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WD_161/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 15.6 x 12.5 | | Size (mm): | 400 x 320 | | Catalog #: | WD_0161 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Harold Rosenberg* (1906-1978) Quotes: *New York contemporary art critic & art scholar.
America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.
The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.
The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.
The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.
Harold Rosenberg
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.
What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?
Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.
-Harold Rosenberg/www.brainyquote.com
"Art, Life, and Harold Rosenberg" by John Link. Posted July 5, 2000.
The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.
Modern art is educational, not with regard to art but with regard to life.
-Harold Rosenberg, 1952
The American Action Painters took Aristotle further than anyone in history had dared take him. Art no longer imitated life, it was life itself. At first reading, it felt like Rosenberg broke through, shedding much needed light on the seeming vacancy of abstract pictures. He told us abstract art really could mean something after all. Once the art writer associates the artist's marks with the rhetoric of life as lived, those marks are as discussible as any other subject matter. More so, really, because abstract pictures generate little resistance to interpretation. Certain intermingled marks could be called "a violent and tortured labyrinth serving up an archetype of creative suffering", or the same marks could be "a saccharin synergy contrived by an overly satisfied Pollyanna". It did not matter which tack you took, what was important was that discussions could begin in terms that the educated and now expanding audience for art could understand.
American style highbrow: Rosenberg's identification of art and life pushed the grounds for art-as-confrontation far beyond the limits of Duchamp's vague intellectualized cynicism. He reduced Europe's detached theorizing to something very American: personal opinion. And he was a master of personal opinion. Everything Rosenberg wrote was more direct and down-to-earth than anything the Europeans could muster and loaded with panache to boot, especially when he got down to the scene at hand. "The big moment came when it was decided to paint....Just TO PAINT." How could anyone say it better than that? Even his use of uppercase was just right. "Unproved" personal opinion, yes, but an opinion that was clear and resonant in the contemporaneous here and now, a resonance that continues to this day. It did not masquerade as universal and nearly incomprehensible "truth" or "morality". That sentence alone makes Action Painters worth reading.
Talking replaces looking: Rosenberg's theory of the identity of art and life offered a solution to the then 50 year old problem of how can art have meaning without subject matter, a solution filled with style, pizzazz, and timeliness. The art boom that was soon to come needed it. The critics who came with that boom needed it even more because it paved the way for the invasion of their word games into what today we call "visual culture".
"Painting in the medium of difficulties" is painting in a medium that can be expressed just as well with words as paint. Rosenberg's idea said visual art could be treated as if it told a story. At first, the story was the story of the artist and life's difficulties at the time of making the picture, the so-called "act" of painting. But, since the life of the artist is as broad as any human being's life, the act could and did expand into just about every issue associated with life as lived, including social conditions, personal circumstances, and especially the branch of politics that deals with generalized morality. Once we accept these entities as part of the essence of visual art, it is much easier to "quote" the work in an essay. If teaching a moral or spinning a philosophy is the content of art, words are the perfect medium for coping with it.
Words include a sensate element - their sound, and perhaps their visual representation as text - but their primary component is what they mean when we think about them. Thus, if a picture can be argued as making reference to, say, "misogyny", that word has meaning before the art writer introduces it into the discussion of the picture, a meaning that is well suited to the art writer's own medium, which of course is also words. Most importantly, "misogyny" is well understood and preemptively interesting to a wide audience before anyone reads the essay. Thus, the puzzle of whether the picture is good or bad can be avoided altogether and the issue of getting the audience's attention is resolved by a word instead of anything visual. Such meaning acts as a springboard for reducing the picture's value to that which can be described with certain words, especially words related to life as lived, and most especially words related to the trend of the day.
"Blue", on the other hand, does not mean much to art until an artist makes something of value that is blue. Even then, its meaning is very hard to describe with words, which are not the normal medium for conveying "blueness", much less blueness that is used well as opposed to blueness that is used poorly. Thus, the art writer who refuses Rosenberg's suggestion that art and life are the same has a difficult time putting the experience of serious painting into words. Such a writer can't address painting directly, because paint and words are much more at odds with each other than life and words.
Nonetheless Rosenberg had a decent eye. His choice of artists to write about was excellent (though you must decrypt his references to know exactly who they were). As they say, a high tide floats a lot of boats. Pollock, Gorky, Kline, deKooning and company constituted a very high group. Clement Greenberg was the first to see the value these artists were creating, but it is clear that Rosenberg soon followed. The fact Rosenberg got it right about the best art of his time helped his writing, even as his writing got aesthetic theory ass backwards. You feel the authority in Rosenberg because you know the authority in the artists he paid attention to, not because of the nonesense about no distinction between art and life.
Legacy now: Curiously, Rosenberg does not get much credit for what he invented 50 years ago. Lots of writers take his well defined (though screwy) theory, put an academically philosophical and often times moral spin on it, quadruple their word count, then claim it as "new" or "Postmodern" criticism. Yet, what makes Rosenberg so much better than those indebted to him is his lack of obscure citations and other forms of academicism, his avoidance of sermonizing, and his way of making a point stick to the scene at hand. "Rosenberg juniors" such as Donald Kuspit, Kay Larsen, Carter Ratcliff, Lucy Lippard, Barbara Rose, and Charles Harrison copy-cat his wrong headed though bizarrely interesting "aesthetics", but nonetheless deliver boring, pedantic, and often moralistic monuments to academicism that Rosenberg would hate. But these and others like them are the cornerstones of current art writing. The faked authority of their writing (disguised as intellectualism) harmonizes with the faked authority of their artists (disguised as toughness). Everybody knows this scene is not the real McCoy, but few seem bothered by the vacuum it creates. The art system's comfort with it has been entrenched for so long that most assume it will continue into the indefinite future. Perhaps forever. I'm beginning to believe it myself.
Writing about art today: Meanwhile art and life ARE distinct. Art continues to imitate life, just as Aristotle observed, and that is one illustration of how the two are different. As Clement Greenberg said, the value of life stands higher, but that does not prevent art's value from being an end in itself. No matter what artists think they are doing, if they are not creating value for its own sake, they fail.
If you want to write well about art, you must recognize which artists have real authority and which don't. Those who have it create visual muscle. Their work pushes your eye around, not to hurt it, but to delight it. Whatever else they do doesn't matter, regardless of how "educational" it might be about life or art. Rosenberg showed how you can be completely wrong as an aesthetician, yet write meaningfully about art if you ground it in what is best in your own time and address specifics. Today's mainstream art writing is dominated by "Rosenberg juniors", yet it comes up miserably short on both counts.
© John Link, 2000-2002
-newcrit.art.wmich.edu/plain/JLrosenberg.html
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