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AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS |
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Resnick/Reinhardt Debate New Years Day, 1961, at The Club by Geoffrey Dorfman Excerpted with permission from the book Out of the Picture: Milton Resnick and the New York School, Midmarch Arts Press, March 2003 (ISBN: 1877675474) part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | back to Texts page Milton Resnick: This isn't really a paper. It's a kind of index; a short way of putting down and covering all the things I would like said this evening. But I can't just leave it dry in an index form. I want to put it in a more formal way. I'll just read it. It won't serve to explain anything but it might put in mind what could be the subject for tonight. Since I'm by nature unable to put things in a hard way I do it by making a story. (begins to read) I dream I am in a police lineup. I am innocent but everyone I see is in uniform. They have hard faces. Here are the questions they ask me. Am I real? Am I committed? Involved? Passionate? Do I have experiences? By this time I have a guilty look. Here are some more questions. Where do I go summers? In what gallery do I show? Am I a new artist? There are more questions but I give up. Here is a list of my associates: Image Painter, Personal Experience Painter, Scenery Painter, American Flag Painter, Nothing Painter; the painter who can put it on; painters who don't talk; there are no action painters. Abstract painters are represented. The Image Painter is human. There is a new remote control painting kit on the market. The Museum of Modern Art is interested. Angels sing at all openings from now on. Flying brushes bring new joy. I propose the following. We talk about art. We influence each other. We make art. We publicize ideas that excite art. We agree that art is not property. I propose that critics be able, be tender, keep up to date, and file away the dead. I propose a system of thought without boundary, without geography, without the mark of obedience; art as a feeling for the future. I ask of business not to trick us. You will miss the fun if you hire company artists. I curse the stupid, the smiling, the strong. I want to live in a large world without suspicion. (finishes reading) The purpose of my attack comes from my feeling that I'm an alien - that I have been alienated - that I've been thrown out; I'm not wanted. It is the result of a system of thought, of thinking, and a way of presenting what artists have done so everything is under suspicion. Suspect. Not that everything else isn't under suspicion. Most people around the art world are progressive, are thinking of the future, are worried about it. They think they should take some responsibility for what happens now because what happens now is something their children will have to - (pause) Now I'm not attacking any single person. I'm really attacking a system of thought. I don't know whether anyone is really to blame. I have a feeling that artists are most to blame, but not because they invented the system; there's not that much unity among artists but I feel things that have been said by artists have been made into a system and the system works against the artist. Some of the things that excited writers and the public and drew them closer to art and gave them an inkling of what art tends to be about were the very things that are now being used in this system - a set of rules, a set of implicit thoughts that have by this time done something like brainwash; a form of brainwashing. Ten years ago the only thing I felt illegal about was that I lived in a loft. I wasn't supposed to. It never occurred to me that I did anything at all that could land me in jail or make anyone a victim of what I thought or did. Except that I had a long-range plan in that I painted pictures which, to my mind and to the minds of most people who painted, had something to do with the future. At that time I think we were quite clearly visualizing the future as, not a matter of preserving our paintings or anything like that, but that the future was open, the future was free, the future would not become impossible and unbearable and frozen. Anything that freed us from this oppressive feeling that art was something done somewhere else, something done far from where we lived and made us feel empty-handed and sick at heart and phonies, (although our intentions were good), and made us seem hopelessly in the shadow, off the stage, without any . . . we couldn't explain ourselves! Why did we want to be artists? It was very difficult. But no one bothered to question us. Nobody troubled us about it. Nobody said, "Well, why do you want to be an artist?" Nobody asked us questions. Nobody talked to us. Now without any of those questions really having been answered everybody seems to have gotten the idea that there are none of these questions. Almost anyone could tell you in a manner of some kind that these are not important questions and you're just silly if you think like that. Now, I think I ought to have some way of telling you why I think I'm under suspicion. Although it isn't very difficult; most everybody has the same feelings as I do because it only takes a little conversation and I see that people think and feel exactly the way I do - maybe not for the same reasons. Before I start, there are two things I could say are the editorial policy of our two leading art magazines. One art magazine, in one way or another presents this point of view. I only mention it because it's one reason why I feel the way I do. "How can art be true if it is used by the state?" - and that of course is meant as propaganda in Brussels, against the Russians and things like that - ".. and by Time magazine and by Life magazine?" In other words, if the state and Time and Life magazines feel sympathetic to most advanced and difficult ideas of artists then something is suspicious by the very fact that they can make use of such things, and they might be right. I mean, I'm not saying that this is not justified in having been said; I'm only saying that this is one of the questions that makes me feel uneasy and - perhaps it is a good question; perhaps it's true - "How can art be true if it is used by the state and by Time and by Life?" Another question and another reason why I feel so bad is that there's been a system worked out in another magazine by which they can grade or tell which came first and who did whatever it is they did. They don't say what anyone ever really did. I never found out what someone was supposed to have done. But they have a list, more or less, telling who came first and what age and how many months apart. Now, the most recent editorial, and I'm not quoting, is this: "We must tell who the imitators are because now they are cashing in." Now that makes me feel very bad. I don't know how anyone else feels but - I've been called an imitator. I've never really believed what anyone tells me and all that, but it isn't because of how I feel that I bring this up. I bring this up because it simply is a way of saying that there is something about art in the last ten years and only in the last ten years; because anything before then, if it enters into the meaningful part of this, would probably destroy the idea that there are imitators; but if art was supposed to have begun ten years-or-so ago then those who started it - if that is possible - to start art ten years ago, are given the credit for having done something that gradually is being imitated by others who come along who are supposedly the younger artists - and now money enters into it and it is being bought - that now is the time that we must tell who the imitators are because they are cashing in. That's probably as close to a program of reviews and articles and writings about art going on in one of our most important magazines today. I may be wrong but that's my impression and that's one of the reasons I feel very bad. One of the reasons why I want to put everything into a nutshell is because some ten years ago - since that period seems to be so very important - ten or twelve years or so, there was Studio 35 and Ad Reinhardt, a few others; they did just that. They put art into a nutshell. They said what art should not be. They said no to probably all the ideas that were current then. They just said no. They didn't have police. They didn't have any way of enforcing their rulings, but they did say no to practically everything. In the case of Mark Rothko - and I'm not attacking Mark Rothko - he was very explicit about the noes: no image, no color, no nostalgia. I don't know how long that list was; it was quite a long list. No sadism. No imagery; no no, no no. On and on. Of course, the idea of the idea was that no one could do that but that it was worthwhile doing. It can be said of Mark Rothko that he invented a process of thinking that has worked all these years and has borne fruit. One nice thing about him is he had a show about that time and someone and I spoke to him about his show and asked if he had accomplished all those things he wanted. He said, "No". He didn't claim he did what he said should be done. There are other reasons why I feel so bad. I don't mean to attack any single person but I do take what someone did write without saying who it is, and I'm not even saying that he means the things I say he means because I do take him out of context and, to tell you the truth, I don't know what he really means, but I simply take the words as printed and this printing is public and this public is, more or less, hearing this said all over the place. I will just pick out words. I'm not attacking these words. I'm not attacking their implicit meanings or whether they have meaning or not. I'm just saying I read this: [All of Resnick's subsequent quotations are from "Literary Form and Social Hallucination" by Harold Rosenberg, which had just appeared in Partisan Review in the Fall of 1960. Upon hearing himself quoted, Rosenberg, abruptly got up and left.] "Art does not lead to truth." I'm not saying those are the words someone wrote. I'm reading something that doesn't - maybe I invented it - doesn't matter, but it's around. "Art subordinates the facts to the emotions. Art subordinates both facts and emotions to art's own ends." Perhaps this is true. But what should art have done? That's the question I ask. "It is not by chance that the meaning of form and the meaning of hallucination overlap. There is a natural alliance between art and deception and one needs no prompting from modem radicalism to see this alliance as the ideal extension of the relation of the arts to their historic patrons: courts, priesthoods and in more recent times, capitalists and bureaucrats." Well, in a way it's saying the same thing; that art now is suspicious because it is used by the state, Time, and Life. "If it weren't for art, men's belief would not be suspended. Would not curiosity press them then to chase after the hidden truth? Form/beauty calls off the hunt by justifying, through the multiple feelings it arouses, the not-quite-real as humanly sufficient. Considering the function of the arts in transferring into familiar experience" - and in that sense I don't know really what it means - "transferring into familiar experience the hallucinations bred in the centers of authority, one might decide that the arts are, by nature, reactionary." Now that of course hinges on the word, reactionary. I don't really know the rest of it because I don't know what a familiar experience is. I don't know what experience is, in the end, because the word, experience has been made to suit a technical form of art. There's a way of reading experience into art and it has something to do with what you actually see. In other words, it's not something you bring - say you have a recollection of a bad experience; you did some terrible thing and you're guilty and you committed an awful crime but no one caught you but you have this thing in you - this experience - and it comes through and is represented on the canvas. It isn't that really. If it were that, you could say art was a form of religious experience - a form of conscience. It isn't really that anymore. I don't know what it is anymore. It's very difficult. It was just as difficult to say what form meant but the word, experience, is around a lot more than the word, form. I don't know who uses the word, form. The last time I heard someone say form was somewhere up in Buffalo. (laughter) "There persists an embarrassed self-consciousness in regard to what art actually does" - that's right; what does art do? - "and this may be the reason for the strain and suspicion." Now that also seems to me straight. I would like that to be the reason for being here tonight. Now, in that sense I wouldn't mind having to explain myself. I would like very much to try to explain what I've done. I would like it if it were the thing that everyone else would like to do. I wouldn't like to do it alone because, of course, that's very suspicious. But if it were the normal occupation of artists to explain what they've done, I wouldn't mind at all doing that. As a matter of fact I think we should. "Art is politically suspect. I mean from the liberal point of view. In short, the temptation of art to betrayal of the social conscience is irremediable." A few more. "In the past hundred years art has more and more conducted wars against its own nature under the banners of various truths or of the search for experience." Now that means something to me. I think it's a very important reason why artists are nervous and restless and somewhat irritated by their own natures or the nature of art or something like that. They are warring constantly against something they themselves are responsible for. I don't know whether they are actually carrying banners proclaiming their reason for warring as truth or experience.I don't really know whether I could really fight for truth or fight for experience. I really want to fight for something better said than that. "Artist's suspiciousness concerning art has led not to the abandonment of art but to radical experiment with form. It has produced anti-formal art." Now this, I think, is important, not because of the article and where it's come from, but because there is - I don't think that anti-form is the best way of putting it - but that there is a kind of 'anti-art' art that is based on those who would replace making art with having experiences. I think there's a lot of new art that wants to be new and the one way they can be new quickly, without spending a lifetime at it, is to be anti what they consider good art. A good way of showing that would be something that happened some years ago when Rauschenberg asked Bill de Kooning for one of his drawings. He wanted, of course, a good drawing and he said, "I would like to have your drawing to erase it." Then he did that and showed it as, Bill de Kooning Erased By Rauschenberg, and the point I want to make about that is that Rauschenberg couldn't erase Bill de Kooning unless Rauschenberg thought that Bill de Kooning made good art. So it depends on someone doing something that people more or less recognize - agree to - as good art in order to be anti-art. I really don't know what would happen if everybody became anti-art. It'd be a hard thing to be then. But it does change technically the way art is done. And that's really the most important thing of all. If I mean anything at all, I mean there is a technical aspect to painting that is really the most fascinating part of art and it leads to all kinds of crises and problems and ideas, and this part of art is completely ignored. It's no longer being printed or publicized or even thought about. It's simply being replaced by people who say, "When I get to the studio that's when I'm an artist and I know how to put it on and that's enough for me." It really has to do with experience - being personal - isolated from everybody else, and having these pure experiences that come from within you. They can't come from outside; they come from within your guts, your heart. Somewhere. Not your brain. That's a very suspicious place for art to come from because if it came from there it may be foreign to you. Somewhere the brain is susceptible to ears and things that come through the ears are not exactly your own. And so you really have to avoid using your hearing. I really think that's why people with no brains like to look around so much. "Artists in our time have become increasingly sensible of the other world of form as a check on, or distortion of, experience." Now; how does someone know that something is meaningful to him? In that respect, I would like to read something I just received this morning. The only reason I'm reading it is that someone who is important in poetry has written me and explains himself - of course it isn't fair to say that a short letter explains just how he would normally write about it - but it does occur to him to say it and I think it's important. First he says about something, "It has the sting of the real thing." And, "So much of the rest, despite zest and feeling just didn't get under my skin." It seems that I could make a case out of that; that in order to make art you have to penetrate somebody's skin. You have to get past his normal resistance to what you're making. And this is also about armored, hard-faced, difficult people who want an experience when they look at art. They want art itself to be an experience. So in some ways that word, experience can't be avoided. I don't know where it comes from. In my own experience, the word, experience has no meaning. Something must be wrong because I might be very isolated by nature - I'm not willingly so - and so this never got to me. It also might be something that is so prevalent throughout the country that it strikes a very important keynote. It means a lot to people to say experience. It probably means more in America to say experience than it means to say form. It probably means more to say form if you know something about art - if you're an international kind of a person. It probably means more if you're religious to say the word, experience. Most people see their experiences as a religious thing. In some way it's gotten into art through a revival of religious feelings. And that is where I feel I'm being left out. I am not religious. If I felt more like being religious I'd naturally be a Jew. If I felt that wasn't a good religion I would have to learn a new one. It would have to mean something to me. I imagine one thing I would have to learn to be a Protestant is the word, experience. I have a hint. I don't know if I'm right or not but I just think so. I think that more than whether it's religious or not, it's nationalistic. I think if someone says that he has had an experience or that he is real or that he is what he is if you say, "What are you?" - then the very fact that he is what he says he is ought to mean something to everybody else. Now, the only people who can ask that question, I think, are Americans. And if you're not so sure then I don't think it's so good to ask those questions. I don't think I could ask that question about myself and come up with a good answer. I don't think I could ask that question of anybody else and find that his answer pleases me - or doesn't please me. It never seems to me a good question to ask, but it's being asked all the time and it's asked in millions of ways. "Who are you? Find yourself. Be yourself. Be real." And I'm just getting very jittery about it and maybe I just have to leave and go where it's not being asked. And that's the nature of suspicion. It's a savage form of life that says there's not enough room here for everybody who wants to be here and some of you don't even belong here and ought to go away - back where you come from. It may even be an impending feeling of doom, a feeling that everyone's getting ready to go to heaven; the right people, of course, are going to get there, and they're going to take the whole country with them - except they're going to leave behind those who don't belong. I feel I'm hitting at a system of thinking. I feel I'm touching - hitting upon - and attacking - in 1961, a system of thought that is being nurtured - that is growing rapidly, with a lot of people and things behind it. What puzzles me is why a lot of people who I respect and who could never go to heaven under those conditions, want to speak like that. I don't know why they want to join this America First Club. They'll never get in! So I think we ought to think about that. About being an alien. Maybe I'll join any other aliens. I mean really, seriously join those artists who, ten years ago were saying, "Society won't accept me." I think they didn't entirely mean that they weren't selling pictures then. I think that they felt that art, considering the nature of business and politics and everything else, meant a lot to them and that it ought to play a part in the world. And, of course, it very evidently isn't playing a part at all. But of course there were a lot of dumb ones who said, "I'm an artist and I'm not accepted by society," and all they really meant was that they wish they could get a job teaching. Of course I don't mean that. I mean there was a period of time when that word, "Avant Garde" came from Europe and it meant, of course, a whole group of painters and marvelous pictures that we began to see at the Museum of Modern Art, and we knew that it was Avant Garde art but it was already quite old - at least twenty or thirty years old. It would be hard for us then to say that we were Avant Garde. It was very clear that we didn't really get it. And if we did, it was already too late. It couldn't really be said that we were really Avant Garde. The most that you could say then was, "Society doesn't accept us." I think that's what we said instead of saying Avant Garde. You couldn't live here and say Avant-Garde, so you could easily say, "Society doesn't accept us." We were really honest people and all that but - you know. So I have attacked a system of thought - no real target maybe - but I do really appeal to other artists to do something that will change things. That's why I feel that talking about art is very important. To influence each other instead of acting like isolation booths; that would be very important. I think we ought to talk about how we make art, whether art is to be made or to be found or whether all these things don't really matter at all, which is possible. And we ought to publicize ideas that excite art, that make it possible to want to do art. Being a revolutionary, I want to have other revolutionaries agree with me that art is not property; that whether business is really interested or not isn't our reason for being critical about it. Whether someone buys or sells we really ought to leave to the nature of the world and not get to thinking that that is the way everything is going to be determined. That's all. part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | back to Texts page
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American Abstract Artists |
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