Greenberg 1981 Intermedia

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    INTERM EDI CLEMENT GREEN ERGThe scene of visual art has been invaded more and more, lateIy, by other mediums than those of painting or sculpture.By scene I mean galleries and museums and the art press.Now these welcome performance art, installation art, sound art,video, dance, and mime; also words, written and spoken; andsundry ways of making poetical, political, informational, quasiphilosophical, quasi-psychological, quasi-sociological points.The printed page, the stage, the concert hall, the literaryrecital platform haven t been nearly so hospitabie to the incursions of mediums not originally proper to themselves. It s true:drama, opera, and dance are of their nature intermedia ormultimedia. But words, sounds, movement and mime are respectively primary in these art forms; in each case the overriding, all-embracing mediums, those on which t ste cum-attention is focused. This isn t true, or hardly so, with intermedia in galleries or museums. The Happenings of yearsback already showed that. They happened in the context orsetting of visual art, and most of the people taking part had todo mainly with visual art, yet they exhibited hardly anything thatwas actually visual art as such.Hardly any of the creators or agents of intermedia startedout as actors, musicians, dancers, or writers, let alone as poets,philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, or polit ical thinkers;not even as interior decorators let alone architects. They almostall started out as painters or sculptors, or at least more in theneighborhood of these arts than any other. (The exceptions areonlyexceptions.)There s nothing necessarily wrong in all this. Good art, greatart can come from anywhere. Means don t matter, only results.The question of value or quality doesn t concern me here andnow. What does is the why: why the scene, area, field of attention of the visual arts (excepting architecture, for good reason)should now be so open, sa much more hospitabie to extraneousmediums than any of the other scenes of art.A good part of the explanation has to do, I feel, with thespecial and large place that painting (not sculpture or architecture) takes up in the whole spectrum of Modernism. It was painting that was first compelled, in the mid-19th century, to innovate and experiment in technical, material, utterly formaiways. It was painting that had earliest in the course of Modernism to dig into its mechanisms. That was in the beginning ofthe 1860s, with Manet (and him alone). None of the other arts ontheir way to Modernism had that early to dig into their own entraiIs. Certainly not sculpture, not music, not dance, not evenliterature. Whitman s free verse, Gerard Manley Hopkins newmetrics are discussable here. 50 are Mallarm s liberties withword order and syntax, and maybe grammar toa. But none ofthese affected the medium of verse as radically as Manet andthen the Impressionists affected the medium of pictorial art.Flaubert and Baudelaire don t pertain in this respect: it wastheir matter, not their farm that scandalized. (The same mightbe said of Mallarm, almost, whose versif ication stayed sa tradi

    tional at bottom.) In music Debussy broke with the melodicand ~armonic conventions of the 18th and 19th centuries nearIy thlrty years after Manet had done the equivalent in painting.Dance had to wait till a decade into this century before becoming free. It was only in 1912, with Picasso s first bas-reliefconstructions, that sculpture Iiberated itself from the monolith; and only around the same time did Brancusi s insistence onthe compact monolith rid sculpture of its obligation to lifelikeness.

    50 it was painting that in the beginning profiled itself as theModernist, the avant-garde art par excellence (Gautier, thatforerunner, glimpsed that.) In the latter 19th century paintingwas what startled most, and kept on startling most. (No valuejudgment here.) In the first decades of our own century it continued to be the cutting edge of the new. See how poets andeven composers in Paris invoked Cubist painting for their ownnewnesses. And so at the same time, if more indirectly, did theinitiators of Modernist architecture.By and large the situation hasn t changed since then. Sculpture of the constructivist kind that came out of Picasso s

    1912-13 bas-reliefs may have become more of the cuttingedge than painting (at the time it told Duchamp what directionto go in order to go far out ), but this only enhanced the statusof the visual as the area of the newest. (It should be noticed thatthe repudiation of the monolith, as, say, in Lipchitz s transparencies, meant a more radical, more historical break with civilized, generally urban, not just Western traditions of sculpturethan taak place with regard to the equivalent in any other of thearts under Modernism.) But painting was still to be heard from.After Pollock, and after Newman, the scene of visual art lookedstill more like the ambience of the newest in art. It began, too,as the 1960s wore along, to look like the place where anythingwent, where (to borrow the late Harold Rosenberg s expression)the tradition of the new licensed any and everythinglicensed it as it did nowhere else, not in music, certainly not inliterature, not even in dance. (It was only later on that theseother arts began to try to use similar license but without gettinganywhere near the same amount of attention.)This, the original and now long-time leadership of visual art inthe matter of Modernist newness, this is what I want to suggestas explanation of the present openness and hospitality of thevisual art scene to intermedia, multimedia, and the rest ofit. But I don t think it s the whole explanation. There has to bemore to it than that.Another part of what I surmise to be the explanation soundsrelatively trivial, but I don t think it is, really. The stage, the concert hall, the literary recital, the printed page require more orless extended attention. Drama, music, dance, Iiterature takeplace over time, not just in it. Visual art is instantaneous, oralmast sa, in its proper experiencing, which is of its unity aboveand befare anything else. (That s the case with sculpture in theround as much at bottom as with a picture: you have to walk

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    around sculpture in the round but each step gives you all you I feel that the two hypotheses I ve offered to explain theseneed to see in an instant whe~ you linger you lose something. newcomers still don t explain enough. Something more must beIt s more or less the sam~ with murals and scroll-paintings: they there, something more embracing than the early innovativenessdeliver themselves from point to point, in instants; and as with of Modernist painting on the one hand and the factor of time orround sculpture, the connecting of those instants-their flow attention span on the other; some shift, I d say, in the appreciainto one another-is instantaneous too.) It belongs to the tion of visual art by the nominally cultivated public (I mean thessence of visual art that it dismisses the factor of time by public that follows advanced art). I t hink it s a shift away fromrowding so much, against all reason, into a point or points of taste as such with respect to visual art as such (to echo Mr.ime (Iike making innumerable angels dance on the tip of a pin). Tomkins partly), a shift away from the demands of taste insofarAnd the pleasure to be gotten from the details in visual art? as they have become, or seem to have become, more taxinghat s to be considered, but it s a subordinated pleasure or with respect to visual art as such. This would account for the acatisfaction, not to be compared with what s gotten from a ceptance of still other phenomena than intermedia : of Patternisual whole, a unity.) Painting, of the new aesthetic of bad taste, and more.The virtual suppression of the time factor is another reason, I Yes, but how to account for the shift itself? The ordinary bad,uggest, why items and events are put up with in art galleries, untaxed taste obtaining since the 1850s or earlier is still with us.useums, and other places where visual art is the main thing as What s new (but no longer surprising) is that such a relativelyhey wouldn t be put up with elsewhere. In any case galleries large part of th is taste in all its unsophistication should nownd museums are to be sauntered through-you sit down only focus on avant-garde or nominally avant-garde art. But th is is ao rest. They can be escaped from as theaters and concert halls clue, not an explanation. The art boom of recent years is ann t beoTrue, Performance art et al ask for an attention span, other clue. They both lead to the fact that great, great numbersime, but it s so much easier to walk out of a gallery or museum of new people, people from rising, new social classes, newhan a theater or concert hall without seeming rude. Considera- middle classes have entered the sphere of higher culture. Andions like these seem petty, yet they count, they belong to life these people in their youthfulness identify higher culture withs lived, in which boredom can turn into anguish. Anyhow, newness, advancedness, the avant-garde. Why they do th isiven the visual-art setting, Performance art, Body art, etc., now, as new people haven t before, is still another question.on t-usually-ask for too much time, too much attention Suffice it that the authorities have come to recognize that thepan. radically newest art since Manet has been by and large the bestIn The ew Yorker of 25 May 1981, Calvin Tomkins, writing art, and they act on this recognition blindly as it were. Andbout video art, put his finger on the time factor. He said that new people go by authority. But the situation is circular:ideo art asks for the kind of concentration we are expected to those who staff authority nowadays are in effect new peopleive to painting and sculpture, and it also asks us to give up our themselves, new in the demoralization so to speak of their tasteime. He means video as directed to purely visual rather than as brought about by the retrospected triumph of the avantramatic, narrative, or documentary ends. That is, video as garde.een in galleries and museums, as what Mr. Tomkins assumes Anyhow, new people when theycome in great enough numo be art as such, fine art. That I d quarrel with his assump- bers, and especially when the authorities are shaken, tend toion, since I find that anything can be art as such, even if bring standards down, at least for the time being. That, as I seeramatic, narrative, or documentary, is beside the point. (The it, is the main reason why nominally cultivated taste declined inhole of the Tomkins article is very much worth reading.) What the West from the 1840s on (though authority wasn t nearly ass to the point is that only galleries, museums, and other visual much shaken as now). Modernist, avant-garde art, literature,rtvenues (Iike colleges) put up with video as purely visual music arose in answer to that decline. (That s not the onlyrt. TV won t, nor will movie theaters. Commercial motives reason; there were ones internal to the arts themselves; theretand in the way, of course. But these can have cogently was, as usually in human affairs, a coinciding.)esthetic reasons. Mr. Tomkins finds most of video art that s What s ominous is that the decline of taste now, for the firstresented as purely visual, as art as such, boring. I too. time, threatens to overtake art itself I see intermedia and theAnd now avalue judgment has slipped out. Weil, the children of permissiveness that goes with it as symptom of this. Notid-century and after seem to have mutated into a tolerance, necessarily, but as it hap pens. Good art can come fromay an appetite for boredom in the aesthetic realm that s un- anywhere, but it hasn t yet come from intermedia or anythingrecedented. It may be the newest of all things new we ve seen like it.

    This is a much revised and expanded version of a talk given in Buenos Aires on 8But in letting Mr. Tomkins take me into the problem of video November 1980at a conference, Jornadas de laCritica, held under the auspices ofe wandered away a little from my subject. Video is just one theArgentinian section of the International AssociationofArt Critics.mong other newcomers to art galleries and museums. And I L..- --l

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    OCTOBER 1981Volume 56 NO.2Establlshed In 1926PUBLISHERALVIN DEMICKEDITORRICHARD MARTINMANAGING EDITORFLORENCE STEINBERGCIRCULATION DIRECTORJACQUE WHITTEDDESIGNERTODD BETTERLEYASSOCIATE EDITORSDOREASHTONDAVID BOURDONALESSANDRA COMINIROBERT PINCUS-WITTENBARBARA ROSEROBERT ROSENBLUMPETER SELZCONTRIBUTING EDITORSKENNETH BAKERBARBARA CAVALIEREJONATHAN CRARYNOEL FRACKMANANDREW KAGANKIM LEVINJOHN LORINGPATRICIA MAINARDIRALPH POMEROYHARRY RANDCORINNE ROBINSJEANNE SIEGELEDWARD J. SULLIVANVALENTIN TATRANSKYGENERAL MANAGERTHERESA DEMICKARTS MAGAZINE Is Indexed inThe Reeder's Guldeto PerIodical L1tereture andThe Ar t Index; I t Is reproduced onUnlverslty Microlllms, Ann Arbor,Mlchlgan 48106, and abstracted byARTblbllographles,Box 9,Oxford OX15EA andRILA (Intematlonel Repertory of theLltereture of Art), Wllilamstown,Massachusetls 01267.ARTS MAGAZINE 1981 by the ART DIGEST Co.Ali rights reserved. Publlshedmonthly Sept., Oct., Nov.,Dec., Jan., Feb., March, April,May, June, at New Vork, N.V.BUSINESS OFFICESat 23 East 26th StreetNew Vork, NV 10010Telephone: MU 5-8500SUBSCRIPTION RATESone year: 10 Issues, 33.00,two years: 20 issues, 62.00,single copy, 4.00.(Foreign postage for one year, 11.00)CHANGE OF ADDRESS:Send both old and newaddresses, and allow threeweeks for change. Not responslblefor unsol lcited manuscrlpts orphotographs. Secondclass postagepaid at New Vork, NV, andadditional mailing offices.

    COVERDOROTHY GILLESPIE,ENCOUNTER WITH THEFORGOTTEN PAST (detail), 1980.Painted metal, 6' x 14' x 6 .2ANDREW TAVARELLI

    by Virginia Fabbri Butera3MARSHA PELSby Christa Lancaster4HELEN LEVITTby Roberta Hellman

    and Marvin Hoshino5CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN

    by Sherry Buckberrough6A CLASS PORTRAITby Ann Schoenfeld7MICHAEL GALLAGHERby Saxton Freymann8ENID MUNROEby Martha B. Scolt9

    CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVEPAINTING AND SCULPTUREby Elizabeth Milroy1JIM WAIDby Roger Harlan11JIMMY DE SANAby Valentin Tatransky12ERNEST SHAWby Virg in ia Mann13JOSEPH DiGIORGIOby Tram Combs14ARTS REVIEWSby Stephen Westfall

    SPECIAL SECTION:ROBERT SMITHSON'SSPI RAL JETTY(pages 68-88)

    15LETTERS TOTHE EDITOR64RICHARD FLEISCHNER'SBALTIMOREPROJECT

    by Ronaid J Onorato68ROBERT SMITHSONAND FILM: THESPiRAL JETTYRECONSIDEREDby Elizabeth C. Childs8THE PASCALIAN SPIRAL:ROBERT SMITHSON'SDRUNKEN BOATby Donaid B. Kuspit89GEORGE STAVRINOS:FASHION AND ARTby Philip Smith9INTERMEDIAby Clement Greenberg94ENTRIES:STYLE SHUCKSby Robert Pincus-Wilten98GILBERT ROHDE ANDTHE EVOLUTION OFMODERN DESIGN,

    19271941by Derek Ostergardand David A. Hanks

    1 8JUD NELSON:SCULPTUREIS HlS BAGby Kim Levin11LEE KRASNER'SEARLY CAREER,PART ONE:PUSHING INDIFFERENTDIRECTIONSby Ellen G. Landau

    M G ZIN

    123THE PRECISIONISTCONSTRUCTIVISTNEXUS: LOUISLOZOWICK IN BERLINby Barbara Zabel 8

    FERDINAND HODLER,FRANOIS BONVIN,AND FRENCH REALISMby Gabriel P. Weisberg

    132PHANTOM ITALY:THE RETURN OFGiORGIO DE CHIRICOby Willard Bohn

    136EVERETT SHINN:THE TRENTON MURALby Thomas Folk139JACKSON POLLOCKAND JAZZ:STRUCTURAL PARALLELSby Chad Mandeles142CONTEXTUALISM:THE NEW DOGMA OFAMERICAN ARCHITECTUREby Edson Armi144MODERN MYTHS :AN INTERVIEWWITH ANDY WARHOLby Barry Blinderman148DOROTHY GILLESPIE'SWAY:THEPAST ENCOUNTEREDby Virginia Pil ts Rembert154RICHARD POUSETTEDART'SNEWWORK INBLACK AND WHITEby Martica Sawin157TERENCE LA NOUE'SPAINTINGS: THEINDIA CONNECTIONby Gary J Schwindler