Resnick / Reinhardt Debate

by Geoffrey Dorfman
Excerpted with permission from the author.

Resnick: Yeah. I want to present a case which puzzles me and I want to see what happens when you and I think about the same thing. It has to do with something you read there. Suppose an artist paints a picture and someone says it’s really a girder. The point you’re making is that something is corrupt. Now, what I would like to know is this. Is it corrupt because there is no girder? Is it corrupt because someone allows someone to speak of his painting as having a girder when you know the artist very well and you know of course, he never meant a girder? He’s being misrepresented and that’s what’s corrupt? Is it corrupt—I mean suppose it were to change; suppose the artist says, “There is a girder. It’s true.” Now, would that change the meaning of corrupt? The reason I say that is I don’t know where the corruption will slip me by. I don’t know where to look.

I know a fellow like Hélion once was showing me a group of his paintings—this was in Paris—and he had just received them from New York. They’d been in a crate and had been stored away here for many years. He, at that time in Paris was painting—well—he called his paintings an attempt at getting at humanity. It seemed a very important word to him—humanity. It was so important that at times when I would see him—he was a wonderfully-abled speaker and he liked to walk and he’d say, “Come walk,” and it seemed to me that we’d walk for miles and all through it was this, humanity—this word that kept buzzing in my head. He was obsessed with the word. Although he didn’t once mention it, I had heard from others that he had been a prisoner, held, escaped, been in concentration camps and something about his experiences there had changed him from an abstract painter, which he had been before the war—and not only was he an abstract painter but he was a very important abstract painter—many people considered him one of the best and at that time, and it was just that—that abstraction was very important; it held a position, it took a position; it took an attitude—and his attitude had changed. He received this crate and he opened it. He had invited me to come for some other reason, but I think he may have wanted me to see them. I don’t know.

It was a very big contrast to see the work on his walls, his easel, the things he’d been working on—and these paintings. He said, “What do you think of them?” and I began to smile. I don’t think I could explain why I smiled, but he immediately said, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that the things I said about humanity are ideas that I’ve only just now held and that I was different before,” and, “It’s not true. Even then I thought of man as being a symbol with his hands up in the air.” Now, I don’t think the point would be clear to you if you didn’t know something about this man’s painting. There was some kind of shape, amorphous shapes, and they had something of that look. And so I laughed and I said, “maybe so,” and all that but what I was only thinking and smiling about is that they looked dated. They looked old. They looked much older than the paintings he had just been working on.

Now, what I would like to get at is, where we could say the artist does the wrong thing? What is demanded of the artist? Is it demanded that he be explicit in such a way that what he says of a painting is exactly there? If that is incorrupt then he is being honest? You would say that of a man who says, “there is a girder,” and there it is. Now, there may be a point at which you no longer recognize the girder and it looks something like a girder, but it could be something else and if you knew the artist you would say he never painted or saw a girder and if someone says it is a girder, why shouldn’t he say it isn’t a girder? There are things now that escape.

There’s an enormous ignorance and its been the most difficult thing to overcome. It’s taken years of artists’ endeavors, lifetimes and a great deal of suffering. I know, because all the artists I knew suffered. They still suffer and they will always suffer. Now, I don’t know, Ad, why you suffer? (laughter) But I want you to tell me when the word “corrupt” finds itself to be at the point where you mean it completely, thoroughly. We could know. What is corrupt about a painting that isn’t a girder?

Reinhardt: Well, I was trying to speculate about what corruption means everywhere. Corruption in society would have something, I guess, to do with a loose moral code or something like that—a rigged T.V. or payola or—I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with what corruption would be everywhere else. Now, what would corruption be in art? And my answer would be in a work that’s too available, too loose, too open. It permits—too poetic, I’d say it permits too many people to project their own ideas in it. I don’t like to see art that open. At some point almost anything goes. Almost anyone could do it. I think that whole idea is corrupt. I think the idea of the artist making believe he doesn’t know what he’s doing is a corrupt one.

Resnick: Well, suppose the artist admits all those things that you say happen. Suppose the artist said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. Art is open. You can read anything into what I do.” He went to the trouble of stating exactly, and saying publicly, about his painting just what you’ve indicated is wrong with his painting. In other words, all the things that are wrong are exactly what the artist says he wants to do. His program is to do a wrong picture. What do we say? I don’t know what to say.

As a matter of fact, now the point is reached where a lot of art is being exhibited everywhere with the idea that it would cause the most amount of irritation to those who know something about painting. By the way, most people today who know very little about painting—and that goes for almost everybody today—applaud it. They go purposely out of the way to say what a lousy thing that was to do, but they only talk about the things that operate against the idea that painting is difficult. The whole feeling between those who attack art or who don’t attack art is that they agree that the target is what they think art really is. I think it’s true that people who know the most about art, know least about how to get rid of it—and that’s what they’re trying to find out.

I think one of the most important revolutions in this country was when Life magazine showed pictures of Jackson Pollock and his paintings, and the first thing that occurred to millions of people is that he looked like everyone they know. He didn’t look like a foreign type, a strange man, a Jew; he really looked all right. He looked like Saturday night. And the paintings he did, they thought anyone could do it. And that’s the first time it occurred to them that painting is something that anyone can do. But artists knew that all the time. That seems to be the part that caught on in this country; that art is something anybody could do if they wanted to. You didn’t have to learn perspective; you didn’t have to go to a foreign school; you didn’t have to be anti-American. You could do it. It would not have been enough without other things; I’m not saying that’s the end of it, but something very important happened here. Maybe that’s what happened ten years ago. Because I don’t feel that artists—at the very moment that people write about what happened then—thought that anything happened. Mostly we were getting rid of a lot of things we didn’t know how to get rid of. We got rid of words that made us sick. We didn’t know how to get away from those words but we had a lot of fun when we started to. Once we got the hint, we really did a good job. So that Bill Litton, an anthropologist, said, “ You artists have just gotten rid of your own language. You have no more terminology. I’ve been thinking about it and I think it’s very bad to be speechless, so I’ve gone to the trouble of making up some new ones. Can I come here and talk to you about it?” “Sure,” but it didn’t work. It just sounded silly.

New words did come about. They really did. That word, involvement. To be involved. To go all the way, as if you’re a young girl who went past kissing. All this feeling that you really were more than on the surface—that you were through and through what you thought you were. That seems to be the most important thing to have happened as far as terminology goes. Whether this ever really had to do with painting or not, I don’t know. I’d like to bring it up now. What is this stuff, involvement? I never saw it! I don’t know what the fuck it looks like! I’m sick of it! I’m not involved! I’m not committed! I shit on those fucking, lousy, stupid words!! They’re not mine and I hate every sonofabitch who uses them: Now, that’s who I attack!!

Reinhardt: Well, I don’t know how, uh—(laughter) I don’t know how to, uh, make that—specific. There’s no question about the idea of commitment and all those terms. What I would like to ask is, what would be corrupt if the ideas that I brought up weren’t so? Where would the corruption lie? What makes it rotten? Does it get corrupt by its own steam?

I know it’s a great trick of artists—and I’m not accusing Milton of doing this—to search out some other kind of straw man to hit out at. It’s easy to attack a curator and critic, however somehow an artist doesn’t do that unless he’s left out or alienated or something like that. I don’t really know one artist who seems to have managed the acceptance in any way. Now I don’t know what he should have done. I bring all these things up as questions. It’s very easy to say that all artists are alike, we’re all artists, we’re all in the same boat, and that outside is corrupt and everything that goes on there. This is not true in the first place. It’s usually insiders telling outsiders what happens. So I’d like to keep asking: Is the proper thing to say, “Why Fight It?” especially if you’re in the position of the author—

Resnick: That’s corrupt.

Reinhardt: —of the statement? I think it’s a little unfair to call a dealer corrupt in a situation in which he functions effectively. It’s the artist that permits or allows it. (pause) If the corruption is not in the using and the exploitation and the accommodation and in the availability and in the openness and looseness, then I’d like to know where it is? This is in the artist, in his actions and in his work.

Resnick: Well, I want to put it another way. The invisible is not corrupt. The things I can’t see, I can’t see the dirt on them. It doesn’t show. If I bend down to pick up something dirty I can get to it. I can get rid of the dirt. I can shine it up; I can sparkle it; I can do something about it. What can I do about this invisible stuff? What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to feel about something I can’t see? Why is it that I must live with corruption being implicit? There’s nothing that I can do about it. Now, that’s why I really feel so bad, Ad; all your words recall to me the things that I can do nothing about. It doesn’t matter what I might try and do. I can’t overcome it. It’s this saying, “What are you, really?” “Why aren’t you more open?” “Why aren’t you more pure?”

It’s come through the years, Ad, that you and I are both in the same position, strangely. You know, because we weren’t. I didn’t ever agree with anybody and certainly not you. But we are in the same position about something and that is the thing you said the last time when you had some people here with you, and you said the most important thing is that we talk—here—about our art or anything. Doesn’t matter whether it bores you or doesn’t. It’s more important that we persist; we have it out. I think I only agree with you about the words. To have it out is a feeling for the future—an anticipation of what you’ll do, what you can do. Those who want that to be closed, to prevent it from possibly happening—the status quo—are corrupt.

The future is the thing new. It’s a little baby’s ass, the future; there’s nothing dirty about it. It’s the only thing I can see about it; it’s tender. I think all thoughts that have to do with the future are tender thoughts. They’re not savage, they’re not slaughterous, they’re not murderous. Murderers have nothing to do with the future. I think art has to (pause) live. I don’t want anyone to give me anything, because I want art to live. I don’t want—because I’m an artist—anyone to give me anything.

Nobody ever gave me anything. The first man who ever offered to help me—I had a mattress on the floor—that’s how I lived—the first man offered me a bed. It was supposed to make me feel happy. It came, free of charge, and it was full of bedbugs. (laughter) It made me sick! It’s true. I don’t want anything to be given. People on the Project were sick at heart. They didn’t want anything like it. It wasn’t generous. It isn’t a matter of money; it isn’t a matter of attitude. It’s something else. We want the future!