information....First my message, and his response.
Hello! I just want to mention that it occurred to me today how fortunate my art generation is to have your art generation to inform us. As I think I may have mentioned to you, my dear friend/mentor, Susan Josepher, alumni of Brooklyn College, was on hand to explain the so-called "importance" of Abstract Expressionism during my art pubescence. "You just had to be there'" she said. And now I get it! Its the zeitgeist.
When I was asking, "Whats next?" It was more a philosophical question than an art question. Does not art reflect the spirit of the times? I am wondering from your perspective, what this may be, and more broadly, I am trying to conceptualize what it actually is.
Post Modern philosophy is very interesting. To the extent of my knowledge, there is a huge emphasis on the "meta". Vice Versa. Irony. The snake eating its tail. We live in a time when art shapes our existence as much as our existence generates art.
RESPONSE:
Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to share this note with your colleagues if you like.
I have never seen a great work of art that is primarily ironic. Not Goya's royal portraits or any of Warhol's work... and Hogarth is (a) not great and (b) more moralistic than ironic.
If examined even cursorily it is OBVIOUS that great art, from any culture, is HUMANIST and presented with and by AFFECTION. All of these titles and philosophies muddy the waters of what artists actually do and are injected into aesthetic conversations by impotent observers who seek the power of quashing the fluidity that I showed operating in the work of Eva Hesse and setting up a "contextualizing" perimeter over which they claim authorship. Greenberg and Rosenberg actually fought over whether New York based artists of the 40's-50's should be called "action painters" or "abstract expressionists".
Aesthetic philosophizing is a pissing contest with all of those puerile motives in tact. Barney Newman was by no means an "abstract expressionist" nor was Eva Hesse a "minimalist". The French, offended at New York for taking the temporary spotlight, came up with all these assholes that you are now required to read - 40 to 50 years after their initial pronouncements and are now calcified in the curriculum of universities whose observational capacities are glacially slow to shed any of their safe encrustations.
Derrida's "Jewish" "talmudic" formatting I sometimes think is a sadly pugilistic response to the iconoclasm, the weakness, the lack of the visual, in Judaism. Forget the "meta" and the "essentialist" crap. What I've been showing all semester, and will continue to show, is that what artists do is actually CONTRARY to what the cultural analysts say we do....and they say that after the fact so they can neatly stack their assumptions into a container and neutralize all of the IRRATIONAL and PURELY VISUAL (not verbal) INTELLECTUALISM that happens in the MYSTERY of the art that deeply moves us. Some people just can't stand a MYSTERY. They must WIN. They must kill the MYSTERY - like Penn and Teller - so that we KNOW. The enduring value of art is that we never know and keep asking, which keeps us ALIVE.
The reason that Louise Bourgeois, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre and Eva Hesse and Smithson the Earthworks guys are interesting and the reason the Donald Judd bores the crap out of me is that Donald Judd was an ART CRITIC and explained his approach, justifying his work with the relief of his finite theories. The same goes for Ad Reinhardt about whom I couldn't care less.
Mondrian's paint, when examined up close, looks like cream cheese, which defies all the "purity" of neo-plasiticism......WHY did he paint THAT way? I've never read a critic address the incongruity of his paint handling with his compositions - but he was Jackson Pollock's great champion with Peggy Guggenheim. Go figure.
The reason that my oldest friend, Larry Poons, keeps painting in a way that has lost all critical support and whose work is "out of fashion" but still greatly admired by painters is something that the critical dialogue would simply not deal with rather than examine.
Irony is bullshit. It is a shield against the courage to be vulnerable and therefore be accessible, to provide the generosity of nutrition, by taking the stance of received information and illustrating it for a timid public that wants emblems of what it is already told to believe. All the best,
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