth-colored current
had begun to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf Stream . . . a
review, it was, by the Times's dean of the arts, Hilton Kramer, of an
exhibition at Yale University of "Seven Realists," seven realistic
painters . . . when I was jerked alert by the following:
"Realism does not lack its
partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given
the nature of our intellectual commerce with works, of art, to lack a
persuasive theory is to lack something crucial—the means by which our
experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values
they signify."
Now, you may say, My God, man! You
woke up over that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell in the sea
of words?
But I knew what I was looking at. I
realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those
utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of
the Moscow or Belgrade pres are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely,
the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game
away.
What I saw before me was the
critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today,
"to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial." I read it
again. It didn't say "something helpful" or "enriching" or
even "extremely valuable." No, the word was crucial.
In short: frankly, these days, without
a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
Then and there I experienced a flash
known as the Aha! Phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was
revealed to me for the first time. The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The
motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshot, and Murine agonies fell away!
All these years, along with countless
kindred souls, I am certain, I had made my way into the galleries of Upper
Madison and Lower Soho and the Art Gildo Midway of Fifty-seventh Street, and
into the museums, into the Modern, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, the Bastard
Bauhaus, the New Brutalist, and the Fountainhead Baroque, into the lowliest
storefront churches and grandest Robber Baronial temples of Modernism.
All these years I, like so many
others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many
thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs,
Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers,
Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now
drawing back, now moving closer - waiting, waiting, forever waiting for… it…
for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which
must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there - waiting for
something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white
walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma.
All these years, in short, I had
assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very
shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward
all along. Not 'seeing is believing,' you ninny, but 'believing is seeing,' for
Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist
only to illustrate the text."
And what was the "text" he spoke of? Wolfe asserted that the
critics, museum directors, academics, and other "art experts" of the
day, had become more important than the artists. These art authorities began
operating like the clergy, but their religious duties were to the church of
modern art. The proclamations of these high priests - i.e., figuration,
narration, and realism in art was archaic and passé - became a divine text and
considered the sacred word. No one dared to question the word for fear of being
thought heretical. Metaphorically, the painted word began to appear in the work
of artists devoted to the new orthodoxy (hence the title of the essay). Wolfe
foretold our current predicament when he wrote:
"Every art student will marvel
over the fact that a whole generation of artists devoted their careers to getting
the Word (and to internalizing it) and to the extraordinary task of divesting
themselves of whatever there was in their imagination and technical ability
that did not fit the Word. They will listen to art historians say, with the
sort of smile now reserved for the study of Phrygian astrology: 'That’s how it
was then!' - as they describe how, on the one hand, the scientists of the
mid-twentieth century proceeded by building upon the discoveries of their
predecessors and thereby lit up the sky… while the artists proceeded by
averting their eyes from whatever their predecessors, from da Vinci on, had
discovered, shrinking from it, terrified, or disintegrating it with the
universal solvent of the Word.
The more industrious scholars will
derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and
journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals,
and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings
directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching
the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.What
happy hours await them all! With what sniggers, laughter, and good-humored
amazement they will look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"
[ Read more excerpts from Thomas Wolfe’s
The Painted Word, or
purchase the entire book from Amazon.com ]
Chapter One The Apache Dance
ALL THE MAJOR MODERN MOVEMENTS EXCEPT FOR DE STIJL, Dada, Constructivism,
and Surrealism began before the First World War, and yet they all seem to come
out of the 1920s. Why? Because it was in the 1920s that Modern Art achieved
social chic in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. Smart people talked about
it, wrote about it, enthused over it, and borrowed from it. Borrowed from it,
as I say; Modern Art achieved the ultimate social acceptance: interior
decorators did knock-offs of it in Belgravia and the sixteenth arrondissement.
Things like knock-off specialists, money, publicity, the smart set, and Le
Chic shouldnt count in the history of art, as we all knowbut, thanks to the
artists themselves, they do. Art and fashion are a two-backed beast today; the
artists can yell at fashion, but they cant move out ahead. That has come about
as follows:
By 1900 the artists arena, the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease,
Success had shifted twice. In seventeenth century Europe the artist was
literally, and also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the
royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one and the same.
In the eighteenth century the scene shifted to the salons, in the homes of the
wealthy bourgeoisie as well as those of aristocrats, where Culture-minded
members of the upper classes held regular meetings with selected artists and
writers. The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius. After the
French Revolution, artists began to leave the salons and join cénacles, which
were fraternities of like-minded souls huddled at some place like the Café
Guerdons rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist
rather than a socialite, someone like Victor Hugo, Charles Nosier, Théophile
Gautier, or, later, Edouard Manet. What held the cénacles together was that
merry battle spirit we have all come to know and love: épatez la bourgeoisie,
shock the middle class. With Gautiers cénacle especially . . . with Gautiers
own red vests, black scarves, crazy hats, outrageous pronouncements, huge
thirsts, and ravenous groin . . . the modern picture of The Artist began to
form: the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to
cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical
bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line
wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldnt see, to be
high, live low, stay young foreverin short, to be the bohemian.
By 1900 and the era of Picasso, Braque & Co., the modern game of Success
in Art was pretty well set. As a painter or sculptor the artist would do work
that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality. As an
individual well, that was a bit more complex. As a bohemian, the artist had now
left the salons of the upper classes but he had not left their world. For
getting away from the bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints
and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguins first
stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no farther
than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what? perhaps two
miles from the Champs Elysées. Likewise in the United States: believe me, you
can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but
the artists keep migrating to New York all the same . . . You can see them six
days a week . . . hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up in front of the
real-estate office on Broome Street in their identical blue jeans, gum boots, and quilted Long
March jackets . . . looking, of course, for the inevitable Loft . . .
No, somehow the artist wanted to remain within walking distance . . . He
took up quarters just around the corner from . . . le monde, the social sphere
described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in
fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers,
writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be "where
things happen," the glamorous but small world of that creation of the
nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le monde, Everybody, as in "Everybody
says". . . the smart set, in a phrase . . . "smart," with its
overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism.
The ambitious artist, the artist who wanted Success, now had to do a bit of
psychological double-tracking. Consciously he had to dedicate himself to the
antibourgeois values of the cénacles of whatever sort, to bohemia, to the
Bloomsbury life, the Left Bank life, the Lower Broadway Loft life, to the
sacred squalor of it all, to the grim silhouette of the black Reorig Lower
Manhattan truck-route internal combustion granules that were already standing an
eighth of an inch thick on the poisoned roach carcasses atop the electric
hot-plate burner by the time you got up for breakfast . . . Not only that, he
had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one
devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the
latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this falls avant-garde
Breakthrough of the Century . . . all this in order to make it, to be noticed,
to be counted, within the community of artists themselves. What is more, he had
to be sincere about it. At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to
see if anyone in le monde was watching. Have they noticed me yet? Have they
even noticed the new style (that me and my friends are working in)? Dont they
even know about Tensionism (or Slice Art or Niho or Innerism or Dimensional
Creamo or whatever)? (Hello, out there!) . . . because as every artist knew in
his heart of hearts, no matter how many times he tried to close his eyes and
pretend otherwise (History! History!where is thy salve? ), Success was real
only when it was success within lemonde.
He could close his eyes and try to believe that all that mattered was that
he knew his work was great . . . and that other artists respected it . . . and
that History would surely record his achievements . . . but deep down he knew
he was lying to himself. I want to be a Name, goddamn it!at least that, a name,
a name on the lips of the museum curators, gallery owners, collectors, patrons,
board members, committee members, Culture hostesses, and their attendant
intellectuals and journalists and their Time and Newsweek all right!even
that!Time and Newsweek Oh yes! (ask the shades of Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko!) even the goddamned journalists!
During the 1960s this entire process by which le monde, the culturati, scout
bohemia and tap the young artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic
way. Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred
Barr and Dorothy Miller, would head downtown from the Museum on West
Fifty-third Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome Street and
environs, and tour the loft studios of known artists and unknowns alike,
looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was
new and significant in order to put together a show in the fall . . . and,
well, I mean, my God from the moment the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third
Street to grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record their sortie . .
. They’re coming! . . . And rolling across Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic
Pulse of the theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:
Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me . . . O damnable
Uptown!
By all means, deny it if asked! what one knows, in ones cheating heart, and
what one says are two different things!
So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the centuryin Paris,
in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich,
Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in New York. As weve just seen, the
ritual has two phases:
(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles,
coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he
doesnt care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth
against the fashionable world uptown.
(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le
monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those
who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards and
shower them with all the rewards of celebrity.
By the First World War the process was already like what in the Paris clip
joints of the day was known as an apache dance. The artist was like the female
in t he act, stamping her feet, yelling defiance one moment, feigning
indifference the next, resisting the advances of her pursuer with absolute
contempt . . . more thrashing about . . . more rake-a-cheek fury . . . more
yelling and carrying on . . . until finally with one last mighty and
marvelously ambiguous shriekpain! ecstasy! she submits . . . Paff paff paff
paff paff. . . How you do it, my boy! . . . and the house lights rise and
Everyone, tout le monde, applauds . . .
The artists payoff in this ritual is obvious enough. He stands to gain
precisely what Freud says are the goals of the artist: fame, money, and
beautiful lovers. But what about le monde, the culturati, the social members of
the act? What’s in it for them? Part of their reward is t he ancient and
semi-sacred status of Benefactor of the Arts. The arts have always been a
doorway into Society, and in the largest cities today the arts the museum
boards, arts councils, fund drives, openings, parties, committee meetings have
completely replaced the churches in this respect. But there is more!
Today there is a peculiarly modern reward that the avant-garde artist can
give his benefactor: namely, the feeling that he, like his mate the artist, is
separate from and aloof from the bourgeoisie, the middle classes . . . the
feeling that he may be from the middle class but he is no longer in it . . .
the feeling that he is a fellow soldier, or at least an aide-de-camp or an
honorary cong guerrilla in the vanguard march through the land of the
philistines. This is a peculiarly modern need and a peculiarly modern kind of
salvation (from the sin of Too Much Money) and something quite common among the
well-to-do all over the West, in Rome and Milan as well as New York. That is
why collecting contemporary art, the leading edge, the latest thing, warm and
wet from the Loft, appeals specifically to those who feel most uneasy about
their own commercial wealth . . . See? I’m not like them those Jaycees, those
United Fund chairmen, those Young Presidents, those mindless New York A.C.
goyisheh hog-jowled stripe-tied goddamn-good-to-see-you-you-old-bastard- you
oyster-bar trenchermen . . . Avant-garde art, more than any other, takes the
Mammon and the Moloch out of money, puts Levis, turtlenecks, muttonchops, and
other mantles and laurels of bohemian grace upon it.
That is why collectors today not only seek out the company of, but also want
to hang out amidst, lollygag around with, and enter into the milieu of . . .
the artists they patronize. They want to climb those vertiginous loft building
stairs on Howard Street that go up five flights without a single turn or
bendstraight up! like something out of a casebook dreamto wind up with their
hearts ricocheting around in their rib cages with tachycardia from the exertion
mainly but also from the anticipation that just beyond this door at the top . .
. in this loft . . .lie the real goods . . . paintings, sculptures that are
indisputably part of the new movement, the new école, the new wave . .
something unshrinkable, chipsy, pure cong, bourgeois-proof.
