Greenberg at the Event Horizon

Originally published in Paletten, Nr 5: (Gothenburg: Stiftelsen Paletten 2013) Greenberg at the Event Horizon Anthony Marcellini Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see. - Dr. Weir to Captain Miller, Event Horizon, 19971 Clement Greenberg stands in an abyss of his own making, a boundlessness that extends all around him. He wanted to steer the course of the future, but above all he was motivated by a relentless desire for flatness. Now the plane stretches out in front of him, expanding like a pool fed from a broken water main with an infinite supply. The pool, the abyss, the realization that this is what he wanted yet somehow exactly the opposite, gets larger and larger, deeper and deeper, darker and more opaque, and he wonders how this happened. He has led the charge to this border region and now everything has shifted, the point of no return, the point at which the pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. At first he was energized by the idea that a prediction could extend this far, but his excitement has quickly turned to terror with the understanding that art has barreled way past him, rendering his world completely alien. Yet he fights, refusing to accept the course of events, refusing to accept this change in awareness, mentally fixed on that point in time before the abyss revealed itself, when everything was safe. He is like any object at the event horizon of a black hole2, which to all other observers seems to be in slow motion, never quite able to pass through, forever teetering on the brink, becoming more and more redshifted and stretched out like the flatness he championed as time elapses and others move on. It is 1954; the Japanese Guitai Movement takes on the materiality of formal abstraction and aims to go beyond its perimeters, to create painting as “any act of picture making in time and space”3. In their manifesto they state, “the most important merits of abstract art 1 Event Horizon, (1997), directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Script written by Philip Eisner, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Event-Horizon.html: Plot: “A rescue crew investigates a spaceship that disappeared into a black hole and has now returned...with someone or something new on-board.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119081/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1 2 “In general relativity, an event horizon refers to the boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. It is the point of no return, i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. The most common case of an event horizon is that surrounding a black hole. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer. Likewise, any object approaching the horizon from the observer's side appears to slow down and never quite pass through the horizon, with its image becoming more and more redshifted as time elapses.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon 3 From a wall text at the exhibition “Gutai: Splendid Playground” at The Guggenheim Museum, New York City (February 15–May 8, 2013) lie in the fact that it has opened up the possibility to create a new, subjective shape of space”4. The process of painting moves from the hands to the feet to the whole body; its application involves chemical, technological and natural processes; its ground shifts from the canvas to the stage, to the park, to the earth, to the air and the heavens; and its form changes from the visual to the tactile and the auditory. It is 1958; Jackson Pollock has died two years earlier and Allan Kaprow writes a kind of late eulogy that echoes similar impulses as Gutai. Kaprow follows the ritual process and the drips of Pollock’s paint off the edges of the canvas; it leads him into the room where the artwork hangs and where he is also standing, into the space of experience and reception. Now in motion he continues to move out of the gallery into the street, into the city, and into the world. All things within this new sphere of everyday life, bodies, clothes, rooms, streets and objects, become fair game for aesthetic gestures and play5. It is 1961; the artist Anne Truitt makes First, an austere sculpture comprised of only three vertical white beams with pointed ends approximately 44 x 17 x 7 inches, influenced by the white picket fences of her childhood. By 1963 her sculptures loose any relation to representation and are further reduced to minimal painted block forms, like Carson 72 x 72 x 13 inches, an almost entirely flat black rectangle with two cut outs at the top and a single yellow line encircling the object painted 1/5 from the crown. These sculptures have the feeling of an Ad Reinhard or Josef Albers painting stepping off the wall and into the room, or as if the flatness of Greenbergian abstraction had followed its proper course and become completely material. With their reduced form and physical presence they share aesthetic and conceptual tendencies similar to later minimalist sculpture, namely a sense of presence or embodiment in the room. Their existence arguably influenced the trajectory of minimalism, though Truitt both accepts and denies this assumption6. Beyond Its Extreme End… …the picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane, which is the actual surface of the canvas. Clement Greenberg7. For some years I have understood intuitively that all and everything is a whole beyond imaginable scale…a seamless whole within which we each must logically have proportionate being. Anne Truitt8 4 ibid “On the Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), Allan Kaprow 6 In her writings Truitt says that her work was heavily influenced by the work of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Neman, which prompted the reduction of gesture (p 19). And that she was working on a black cube at the same time as Tony Smith but never completed the sculpture (p 113). Anne Truitt, Prospect: the journal of an artist (New York: Scribner 1996) 7 Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986) p 35 8 Anne Truitt, Prospect: the journal of an artist (New York: Scribner 1996) p 97 5 In October 2012, I attended a lecture by philosopher Graham Harman titled, "The Use of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Philosophy in the Arts", hosted by Paletten in collaboration with Museo Diffuso, Lindholmens verkstäder, Gothenburg, Sweden. Harman spent a great deal of time on Clement Greenberg, which provoked me to reconsider Greenbergian Modernism and imagine that perhaps Greenberg was an inadvertent object-oriented critic who, with his notion of flatness, unwittingly laid the groundwork for a kind of philosophy Harman wants to see, “in which all objects interact with just as much dignity as human and world, but in which entities also retain some autonomy in their relations with other things.”9 If we follow Greenbergian Modernism to its extreme end and consider painting as a discipline pushed to recognize its own structure, embracing flatness in its concern with the specificity of its medium, no longer becoming a window into a another dimension but a physical thing, then we shift painting from a painting into an object hung on a wall, a thing that is suddenly connected to all the other objects in the room, humans included. This flatness extends painting into the realm of the material and the real, the phenomenological sphere of sculpture and performance, and breaks down the divisions between, culture and the everyday, high and low, perhaps even avant-garde and kitsch10, opening up the potential forms, methods, subjects and presence of art objects. It seems Greenberg was both aware of the potential of a break that his theories provoked yet refused to allow his theory to be extended into the realms that Kaprow, Gutai, Truitt and numerous other artists seem to do. For example, Greenberg is supportive of Truitt, loosely placing her in the group of artists he associated with Post-Painterly Abstraction and promoting her to the gallerist André Emmerich. Yet he is also scared of what Truitt’s works represent. Forecasting later writings by Michael Fried on Minimalism, Greenberg describes an encounter with Truitt’s work in 1963. “I noticed how this look could confer an effect of presence. That presence as achieved through size was aesthetically extraneous I already knew. That presence as achieved through the look of non-art was likewise aesthetically extraneous, I did not yet know.”11 Both the human size of the work 9 Graham Harman, “Asymmetrical Causation: Influence without Recompense” Parallax, Volume 16, Issue 1, (London, Routledge, 2010), p 98 10 In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), an important early essay for Greenburg, he suggests that the artistic avant-garde arose with the emergence of a Bourgeois collecting class, which allowed the artist to remove themselves from the process of commissioning, and thus from the responsibility of representation or subject matter. This shift permits the artist to make art for their own ends, art for arts sake, and begins a gradual move towards abstraction. Greenberg states “In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of their own craft.” At the same time this moment represents art’s distancing itself from common society. Thus Kitsch, mass produced cultural objects, steps in to replace art with objects of common understanding. The difference between Art and Kitch says Greenberg, can only be understood through technique and artistry, basically it is a question of taste. In other words it is in the hands of the critic to say what is or is not art, a protection from the increasingly barrierless world of twentieth century art. - Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) p 6 11 Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” American Sculpture of the Sixties (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1967), p 24–26. and its reduced aesthetic signals for Greenberg “the question of the phenomenal as opposed to the aesthetic or artistic,”12 Greenberg concluded of the new sculpture that art needed to be pushing in the direction of the formalism of its medium, not towards the phenomenal. But doesn’t extreme formalism inherently move into the realm of the phenomenal? When you emphasize the materiality of an object you emphasize what makes it what it is, or the thingness of the thing. I think somehow Greenberg understands these moves, the extramaterial, the rising up of the base and the anti-aesthetic, as challenges to his theories that go beyond them, and he can’t accept the presence and uncertainty that they expose. He was against the opening up of the aesthetics of the avant-garde to everyday objects and preferred the high-ground of abstraction and the authority of the critic taste to certify greatness13. Clearly he is enticed by materiality and pushes himself further into the point of no return when he makes statements like the following, which predict outcome of formalist/flat painting, “painting having been pushed up from the fictive depths is forced through the surface of the canvas to emerge on the other side in the form of paper, cloth, cement and actual objects of wood and other materials pasted, glued or nailed to what was originally the transparent picture plane”.14 Greenberg’s approach points to the painting as an object and its subject the action and performance of painting, thereby moving away from painting as a fixed gesture –towards the performance of process and the space of reception, the before and after of the work. Even more damning is the fact that Greenberg’s favorite painter is Jackson Pollock, who Greenberg believes best exemplifies his notions of flatness; yet Pollock is the Abstract Expressionist artist whose practice, more than any other, becomes a stage for numerous others like Kaprow and Gutai to move beyond the canvas out of the gallery and into the public. And these moves prompt the emergence of new forms, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Performance, Institutional Critique, Socially Engaged Practice, amongst many others, drastically altering the ways we think about and produce art. Yet Greenberg seems to ignore these changes. Unwilling to take things in a holistic direction, which his flatness seems to materialize, Greenberg is immortalized as a kind of tragic figure fighting to stop time and the course of progress, left forever teetering on the edge, watching everything open up around him, paralyzed by the unknown that emerges from the muck, while he is tethered to a dualistic rope of good vs. bad, culture vs. the everyday, avant-garde against kitsch. 12 ibid See, Clement Greenberg “Necessity of ‘Formalism’”, New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Autumn, 1971) pp. 171-175 14 Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986) p 36 13