To reject the whole world as unworthy
of painting is a dizzying,immense act. Suddenly everything that we
ever saw,experienced and admired is pushed over a cosmic ledge.
A painter,someone gifted with particular
acuity of seeing,of fanatical dedication to praise visible world
rejecting the whole universe of the Visible? It would have to be a
most unusual humanoid, so detached from love of the world,hostile to
its eternal beauty and so disinterested in finding in painting a way
to communicate with public our common experiences of living in the
midst of the Marvel of the World-it surely would have to be someone
thoroughly detached from humanity.
*
In the new London
Review of Books there is an article about huge exhibition at Museum
of Modern Art in NYC tracing the history of abstract art. To explain
how those early abstract-artists came to reject representational art
the author quotes Walter Pater:”All art constantly aspires to the
condition of music”.Behind that quote there is a conviction that
all art somehow would want to be music or approximate music since
music is the most “abstract” of artistic disciplines. It suggests
that artists generally felt burdened,shackled by the low-flying
expectations of depicting the world,rather than taking wings over the
vastness of non-representational possibilities-like music! What
horizons,what exhilaration ,what a new universe for the pioneers of
new art! But wait- let us return and examine that seemingly brilliant
quote of W. Pater: does all art really aspires toward anything
outside of its own possibilities?Does “Gargantua and Pantagruel”
wants to be a kind of music? Does the Grunewald's Crucifixion aspires
to be like music? Is perhaps such sense of insufficiency and wish for
musical means of expression in Nike of Samothrake?
Certainly not. The
aspirations within every discipline of art is to work its own magic
to its utmost.
Every piece of art
presents a very exacting arrangement of parts that harmonize and
contrast with each other and that formal stratum of artwork is the
structural framework to carry the content. The idea that resolving
the decorative,formal play of elements within artwork is the true
and only sovereign territory of art created abstract art. Unburdened
from content and therefore from meaning abstractionists made
paintings that were intended to be like painted music.The trouble is
that it is not an appealing sensation. The viewer's eye is lead from
one geometric form to the next in staccato rhythm as if police horn
couldn't be turned off. The rottweilers of primary colors attack your
eyes with force but the encounter is too loud,too barbaric to
constitute an aesthetic experience. If abstract art should be
considered an addition of decorative arts ,like,maiolika tiles {Miro}
or wallpapers {Jackson Pollock} than it would find its proper place.
Linoleum flooring by Mondrian in a diner from the “50s would look
just right.
But of course those people had grand
claims of replacing Western tradition in arts with their arbitrary
geometries and loud blankness rather than to produce wallpapers. How
something so mediocre become so vastly successful is a question with
many answers,or perhaps all of them are parts of a complicated
answer.
In the larger topography of changes
abstract art belongs with statism,multiculturalism,mythology of
equality,elevation of primitivism,belief in inexorable cultural
progress. In a word:Cultural Marxism :mama and papa of Political
Correctness tried so successfully in the Soviet Block and later in
the West and especially in America. There is only one form of art
that is suitable both for families dragging children through museums
as well as to decorate corporate headquarters: abstract art. Nobody
would complain about controversial content of abstract art. It has
none. If only literature could exhibit the same docile restrain and
it nearly did as long as the gateways to publishing were guarded by
cultural marxists.
Western Tradition in art has always
been figurative and continues in that way.Abstract art does not
belong inside of that tradition: it is an intruder that imposed
itself in our museums,at art schools ,exhibitions of art. The
take-over has not happened by some mysterious osmotic process-there
were busy little men removing our art and replacing it with nearly
empty canvases and metal junk. Where deservedly and proudly we should
have great art of Andrew Wyeth public would encounter some immense
smear by Franz Klein. Element by element of our culture has been
replaced with audacious trash.
