Resnick / Reinhardt Debate

by Geoffrey Dorfman
Excerpted with permission from the author.

Resnick: Yeah. How did religion get back? It was gone. It was done for, a hundred years ago, really. How did it get back? Now, I have a theory. I think it just suited something said about art; something started by the ideas of avant gardism. And by accident. I think that when Kierkegaard, in his beautiful way of writing, spoke about “how would he find the knight of infinite faith?” How would he find the man who truly has faith? He said, “I would exchange that—finding such a man—with the most incredible monsters of Africa.” Now, that would be a real find. In other words, a man with faith, according to Kierkegaard, was a very rare person. He went on and elaborated upon that, but the idea being that he didn’t count churchgoers or anything like that as very religious at all. He thought this thing like an act of faith was so rare, so highly improbable—almost impossible—that it could only exist in a form that you’d never recognize it. That’s how it got back. It was something that was rare, It was something that you didn’t recognize. Only one-of-a-kind. And I think when Heidegger, and people like him, with their looking for hard work, for a lifetime of hard work—it always occurs to them that if something is impossible then it could take their lifetime and it would be well-occupied, they’d be Herr Professor, and have credit for at least trying—I think in art now this religious feeling—this feeling of guilt—no one says why they’re guilty. If you ask them, “What did you do?” they answer—“Well, it’s this feeling I have.” All this religious feeling doesn’t mean you have to get up in the morning and go to church; as a matter of fact, most people don’t get up early in the morning. Most people assume that someone else does and they figure “He’s going to church,” so they’re a little respectful about it, but they wouldn’t be caught dead in church. They’re not like that. They want it to be single; only one-of-a-kind. It seems that’s historically the role of the great art; that there’s only one-of-a-kind. Well, I think that’s bunk. I think it’s never been true. It’s always been a short synopsis, a short way of presenting a lot of very complicated facts and ideas in the person, one. It’s been a way of getting rid of that long list that nobody can remember. And I think that we suffer from it terribly, right now, when we ought to feel free in every sense. We’re the most victimized by historians, by system makers, by corporations; I don’t know what they are but they bother me. And the only freedom I have is among artists. I want to live among artists. I want to be in and out when I feel like it, to go back to my studio and come out. But to come out means that everyone’s willing, that everyone likes the idea. It doesn’t mean that I have to be running around nagging, saying, “Lets talk about art.” I didn’t come here to do that. I just really came here to speak my mind. And attack. My idea is that I’m attacking everybody. Ad Reinhardt is much more particular; he’s only attacking corrupt people, but I’m attacking everybody.

Reinhardt: Let me say almost the same thing Milton’s saying. For somebody to question somebody about honesty or corruption; if you think for a minute how dopey that is. What would it prove if you proved that I was a little corrupt? Or the most corrupt guy in the world? We’re talking about an idea here. That exists. Now that doesn’t exist because I said it, personally. lt exists and it exists perhaps among everyone. Now, to bring it up is just—well, its just dumb, that’s all.

Resnick: Sure is dumb.

Elaine de Kooning: I’d like to ask one question about it. If you’re so against the artists who appeared in Life magazine, how come you were posed so carefully with seventeen other men in 1951? You were very carefully posed—

Voice: pantheism—about three years ago.

Reinhardt: Are you implying that we posed ourselves?

Voice: The deities were set up at that time. That’s a mild corruption that rubs off on everyone.

Reinhardt: That’s right. It was a sin. I have to admit—(laughter) (clapping)—I think that was a very ambiguous time and there were two or three artists, for example, who swore that they would never appear in Life magazine. Now, I never thought about it that way—just like that—but they absolutely swore that they wouldn’t—and they

Voice: The deities were set up at that time. That’s a mild corruption that rubs off on everyone.

Voice: They wanted to have a little fun, I guess.

Reinhardt: Well, I don’t know what it was. It was the activity of two galleries. You know, it’s become a kind of symbolic picture, a symbolic activity. Perhaps going back ten years before that—that was 1950—in 1940, the American Abstract Artists picketed the Museum of Modern Art. I think that was a very important gesture.

Voice: Representational artists picketed it last year.

Reinhardt: Yeah. That only goes to show that even attack and protest is a problem. I think we indicated before that, even in the general situation, the people who write the most devastating attacks on society now are people who spent twenty or thirty years on the staff of Time and Life. The guy who wrote the book, “The Operators,” or something like that. He was a Life editorial writer. There’s a book called the “Waist High Culture,” and it was written by a Time—now, that’s curious. Now, of course, protesting and attacking can be a racket. I don’t know how many careers have been built on artists hard to get dirty. You know, just biding your time; not showing, waiting and suddenly cashing in; well, that’s an old stock market trick.

Voice: Why are you doing it?

Reinhardt: Not selling until the right time. You’re always faced with that.

Resnick: The question is why are you doing it? What are you doing? (Laughter) What are we doing?! What did we just do?

Reinhardt: One thing we know is that both Milton and I are trying to articulate something we think is not right. It’s something for all of you to think about as much as we’ve thought about it. Milton has also said to me, we’re involved in discussing this thing, not only between ourselves but with our own selves. The fact that we’re human like any other artist doesn’t make it any better or worse; that’s like bringing up the same question before. I guess we’re involved in the same things other people are, but at least Milton and I are not very happy about it—

Resnick: Miserable. (laughter)

Reinhardt: —and we decided not to clam up about it.

Voice: But hasn’t there always been corruption in periods of intense activity? You read Benvenuto Cellini and—

Reinhardt: Of course, but that doesn’t make it any better.

Voice: What’s that got to do with great art or not great art? I don’t think it makes it any better but why is it so important?

Wolf Kahn: I think we want to sound a dirge—

Reinhardt: Anybody who gets tired of talking—Milton and I are going to talk here anyway for a long time. Now, if anybody wants to go they’re perfectly entitled to go; they’re perfectly welcome to go because we’re not here to entertain anybody.

Voice: Is there a question and answer period? Or have I made a mistake?

Resnick: No, you have to know me to get anywhere. (laughter)

Louis Finkelstein: You’ve attacked the situation by talking freely. What would happen? What do you envision would be in terms of your success? How would you know if you made any headway? What would you produce? What would occur?

Resnick: Well, maybe we shouldn’t do it if that’s the point.

Louis Finkelstein: I didn’t say you shouldn’t do it.

Resnick: Well, you sure put it in a funny way. (Iaughter) (exclamations)

Voice: No he didn’t.

Resnick: I don’t know what l could produce. What could I produce?

Louis Finkelstein: Under what circumstances would you be less miserable?

Resnick: I don’t know. I give up.

Louis Finkelstein: Ad?

Reinhardt: I brought up once the Thirties, but I didn’t bring it up as an ideal situation, or the work that was being produced particularly, or that I wanted everybody to be on the W.P.A. again. But there was a very light feeling in the Thirties that artists have something to say about who they were and what they did, so that there was a better debate, a better feeling among artists then. Now, I’m not suggesting a return to any period in the past. If things get worse and worse there isn’t any place to return to, any golden age. There are a number of people now thinking of the early Forties as a golden age as if everything that was corrupt started last year. That means younger artists. That’s become a real racket among someone. Everyone thinks, well, there is a kind of a parroting going on. Hess, for instance, has talked about history as a full kind of racket—I can’t say that he, himself is free of it, however. That comes up all the time and it’s a ticklish thing to deal with.

Resnick: I have an answer. (to Finkelstein) The thing I can produce is contrast. I’m suffocating. It’s all the same. It seems as if it’s an endless amount of disappointment. If I can produce some contrast wouldn’t that be worthwhile?

Louis Finkelstein: Well, you were saying that you would like conscious talk, open difference, exploration, and you laid the lack of it, by implication, to some sort of conspiracy in which everybody participated by following their own motives. it seems to me that part of the serious discussion of why there isn’t that kind of talk you want might also regard things other than corruption itself—

Resnick: Yes. Other things than corruption.

Louis Finkelstein: —which are probably very much in the matter of painting. I just asked the question to elicit whether you thought—

Resnick: I don’t know whether I quarrel with Ad Reinhardt about the word, corruption. Because it’s his word for it. Now, I do agree with Ad Reinhardt. That’s why we’re here. So I don’t want to be the guy who picks up the word and throws it back and has some fun with it. I want to be the guy who’s a little artistic about something or other. And I know more about that—this getting rid of things. I’d rather just leave it alone. I said the other day when Larry Rivers spoke about, “What are we supposed to be doing?” I mean, as if, I don’t know why it occurred to me that I hated him for saying it, because that seems like a very sensible question. It could be said with a spirit and we could—but the way he said it, boy,—I could’ve smacked him.

There is the nature of what I am supposed to feel like, or be like. It isn’t a matter of being deprived, or living in a system that I don’t like. I think it’s much more true about feelings around art that you could leave almost anything. Easily. It wouldn’t occur to me that I couldn’t. Except that I would have to find a place for it. When I was living at home, a boy, art seemed to be something I’d like very much to do. When I couldn’t do it because my father said, “You can’t be an artist as long as you live in my house,” it seemed very easy to leave. I like the idea that he said that, as a matter of fact; after all these years of bitterness, I feel that he was a terribly wonderful man for sticking to the ideas he thought he wanted. But I left because he didn’t become a mealy-mouthed sonofabitch who wore me out, who gave me a car or some other shit that I didn’t want but forced me so I couldn’t leave. Now, I want to do something so that it’s possible (pause) it’s possible to leave corruption. It should be easy. I’m not swallowed. I’m suffocating—

Voice: That wouldn’t stop you.

Resnick: Fuck yourself, you sonofabitch!

Other voice: What you’re saying—

Resnick: Fuck you, too. You rotten egg!

Reinhardt: You want to say something?

Kyle Morris: Other than these petty attacks; I appreciate what you’ve both been saying. I think what it comes down to, in very specific terms, is like we’re here to say “uncle”. Art – abstract art – abstract painting, has been accepted. We have to give our own individual insights into what we’re doing. And this is the next step, for clarification and identity. That’s very important and that’s all I wanted to say. Insight is the next step.