Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Debate with Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg Between the Lines By the same author AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp...

Author: Thierry de Duve

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Clement Greenberg Between the Lines

By the same author

AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade tr. Dana Polan, pref. John Rajchman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp editor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991) Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996) AVAILABLE IN FRENCH

Nominalisme pictural. Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984) Essais datés I, 1974-1986 (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1987) Au nom de l’art. Pour une archéologie de la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989) Résonances du readymade. Marcel Duchamp entre avant-garde et tradition (Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1989) Cousus de fil d’or. Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp (Villeurbanne: Art Édition, 1990) Faire école (Paris: Presses du réel, 1992) La Déposition (Paris: Dis Voir, 1995) Du nom au nous (Paris: Dis Voir, 1995)

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CLEMENT GREENBERG BETWEEN THE LINES INCLUDING A DEBATE WITH CLEMENT GREENBERG

THIERRY DE DUVE TRANSLATED BY BRIAN HOLMES

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © Éditions Dis Voir All rights reserved. Originally published in 1996 by Éditions Dis Voir; translated with the support of the Centre National du Livre (Paris) University of Chicago Press edition, 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17516-4 (paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-17516-2 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duve, Thierry de. [Clement Greenberg entre les lignes. English] Clement Greenberg between the lines : including a debate with Clement Greenberg / Thierry de Duve ; translated by Brian Holmes. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17516-4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-17516-2 (alk. paper) 1. Greenberg, Clement, 1909–1994. 2. Art criticism—United States—History—20th century. 3. Art, Modern—20th century. I. Greenberg, Clement, 1909–1994. II. Title. N7483.G73D8813 2010 709.2—dc22 2009040096 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 6 Preface: The Three Greenbergs 7 The Paths of Criticism 13 Silences in the Doctrine 39 Wavering Reflections 89 Debate with Clement Greenberg 121 transcribed by Stephen Wright

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Acknowledgments

This book saw the light of day in 1996 thanks to Danièle Rivière, who ran—and still runs—a small and courageous publishing house in Paris, called Dis Voir. It seemed a good idea at the time to issue an English translation simultaneously with the French original, Clement Greenberg entre les lignes. Only later did we learn that for a book published in France, finding its natural readership in the English-speaking world depends on more than just its existence and its content. I am therefore grateful to Danièle Rivière for allowing me to republish the book with an American publisher. And I am equally grateful to Susan Bielstein and Margaret Hivnor for welcoming the book at the University of Chicago Press. Since Chicago is home to the four volumes of Greenberg’s collected writings, edited by John O’Brian, it seemed logical that a volume of essays on the great art critic should join them. I feel honored, to say the least, by both the Press and its history of publishing art criticism. Except for the correction of occasional typographical errors and a few minor stylistic adjustments in the translation, nothing has been changed visà-vis the 1996 edition. Writers who look back at their work from a distance of some fifteen years may be tempted to revise, and I am no exception. The second chapter of Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, in particular, contains the beginnings of developments that later found a more adequate expression in Voici (or Look).1 However, the publisher and I feel that the book, as it is, stands on its own and contains nothing that I fundamentally changed my mind about or that I should feel ashamed of. May it find its readers, and may they be as ruthlessly critical as Clement Greenberg once was. Thierry de Duve, Voici: 100 ans d’art contemporain, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods as Look: 100 Years of Contemporary Art (Ghent: Ludion, 2001).

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Preface: The Three Greenbergs

The winds are turning. Some fifteen years ago, in a rather clumsy essay devoted to Clement Greenberg, I expressed the wish that his texts be given an unprejudiced reading, adding that the moment of impassioned rejection had already passed, while that of critical reappraisal remained premature.1 Less than a year after his death, in May 1994 at the age of eighty-five, a session of the International Art Critics Association at the annual congress of the highly influential College Art Association was devoted to precisely such a critical reappraisal.2 The younger generation, for whom the moment of impassioned rejection is history, seems to have begun reading Greenberg with an unprejudiced eye, thanks no doubt to the publication of the first four volumes of his complete writings, edited by John O’Brian. For my part, I have frequently read and reread him since my first essay, and what matters to me today is less a critical reappraisal than an attempt to read between the lines of his writings, in search of an answer to a question that probably holds for myself alone: why do I continue to learn so much from this man? This is to say that this book has no ambition of being a commentary of Greenberg’s work in its totality, but instead is a personal path through his writing and his thought. I am less well-placed than anyone to say whether it is Greenberg who has written between his own lines what I think I can read there; but when I appeal to a commentary by another of his readers I make sure to cite the name, and when I advance my own opinion I do not hide it. Otherwise I wrote this book with the impression of reading aloud a text where Greenberg was doing the thinking, under his breath sometimes. A certain familiarity with his writings is recommended, but it is not indispensable for one’s understanding. Thierry de Duve, “Clement Lessing” (1979), in Essais datés I, 1974-1986 (Paris: La Différence, 1987). 2 “Clement Greenberg and his Legacy: A Critical Reassessment,” session organized by Frances Colpitt of the University of Texas in San Antonio. 1

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CLEMENT GREENBERG BETWEEN THE LINES

The book is built of three chapters, with the idea that there are, to sum up and to simplify things, three Greenbergs. The first is the doctrinaire Greenberg, who very early on formed a conviction as to the role of the avant-garde. He is the one I admire the most and from whom I have learned the most. The second is the art critic who wrote from day to day, who discovered Pollock, panned Rouault, changed his opinion on Mondrian— he’s the one I enjoy the most, the one whom I would really like to see emulated. The third—the one who most interests me—is the theorist who, under the pressure of “advanced art,” took up debates with Croce and even Kant on the terrain of theoretical aesthetics. The first Greenberg (who will be the second in order of appearance in this book) is the author of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon”: grating, militant texts, from 1939 and 1940 respectively, inspired by the imminence of the catastrophe and the fear of Nazi barbarism, and written before the slightest commentary on any exhibition or particular work. I discovered him late, around 1974-75, at the same time as a good deal of the American art he supported at the time (Noland and Olitski, for example), and therefore well after the shock that I experienced in 1964, as a young European raised on the utopian heritage of the Bauhaus, when I first encountered pop art, Warhol in particular. Only through much effort could I admit the paradoxical conception of the avant-garde which the young Greenberg had formed once and for all. While everyone else was crying from the rooftops that the avant-garde was an anti-tradition, Greenberg saw it as the sole authentic defense of the tradition before the erosive force of kitsch. Despite reservations which have not all disappeared, I finally came to accept the idea: it was a better explanation of history than the optimistic progressivism on which I had been nourished before. Since that time, I can persuade myself in front of the works (but not all of them) that when Warhol is the great artist I believe him to be, he is traditional because avantgarde. I see this “because” as a point of doctrine which I owe to Greenberg. Doctrinal debates were of little interest to Greenberg. The thing that most amused him when he met someone new was testing you on your taste. He measured you in five minutes. The first time I met him, the conversation turned quite rapidly to Warhol, and when I told him what I thought of Warhol he retorted: “You’ve just disqualified yourself as a judge of art.” I laughed—I expected that—and the conversation then turned to Noland, of

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THE THREE GREENBERGS

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whom we had a few examples before us, rather unconvincing in my eyes. This to say that I have not the slightest need to agree with Greenberg the art critic (who appears first in this book) to confess that he is the one closest to my heart. From one day to the next he wrote about what he liked or didn’t like in art, taking his reader along through his successive discoveries, sharing his hesitations, his changes of mind, his enthusiasms. I still read him with tremendous pleasure, and he remains for me a pragmatic model of good art criticism. The third Greenberg—the one who interests me most—is the theorist around whom some of the strands come together which make it possible, I believe, to weave the beginnings of a reinterpretation of artistic modernity. Greenberg the theorist did not always exist, but appeared in the course of the seventies in some ten articles, all entitled “Seminar” and published seemingly at random in various art journals. Above all, he did not come into being spontaneously but rather in reaction to the new artistic currents of the sixties, in the first place pop, then minimal and conceptual art, currents which Greenberg saw, rightly or wrongly (and I would say: rightly for certain works and certain artists, wrongly for others), as a dangerous threat to what he deemed to be art’s highest ambitions. In all these “Seminars” his argument is with the specter of Marcel Duchamp, which is not their least interest in my view. The first chapter was written in response to an invitation from JeanOlivier Majastre to a conference organized by him in November 1993 at Pierre Mendès-France University in Grenoble. The title of the conference was Le texte, l’œuvre, l’émotion, so I responded by linking those three words in a proposal entitled “Did Greenberg make me love Pollock?,” which was published in the proceedings of the conference and appears here under another title.3 The second chapter, previously unpublished, is the most recent. It forms something like the pièce de résistance of the book, and proposes the beginnings of a reworking of modernism which I hope is capable of loosening up a situation where pro- and anti-Greenbergians toss insults at each other over texts which they imagine as canonical, but which are in reality quite open to interpretation. The third chapter (the first in the chronological order of writing) is the text of my contribution to the 3 “Greenberg m’a-t-il fait aimer Pollock? Remarques sur la critique d’art de Clement Greenberg,” in Jean-Oliver Majastre, ed., Le texte, l’œuvre, l’émotion (Brussels: La lettre volée, 1994).

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Greenberg conference held at the Georges Pompidou Center in May 1993, on the initiative of Daniel Soutif and Jean-Pierre Criqui. It was initially published in the journal Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne.4 I would like to thank Jean-Olivier Majastre, Daniel Soutif, and Jean-Pierre Criqui for having kindly authorized the translation (without major changes) of chapters one and three. Finally, the book contains an unpublished debate with Clement Greenberg. It took place on my initiative, on March 30, 1987, at the University of Ottawa, where I was teaching at the time. I devoted a good month of course work to preparing the students, giving them a selection of texts to read with subsequent discussions in class, after which they formulated a certain number of their own questions. The debate was public. There were almost four hundred people in the room, and my students were far from the only ones to participate. That evening, a demanding and well-informed public submitted the world’s best-known art critic to a hail of pointed questions which neither curried his favor nor discounted his answers in advance. I myself did not spare him, and the reader will find in the debate a good number of the inquiries which form the underpinnings of my reflection in this book. Greenberg submitted to the ordeal with grace, sometimes amused and sometimes irritated, and always with a great deal of respect for his interlocutors, whoever they were. Of course he restated convictions, often cut-and-dried ones, which readers of his texts will find familiar. But he was also presented with a few unexpected objections, and produced equally surprising answers which added not a little to the interest and the charm of the evening. To do all possible justice to the ambiance, the rhythm, and the tone, we have reproduced almost the entire session, retaining the oral style of the exchange to the greatest extent, in the awareness that we were dealing with a historical document. My only regret—due to a fallible memory, but also to the impossibility of identifying the participants I did not know—is that I am unable to name the questioners, excepting my colleagues, Johanne Lamoureux and Olivier Asselin. I hope that all those who contributed to the quality of the debate, and who will recognize their own voices, will excuse me for this forced anonymity. 4 “Les tremblés de la réflexion. Remarques sur l’esthétique de Clement Greenberg,” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45/46, Fall-Winter 1993.

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THE THREE GREENBERGS

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Bibliographical Note In order to abridge and unify the notes, the following conventions will be adopted here. The references to Greenberg’s writings are to the original publications and, for the writings up to 1970, to the four currently published volumes edited by John O’Brian under the title Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago University Press, Chicago and London). The first two volumes were published in 1986: Volume I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, and Volume II, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949; the two following, in 1993: Volume III, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, and Volume IV, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. This edition will be referenced as follows: Greenberg, followed by the volume number in roman numerals and the page number (ex.: Greenberg IV, p. 87).

The Paths of Criticism

First, the question: is artistic emotion textually transmissible? Can an art critic cause his readers to love the work of which he speaks, and if so, by what means? By his argumentation, his rhetoric, his writing? Second, the question of the question: which critic are we talking about, and which work, which transmission? Third, an attempt at a first-person response concerning one specific case: did Greenberg make me love Pollock? Fourth, the problem of generalization, and its legitimacy. Fifth, the whole thing is opened up again for discussion. I have a particular affection for Clement Greenberg the art critic, even if I am far from sharing all his judgments, even if I may have learned more from Greenberg the historian, who very early on formed quasi-dogmatic convictions about the role of the avant-garde and the raison d’être of modernism, and even if my debates have primarily been with Greenberg the theorist, who stepped out onto the terrain of aesthetics in the sixties under the pressure of the art stemming from Duchamp, whom he detested. All this means that even when I stick to Greenberg the art critic, my feelings are mixed.1 I also have a particular and long-standing affection for Jackson Pollock, the painter and the artist. However, being a child of my times, I must admit that what I now call my affection for Pollock—which twenty years ago I would have called my interest in Pollock—has gone through successive phases in which I am occasionally unsure whether I recognize the same artist. As an adolescent, my first contacts with the painting of Pollock, by way of Skira press, led me to view him—in the doxa of the epoch—as an American Mathieu. I already didn’t like Mathieu, but I liked Soulages and I 1 And thus in answering the questions I’ve set out for myself above, I will always keep in mind the two that Jean-Pierre Criqui has asked with respect to Greenberg: “what advantages does he offer to his reader, and at what cost?” J.P. Criqui, “Le moderniste et la voie lactée (Note sur Clement Greenberg),” in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 22, December 1987, p.100.

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adored Hartung. And how could I have understood that it was Mathieu who sought to pass himself off as a European Pollock? In short, I learned that there was art in America, that tachisme translated as “Action Painting” in American, and that Pollock was a name with a future. He seemed difficult. Kline and Rothko looked better in reproduction, that’s sure. The important thing, in any case, was the moves of “Jack the Dripper,” more so than the results. That’s what I hung on to. Later on, as a young professor overflowing with more or less well-digested theory, with “critiques of the dominant ideology,” and “the deconstruction of representation,” I was impudent enough to credit Pollock with dealing the definitive blow to the old Renaissance window. I had my Hans Namuth photos to prove it. The canvas lay on the ground, and the artist was up on his feet, dancing around in an altered state (alcoholism or floating attention?). His body had abjured the authority of the gaze, his hand had forgone the mastery of the tool, his trade had been given over to the force of gravity, like his whole being to the winds of chance. The word “chance” contained an entire epistemology: Boltzmann and Heisenberg, not yet Prigogine but already Shannon, and also tuchè, automaton. A bit further and I’d have reproached Pollock for his Jungian analyst, when a Lacanian would have done so much better. And for a crowning touch, the all-over treatment was a symbol of democracy and egalitarianism, whereas Mathieu centered his compositions and took himself for Connétable de Bourbon. The moves had become infinitely more complex, but they were still more important than the canvases. Poor me. I don’t disavow all that, there’s still some truth in it, but nonetheless... It was then, and all at once, in a well-wrapped package, thanks to the good graces of Yve-Alain Bois and the journal Macula, that Greenberg’s texts on Jackson Pollock fell out of the sky in a French translation. Only ten years later did they become easily available in the original, without long hunts through the library.2 Meanwhile, I had seen some Pollocks. And then I saw them again, and some I saw again and again. And I read and listened to other critics, for example T.J. Clark in Vancouver, who made me realize, suddenly, without saying anything of the sort, that Pollock was in the same family as Cézanne, and on the same level. But that was in 1986, and the Macula articles are 1977. And it was then, I say it for truth’s sake, without shame and in 2 “Les textes sur Pollock,” collected and introduced by Yve-Alain Bois, in Macula 2, 1977. The English originals have been published in Greenberg I et II.

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THE PATHS OF CRITICISM

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gratitude, that my interest in Pollock finally molted into affection. Yes, Greenberg made me love Pollock. The question is: how? Did he get me to trade an ideology of “critique of ideology” for another, that of “modernist painting”? I’ll dare to hope not. If there is an ideologue in Greenberg it is the early Greenberg, the one I call a dogmatic historian, the one who wrote “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon”; not the art critic. (And I am quite careful about distinguishing the three Greenbergs; such are my ethics toward him.) The fact is, I don’t love Pollock because he is a modernist, nor Greenberg for that matter; and I don’t love Pollock because Greenberg made me love him. I love Pollock because he is the best painter of his generation. Now there’s an undisguised judgment, a real Greenbergian one, tautological! An argument of authority with much waving of hands. Could I be under his influence? Yes, but just when I say it, not when I think it. And just when I write it like that, in his rhetoric and without fearing reprisals, which is only courageous on the level of rhetoric, if at all. Where the judgment is concerned, I have nothing left to fear. And the rhetoric only seduces me in flagrante delicto of non-vigilance, and never without a slight feeling of guilt. Ask a certain “smart Jewish girl with a typewriter” about it, she’ll tell you why. If you believe me when I say that argumentation by the “logic” of modernism was not what made me give Pollock his place in the pantheon, and if you believe me when I admit that the formulation of Greenberg’s judgments—or of my own when I envy and imitate them—in a rhetoric aspiring to the apodictic still raises a slight flush of shame on my brow, then will you also believe me if I say that it was not Greenberg’s style which persuaded me to love Jackson Pollock? None of this is clear-cut, because modernism is not foreign to my affection for Pollock; but modernism is simply not a logic, except perhaps an apparent and retrospective one. Nothing is clear-cut, because to say of Pollock, “he’s the best,” and to think it too, may not be so different from saying of the woman I love, “she’s the most beautiful”—and the flush on my forehead isn’t just shame. As to Greenberg’s style, if it can give me the opportunity to ask whether artistic emotion is textually transmissible, it is only on the condition—a minimum— that I love it too. And therefore that I judge it good. Does Greenberg write well? Yes, he writes well. Does it matter? Yes, it matters. But what does it mean to write well? It’s to write “true.” And “true,” what does that mean?

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That means... but take a look for yourself, read a passage: It is possible to accuse the painter Jackson Pollock, too, of bad taste; but it would be wrong, for what is thought to be Pollock’s bad taste is in reality simply his willingness to be ugly in terms of contemporary taste. In the course of time this ugliness will become a new standard of beauty. Besides, Pollock submits to a habit of discipline derived from cubism; and even as he goes away from cubism he carries with him the unity of style with which it endowed him when in the beginning he put himself under its influence. Thus Pollock’s superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create a genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control. His emotion starts out pictorially; it does not have to be castrated and translated in order to be put into a picture. Pollock’s third show in as many years (at Art of This Century, till April 20) contains nothing to equal the two large canvases, Totem Lesson I and Totem Lesson II, that he exhibited last year. But it is still sufficient—for all its divagations and weaknesses, especially in the gouaches—to show him as the most original contemporary easel-painter under forty. What may at first sight seem crowded and repetitious reveals on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety. One has to learn Pollock’s idiom to realize its flexibility. And it is precisely because I am, in general, still learning from Pollock that I hesitate to attempt a more thorough analysis of his art.3

This is one of two articles by Greenberg on Pollock that I will quote in full, and I do so not to betray it by cutting it short. It was published in The Nation on April 13, 1946. There is nothing extraordinary in the style, it’s just good journalism. It packs a maximum of information into a minimum of space, without tiring the reader, and without forgetting—no doubt it’s a law of the genre, but it has great importance—to indicate the location of the exhibition and its closing date, so the reader can verify the critic’s words with his own eyes. In passing, the reader who knows nothing of Pollock learns that the painter is under forty, that he was initially influenced by cubism, and that he has had three exhibitions in three years. He also learns that Pollock has bad taste, that he is superior to his contemporaries in this country, and that he is nothing less than “the most original contemporary easel-painter under forty.” But does he really learn that? Not really. He learns that such is the opinion Greenberg has formed of Pollock. To write “true,” for an art critic, is perhaps above all to interject this quality of frankness, emanating 3

Greenberg II, p. 74-75.

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from a style which, while blending factual information and value judgments in the same breath, still stresses the heterogeneousness of the registers with crystalline clarity, using none of those falsely modest provisos such as “in my opinion,” “I believe that”—or even worse, pusillanimous pedantries like “in the eyes of the present writer...” Greenberg writes in such a way that the speaking subject never disappears behind the subject of the sentence, but also in such a way that we feel that this assignation of the subject to different places does not dissolve the writing into subjectivity, by which I mean subjectivism. How do I know that? You can feel it, and there’s nothing more to be said, if not this: frankness does not equal sincerity. And this: an operation of feeling, which is also an operation of reflection, causes me to say upon reading this article that the frankness of the style cannot be reduced to the sincerity of the author; is this operation not akin to the operation of feeling and of reflection (filling a small paragraph of explanations which are simultaneously a judgment) which causes Greenberg to say that Pollock’s bad taste is not bad taste, or that his ugliness will become a new standard of beauty? He doesn’t say exactly that, by the way. He says “what is thought to be Pollock’s bad taste is in reality simply his willingness to be ugly in terms of contemporary taste,” adding that “in the course of time this ugliness will become a new standard of beauty.” How does Greenberg know that Pollock is not ugly but that he is willing to be ugly? He feels it, and there’s nothing more to be said, just as I feel that Greenberg writes “true” and that his frankness is not one with his sincerity. Moreover: just as Pollock is willing to be ugly, Greenberg is willing to yield to the truth of what he perceives—I mean, what he feels—in Pollock. One could linger over each word of this text, stressing the pertinence of its reading of Pollock’s sources in cubism (at a time when his painting shows more the influence of Masson and Hofmann, with traces of Thomas Hart Benton), recognizing the acuity of the judgments, bowing before the premonitory intuition of variety in “what at first sight may seem crowded and repetitious,” and finally thanking the author for the humility of the final paragraph. Shunning all braggartism, an art critic announces to his readers that his function is to learn from artists, and that because this artist has not finished teaching him he can say no more for the moment. Admirable. But I am not here to praise Greenberg, I’m here to find out how he made me love Pollock. So I’ll ask once and for all, because I’ve got it under my skin: who writes like

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that today? Where can you read art criticism that discusses a contemporary work, and at the very moment of its blossoming (because one must remember that outside a small circle, Pollock was a nobody in 1946), with the terms customarily reserved for the great masters of the past, and yet without sparing specific reproaches: “divagations and weaknesses, especially in the gouaches”? No jargon, no abstruse theorization, no professorial condescendence, no need to excuse oneself for promoting the artist—or for not promoting him. The reader is assumed to take contemporary art as seriously as the critic. Greenberg only addresses himself to real art lovers, but in a style and in a mode of address that excludes no one. It’s a long time since I’ve read anything similar (or wrote anything similar, I admit) in contemporary art criticism. The text I have just quoted is Greenberg’s third critique of Pollock. The very first, commenting on the painter’s first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery (in The Nation on November 27, 1943), begins with these words: “There are both surprise and fulfillment in Jackson Pollock’s not so abstract abstractions.” Next comes a laudatory evocation of Blakelock and Ryder, enlarging on “the muddiness of color that so profoundly characterizes a great deal of American painting.” Immediately afterwards, that same miry quality earns Pollock the following comments: The mud abounds in Pollock’s larger works, and these, though the least consummated, are his most original and ambitious. Being young and full of energy, he takes orders he can’t fill. In the large, audacious Guardians of the Secret he struggles between two slabs of inscribed mud (Pollock almost always inscribes his purer colors); and space tautens but does not burst into a picture; nor is the mud quite transmuted. Both this painting and Male and Female (Pollock’s titles are pretentious) zigzags between the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural. The smaller works are much more conclusive…4

It must be admitted, we’ve lost the habit of such criticism, a criticism peppered with judgments, laced with admonitions to the artist (orders he can’t fill, pretentious titles), a criticism that breathes fire and ice in the same sentence—a criticism where one can wonder if the word “mud,” weighted with so much malevolence by the nineteenth century (like coal, blacktop, pipe juice), is not after all simply being employed here as an innocent description. But a strange description nonetheless, since Greenberg applies it to pure 4

Greenberg I, p. 165.

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colors. I recently saw Guardians of the Secret again, and as for those traces of mud, really, there aren’t any. But I can understand that an eye which, in 1943, could not of course have familiarized itself with the impastos of Burri, Fautrier, or Dubuffet, could use the word “mud” for such violently colored paint, thick and indeed, inscribed—grafittoed, one might say—onto the canvas. And I can understand the evocation of Blakelock and Ryder, even if the comparison strikes me as distant, above all for Blakelock. Whatever the case, I think it is the last sentence of this excerpt that should catch our attention, where it is said that this painting “zigzags between the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural.” Here, and very early on, Greenberg has seen something—a question or a dilemma—which without exaggeration can be said to structure a large proportion of his later thinking on “modernist painting.” We’ll come across it again further on. Jackson Pollock’s second one-man show at Art of This Century (till April 14) establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since Miró.... In Pollock, there is absolutely [no self-deception], and he is not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.... Pollock’s single fault is not that he crowds his canvases too evenly but that he sometimes juxtaposes colors and values so abruptly that gaping holes are created.5

This dates from April 7, 1945, in The Nation. Where Greenberg appealed to the American school one year earlier, here he does not shy away from comparison with the best of international art: “...the greatest one to appear since Miró.” As he will again a year later, he compliments Pollock on his ugliness, drawing in passing a general law, unless perhaps he is applying that law (“all profoundly original art looks ugly at first”). Let us note that he does not yet praise the willingness to be ugly, but the audaciousness it requires. In a passage I have not reproduced, he sets apart the two Totem Lessons, “for which I cannot find strong enough words of praise” (he returns to them the next year, regretting that nothing new can equal them). He also offers some counsel: “Those who find his oils overpowering are advised to approach him through his gouaches, which in trying less to wring every possible ounce of intensity from every square inch of surface achieve greater clarity and are less suffocatingly packed than the oils.” 5


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If the sentence above contains a judgment (and doubtless it does contain one), Greenberg will nonetheless change his mind a year later, since Pollock’s gouaches then count among his “divagations and weaknesses.” But the sentence also contains a conceptual elaboration which parallels—and as we’ll see, continues to parallel—the work of elaboration that the painter himself undertakes, brushes in hand, without conceptualizing. Greenberg perceives the suffocatingly packed oils of Pollock as a failing, as well as his tendency “to wring every possible ounce of intensity from every square inch of surface.” But the last sentence of the excerpt I have quoted (“Pollock’s single fault is not that he crowds his canvases too evenly...”) ceases to perceive this as a failing. And it anticipates the idea of all-over, although neither the word nor the concept have yet been established, for the good reason that Pollock’s explicit turn in that direction only comes with the adoption of the dripping technique, and the drip is in 1946-47. As Greenberg says in the 1946 article, “one has to learn Pollock’s idiom,” and that is what will occupy his efforts, article after article. Let us read again: Jackson Pollock’s fourth one-man show in so many years at Art of This Century (till February 7) is his best since his first one and signals what may be a major step in his development—which I regard as the most important so far of the younger generation of American painters. He has now largely abandoned his customary heavy black-and-whitish or gun-metal chiaroscuro for the higher scales, for alizarins, cream-whites, cerulean blues, pinks, and sharp greens. Like Dubuffet, however, whose art goes in a similar if less abstract direction, Pollock remains essentially a draftsman in black and white who must as a rule rely on these colors to maintain the consistency and power of surface of his pictures.6

This article on Pollock is the fifth written for The Nation, dated February 1, 1947 (I’ve skipped one, from December 28, 1946). The comparison with Dubuffet stems from the fact that the opening section of the article is devoted to an exhibition of the French painter, held at Pierre Matisse Gallery in January 1947. The Pollock exhibition at Art of This Century was the largest to date, since in addition to the Mural executed for Peggy Guggenheim it comprised sixteen paintings, among them the six that compose the series Sounds in the Grass. It is quite rare to see Greenberg wax expansive over color, and if he does so in the paragraph above—“alizarins, cream-whites, cerulean blues, pinks, and sharp greens”—it is only to cut such lyricism short with a 6


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rather blunt judgment: “Pollock remains essentially a draftsman in black and white.” I will pause over this judgment. If I can say that Greenberg’s articles made me love Pollock, it is clearly because I read them all at once, with thirty years’ distance from the work itself. I can neither answer the question of the effect they may have had on the readers of the time, nor abstract myself from this historical remove. And it is equally clear that a large share of my renewed interest and attention (I don’t yet say affection) for the painting of Pollock in 1977 was due to the fact that I could see before my very eyes the elaboration of concepts with which I was familiar (like the idea of all-over), but which I knew could not yet have been concepts at the moment when Greenberg was groping to fashion them (and I’ll return to this). So much premonition had to be the sign of sound judgment; it predisposed me—that’s certain—to believe the critic who offered me such proofs. But it is today that I must say how it was that Greenberg made me love Pollock, and I have a hard time leaving behind this supplementary historical distance, in order to decide whether, in 1977, my renewed interest for the painter could be explained by my reading of the critic. Yet it’s even more complicated than that, because Greenberg never fully succeeded in making me believe that Pollock was a “draftsman in black and white” who had to “rely on these colors to maintain the consistency and power of surface of his pictures.” To say he made me see Pollock that way would already be more apt: a good critic sends you back to the paintings. But which ones? Each time I find myself before a Pollock of the “great” period (1948-50), like Number 1 or Number 6 (1948), Number 1 (1949, which I recently saw again), One (1950), or the sumptuous Lavender Mist (1950), I find that my eye judges against Greenberg’s: Pollock is an accomplished colorist in these works. Far from relying on black and white, he weaves a spidery network of colored strands, “stopped” by the black and aluminum at the precise moment where too much jubilation in color risks pushing the painting over the line of the decorative (and the fact that the black is put on last, in some of these canvases, might reinforce the interpretation7). Even so, I would not say that Pollock was a born colorist, like Matisse. But like the later Having taken another look at Lavender Mist while putting the finishing touches on this book (the painting hangs in the National Gallery in Washington), I must say that it is impossible, on close examination, to decide on any order of colors whatsoever. They are so interwoven that one can only suppose Pollock worked with all the colors at once. However, at a distance the combined effect is that the black and the aluminum “stop” the picture. The achievement is even stronger.

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Cézanne, yes. It suffices to recall the coal-dust beginnings of Cézanne, the laborious black strokes that imprison Oncle Dominique, the violent black and white of Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the heavy chiaroscuro that suffuses the Madeleine or the Nègre Scipion, to draw the parallel with the “Gothic” Pollock of 1940-1945 (I’ll get back to the term), and to realize, by contrast, that the “colored planes” of the late Cézanne found an unprecedented equivalent in the colored strands of the American painter between 1948 and 1950. There is the same friability of the color, the same non-atmospheric opticality, the same passionate attention to peripheral vision, the same reflexive immersion in the act of seeing and of letting the painting paint itself, so to speak. (Essential differences: the obstinate immobility of Cézanne is answered by Pollock’s dance; the latter’s visual field is no longer filled by Sainte Victoire, only by the canvas). This is what I would say today; but I was in no position to say it in 1977. One thing is certain: if Greenberg didn’t make me see Pollock exactly that way, still he may have helped me include in my affection for the painter (and I give “affection” its full pang of suffering) a Pollock whom I don’t spontaneously like. To bolster his severe judgment on “the artist’s weakness as a colorist” (as he put it one year later), Greenberg in 1947 obviously did not have before his eyes the great black-and-white canvases of 1950-1953 that I had in mind at the time I read him, in 1977—canvases whose return to figuration posed a problem for me. They must have reinforced my feeling that Greenberg had seen true, and I remember that his appreciation, which is also an interpretation, was long useful to me in teaching Pollock, as a prop for a reading of his work which drew a link between the canvases of the early forties and those of a decade later. At the price of a gap in talent, the work gained in unity; and at the price of adopting another’s judgment, my interpretation gained in coherency. I was fooling myself, though Greenberg wasn’t necessarily. That still doesn’t tell us whether aesthetic emotion is textually transmissible—but rather that the paths whereby lord Greenberg transmitted Pollock to me are impenetrable. With the distance I have today, I would say that what matters is not so much Greenberg’s judgment in the 1947 article, as the fact that this judgment so abruptly cuts short the lyrical elan which precedes it. It is as though Greenberg, almost willing to admit the new beauty of Pollock’s chromatism, suddenly snapped back to the order of an earlier judgment that had made him see Pollock’s willingness to yield to the ugliness of his “mud,” and that

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had reminded him of Albert Pynkham Ryder. It takes an almost psychoanalytic attention to the text to pick out a cut-off effect whose cause, I can’t help thinking, lies in the discontinuities of the painter’s work from 1946 onwards, and whose consequences for the critic take the form of “amendments” that will only make themselves felt much later.8 Here we are on the uneasy ground where the man emerges behind the critic. When Greenberg later went around saying that Pollock had “lost his stuff” (it’s the vindictive voice of Rosalind Krauss who relates his9) and when (as Yve-Alain Bois recalls) his love affair with Helen Frankenthaler gradually led him to a more Apollonian vision of “modernist painting,” relying on Monet rather than cubism, it is not that he was finally willing to see Pollock rehabilitated as a colorist, but rather that he had fallen back on “sublimated” spin-offs which allowed him to freeze his doctrine around the parousia of pure opticality.10 All things considered, I much prefer to see him censure his enthusiasm for the “alizarins, cream-whites, cerulean blues, pinks, and sharp greens” that he perceived in Pollock’s work, and bluntly conclude: “Pollock remains essentially a draftsman in black and white”! To paraphrase: one has to learn Greenberg’s idiom to grasp the paradoxical wavering of his most peremptory affirmations, and the no-less paradoxical assurance of his hesitations. And it is precisely because I am, in general, still learning from Greenberg that I don’t hesitate to say that he has not ceased to deepen my affection for Pollock. Let’s go back to the 1947 article. Greenberg pursues the comparison with Dubuffet, entirely to the American’s advantage and rather acidly for the Frenchman (“Pollock, I feel, has more to say in the end and is, fundamentally, and almost because he lacks equal charm, the more original”), only to conclude his critique with a remarkably waffling prophecy: In any case he is certainly less conservative, less of an easel-painter in the traditional sense than Dubuffet, whose most important historical achievement may be in the end to have preserved the easel picture for the post-Picasso See Yve-Alain Bois, “Les amendements de Greenberg,” in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45-46. Also see Sidney Tillim, “Criticism and Culture, or Greenberg’s Doubt,” in Art in America, May 1987. 9 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 251. 10 I don’t count Frankenthaler’s paintings among those “sublimated” spin-offs; they are much too rough and too good for that. I am rather thinking of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. 8

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generation of painters. Pollock points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps—or perhaps not. I cannot tell.

One year before, it was Pollock who zigzagged “between the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural.” Now it is Greenberg who hesitates, and his hesitation is an indecision about which he remains quite discreet, but which, when one knows the profoundly pessimistic nature of his vision of “modernist painting,” says a great deal about his capacity to yield to the raw and violent originalities of the avant-garde, at least at this time (he later becomes more patently conservative, when he sees Louis, Noland, and Olitski as the legitimate inheritors of Pollock). I say “yield,” or better, surrender, in my opinion the key word to his whole aesthetics, a word linked in his mind to the involuntary driving force of the historical tendency of modernist painting toward flatness. There is something moving in this passage, because if Greenberg credits Dubuffet with an “important historical achievement,” which “may be in the end to have preserved the easel picture for the post-Picasso generation of painters,” it is nonetheless before the raw violence of Pollock that he finally bows down, at the risk (and it is painful for him) of seeing the life-expectancy of easel painting drastically curtailed. At the time when Greenberg published these words (February 1, 1947), Pollock had already stopped painting with the canvas at the vertical, and had switched to the drip technique first tried out in Compositions with Pouring I and II, from 1943, although Greenberg may not have known this. The critic is clearly reacting to the presence in the exhibition of Mural (1943), commissioned from Pollock in precise dimensions by Peggy Guggenheim, when he asks whether the painter “points a way beyond the easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps.”11 It seems clear that this painting—for it is a transportable picture and not a fresco, despite its sitespecific destination—stabilizes and confirms the conceptual framework of all the questions that Greenberg will henceforth ask in Pollock’s regard.12 Why stress the fact? Why launch into an exegesis of the gradual develop11 History does not record whether Greenberg saw Mural before or during the 1945 exhibition at Art of This Century, or at some other time. It was not in the exhibition, but opening night visitors were invited to see it in situ at Peggy Guggenheim’s residence. In any case, Greenberg does not mention it in the article of April 7, 1945. 12 Questions which Pollock also asked himself, as witnessed by the text of a Guggenheim scholarship application drafted in 1947 (see “Les textes sur Pollock,” p. 43, note 3).

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ment of the Greenbergian interpretation of Pollock, when I have simply promised to say how it was that the critic made me love the painter? The answer comes in two parts. First: because what I found most convincing at the time of my initial reading of the texts published by Macula was to see the critic creating his own conceptual framework (the dilemma of easel painting/mural painting) which the subsequent work of the painter would apparently disqualify (since he would begin painting on the ground, denying the entire frontal tradition of painting), but which would finally reveal itself to be the most pertinent framework of reflection. Second: because today I think that the pregnancy of Greenberg’s analyses stems from the fact that they don’t let themselves be wrapped up in a conceptual framework. If Greenberg had the elegance to defer to John Graham where the discovery of Pollock was concerned, he may have done so in the knowledge that it was reserved for him alone to elaborate the conceptual means of understanding the painter. I will certainly not contest him that, although I think I would do him a disservice if I said that my own debt to him is of a conceptual nature. These means of understanding Pollock can be called concepts if one wishes, in the belief that they fall like roasted pigeons from God knows what sky of ideas—from a theory of modernist painting perhaps—but for that one either has to have read nothing of Greenberg but “Modernist Painting,” and deliberately refused to see the text as a synthesis that closes a chapter of history and puts it retrospectively into perspective, or one has to be totally mistaken about the nature of art criticism in its relation to theory. The good art critic doesn’t deprive himself of theorizing, but he always proceeds intuitively. Like the empiricist described by Deleuze, he is a great fabricator of concepts. And the fabrication of concepts by a good art critic almost always begins with the choice of an appropriate word to express a judgment. I would add that it also ends there. All the “conceptual” work of interpretation—and I put the word between quotation marks, so convinced am I that almost nothing in art is a matter of concepts or theory in the strict sense of the words—is left hanging between two judgments: a first judgment, aesthetic and perfectly intuitive, from which the desire to understand the work is born, and the same judgment, but in a form nourished by reflection, where the comprehension of the work attains its conclusion. (The fact that judgments change over the course of time and that they come to rest on wider or deeper experience and on a

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broader general culture changes nothing about the nature of this cycle). Reflection, for its part, needs a framework, and this framework is often a question or a dilemma. Thus the “concept”—I mean, the appropriate word—of all-over, and its framework of reflection: the dilemma of easel painting/mural painting. The first time an expression approaching “all-over” appears in the texts is precisely in the article of 1947, where Greenberg compares Pollock to Dubuffet: “Pollock, again like Dubuffet, tends to handle his canvas with an over-all evenness; but at this moment he seems capable of more variety than the French artist…” “Over-all evenness” is descriptive; the key word of the judgment is “variety,” a judgment confirming that of the previous year: “What may at first sight seem crowded and repetitious reveals on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety.” In these two texts the judgment is comparative, but in the 1947 text it compares two artists, and in 1946 it compares (that is to say, rejudges) two successive aesthetic experiences of the same work. When Greenberg writes “on second sight,” he is not speaking of an afterthought; he literally means to say that he went to have a second look at the work. That he found Pollock “crowded and repetitious” before finding him varied is demonstrated by the way he had already corrected himself a year before: “Pollock’s single fault is not that he crowds his canvases too evenly but that he sometimes juxtaposes colors and values so abruptly that gaping holes are created.”13 And at the moment of his retrospective summary (in “The Jackson Pollock Market Soars,” published in the New York Times Magazine, April 16, 1961), it is again on the notion of “varied”—appearing this time in the expression “range of mood”—that the Greenbergian jurisprudence of his own judgments and rejudgments on Pollock concludes: When I first began to admire Pollock’s painting it was for its intensity and force; later on, it was for its clarified splendor and eloquence; right now I would praise it most for its range of mood.14

The force of judgment in the word “all-over” (which, semantically, remains a descriptive term) is therefore eminently paradoxical: the word One may suppose (see above) that he himself needed to approach Pollock through his gouaches, before he ceased feeling suffocated by “the extreme density of his oils.” 14 Greenberg IV, p. 111. 13

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signifies uniformity, while it designates variety.15 And that is why it is the appropriate word. In what sense is it a concept, if indeed it is one? The first occurrence of the word, as an adjective and between quotation marks, dates from 1952 and qualifies an already finished period of the painter’s activity: “But everything Pollock acquired in the course of his ‘all-over’ period remains…”16 We will have to await the retrospective article of 1961 to see the word reappear, still as an adjective coupled this time with “paintings,” still associated with a specific period (1947-50) which is that of the drips (even though many paintings from before the drips would merit the term), and accompanied by an explanation in parentheses: “‘all-over’ because their design repeats itself all over the surface.”17 Finally, even very late, in his article for Vogue of April 1, 1967, Greenberg still refrains from making the adjective all-over into a substantive. He uses it to designate paintings, not the concept itself (“an ‘all-over’ Pollock,” he says three times). It may simply be because it is more difficult in English than in French to make an adjective accompanied by a definite article into a noun, but in any case what French criticism has acquired the habit of designating as “le all-over” does not exist in Greenberg’s writing. For him, “all-over” is never a conceptual category, even less a pictorial genre. To my knowledge he never even used it for any painter other than Pollock. I am not saying it is illegitimate to make the adjective “all-over” into a substantive, even in English. People speak of “all-overness,” and Strzeminski could have claimed the word for the principle of composition to which he preferred to give the name Unism. I don’t bring the two words together by chance. When Yve-Alain Bois questioned him on the similarity of conception between Unism and all-overness, Greenberg answered (and one can imagine his exasperation), “When Strzeminski says ‘ought’ I say ‘has been’ or ‘is.’”18 In other words: Strzeminski prescribes, I describe. Now, Greenberg has been reproached a thousand times for upholding—that is, prescribing—the flatness of modernist painting as though it were a criterion and a guarantee of quality, applicable anywhere and anytime. And Greenberg defended himself a thousand times, saying that with “Modernist 15 See the marvelous passage in his article for Vogue of April 1, 1967 (Greenberg IV, p. 245-250), where he compares Pollock to Mondrian and then goes on to exploit all the resources of the paradox. 16 Greenberg III, p. 105. 17 Greenberg IV, p. 110. 18 Quoted by Yve-Alain Bois, “Les amendements de Greenberg,” p. 54.

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Painting” and all his other texts he does nothing but describe a historical process as it has happened, a process that only revealed its tendency to flatness after the fact, as an involuntary tropism, and above all not as a program.19 That he preferred to ignore the fact that it was a program for certain artists, including Strzeminski, is secondary here. What is not is that the chain of historical descent which he describes with the appellation “modernist painting” is the result of a series of aesthetic judgments: those of the artists who chose to place themselves under the influence of elders who themselves “pushed” flatness, and his own when he judges that in each generation of artists, those artists are the best. Now, aesthetic judgment is prescriptive, insofar as it seeks the assent of others. Greenberg doesn’t want to see that. He argues either for the involuntary character of the judgment of taste, or for the evident consensus of history (which he assimilates to the supposed objectivity of taste), always in order to claim that he describes but does not prescribe. This theoretical error wrongs his adversaries.They, on the other hand, confuse the prescriptive and the normative. They accuse Greenberg of making flatness a norm, when it is nothing but the phenomenological constant that stands out retrospectively from a series of judgments declaring, for example, that Matisse is superior to Dali or Pollock is superior to De Kooning. This is another theoretical error and it has done enough disservice to Greenberg; I won’t insist on it here. Yet in no way do I wish to erase the differend that pits Greenberg against the majority of his deriders—for it is a differend in Lyotard’s sense, not a litigation, and this differend is in fact constitutive of aesthetic judgment.20 It would remain even if the two parties had the correct theoretical comprehension. I stated above that the force of judgment in the word “allover” (which, semantically, remains a descriptive term) is eminently paradoxical: it signifies uniformity, it designates variety. And that is why it is the appropriate word. I added: in what sense is it a concept, if indeed it is one? I would now answer: it is one by what it signifies (uniformity, in general), it is not one by what it designates (variety, in Pollock’s work). And therefore, in the final account, it is not one. It is not one insofar as I, like See the postscript added to “Modernist painting” for its reprinting in the anthology edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Esthetics Contemporary (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1978); Greenberg IV, pp. 93-94. 20 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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Greenberg, apply it only to Pollock or, more strictly still, to those paintings of Pollock which I declare to be all-over paintings because I judge them “varied amidst their uniformity.” Like the word “art” (like the word “painting,” like the word “beauty,” like the word “variety”), when employed to express an aesthetic judgment, the word all-over is a proper name, and not a concept.21 Have I then learned nothing more, from the word all-over, than what I would have observed with my own eyes? Nothing conceptual? Not exactly. The word all-over is an oxymoron—but the two terms of the contradiction are on different levels: Sinn and Bedeutung. It neither signifies nor designates “varied amidst their uniformity.” It signifies “uniform,” it designates variety. Thus there is a differend within the word, and that’s why it is the appropriate word. I recoil today from making “all-over” into a noun, unless as a proper name, remaining faithful in that to Greenberg, for whom, as we’ve seen in the texts, the qualifier never solidified into a concept. I was not at that point in 1977. What struck me then was to see the critic giving himself a conceptual framework (the dilemma of easel painting/mural painting) in which all-overness (which I also took for a “concept”) acquired its meaning and resonance. Since I read the entire body of texts on Pollock at once, the suspense in which Greenberg left me with his 1947 article (“Pollock points a way beyond the easel... to the mural, perhaps—or perhaps not. I cannot tell.”) clearly could not last. Four pages and five years later, commenting on the 1951 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery for Partisan Review, Greenberg had established his opinion. If it was left to Dubuffet “to have preserved the easel picture for the post-Picasso generation of painters,” it was perhaps left to Pollock to have preserved it for many generations to come: All black and white, like Kline’s, and on unsized and unprimed canvas, his new pictures hint, as it were, at the innumerable unplayed cards in the artist’s hand. And also, perhaps, at the large future still left to easel painting.… But everything Pollock acquired in the course of his “all-over” period remains there to give the picture a kind of density orthodox easel painting has not known before.22

From the all-over period and, earlier, from the experience of the Mural for Peggy Guggenheim and the premonitory zigzag “between the intensity See Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), and in particular the first chapter, entitled “Art Was a Proper Name.” Greenberg III, p. 105.

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of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural,” Greenberg concludes that easel painting has come out stronger, having acquired through this journey a new and unorthodox density. “Density” is a compliment, but not of the same order as “variety.” It bears with it, as if underhandedly, all the pejorative connotations associated with “crowded,” “repetitious,” “monotonous,” “uniform,” not to speak of “inscribed mud,” all that being on the side of mural painting. It is the very construction of the dilemma serving as a conceptual framework for all-overness that makes it this way: Greenberg—like myself after him, in 1977—is a “structuralist.” But since the opposition of terms is hardly neutral (Greenberg having made no mystery of his attachment to easel painting), mural painting secretly becomes the baleful object of his resentment. With what can he reproach it? In 1948 he spits out: I already hear: “wallpaper patterns,” “the picture does not finish inside the canvas,” “raw, uncultivated emotion,” and so on, and so on.

It is 1948, and Harold Rosenberg had not yet launched his own ambiguous compliment to those he called “The American Action Painters,” and of whom Pollock is perhaps the hero, if indeed he should be credited with the invention of the famous “apocalyptic wallpaper.”23 It is known how irritated Greenberg became at this, lashing out at Rosenberg and his followers in “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name” and elsewhere.24 I can almost hear him now: it’s one thing for a professional art critic to pedagogically anticipate the objections of a public like the great unwashed readers of The Nation, and another to brandish the judgment of philistines as a revolutionary aesthetic category. Still I’m overcome by the devilish temptation to prickle Greenberg a little with this apocalyptic wallpaper. After all, if he lends the objection to his readers, it’s because it occurred to him first. Let me resituate the phrase in its context: Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in Art News, December 1952, reprinted in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959). The compliment is ambiguous in more than one respect, as is the entire article, whose fame has eclipsed its content. In fact Rosenberg does not credit those artists whom he considers the real action painters with the invention of the “apocalyptic wallpaper,” but rather those whom he accuses of “weak mysticism” (of the “Christian Science” kind), those who don’t run the full risk of a combat from which the canvas may well emerge victorious. In truth, Pollock does not seem to merit this accusation, but we will never know if he was really the target, for the article achieves the strange tour de force of launching the label “action painting” and the conception of the painting as an arena, both of which have become famous, without quoting a single name! When Rosenberg takes sides it is to champion De Kooning, giving up Pollock, so to speak, to his legendary rival Greenberg. 24 Clement Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name,” Encounter 19, December 1962; Greenberg IV, pp. 135-144. 23

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Jackson Pollock’s most recent show, at Betty Parsons’s (till January 24), signals another step forward on his part. As before, his new work offers a puzzle to all those not sincerely in touch with contemporary painting. I already hear: “wallpaper patterns,” “the picture does not finish inside the canvas,” “raw, uncultivated emotion,” and so on, and so on. Since Mondrian no one has driven the easel picture quite so far away from itself; but this is not altogether Pollock’s own doing. In this day and age the art of painting increasingly rejects the easel and yearns for the wall. It is Pollock’s culture as a painter that has made him so sensitive and receptive to a tendency that has brought with it, in his case, a greater concentration on surface texture and tactile qualities, to balance the danger of monotony that arises from the even, all-over design which has become Pollock’s consistent practice.25

Once the phrase is returned to its context it no longer sounds as though Greenberg spat it out heedlessly. But if you listen to the entire paragraph with a careful ear, the whole thing sounds just slightly too polished. The second sentence is a bit paternalistic toward the reader. Nowhere else have I seen Greenberg putting on kid gloves to address “all those not sincerely in touch with contemporary painting.” Having done so, he can place the objection of the wallpaper in the mouth of just such a reader; but the other objection—“raw, uncultivated emotion”—is too close to his own voice not to betray him. After which he reassures us, or reassures himself. To qualify Pollock as a cultivated, sensitive, and receptive painter is apt, but it overEuropeanizes the image of the man whom the press of the time was describing as “the cowboy from Wyoming.” And comparing Pollock to Mondrian is not exactly senseless in the framework of the dilemma of “easel painting/mural painting,” but I can’t help thinking that beyond this Apollonian parallel there is something apocalyptic to which Greenberg has a hard time adjusting. “Apocalyptic” is Rosenberg’s word; Greenberg’s own word, to describe the same thing, is “Gothic.” I won’t have finished dealing with the question of the transmissibility of artistic emotion so long as I haven’t asked whether it is with Greenberg, or against him, that I learned to love this particular Pollock. In a 1947 issue of the English journal Horizon, where he published the first post-war text written by an American critic with the aim of describing the country’s artistic situation to a European audience, Greenberg struck out

g 25

The Nation, January 24, 1948; Greenberg II, p. 201-202.

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against a certain American (and English and German) incapacity to translate the “positivism” and “materialism” of industrial modernity into culture (a translation which he says the French Impressionists carried off successfully). He accused “the dominant creative tradition in America” of remaining “Gothic, transcendental, romantic, subjective.” Having brushed this background, he applies the word “Gothic” to Pollock three times over: Significantly and peculiarly, the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is a Gothic, morbid and extreme disciple of Picasso’s cubism and Miró’s post-cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and Surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock…. For all its Gothic quality, Pollock’s art is still an attempt to cope with urban life; it dwells entirely in the lonely jungle of immediate sensations, impulses and notions, therefore is positivist, concrete. Yet its Gothic-ness, its paranoia and resentment narrow it; large though it may be in ambition—large enough to contain inconsistencies, ugliness, blind spots and monotonous passages—it nevertheless lacks breadth.26

The sole American painter “who promises to be a major one” suffers from “Gothic-ness, paranoia and resentment,” and for this reason “lacks breadth.” It is not that Greenberg hesitates, nor even that he distributes the good and bad points in one movement as he so often does, but rather that he comes up short here against the baleful object of his own resentment, that is to say, of his own repression. This object is not mural painting as such, nor even the risk of seeing easel painting melt into the decorative function of wallpaper; it is the risk of seeing painting give into the religious, the romantic, or the subjective, in other words, the Gothic or the apocalyptic. This is not the place to show the degree to which, in everything but style, the historical backdrop brushed by Greenberg treats the same concerns as Rosenberg’s article on “The American Action Painters,” with respect to the sudden media penetration of American cultural modernity in the immediate post-war period. But in my opinion these identical concerns are in no way foreign to the mimetic rivalry of the feuding brothers. Greenberg’s bitterness toward his rival Rosenberg has something exaggerated and terrifying about it, whose only equivalent today is that of Rosalind Krauss toward Greenberg himself (of course it’s her, the “smart 26

Greenberg II, p. 166.

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Jewish girl with a typewriter” in my introduction). The parallel has some grounds. What the “formalist” critic never forgave the inventor of “Action Painting” was that for the latter, the act apparently counted for more than the result. When Greenberg pokes fun at Rosenberg’s image of the arena which the canvas forms for the action painter, he is not denying the fact of the combat, but rather deriding the idea that the arena can be hung up on the wall after the fight, as if its artistic value derived from the emotional charge of a few streaks of blood in the sand, the proof that the combat has taken place. In short, from what Krauss, following Peirce, calls the index, a conceptual motif which she has often theorized, in order to construct a sculptural and then photographic paradigm of modernism which would be an alternative to Greenberg’s pictorial paradigm. It is a motif to which she returns in her latest book, The Optical Unconscious—and precisely in relation to Pollock. 27 For her it is a matter of resolving the dilemma of “mural painting/easel painting” in indexical terms, by pointing at the insistent horizontality that Pollock’s drips retain even when hung on the wall, and reading them, not through Greenbergian opticality and the posterity of Pollock’s canvases in the Veils of Morris Louis, but rather through Bataille’s themes of the informe and bassesse, and Andy Warhol’s Piss Paintings. In short, for her it was above all a matter of desublimating Pollock, of tearing away the Apollonian aura in which Greenberg envelops and isolates his best period, and restoring the obscure density of his doubts, his angst, his alcoholism, his suicidal depression, his “Gothic-ness, paranoia and resentment,” and finally, his terrible failure after 1950. In 1977, of course, I had not read the text by Rosalind Krauss, which— even if I find it slightly forced in its rage to establish a maudite genealogy that can block off the sublimating genealogy constructed by Greenberg when he sees Louis, Noland, and Olitski as the true inheritors of Pollock— still remains stunning in its psychological truth and more than pertinent when it is a question of making sense of Pollock’s entire career, including his tumultuous personality problems, bouts of emptiness, and fatal, James Dean-style car crash. Although he knew that side of Pollock, Greenberg would hardly have been able to open me up to an understanding of it, because he repressed it in the texts published by Macula in 1977—Krauss is 27

Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, final chapter.

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right to stress that. I opened myself up to it later on, but that’s another story. It remains that on this point, Greenberg was unable to make me love Pollock. I’m not at all sure that Krauss has made me love him any more, but that too is another story, which is perhaps nothing more than a matter of disciplines (theory versus criticism), or of literary genres and of style, but perhaps also of morals and of professional ethics—I don’t feel able to decide. In any case, Krauss gives the impression that Pollock’s existential failure holds the truth of his artistic success, and I happen to prefer Greenberg’s discretion (which is also a cruelty: “Pollock had ‘lost his stuff’”). Greenberg sticks with what his eye dictates and refuses the indices of biography, be they read self-referentially in order to establish an interpretative paradigm. But of course, he speaks of opticality, and she, of an optical unconscious.

N a 1

I’m not deciding either way, but I do admit having learned a tremendous amount from Greenberg’s aesthetic “positivism,” from his total absence of sentimentalism, from what everyone calls his “formalism,” but which to me seems no more than a rule of the professional ethics of art criticism—a puritan ethics no doubt, but also a rich lesson in rigor, even when it is a matter of launching theoretical readings, beyond art criticism in the strict sense of the word: the rule of consulting only one’s feeling before the work, but then saying nothing about it; of speaking only of what one sees; of rendering one’s verdict. All that does not keep the human substrata of the artist’s work from being discreetly present, for whoever knows how to read between the lines: Jackson Pollock’s problem is never authenticity, but that of finding his means and bending it as far as possible toward the literalness of his emotion. Sometimes he overpowers the means but he rarely succumbs to it.28

Drawn from a text whose telling title quotes Goethe’s saying, “Feeling is All” (but which, in another telling detail, is reproduced in Art and Culture under the puritan title of “Partisan Review ‘Art Chronicle’, 1952”), these lines head off a long passage on Pollock where the increasingly emphatic praise alternates with the henceforth ritualistic reserves concerning his use of color, along with the allusions (I quoted one above) to “the large future still left to easel painting.” This is Greenberg’s last text on Pollock published during the artist’s lifetime. But it is with the second-to-last, published in The 28

Greenberg III, p. 104-105.

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Nation on February 19, 1949, that I will conclude, so perfectly does it gather all the interpretative threads that I have teased out of the corpus published in 1977 by Macula.29 It has to be quoted in full: Jackson Pollock’s show this year at Betty Parsons’s continued his astounding progress. His confidence in his gift appears to be almost enough of itself to cancel out or suppress his limitations—which, especially in regard to color, are certainly there. One large picture, Number One, which carries the idea of last year’s brilliant Cathedral more than a few steps farther, quieted any doubt this reviewer may have felt—and he does not in all honesty remember having felt many—as to the justness of the superlatives with which he has praised Pollock’s art in the past. I do not know of any other painting by an American that I could safely put next to this huge baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder, and blue. Beneath the apparent monotony of its surface composition it reveals a sumptuous variety of design and incident, and as a whole it is as well contained in its canvas as anything by a Quattrocento master. Pollock has had the tendency lately to exaggerate the verticality or horizontality, as the case might be, of his pictures, but this one avoids any connotation of a frieze or hanging scroll and presents an almost square surface that belongs very much to easel painting. There were no other things in the show—which manifested in general a greater openness of design than before—that came off quite as conclusively as Number One, but the general quality that emerged from such pictures as the one with the black cut-out shapes—Number Two—that hung next to it, and from numbers Six, Seven, Eighteen, and especially Nineteen, seemed more than enough to justify the claim that Pollock is one of the major painters of our time.30

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I repeat: who writes like that today? Who, and what’s more in the popular press, practices art criticism that way? The critics of the dailies or weeklies most often explain contemporary art, laboriously, professorially, with a good will equalled only by their reticence to pass for people who judge. I will be told (as I have often been told) that between Pollock’s time and our own there has been a break, that art today is theoretical in a way that Pollock ignored (and Greenberg sought to ignore), that in the interim Marcel Duchamp has been through. I don’t think I’m particularly ignorant on that score. The fact that I myself do not practice art criticism on a daily basis (essentially because I’m slow to judge, and one must be quick to be a discoverer) does not take away my right to wish that others might dust off Skipping his laconic comments on Pollock’s participation in the 1947 Whitney Annual, in The Nation, January 1948 (Greenberg II, p. 200). 30 Greenberg II, p. 285-286. 29

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the laurels of a style of art criticism—and also an attitude before art, and an ethics—in which Greenberg for a time was exemplary. I don’t see why this attitude should be the exclusive property of those who share Greenberg’s taste. The fact that contemporary art does indeed appeal to an intense intellectualization, very specialized and at times even esoteric, does not to my mind prohibit it from being appreciated aesthetically, on the strength of feeling. The sophisticated art lover should possess that level of culture and have incorporated the necessary intellectual references; once he has done so, it is also by feeling that he judges. As to the others, the best way to give them the desire to acquire that level of culture and the urge to hurry out to the galleries is certainly not to talk to them like school children. Finally, I don’t see why it should be beneath a critic’s dignity to hand out stars like travel guides. When I look to the cinema ratings in the entertainment section of the local paper, I don’t feel obliged to judge like the local critic, and once I have gotten to know his taste I finally realize that an unfavorable critique is a good sign that I should go see the film. This type of criticism exists for theater, cinema, and music; it is sorely lacking for the plastic arts. Yet it would be of tremendous help in pulling contemporary art out of its ghetto. Greenberg often expressed his opinions on the function of the art critic, and always to say: point, point, point. There’s just one essential thing to be done, which is to voice one’s own judgment: this is good, that isn’t. Greenberg made use and perhaps abuse of his. Had he done no more, would he be read? Personally I can’t tire of reading him, because in fact he did nothing more. Let’s be clear: as far as I know, the four volumes of his complete writings published so far do not rack up page after page of little index fingers pointed to works and accompanied by stars. But each of his conceptual elaborations, each of the reflections he shares with the reader, not without touches of the ingénu or the ingenious, each of the expressions that he coins in the proximity of his experience, each of the tropes of his rhetoric are pointers which all designate one aspect or another of a work which might have gone unnoticed without him. All of them ask me: are we the appropriate concept, reflection, expression, or turn of phrase to express that to which we draw your attention? Thus when I read Greenberg (and this is the greatest compliment I can make to an art critic) I am constantly wracked by the temptation to run to the museum and verify his judgment by consulting my own, and then to return to the text and confront his qualifiers

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with the ones that came to my mind before the work. If something conceptual (something substantive, some substance) emerges from reading (and so it does), it can only come from this double movement which never crushes the visual into the conceptual, the aesthetic into interpretation, designation into signification, Bedeutung into Sinn. So the question I’ve been obstinately asking since the beginning of this chapter, “Did Greenberg make me love Pollock, and if so, how?” has only this response: a hundred times, he brought me back before Pollock. Greenberg has made me appreciate Greenberg, but it is Pollock who made me love Pollock. And the swing back and forth still gives me food for thought.

Silences in the Doctrine

Clement Greenberg had just a year left to live when he let slip, in an interview with Ann Hindry, that at the age of sixteen or seventeen his dream had been “to paint and draw like Norman Rockwell.”1 It was the casual remark of an old man rekindling his memories, with nothing left to prove, not even to himself. Fifty-four years earlier, the same man had brilliantly launched his career as an art critic with a resounding doctrinal article entitled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” It opens in these Spenglerian tones: “One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover.”2 At that time it was Norman Rockwell, a clever, crowd-courting painter of populist realism, expressing with a nauseatingly infallible flair the most conformist aspirations of the American middle class, who realized, week after week, the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. It was he Greenberg stigmatized as the champion of kitsch, here and further along in the same article. But the critic’s belated avowal of his youthful error puts Rockwell in a troubling perspective. Perhaps it can be illuminated by another, more serious confession: One looks into oneself and discovers there what is also in others. A realization of the Jewish self-hatred in myself, of its subtlety and the devious ways in which it conceals itself, from me as well as from the world outside, explains many things that used to puzzle me in the behavior of my fellow Jews. I do not think that in this respect I am projecting upon others faults I find in myself; it is only reluctantly that I have become persuaded that self-hatred in one form or another is almost universal among Jews—or at least much more prevalent than is commonly thought or admitted—and that it is not confined on the whole to Jews 1 Ann Hindry, “Entretien avec Clement Greenberg,” in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45-46, p. 13. 2 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Partisan Review, Fall 1939; Greenberg I, pp. 5-6; Art and Culture, p. 3 (henceforth AGK).

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like myself.3

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that a short-lived identification with Norman Rockwell made by a young son of Jewish immigrants striving for assimilation pushed him to project onto others a love of kitsch that he felt in himself, along with “Jewish self-hatred”; and I’m not saying this is what he did in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Love of kitsch and self-hatred are certainly linked, in general; but we must believe Greenberg when he says he does not project. Sidney Tillim and Bradford Collins have taken up the delicate question of Greenberg’s “Jewish self-hatred,” relating it to his family origins, his own quest for identity, and his precocious ambition to define modernism; they point to similar sentiments in Lionel Trilling and other peers at Partisan Review, and evoke the bohemian aura conveyed, in the socialist intellectual circles he frequented in his youth, by the equation “Jewishness = alienation.”4 For my part, it is in relation to introspection that I would like to ask whether kitsch, for him, was not similar to his Jewishness, for what he says about introspection indicates a form of generalization from the individual to the social group which I do not find entirely foreign to the way he looks at art, and concludes in favor of the avant-garde over kitsch. The text on “Jewish self-hatred,” whose opening lines I have quoted, closes with these remarks: “The problem has to be focused directly in the individual Jew and discussed in personal, not communal, terms. For self-hatred is as intimate a thing as love.”5 3 “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism: Some Reflections on ‘Positive Jewishness,’” in Commentary, November 1950; Greenberg III, p. 45. The text gives no impression that Greenberg had read Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive, even if his own reflections on the subject are similar in some respects. 4 See Sidney Tillim, “Criticism and Culture, or Greenberg’s Doubt,” in Art in America, May 1987; Bradford R. Collins, “Le pessimisme politique et ‘la haine de soi’ juive: Les origines de l’esthétique puriste de Greenberg,” in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 45-46. Greenberg was the son of Lithuanian Jews of Polish origin, middle class tailors like so many others, making a difficult living in New York. For many second-generation Jewish intellectuals, the socialist, then Trotskyist circles frequented by the young Greenberg embodied the hope of an assimilation that would not betray their community values. Finally, the conversion to modernism of numerous intellectuals gravitating around the Partisan Review at that time, most of them Jews, is attested by many of them, including Greenberg (in a well-known phrase from “The Late Thirties in New York,” Art and Culture, p. 230) and Alfred Kazin, who says this in particular: “They put all their zeal for social revolution into the purer and perhaps more lasting revolution of modern literature and art. They would soon be the intellectual style setters, the cultural leaders and gurus of a modernism that would replace the old academic orthodoxies.” Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 66. 5 “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism,” art. cit., p. 58.

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Unlike this text of 1950, there is nothing introspective about “AvantGarde and Kitsch.” From the outset, it is within a historical frame that Greenberg asks whether the seemingly irreconcilable disparity between a T.S. Eliot poem and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a Braque painting and a Rockwell image, is part of the natural order of things or instead is something entirely new. And yet: The answer involves more than an investigation in aesthetics. It appears to me that it is necessary to examine more closely and with more originality than hitherto the relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific—not the generalized—individual, and the social and historical contexts in which the experience takes place.6

“Specific individual,” “individual Jew”: here is the basis on which we can ask if, in order to take a stand with the avant-garde as he did, in an inaugural text setting up as its mortal enemy not academicism, as is generally done, but kitsch, Greenberg did not have to feel within himself a secret attraction for the enemy’s iniquitous charms.7 The love of kitsch is nothing other than the pleasure taken in the corruption of one’s own taste, and therefore, indeed, the aesthetic expression of self-hatred. Jewish self-hatred? Not necessarily, even if Rockwell’s art is not exempt from anti-semitism, and if the old man’s admission is somewhat troubling. Let us make a counter-test via the avantgarde: everything suggests that when the “specific individual” Greenberg examines the Jewishness of the “individual Jew” Kafka—“the only example I know of an integrally Jewish literary art that is fully at home in a modern Gentile language”—he does so with the painful consciousness of his own Jewishness. The 1955 article “Kafka’s Jewishness” (from which the previous quote is drawn) begins with these lines: Kafka, the writer, could do with a little more placing. And to this end it would be useful to inquire a good deal further into his Jewishness, but as it relates to his writing alone rather than to his personality or neurosis.8

It ends in this fashion: AGK, p. 9. 7 The most original aspect of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is, in my mind, the way it escapes the expected opposition between avant-garde and academicism. Greenberg doesn’t explain why, but shelves the problem in a single sentence: “Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that’s academic is kitsch” (p. 11). 8 “Kafka’s Jewishness,” Art and Culture, p. 266; this is a considerably reworked version of “The Jewishness of Franz Kafka: Some Sources of His Particular Vision,” in Commentary, April 1955; Greenberg III, pp. 202-209. 6

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And when did a Jew ever come to terms with art without falsifying himself somehow? Does not art always make one forget what is literally happening to oneself as a certain person in a certain world? And might not the investigation of what is literally happening to oneself remain the most human, therefore, the most serious and the most amusing, of all possible activities? Kafka’s Jewish self asks this question, and in asking it, tests the limits of art.9

Beginnings and endings are always points of importance in Greenberg’s writing, as we saw above in “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism.” The beginning and ending of “Kafka’s Jewishness”—the essay chosen, not indifferently, to close Art and Culture, which opens with “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”—are an invitation to see how the remarks he makes in that essay, with their subtext of introspection, come to resonate in the murky interval that opens with his early declarations as art critic and with the twist they were given, near the end, by his casual avowal of a youthful error. This is why I have approached Greenberg by “his Jewishness, but as it relates to his writing alone rather than to his personality or neurosis,” supposing, as in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” that it is on the basis of “aesthetic experience as met by the specific—not the generalized—individual” that he attempted “the investigation of what is literally happening to oneself.” Thus I must recall the end of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” written in 1939: Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture—as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now.10

Here is a sentence which is quite difficult to read as “the investigation of what is literally happening to oneself,” a sentence whose measure of hope— albeit disabused and far from utopian—must today be added to the long and atrocious list of Jewish jokes become reality. Not only has the type of socialism to which Greenberg aspired in 1939 (Marxist for the theory, communist for the mode of production, Trotskyist for the ideology) finally collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, but the social-democracy with which the international left has grudgingly come to terms in recent years has failed to offer convincing proof that it can preserve “living culture” any better than 9 Ibid., p. 273. Greenberg’s writings are studded with reflections on Jewishness. To understand “the most serious and the most amusing of all possible activities,” I would recommend reading “The Jewish Joke: Review of Röyte Pomerantzen,” Greenberg II, pp. 182-187. 10 AGK, p. 28.

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neo-liberalism. I stress the point because now that the reappraisal of Greenberg has begun, the most problematic aspect of his work remains the opposition between avant-garde and kitsch. No rereading of Greenbergian modernism stands a chance of contributing fruitfully to future debates if it does not first deal with this fundamental opposition. Grouped by order of growing complexity, the criticisms most often levelled at “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” are, broadly speaking, the following: 1) Greenberg is elitist and scorns the people’s taste; 2) he conflates cultural productions designed for the use of the masses with productions that spring from popular inventiveness; 3) he ignores or feigns to ignore that the avant-gardes have continually drawn inspiration from popular art, even in its most vulgar and commercial forms; 4) when he ceases to ignore this, he privileges the transfer in one direction, from kitsch toward the avant-garde, and refuses to see that the relations of high and low are dialectical; 5) he is reluctant to admit that the avant-garde, or at least the most politicized factions of the avant-garde, have dismantled the opposition between high and low and denounced the hegemonic pretensions implied by its maintenance; 6) he picks the wrong rhetoric when he defends the avant-garde with superlatives inherited from another epoch (“it’s Athene whom we want: formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension,” etc.) and he confuses kitsch, a dated word denoting a condescending judgment of value, with the culture industry, a term that designates an objective economic reality. I will take a closer look at this last objection. “Culture industry” is, of course, an expression of Adorno, an author whom many of Greenberg’s most contemptuous detractors venerate, and whom they would hardly criticize in the same terms. Nonetheless, the two thinkers have a tremendous amount in common: not only their original Marxist background but above all their lucidity and their historical pessimism, the fact that they take Spengler seriously, and their conviction that the avant-garde is the modern, dynamic form that the tradition assumes when it resists dissolution, with its back against the wall. Both had the same deeply rooted intuition of the avant-garde as working in a materiality that Greenberg calls respect for the medium and Adorno, the progress of the material. Both attacked kitsch with the same stubbornness, often bordering on blindness and injustice. One need only read the article on jazz in Prismen to realize that Adorno could have signed many sentences in “Avant-Garde

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and Kitsch.”11 The differences, which nonetheless are major, stem to a large degree from the fact that Adorno is a philosopher—educated in Germany and therefore essentially Hegelian—while Greenberg is an American autodidact, empiricist by character and pragmatist to the extent that he came anywhere near philosophy. But these differences do not explain the fact that Adorno remains a reference for some, while Greenberg is thrown to the dogs. The difference that really makes the difference is that Adorno believes in salvation by art and Greenberg does not. Adorno remains a utopian despite everything: even when he fights the illusions of utopia with all the resources of negative dialectics, he is unable to complete his mourning for a messianic—or in other words, politico-religious—conception of the function of art in society and in history. Greenberg renounces that dimension, which means he is at least conscious of its presence in the historical avant-gardes. His renunciation is still not entirely clear in “AvantGarde and Kitsch,” but it will be later, as the man becomes increasingly conservative under the successive blows of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, and as the critic comes increasingly to defend an Apollonian, formalist art. Knowing this, many have read him as though his political opinions directly determined, perhaps not his artistic choices, but at least a certain mental complicity with history as written by the victors—something with which Adorno cannot be reproached. I prefer to believe (as many texts confirm between the lines) that Greenberg was long tempted by salvation through art, perhaps until the very last, but that his intellectual rigor forbade him from ceding to the temptation. He must have known perfectly well that art was his personal salvation, but that it was futile to make it a social panacea; he must have thought that in the long run there was more courage in attempting to speak the truth than in offering hope. For that I admire him, though I don’t know if I like him (every self-respecting intellectual is torn between Sartre and Aron). What I think I can say, without going as far as psychoanalysis, is that I would not be astonished if the aura of “high art” and apodictic arrogance with which Greenberg progressively enveloped his judgments was a defense mechanism—and one that should be recognized as such, in order to silence its irritating aspects—at the same time as it was the path of his personal assimilation to the mainstream of Western culture, that 11 Theodor W. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion—Jazz,” Prismen (1955), Engl. tr. Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 119- 132.

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is to say, goy culture. This introduction via Greenberg’s Jewishness is a way to suggest that “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and the other “dogmatic” texts should be read against the background of a highly troubling relation to otherness. It is also a way to stress that neither the introduction nor the reading are gratuitous. The introduction seeks to understand that there is something at stake in Greenbergian modernism that Greenberg himself holds back, either because he didn’t succeed in saying it or because it was self-evident for him— repression or discretion, little matter. The reading will attempt to identity that something. At stake is the possibility of going beyond Adorno’s incapacity to renounce a messianic conception of art, without falling into the positivism of the medium with which all of Greenberg’s critical reception so obstinately saddles him, as though it were the last word of his thinking. I have nothing more to add about Jewishness (that of Greenberg, or in general) except that I accept what he says about it for his own account, and I declare—with, I hope, the same introspective honesty as he—that I experience its meaning within myself. The meaning it has, of course, for a Gentile: not being Jewish and having been raised as a Christian, it is inevitable, for me, that “Jewishness” should be one of the cultural names (not the only one) of otherness as such. I trust nobody will accuse me of projection if I generalize. Whom must one read, Marx, Adorno, Benjamin, Hermann Broch, or Hannah Arendt—all Jews, Adorno by his father—to be convinced that the love of kitsch is a hateful relation toward the other turned around on oneself and made guiltless, a hate of the other that finds an aesthetic outlet by eroticizing the commodity? The word “kitsch” was not yet in use when Marx made his famous remarks about commodity fetichism in Book I of Capital, but the theory whereby commodities are reified relations of production, that is to say, social relations among things, is the basis for understanding what kitsch adds to the commodity: essentially, a narcissistic round-trip that confirms the other’s suppression in the object, and revels in it. In the commodity, the concrete labor of another man is negated in its otherness, to be presented as a potential for abstract exchange among equivalent quantities of labor. An object is only ready to become kitsch if it is a commodity, and it becomes a commodity by entering (from its very conception) into the world of value, the economic world where exchange is

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not of the order of speech addressed to someone, but instead is an instrumental relation. One could say, paraphrasing Lévinas, that the commodity has no face. Kitsch is the mask of this non-face. Whether by means of ornament, of vulgar seduction, of garishness, of fine work (which Broch contrasts to the artist’s good work), kitsch holds up a mirror without resistance to self-love. Because there is no confrontation, this self-love regresses toward primary narcissism; therefore it is not love at all, but pleasure gleaned from the disappearance of otherness. Finally, because such pleasure is a lie, this false love is true hate: of oneself and the other. It is not for me to say whether the fact that the best critics of kitsch were Jews has anything to do with the self-hatred that Greenberg’s introspection revealed among his fellow Jews, but it is certain that if the Jew embodies the figure of the other for Gentiles, and if, therefore, the “individual Jew” (above all if he is assimilated) lives his own identity in the mode of “the other of the other,” then the Jewish guilt-complex must be a fertile ground for the blossoming of an exacerbated sensibility to the threat of kitsch—a critical sensibility, because its torments are intimately experienced. One need not be Jewish to feel the threat, nor need one evoke Jewish guilt to understand that an art (if it is an art) whose pleasure rests on the eradication of otherness proliferates in a society that fantasizes its identity on the basis of the physical suppression of the other. Every cultivated person who has given the slightest thought to kitsch has realized that behind the little dwarfs in the garden are the SS playing Brahms in the camps. In 1939 the camps were still unimaginable. Nonetheless, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” doesn’t waste time fiddling around with the little dwarfs. Three full pages of the article are devoted to developing the idea that “the encouragement of kitsch is simply another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.”12 And though Stalinist Russia and the Italy of Mussolini are not spared, the most pointed reflections are devoted to the transition from the “enlightened” cultural politics of Goebbels to Hitler’s cult of kitsch. Thus like the other Jewish intellectuals mentioned above, Greenberg accurately perceived the historical threat that kitsch hangs over all of society and culture, far beyond the sole artistic sphere. Yet he did very little to advance the study, called for 12

AGK, p. 19.

in a h th d R b in w c o to sl w a p u p re b

b h p a th p R a d c d 13 14

th h co

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in the text’s introduction, of “the relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific—not the generalized—individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place.” And it is not through introspection that he approaches the “specific individual.” When he does bring an individual up on stage, it is in the relatively exotic costume of a Russian peasant who prefers Repin to Picasso, and who would succumb before a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell if he were not insulated from the products of American capitalism. Coming from a man who was briefly tempted by Norman Rockwell during his adolescence, I cannot help but find this exoticism curiously displaced, the relationship to otherness it suggests disappointing, the psychology of kitsch that underlies it too little introspective, and the reflection on the reasons for its success too slim. Greenberg denounces the reassuring illusion of the cultivated left, whereby the masses of the totalitarian countries choose kitsch because they are conditioned to it by the government; but to explain why the Russian peasant whose own culture has been eroded by industrialization and urbanization converts to Repin, he contents himself with saying: “In Repin’s picture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures—there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention.”13 I’ll leave aside the injustice done to Repin, whom Greenberg upholds a bit hastily as the paragon of kitsch, though he may not have seen even one of his paintings at the time.14 The injustice done to the Russian peasant is more problematic, and consequently the implied equations between kitsch and academic realism, on the one hand, and avant-garde and abstract painting, on the other, become problematic as well. Greenberg overrates illusionism’s power to seduce the peasant, and underrates the role of convention in Repin’s realism. I’m afraid he does so because the “discontinuity between art and life” and the “need to accept a convention,” important points of his doctrine to which I don’t object in the slightest, serve as a foundation for his conviction that there exists “an agreement” resting on “a fairly constant distinction made between those values only to be found in art and the values AGK, p. 14. He practically admits as much in a 1972 postscript included in the French edition, confessing that in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” he had attributed battle scenes to Repin, even though the latter had never painted any, “proof of my provincialism where nineteenth-century Russian art is concerned.” Art et culture (Paris: Macula, 1988), p. 28.

13 14

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which can be found elsewhere,” another point of doctrine which, on the contrary, I think it is urgent to contest.15 I share the opinion of T.J. Clark, who refuses the idea that this value-distinction can be made so neatly, and shows with a concrete example that in the works he likes, the avant-gardeart lover appreciates values that he also perceives in life, while at the same time perceiving their symbolic transposition, and thus distinguishing between them.16 I would go even further, and say that the same thing holds for the lover of kitsch. Greenberg accuses kitsch of blurring the distinction between the values of art and those of life, which is a simplistic view he no doubt wouldn’t have accepted if, rather than focusing on Repin and the peasant, he had looked within himself instead. In fact, the motivation for kitsch is a two-stroke motor. First, and in the most perverse possible way, kitsch places the values of an “art” based on a false love of self above the values of social life, itself based on hate of the other. It exalts the distinction between the values of art and those of life, and because all values are shared ones, it sets up an ideal, unanimous community around the values of art, a community reveling in itself in innocent communion, sheltered from otherness. Here is an extraordinarily effective way of repressing all guilt— before turning around, in a second moment, in order to fantasize a real society built on the model of this imaginary artistic community. Thus every kitsch object, even at the benign scale of the garden dwarf, proclaims: fiat ars, pereat mundus. Otherwise, how could the SS have enjoyed playing Brahms in the camps?

re a a a th g o c p (o o in

1 sa n to “

The difference between the avant-garde and kitsch lies neither in the existence of an agreement on the need to accept a convention, nor in the recognition of a symbolic dividing-line between the values one can expect of art and those one can expect of life. It lies in the relation to the other, as it is inscribed, deposited, embodied in an object. Greenberg never speaks of the relation to the other. To what degree did his own difficult relation to otherness and identity drive him into a simplistic explanation for the success of kitsch? I can’t say. But the fact is that he remains equally mute on the relation to the other within the avant-garde, and that considerably handicaps his doctrine of modernism (or at least, I should say, the image he gave of it). Had I not acquired the conviction—very gradually, by reading and 15 16

AGK, p. 13. T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” see note 25 for the reference.

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rereading him, by confronting what he says with my own experience as an art lover and critic, by weighing the arguments levelled against his doctrine and finding them insufficient—that he was essentially right, I would not feel authorized to write between the lines of his text what I believe I can read there, which comes down in the end to something quite simple: for an avantgarde artist (as he said at the time), or for a modernist artist (as he said later on), the other is the medium. Where the reduction of art to an ornamented commodity results, for the lover (or the producer) of kitsch, in a bonus of pleasure founded on the suppression of the other, for the avant-garde artist (or art lover), it is in the conventions of the medium that a relation to the other is inscribed, deposited, embodied—a relation which consists above all in surrendering to an irreducible otherness. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” appeared in Partisan Review in the fall of 1939. Less than a year later, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” appeared in the same journal. Between them Greenberg wrote nothing, or at least published nothing. The two essays are equally vigorous, the second seeming naturally to follow the first, in the same doctrinal or even dogmatic tone. Indeed, “dogmatism” is the text’s first word: The dogmatism and intransigence of the “non-objective” or “abstract” purists of painting today cannot be dismissed as symptoms merely of a cultist attitude towards art. Purists make extravagant claims for art, because usually they value it much more than any one else does. For the same reason they are much more solicitous about it. A great deal of purism is the translation of an extreme solicitude, an anxiousness as to the fate of art, a concern for its identity. We must respect this. When the purist insists about excluding “literature” and subject matter from plastic art, now and in the future, the most we can charge him with off-hand is an unhistorical attitude. It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other circumstances of the age in which its creators live, and that there is nothing inside art itself, disconnected from history, which compels it to go in one direction or another. But it is not easy to reject the purist’s assertion that the best of contemporary plastic art is abstract. Here the purist does not have to support his position with metaphysical pretensions. And when he insists on doing so, those of us who admit the merits of abstract art without accepting its claims in full must offer our own explanation for its present supremacy.17

e e of s e o s e s ). d

“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review, July-August 1940; Greenberg I, p. 23 (henceforth TNL).

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Pure Greenberg, this introduction. It even exudes the tactical sense that is the hallmark of his style. Of course he never had the least intention of attempting to “reject the purist’s assertion that the best of contemporary plastic art is abstract.” He is already convinced (as the rest of the article and the reference to Lessing in the title confirm) that “literature” and “subject matter” are only different names for a “confusion of the arts,” which in its turn is only a symptom of the confusion between the values of art and the values of life.18 “Kitsch” does not appear in the text, and it is with the more traditional expression of “academicism” that Greenberg designates “that particular widespread form of artistic dishonesty which consists in the attempt to escape from the problems of the medium of one art by taking refuge in the effects of another.”19 A Manichean duality is hammered out to the point of obsession, from one end of the text to the other: purity, purism, anxiousness as to the fate of art, concern for its identity, and purely pictorial specificity are on the side of the avant-garde; mixture, confusion, alteration, contamination, denaturing, and submission to “ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society” are on the side of academicism and kitsch. At first sight, art’s salvation seems to depend on its capacity to preserve itself, to stay the same; its ruin lies in corruption by the other. If things are more complex on second sight, it is not for lack of historical simplifications,20 nor of peremptory conclusions, irrefutable in their generality. Here they are, in two excerpts, for the arts in general and for painting in particular:

o su la fa

The arts lie safe now, each within its “legitimate” boundaries, and free trade has Hence his concern to set himself apart from the “metaphysical pretensions” on which certain purists based themselves; one thinks of theosophy’s role for Mondrian. 19 TNL, p. 26. 20 Here are a few: when Greenberg reproaches the seventeenth-century bourgeois merchant class for turning its creative and acquisitive energies toward literature to such a point that it became a model for the other arts, including painting, it’s clear that he does so to explain why the autonomy of the medium didn’t exert any pressure on the history of painting before the nineteenth century. But one wonders what happened to the Dutch painters. When he accuses romanticism with putting poetry above all else and enlisting realist illusionism to the service of sentimental and declamatory effects, even in painting, one can easily agree. But he makes short shrift of Delacroix, Géricault, and Ingres, when he says their schools joined with those of Morland, Greuze, and Vigée-Lebrun to become the official painting of the nineteenth century and give rise to academicism. And when he tackles the more difficult problem of explaining why painting, on the road to abstraction, let itself be seduced by the imported model of music, the solution is wonderful: music has always been abstract, and painting imitates its operations, not its effects. But that seems like a rather easy way of skirting around Walter Pater. The page devoted to Mallarmé and “pure poetry”—another undeniable source of abtract painting—is cut from a similar cloth: clever but cursory. 18

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is of y e ” y

been replaced by autarchy. Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.… The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized. For the visual arts the medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically.21

18

al r e of n, e of g, al t, e n y r

The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to “hole through” it for realistic perspectival space. In making this surrender, painting not only got rid of imitation—and with it, “literature”—but also of realistic imitation’s corollary confusion between painting and sculpture.22

Thus as early as 1940 the simplified argument that explains the superiority of the avant-garde or of modernism has been established, as though this superiority could be reduced to a single, essential phenomenon. Twenty years later, “Modernist Painting” will give a more condensed version, fixing the famous “dogma” of flatness: The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.… Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art.… It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.… It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the process by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art.… Because flatness was the only

as

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21 22

TNL, p. 32. TNL, p. 34.

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condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.23

When Greenberg says “painting,” one must never forget that he means “the best painting.” And when he says “modernism,” he means “the best of modern art.” In “Modernist Painting” that remains between the lines. But here it is, in a later article: Modernism defines itself in the long run not as a “movement,” much less a program, but rather as a kind of bias or tropism: towards esthetic value, esthetic value as such and as an ultimate. The specificity of Modernism lies in its being so heightened a tropism in this regard.24

re th co th In e q fl

S e m a id a m c ta o d d b

Anyone who has delved into Greenberg’s day-to-day art criticism and not remained content with his “dogmatic” essays is likely to agree that with the latter, he hands out the switches for his own thrashing. Those who would accuse him of drawing up a strict program of purification for past, present, and future art, in the name of “esthetic value, esthetic value as such and as an ultimate,” have an easy time of it: the program gives you the shivers. But their accusation isn’t serious. “Modernist Painting” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon” don’t offer a program, but an explanatory summary of a historical development which has taken place and which has never been a program. One has the right to take Greenberg at his word, but perhaps then one should pause over his choice of words, all the more because the summary is elliptical. For him there is definitely a determinism at work in the history of modernist painting, but what sort of determinism is it, that orients painting toward purism, not by a program or a project but by a kind of bias or tropism? Similarly, there is a kind of logic in the claim that an art keeps itself pure from any confusion with a neighboring art by accentuating the physical nature of its support; but it is not logic (perhaps psychology, or the art of warfare) that explains why an art affirms its identity through willing acceptance of the limitations of the medium, or why modernist painting preserves its integrity through surrender to the resistance of the picture plane. Such expressions suggest a duel between the artist and his medium, a struggle as much in the nature of love as of war, and which

e “ in in p th G ro m

“Modernist Painting,” Forum Lectures (Voice of America, Washington), 1960; Greenberg IV, pp. 85, 86, 87. 24 “Necessity of Formalism,” in New Literary History, Vol. 3, 1971, reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Esthetics Contemporary, op. cit., p. 207.

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results in a capitulation, an abandonment, or an acquiescence. Whether in the register of war or love, the artist finds himself in the position of the conquered and not the conqueror; the least one can say is that these are not the connotations most frequently attached to the word “avant-garde.” Indeed, I am of the opinion that surrender is the key word of Greenberg’s entire aesthetics and, more importantly, that this word allows us to see the question of the other emerging from painting’s famous reduction to the flatness of its medium. One never finds this question treated as such in his texts. Discretion? Self-evident implication? Tacit accord with a reader whom he supposes equally aware that an artwork is a crystallization of human experience, as much as it is a physical object? Personal difficulties in speaking of content in art and of the human relations that permeate it? Problematic relation to identity and otherness? No doubt there is a little of all that in Greenberg. In any case, I believe this silence concerning the relation to the other is what makes people wrongly think that the search for the identity of the medium cleanses it of any alterity. I stated my thesis above: that quite the contrary takes place in modernist art; the other is the medium, or the medium is the other. Or again: the identity of the medium (liable to technical-aesthetic definitions) is the site of otherness as such (liable to psycho-social definitions). Now I must show how and why—and also that this thesis can be found between the lines of Greenberg’s writing. A detour will be useful. In 1982, the journal Critical Inquiry published an exchange of views between the “social” art historian, T.J. Clark, and the “formalist” art critic and historian Michael Fried, on their respective interpretations of Greenbergian modernism. 25 This exchange is all the more interesting in that the protagonists took pains to occupy paradoxical positions: Clark, expected in the role of prosecutor, admits straight away that he is “genuinely uncertain as to whether [he is] diverging from Greenberg’s argument or explaining it more fully”; Fried, expected in the role of the defense, sets himself clearly apart from Greenberg over the way modernism works. Indeed, “How Modernism Works” is the title of Fried’s 25 T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art”; Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark,” in Critical Inquiry 9, September 1982; both reprinted in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 4763 et pp. 65-88.

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answer to Clark, who had entitled his text “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art.” Faced with modernism as a cultural phenomenon, Clark seeks primarily to explain the why, and Fried, the how. From their ways of answering the question they set for themselves and not answering the question asked by their adversary, there is, I think, a lesson to be learned. T.J. Clark puts his finger on the question of otherness by saying that in modernist art “the medium has appeared most characteristically as the site of negation and estrangement.” 26 The modernist medium, says Clark in substance, is not only the material site of the identity of an art, it is also a metaphorical site where meaning is produced and destroyed, and a social site where identity is estranged. The interesting thing is that Clark displaces the apparent Manicheanism of “Towards a Newer Laocoon” by asking the question of the other quite differently from Greenberg: not as the threat of one art’s corruption by another art, but as an address to an addressee. “Art wants to address someone,” he states.27 He goes on to seek a social identity for this someone, and observes that it is lacking: what surfaces in the medium of the modernist artist is exactly this lack, in the form of various absences (of depth, of figuration, of spatial unity, etc.). Asking why “modernism would have its medium be absence of some sort,” he answers that “it is the lack of an adequate ruling class to address which goes largely to explain modernism’s negative cast.”28 He can then reformulate Greenberg’s socio-historical explanation in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” for his own use, transcribing it in terms which very clearly situate the medium in the place and stead of the missing addressee: It seems that modernism is being proposed as bourgeois art in the absence of a bourgeoisie or, more accurately, as aristocratic art in the age when the bourgeoisie abandons its claim to aristocracy. And how will art keep aristocracy alive? By keeping itself alive, as the remaining vessel of the aristocratic account of experience and its modes; by preserving its own means, its media; by proclaiming those means and media as its values, as meanings in themselves.29

Even if he is ironic about the how, Clark acquiesces to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” over the why, and pushes the Marxism that Greenberg T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” art. cit., p. 58. Ibid., p. 60. 28 Ibid., pp. 58 and 59. 29 Ibid., p. 54. 26 27

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30

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professed at the time to pessimistic consequences which leave little hope about the possibility of linking political progressivism and the artistic avantgarde.30 Nineteenth-century history, which he knows very well, obliges him to recognize that the avant-garde marches backwards into the future, defending the values of a class already liquidated by history. Nonetheless he protests, maintaining that the “age when the bourgeoisie abandons its claim to aristocracy” is also “a period when one set of meanings—those of the cultivated classes—is fitfully contested by those who stand to gain from their collapse.There is a difference, in other words, between Alexandrianism and class struggle.” 31 The point is important. But Clark is at once too cultivated not to know that an ambitious, complex, meaningful art needs a cultivated public, and too disenchanted, too lucid, too pessimistic to believe that class struggle will provide art with the public it deserves. This is why he hesitates between the medium as the site of an absence (of cultivated addressees) and as the site of a struggle (between classes). This hesitation is betrayed by his concept of negation: Modernism is certainly that art which insists on its medium and says that meaning can henceforth only be found in practice. But the practice in question is extraordinary and desperate: it presents itself as a work of interminable and absolute decomposition, a work which is always pushing “medium” to its limits—to its ending—to the point where it breaks or evaporates or turns back into mere unworked material. That is the form in which medium is retrieved or reinvented: the fact of Art, in modernism, is the fact of negation.… negation appears as an absolute and all-encompassing fact, something which once begun is cumulative and uncontrollable; a fact which swallows meaning altogether. The road leads back and back to the black square, the hardly differentiated field of sound, the infinitely flimsy skein of spectral colour, speech stuttering and petering out into etceteras or excuses.32 30 It is just when he makes the Marxist character of his reading explicit that Clark declares himself uncertain whether he is diverging from Greenberg or explaining him more fully. The latter would be reasonable, he says, since Greenberg’s early texts were in fact situated in the Marxist tradition. A footnote implies that it is because he shares his “justified, though extreme, pessimism as to the nature of established culture since 1870,” that Greenberg’s Marxism interests him—and fascinates him, I would add. At bottom we are dealing with two intellectuals, a generation apart, who are both convinced of Marxism’s theoretical explanatory power and both disenchanted by its practical failure—a familiar picture. 31 T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” art. cit., p. 60. 32 Ibid., p. 59.

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I will not give into the temptation to ask Clark what works he is talking about (Fried does so), nor to whom he attributes the “fact” of negation (to the artists, to the cultivated public who has not heard the call, or to class struggle as such?), nor whether he observes, or judges, or projects, or generalizes by introspection (like Greenberg in “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism”) when he declares the practice of modernism desperate. Connoisseur of modern art that he is, he can be credited with having aesthetically perceived the why in the how of modernism, the absence (of an addressee) or the struggle (of classes) in the flatness of the black square. On the other hand, one really cannot say that his interpretation of the how by the why, of the “fact” of flatness by the “fact” of negation, offers a satisfactory explanation of the positively undeniable fact of their articulation: “I think we can say that the fact of flatness was vivid and tractable—as it was in the art of Cézanne, for example, or that of Matisse— because it was made to stand for something.”33 This is followed by a poorly written paragraph (Clark normally writes in fluid and elegant English) where he says that flatness could stand as an analogue of the “popular,” or that it could signify “modernity,” or that it could be seen as standing for the “truth of seeing,” interpretations which, in their banality, are not entirely false but have the extreme weakness of resting on the concept of representation. He takes great care not to pronounce the word, and his preferred expression here is “stand for,” a term which refers to representation in the sole sense of replacement, of deputation, but which immediately raises the question of legitimacy: on what right, and under whose mandate, and before which assembly does the flatness of painting stand for the failing bourgeoisie? No doubt Clark would answer that it is not the bourgeoisie, nor even the failing bourgeoisie, that flatness represents, but rather the failing of the bourgeoisie, “the lack of an adequate ruling class to address”—hence the emptiness of the representation in question: “the black square, the infinitely flimsy skein of spectral colour,” one lack for another. But if such is the case, Clark cannot keep his concept of representation-that-doesn’t-dare-speak-its-name from taking on its traditional sense of image and figuration, which is a bit much, when it’s modernism and abstract art we’re talking about. For if there is one thing that has been aggressively denied, attacked, destroyed, and flattened by 33

Ibid., pp. 57.

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modernism in all the arts, it is representation. Clark knows that full well, just as he knows that by representation one must understand not only the image, resemblance, and realism, but also an entire episteme. He covers his disarray so carefully that he manages not to write “representation” in the entire article, until the word finally returns—twice—in a footnote that smacks of a denial. He so manifestly uses it there in replacement of the word art that it is impossible not to sense the seemingly irrepressible tendency of Marxist thinking on art (since the time of Lukács at least) “to smuggle in a demand for realism again by the back door,” that is to say, a demand for an addressee.34 I would let it go with a smile, but for the depths of despair to which it leads. For T.J. Clark, the debate on the meaning of modernism comes down to a debate on the politics of representation. To which Michael Fried unhesitatingly responds with “the politics of conviction.”35 His title sets the tactics: Fried will not answer Clark on the grounds of why, but only of how. On those grounds he stands firm, like someone enjoying the art he loves with no second thoughts; and he responds affirmatively, even cheerfully, that in practice modernism has never worked by negation. Where did Clark see the despair? In any case not on Fried’s side of the fence. But things are not so simple here. To see what is really at stake, one must measure the Let the reader judge for himself. In the body of the text Clark bursts out: “Art wants to address someone, it wants something precise and extended to do; it wants resistance, it needs criteria; it will take risks in order to find them, including the risk of its own dissolution” (p. 60). Then, in a footnote: “This is not to smuggle in a demand for realism again by the back door; or at least, not one posed in the traditional manner. The weakness or absence I have pointed to in modern art does not derive, I think, from a lack of grounding in “seeing” (for example) or a set of realist protocols to go with that; rather, it derives from its lack of grounding in some (any) specific practice of representation, which would be linked in turn to other social practices—embedded in them, constrained by them. The question is not, therefore, whether modern art should be figurative or abstract, rooted in empirical commitments or not so rooted, but whether art is now provided with sufficient constraints of any kind—notions of appropriateness, tests of vividness, demands which bring with them measures of importance or priority. Without constraints, representation of any articulateness and salience cannot take place” (pp. 62-63). 35 Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works,” art. cit., p. 71. Fried defines “the politics of conviction” as “the countless ways in which a person’s deepest beliefs about art and even about the quality of specific works of art have been influenced, sometimes to the point of having been decisively shaped, by institutional factors that, traced to their limits, merge imperceptibly with the culture at large.” “Politics of conviction” is Fried’s equivalent for “politics of taste,” the expression Greenberg borrows from Lionello Venturi in TNL. I might note that neither Fried nor Greenberg engage in any discussion of the (their) politics of conviction or of taste. Greenberg adds that there is no exit to such discussions—at least, not on paper (TNL, p. 37). 34

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subtle bad faith that permeates the debate on both sides.36 Clark bases his reading of Greenberg on his two first doctrinal texts, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Fried bases his on “Modernist Painting” (1960) and “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962), and carries on as though he and Clark were discussing the same Greenberg. By laying aside the Marxism and pessimism of the young Greenberg (which are “pushed,” on the contrary, by Clark), Fried gives himself the rather underhanded freedom to use the argument of negation when it helps him put Clark and Greenberg in the same basket, and to refute it when it serves to set himself apart from both of them. There is, in my view, a very clever denial at work here, essentially a reprise of the slippage that allowed Greenberg to take the autonomy of the how over the why for granted when he passed from “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” to “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Indeed, Greenberg could afford to state at the opening of the Newer Laocoon: “It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other circumstances of the age in which its creators live,” and then make no more mention of those circumstances, since in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” he had already found a way to explain that the autonomy of the arts with respect to socio-historical reality is an effect of that very reality. Therefore in his defense of purism he no longer felt obliged to find justifications in social history (the why) for an art led by its own history to expel the social reality of its subject matter; he only had to show the how: how in modernist art the artists take their own medium for subject matter and how, by an involuntary but no less ineluctable tropism, they are led to abandon all conventions one by one, until nothing remains but the irreducible conventions that define the medium in its purity. On the condition that “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is forgotten, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” leads straight to “Modernist Painting”—and that is how Fried feigns to read it, because that allows him to distance himself from Clark’s negativist thesis, while imputing it to Greenberg as well: I don’t say that Clark swallows Greenberg whole.… But I do suggest that Clark’s insistence that modernism proceeds by ever more extreme and dire acts of negation is simply another version of the idea that it has evolved by a process of 36 Bad faith and the feeling of bad faith in one’s interlocutor are an essential ingredient of all debates over art where one party claims that the argument is about interpretations, while the other claims it is about proper names and individual judgments. This is the subjective side of what Lyotard calls a differend.

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radical reduction—by casting off, negating, one norm or convention after another in search of the bare minimum that can suffice. Indeed I believe that it is because Clark accepts Greenberg’s reductionist and essentialist conception of the modernist enterprise that he is led to characterize the medium in modernism as “the site of negation and estrangement.”37

It’s a rigged trial. Just as there is a difference between Alexandrianism and class struggle, there is one between reduction to the essence and negation. Fried—who doesn’t have hard enough words to say that Clark’s thesis, to the extent he finds it intelligible, is wrong—will hear nothing of this difference. That the “fact” of negation in no way corresponds to his experience of modernism, okay. But his conflation of negation and reduction blurs the originality of Clark’s reading, which is to posit the medium, not as a material susceptible of being purified, but as the site of an address to a missing addressee. With this question of the address it is the question of the other that Clark raises, and justly so, in my opinion.38 He formulates it in terms of social classes which art seeks, fails, or succeeds to address—I translate: in terms of social classes which are or are not to be found at the right address. For example, a bourgeoisie which has taken up residence in the palaces from which it expelled the aristocracy, and which apes the aristocracy’s manners while having lost or destroyed its values. Fried can hardly fail to grasp the historical force of this argument, having devoted an entire book to the strategies of address constituted by absorption and theatricality.39 And yet here it is as though the question didn’t even make sense to him, perhaps because Clark frames it in sociological terms, rather than the aesthetic terms which are his own; and perhaps also because here, it Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works,” art. cit.,p. 68. I’ll take this chance to express my deep gratitude to Sylvie Blocher. I owe her the expression “the question of the address,” which was the title she gave her 1993-1994 seminar at the Ecole Nationale d’Arts in Cergy-Pontoise, where she invited me to give a talk in January 1994. I answered the invitation by digging out of my notes four sentences written ten years earlier about Victorine’s gaze in Manet’s paintings (the sentences will be found in a footnote of Kant after Duchamp, op. cit., p. 254, note 74), and by developing the question of the address implied there, which had remained latent in my work and which—as I’m now beginning to realize—has gradually made it take a new direction. In parallel, the emergence and the progressive displacements of the question of the address in Sylvie Blocher’s work, from Le partage du secret (1992) to L’annonce amoureuse (1995) seem to me to finally open the possibility for art to go beyond modernism, while avoiding the disavowals and betrayals of postmodernism. Concerning Déçue la mariée se rhabilla, the work that immediately precedes Le partage du secret, see my book, La déposition (Paris: Dis Voir, 1995). 39 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 37 38

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is in the present tense and on the basis of his conviction that he speaks. Why would art want to address someone? Artists, yes, but art? Fried makes fun of the personification. He acts as though Clark didn’t know as well as anyone that saying “art addresses itself” is a manner of speaking; works of art are what address themselves. But that too is a manner of speaking. The works are physical objects bereft of speech, addressed to human beings by other human beings. The men and women whom these objects reach are the ones who lend them the tenor of an address to an addressee, as though they were messages; and the men and women who made them, their artisans or authors, are the ones in whom the receivers suppose the intention of making the works into messages, of writing an address on them. Theories of communication, considering that works are object-messages which must reach their addressees, suppose that art is a “language” in which sender and receiver must be equally competent. A theory of address does not necessarily suppose that. A message can be addressed without ever arriving at its destination, or it can be written in a foreign language, or in no language at all, without being any the less addressed; it can also reach me and be written in a language that I understand perfectly, and yet not be addressed to me. Snobs and social agitators are masters in the art of addressing to a particular social class messages drafted in the language of another, and in the even more provocative art of not addressing to a given social class messages ostensibly drafted in its language. (Need I underline how often avant-garde art and its potential for active negation have been perceived as either an activity of snobs or of social agitators?) One address generally hides another, and the interplay of addresses is a game of three-corner pool that can be damnably complicated—and violent. Fried only takes account of the game when the ball has exhausted its kinetic energy and stops… in his pocket. For him there is no doubt that the avant-garde painters of the nineteenth century have found their addressees: he is among them, along with Clark, as far as he can tell. Why then all this insistence on the negativity of modernism? It is “at most a negative ‘moment,’ the significance of which can only be understood in terms of a relation to a more encompassing and fundamental set of positive values, conventions, sources of conviction.”40 And conviction not being liable to proof by the why, Fried sticks with a practical demonstration 40

Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works,” art. cit., p. 67.

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of the how, carried out on Anthony Caro. But the explanation by the how alone remains as unsatisfying as the explanation by the why alone, because it takes the notions of value and convention for granted, in the name of conviction. Secure in his personal aesthetic judgment and in his conviction as to the value of Caro’s art, certain, in other words, that Caro is addressed to him, Fried lets himself skip over the way the question of the address creeps into collective notions of value and convention, and loses sight of the question mark as to the addressee of art, whom Clark sees in terms of a social class failing to answer the call. For my part, I would never blame Fried for speaking in the name of his conviction, even when I don’t share it, and I refuse to lend him—and “formalist” criticism in general—a “bourgeois” aesthetic position, as if by answering the call he had automatically become the representative of the entire social class which, historically speaking, is or was the missing addressee of modernist art. I have already said that I do not think the politics of representation is an adequate alternative to the politics of conviction. But I side with T.J. Clark when he formulates the question of the address in its collective dimension, with the proviso that it is not the notion of representation that can properly articulate that question in that dimension, so as to arrive at a theoretical explanation of modernism capable of putting the how and the why together. It is the notion of convention. In any civilization whatsoever, the artist’s trade obeys conventions. The latter are technical rules that lend body to the know-how of a specific profession or guild, but also aesthetic rules partially imposed on artists from the outside, by the part of society that supports them and commissions their work. An artistic tradition is stable when the artists wilfully submit to the taste of their patrons and when the latter cultivate respect for the artists (court art is paradigmatic here), that is, when artistic conventions are what all conventions should be: a pact, a tacitly or explicitly signed accord between two parties who are familiar with each other, who know who they are and what they want. The avant-garde is born—can be born, is bound to be born, I’d say—when these conditions no longer exist. As Greenberg says in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”: A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved

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by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.41

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Such a situation, Greenberg adds, leads generally to Alexandrianism: the artists turn in on themselves, forming a caste of clerics cut off from society, churning out infinite variations on a withered tradition. The originality of the avant-garde, as it appeared in France in the mid-nineteenth century, is to be an Alexandrianism in motion—pushed forward, Clark would add, by class struggle. But class struggle, in its generality, does not explain everything. A caste of clerics turned in on themselves would know very well who they are, and above all, whom they address. It is no accident that the pictorial avant-garde was born in France, because France produced an institution in the field of the plastic arts which has no equivalent anywhere else: the Salon. Initially an offspring of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries retained a quasi-monopoly over artists’ access to the profession, the Salon from the very time of its inception took the unprecedented step of regularly opening up the production of living artists (accredited by the Academy, and then in the nineteenth century by the Institut and the juries which it more or less controlled) to the judgment of the crowd, the hoi polloi. Anyone could visit the Salon, whatever his social class, and people weren’t shy about it: there were almost 900,000 visitors to the Salon of 1855. Nor were they shy about judging. Thus a public space for private aesthetic judgment was created, in patent contradiction to the protective measures taken by the Academy in order to maintain its aesthetic canons and the continuity of its tradition. Class struggle, yes: taste struggle. The bourgeoisie is necessarily at a loss, when it no longer knows whose shoulders it’s rubbing at the Salon. The birth of the pictorial avant-garde is inseparable from the conflictual history of the Salon, even if far more than the latter is at stake. To be sure, the artistic upheavals of modernity would have appeared even if France hadn’t invented this strange institution, as indeed they did appear in other countries. But it is a historical fact that where the mainstream is concerned, the history of the avant-garde or of modernism up to the time of the First World War was played out in Paris, on the stage set by the Salon (or the Salons), and that the

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new conditions of production and reception dating from the Salon have remained largely valid ever since.

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When painters exhibit in conditions where they address themselves to anybody and everybody without distinction, what becomes of the conventions of the trade? To understand this, the accent must be laid on the convention not as a technical-aesthetic rule, but as a pact. If the partners in the pact are vague, the pact is uncertain, and the artists aren’t responsible. They are only responsible for not mistaking their time, that is, above all, for understanding that any broken pictorial convention signals a pact broken with a faction of the public, at the same time as a demand for a new pact addressed, as the case may be, to another faction. Reducing these factions to the battle between academicism and the avant-garde is too simple. No doubt there are the Academy, the jury, the Beaux-Arts Schools, but all this fine society does not by definition profess a single, monolithic, backwardlooking opinion. No doubt there are sensitive and audacious critics, a few enlightened art lovers and collectors, an artistic and literary intelligentsia which will support the avant-garde, but there are also conservative critics, a narrow-minded bourgeoisie, an uncultured popular class, and philistines of every stripe. Finally, in the classes least educated and least encumbered by academic culture there are from time to time sensitive individuals, artists by temperament if not trade, who instinctively turn toward the works that count. The painters all have to deal with the indeterminate public of the Salon; none of them can hope to please everyone at once; all paint with an anonymous, unpredictable crowd looking over their shoulders. The painters experience the contradictory expectations of this crowd as aesthetic desiderata, tastes and prejudices that come to them from others; but they live this experience with their brushes in hand, in front of the canvas. Thus it is aesthetically, with their sensibility, and through the mediation of the technical constraints of their trade, that they sense the need to conclude a pact with an addressee who is indeterminate and divided by social conflicts. It is under the aesthetic pressure of these technical constraints that an artist worthy of the name creates, accepts, or breaks a convention, that is to say, the pact. And conversely, it is under the contradictory pressures exerted by the authority of the pact that holds in a given society and the possible desire for another pact with another social faction that the artist aesthetically

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creates, accepts, or transgresses a technical constraint. By breaking the convention (the rule), avant-garde artists provoke the public into taking stock of the fact that since the convention (the pact) is uncertain, it is in practice already broken and must be renegotiated, case by case. Conversely, by breaking the convention (the pact), avant-garde artists make the conventions (the rules) of their trade into the site of a negotiation. A negotiation with whom? To the extent that the rules of the trade matter only to professionals, the negotiation is carried on with the artist’s specific tradition. But to the extent that they imply a pact with the indeterminate public that the Salon invites to intervene in matters artistic, the negotiation must be carried on with any and everyone. And to the extent that artists, in the nineteenth and then the twentieth centuries, begin to depend more and more on public recognition for their professional status, the negotiation must be carried on with a specific tradition of which the professionals are no longer the sole custodians, but which now transits by the verdict of the crowd. This is what so inextricably complicates the question, and leads to the notion that a modernist—or avant-garde—artist is someone who, no longer knowing whom he addresses, treats the technical aesthetic constraints that Greenberg calls the medium as the site for the conclusion of a new pact. Site of conclusion, site of negotiation as I said a few lines ago, and site of address, I would add, to take things from the beginning. Everything begins with the address, and the address is a demand for a pact. (Indeed, not only must a demand be addressed for it to be one, but every address is already a demand. To address one’s speech is to demand that someone listen. Since listening is a recognition of the other—the most basic pact—it follows that the address is already a demand for a pact.) But here the pact has a precise meaning, that of convention of the medium. The medium in the Greenbergian sense is something specific that sanctions the separation and autonomy of the arts, each in its “autarchy,” something like “painting,” “sculpture,” “music,” and so on. For as resolute an empiricist as Greenberg, “painting” has no concrete existence outside the ensemble of technical conventions (rules of making) and aesthetic conventions (rules of judging) which hold sway or are valid at a given moment in history. In other words, precisely those rules which at least momentarily formed the object of a convention established between two parties: the professionals—the

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painters—and the contemporary public. As divided and indeterminate as this public may be, still all the social ties have not dissolved, all the authorities have not disappeared (far from it), all the conventions have not been thrown into doubt at the same time: something of a pact exists. What is more, even if the public is lacking, or has abdicated, it is present at the Salon, and massively so. It is this contemporary public that the painter addresses, whether he likes it or not, when he participates in the Salon, and this, as soon as he submits his work to the jury, as soon as he paints it in his studio, as soon as he conceives it in his head. For a Salon artist (and they’re all Salon artists in the nineteenth century, moderns as well as academics), the public is always present, even when he would like to totally forget it and paint for himself. The public is present because the painter cannot avoid dealing, very concretely, with this momentary state of aesthetic consensus: the conventions of his medium. And I insist, the conventions are the consensus, they do not “represent” it. A pictorial convention is indissolubly an aesthetic-technical precept and a social pact; one can no more separate the social from the aesthetic-technical than one can keep the same coin from having two sides.42 The academic painter knows where his immediate social interests lie, and subordinates his technical and aesthetic means to them. He targets or believes he targets a clientele, or—less cynically but less intelligently—he believes he is serving eternal or universal values while in fact he is unconsciously bending to the taste of those who bring him honor or material advantage. He treats his medium as though it were transparent, Greenberg would say, and thus it becomes a means—that’s the definition of medium—in the service of an end which is to reach the public, with whom the pact is sealed in advance. His strategy of address is selective, even and above all when he cloaks it in a universalizing discourse. The other is a receiver at the end of a chain of communication. The avant-garde painter is more sensitive to the fragility of aesthetic pacts, but infinitely more ambitious concerning their extension; he is more alert, more alarmed, perhaps more panicked by the indeterminacy of his addressee. He addresses his medium as though it embodied the addressee. For him, the other is not at the end of a chain of communication, and the medium is not a channel or a means. (Which does not imply, despite what Greenberg sometimes hints, 42

However, one can separate aesthetics and technique when one is simply a viewer and not an artist.

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that it is an end in itself.) The medium is the other. It embodies and materializes the otherness of the addressee. Indeed, the pictorial medium being made of the technical-aesthetic conventions of the trade, its material can very well be “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (as in the proto-Greenbergian definition of Maurice Denis); its true substance is still the pact. And where there is a pact there is some other. How to make the other visible, if not by rendering the convention opaque (the convention of the transparent picture plane, for example), so as to reveal that it is merely a convention—a pact, contingent like any pact? How to bring this contingency into play, if not by submitting the technical rule to an aesthetic test carried out by the viewer? And how to test this rule if not by twisting it, breaking it, or abandoning it? The modernist or avant-garde painter presses the other whom he addresses to accept the challenge of renegotiating the technical-aesthetic conventions of the medium by acquiescing to the broken or abandoned convention, that is, by sealing a new pact around the broken one. This can be said another way: rather than demanding that his public ratify the quality of his painting within the existing conventions which, at a given moment of history, define what a painting must be, the modernist painter demands that the viewer bring his aesthetic judgment to bear on those conventions themselves, that he conclude a pact apropos of a pact. Such would be the mainspring of selfreferentiality, that inevitable topos—I should say that overblown cliché—of modernism. If a new aesthetic pact must be established, it can only be formed between artists who have risked their legitimacy as artists on technical questions and sophisticated art lovers who have understood that it is precisely where the conventions of their taste have been violently upset that they are being challenged to reconstitute the pact. That these art lovers are recruited among the cultivated elites and that these elites are bourgeois is a sociological given which it would be absurd to deny. It’s more interesting to suppose that the art lovers with a taste for such challenges have a sensitivity to social conflicts which, while not necessarily being on the order of an empathy for rebels or marginal elements, or of a political commitment to the working class, is nonetheless on the order of an ethical respect for the social differend as such. Before the work of art, this respect makes itself known to them aesthetically, that is, through a feeling, a sentiment. A sentiment for

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which all the figures of negativity can be appropriate—the feeling of emptiness or insignificance, the feeling of destruction, the feeling of conflict, of being ripped apart or separated—in a word, the sentiment of dissent.43 Indeed, it suffices to be such an art lover to know these things through introspection. Every genuine lover of avant-garde art has his own inner conflict of high and low, with his personal Norman Rockwell to be used not only as a foil, but also as a reference whom he consults to break a pact with the “good taste” of his social class and to seal another with himself, insofar as he feels himself to be at once more and less than an individual, and something other than the representative of a group. T.J. Clark cannot help but call on the notion of representation to articulate the how and why of modernism, but how much more interesting and apt is Greenberg’s avowal of the “Jewish self-hatred” that he finds in himself by introspection. The form of generalization from the individual to the social group (from self to others) that such introspection points to—and which as I said at the beginning of this essay I do not find entirely foreign to the way Greenberg looks at art and concludes in favor of the avant-garde over kitsch—is on the same order as the form of generalization set into effect by the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment. Every lover of avant-garde art could say, paraphrasing Greenberg in “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism”: “I do not think that in this respect I am projecting upon others a taste for negativity I find in myself; it is only reluctantly that I have become persuaded that hatred for one’s own social affiliation in one form or another is almost universal among lovers of avant-garde art—or at least much more prevalent than is commonly thought or admitted—and that it is not confined on the whole to lovers of avant-garde art like myself.” And then conclude with a similar paraphrase: “The problem has to be focused directly in the individual lover of avant-garde art and discussed in personal, not communal, terms. For hatred for one’s own social affiliation is as intimate a thing as love.” Or again, to use the languages of T.J. Clark and Michael Fried in the same sentence: estrangement is something as intimate as conviction. When the pact is reconstituted it is always by way of “aesthetic experience as met by the specific—not the generalized—individual,” as Greenberg puts On the sentiment of dissent, see “Art Was a Proper Name,” the first chapter of Kant after Duchamp, op. cit.

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it in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Clark was right to link the active negation of the conventions of painting to the abdication of the social class which is its “natural” addressee. His only mistake, in saying “art wants to address someone” and in naming this someone with a collective noun, “the bourgeoisie,” was to fail to see that in aesthetic matters, address cannot be collective but instead touches individuals living through singular experiences and establishing a fragile and contradictory pact with themselves, founded on the sentiment of dissent. When, from singular experience to singular experience, the pact is finally reconstituted socially, it is always around the appreciation of a singular work. Cases are hardly lacking—indeed, they are the landmarks of the modernist mainstream—of the spectacular reversals of opinion which, over time, have made the most violently contested works into the masterpieces of modern art. The force of such works is to draw a redefinition of the entire medium in their wake. Of course we are allowed to say retrospectively: Manet, Cézanne, Mondrian, and others have redefined painting. But each of these painters, in his day, was what Greenberg calls a specific individual. What of their experience, itself also specific? What of their own introspection, of the pact they established with themselves when they judged their paintings finished, of their own negotiation with the conventions of their medium, and of the address to the other which they initiated, brushes in hand? Can it really be said that they addressed themselves to the medium as to the other? Isn’t all that played out instead at the level of the painting, flush with the individual work? Common sense (I’d even say ordinary mythology) very easily conceives the painter as engaged in a dialogue and even an amorous combat with his canvas. Yet I maintain that it is not only the individual canvas he addresses, but the canvas insofar as it is an instance of “painting,” a generalizable singularity, an object that holds for a class of objects. Let us imagine a painter at work, and let us suppose he innovates. He might be Manet before he sets out to paint, projecting the composition of a trio borrowed from a Raimondi engraving, a still life thrown down on the grass as though on a table by Snijders, and a forest decor brushed like stage scenery, which will allow him to transgress the laws of all the genres at once; he might be Cézanne busy painting Pont de Maincy, placing on the surface of the water the white reflection that draws the painting out into space and reverses the perspective; he might be Mondrian contemplating his finished

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Checkerboard Composition with Dark Colors of 1919, and asking himself whether this perfectly regular grid still deserves the name of composition. One can see in these examples that it is not always the canvas that the painters address. It can be much less—the idea that Manet projects, or the brush stroke that Cézanne has just laid down—but at the same time it is always much more: they address “painting.” “Painting” does not answer, the canvas answers. And yet that again, like “art addresses itself,” is but a manner of speaking. The canvas is an object and objects are mute. What answers is the painter’s aesthetic judgment, at every instant of work. The judgment that convinces Manet his idea is good, and that makes him decide to paint Déjeuner sur l’herbe; that makes Cézanne doubt, and in the depths of his doubt, convinces him to surrender to what his eye dictates; that disappoints Mondrian, convincing him to set aside his regular grids and to return to asymmetrical composition, because the risk is greater. Fried’s word springs up again here: conviction. The painter’s necessarily precedes the critic’s. But what does the conviction of Manet, Cézanne, and Mondrian bear on? Manet must be convinced that if he is able, by a certain quickness of the brush, by a certain treatment of the surface, and of course, by the mocking frankness of Victorine’s gaze addressed to the viewer, to halt the latter stopped short in his tracks, frozen in stupefied attention, then he will have succeeded in making his canvas into a tableau and not a mosaic of morceaux. Cézanne must be convinced that the brush stroke he has just laid down is not a stroke like any other, that even when applied to the vertical plane of the painting and placed on the surface of the water in the hollow space of representation, it also has the incredible capacity to extend to the entire painting that faculty possessed by reflections of light on an apple: to make it swell outwards, turning four hundred years of perspective inside-out like a glove. Mondrian must be convinced that he erred momentarily on a too-facile path, and that if painting must really break with the tragedy of life it will not be by obliterating contrasts, but by integrating them in the reconquered unity of the picture plane. I have chosen precise examples, among the most ambitious painters, for whom a conviction was only convincing if it led to a redefinition of the entire medium: the tableau, the perspectival system, the new plasticism— definitions whose purism Greenberg is right to underscore, like Clark their force of negation, and Fried their positive value. I have also chosen painters

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who imposed themselves on their successors, demanding they form their convictions by addressing a medium whose conventions have grown more rarefied as its definition has broadened. Here is one definition: painting is pigment on a support. I don’t even say: “colors assembled in a certain order.” I stick to a definition broad enough to include house painting, but it is still too narrow. If we believe Greenberg, the pigment can go. We are in 1962—Newman, Rothko, and Still are at the zenith of the Greenbergian sky, Klein’s monochromes have only recently landed in America, Fontana and Manzoni haven’t yet stepped ashore, Stella has just unveiled the double surprise of his black paintings and his aluminum paintings, and Ryman, whom no one yet knows, is quietly working in white—when Greenberg discovers that flatness is not only what modernist painting tends toward but is concretely its irreducible working essence, and thus feels authorized to say that “a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one.”44 Five years later, Fried comments that it is not conceivably a successful picture, because at that point, nothing more would remain of painting than the name. And he proposes his own version of how modernism works, with two different arguments that can be equated: The essence of painting is not something irreducible. Rather, the task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work’s identity as painting.45 What the modernist painter can be said to discover in his work—what can be said to be revealed to him in it—is not the irreducible essence of all painting, but rather that which, at the present moment in painting’s history, is capable of convincing him that it can stand comparison with the painting of both the modernist and the pre-modernist past whose quality seems to him beyond question. 46

I’ll pass over the rigged trial (once again) of Greenberg, who in reality, just like Fried, measures what is essential and irreducible by his own conviction, drawn from experience. For the utter empiricist he is, experience “After Abstract Expressionism,” in Art International, October 1962; Greenberg IV, pp. 131-132. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Artforum, June 1967; the argument is taken up again and quoted in “How Modernism Works,” art. cit., p.69. 46 “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” in Artforum, November 1966, quoted in “How Modernism Works,” art. cit.,p. 69. 44

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does not necessarily entail an essentialist philosophy, “Modernist Painting” notwithstanding.47 More important and much more apt is Fried’s criticism of Clark: as soon as one accepts the idea that conviction is nourished on comparison with the art of the past, one is obliged to repudiate the idea that a project of negation is at the basis of modernism, for it is clear that one cannot suppose an intention of negation at the basis of the art of the past. The argument is powerful, and leads to a few reflections which link conviction and address together around the equation established between pictorial identity and the capacity of a work to sustain comparison with the painting of the past. Still quoting Fried: To repeat: my insistence that the modernist painter seeks to discover not the irreducible essence of all painting but rather those conventions which, at a particular moment in the history of the art, are capable of establishing his work’s nontrivial identity as painting leaves wide open (in principle though not in actuality) the question of what, should he prove successful, those conventions will turn out to be.48

Indeed, the painter can seek all the comparisons he likes with the great masters of the past, it is still the future alone which will say if he succeeds; and it is neither from the past nor from the future that he draws his conviction, but from the present moment. Here he is then, painting, and there comes a moment when he declares his painting finished. It is the moment when his conviction is complete—or if it is not complete, for the word conviction is not always appropriate—it is the moment when a certain excitement, a certain quality of doubt convinces him despite everything (and here the word conviction comes back into its own) to acquiesce to the results (surrender, Greenberg would say) and to run the risk of letting the painting leave the studio. We are in 1951, and Rauschenberg has decided to leave to 47 Realizing he had been misunderstood, Greenberg returned to “Modernist Painting” two years later (in the sentences of “After Abstract Expressionism” just preceding the famous definition of painting’s “irreducible essence”), to say that modernism’s self-criticism is “entirely empirical and not at all an affair of theory,” and that its aim is “to determine the irreducible working essence of art” (my emphasis), adding that “under the testing of modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential.” It is disconcerting to observe that despite such precise statements, many of Greenberg’s critics (including Fried) stubbornly continue to see him as a kind of Platonist of pure painting, upholding an essentialist conception of art. Nothing could be more untrue, and it’s high time to ask whose interests are served by this refrain. 48 Fried, “How Modernism Works,” art. cit., p. 71.

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their definitive incompleteness the seven vertical panels abutted one against the other which he has just painted, with a roller, in immaculate white latex. I’ve deliberately gone straight to the most difficult example, one which will no doubt set Michael Fried’s hackles on end, because it’s clearly the test example. It is with respect to this painting (and to only a few others) that “the question of what, should [the painter] prove successful, those conventions will turn out to be” can be said to have been settled, eleven years later, when Greenberg felt obliged to say that “a stretched or tackedup canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one.” It is here that the difference between a picture and a successful picture reveals itself to be undecidable, but brings an aesthetic judgment into play nonetheless, a judgment which I cannot imagine resting, in Rauschenberg’s mind, on anything other than “those conventions which, at a particular moment in the history of the art, are capable of establishing his work’s nontrivial identity as painting.”49 I’ll point out that neither Fried’s conviction nor mine are at issue in this “particular moment in the history of the art,” which I would designate as “1962 anticipated in 1951.” Only Rauschenberg’s comes into play. I am personally not at all convinced that this picture is a successful picture, even though I am totally convinced that it is a picture—and I say it with all the more assurance as I have the fortune to write these lines with the work practically before my eyes.50 Indeed, I need not ask for more than this nominal judgment from Rauschenberg to be certain that an aesthetic judgment has fed his conviction, and that the comparison with the works of the past is therefore implicitly required. Thus I imagine Rauschenberg convinced (at least sufficiently convinced to be excited by the risk he runs) that the division of the surface into seven panels (a prime number, uncommon) will suffice to establish the intent of composition, but a composition with neither meter nor harmonics, responding to a modernist imperative established since the time of cubism; that their abutment without interstices will suffice to Fried will contest that the question has been answered; he thinks, on the contrary, that it was raised by cases like this one. He will also contest both the undecidability of the judgment that distinguishes between a picture and a successful picture and the nontrivial identity of the result, because, like Greenberg, he contests the aesthetic nature of such a judgment. I believe I have refuted his argument in “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas” (chapter 3 of Kant after Duchamp, op. cit.), but my debate with Fried has hardly begun. 50 The painting hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, where I have an office for the moment, thanks to a research grant from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. It was upon seeing it while finishing up this book that I decided to include it in these reflections. 49

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establish the autonomy of each and the unity of the whole, sparking reminiscences of Mondrian’s studio and associations with Kelly’s contemporary decision not to juxtapose several colors on the same panel; that the work of the roller, as invisible as that of a house painter, stops with exactly the requisite precision and nonchalance at the edge of the canvas, without covering the side, so that an attentive eye can make the link to the manner in which Pollock’s all-over arabesques roll back toward the center in the vicinity of the perimeter; that this even, seemingly industrial whitewashing will suffice to evoke Le Corbusier’s cherished “loi du ripolin”—a certain very “Bauhaus” idea of modernity—but that its sevenfold application on such a craftsmanlike object as a canvas stretched on a frame will also voice all the irony of the evocation. This is how I imagine Rauschenberg in 1951, convinced that his painting “can stand comparison with the painting of both the modernist and the pre-modernist past whose quality seems to him beyond question.”51 No small negation of the painting of the past has entered his approach, including one which is very precise: the White Paintings are born of a revolt against the censure exerted by Josef I can hear the objection already: you imagine all that, indeed, you project onto Rauschenberg intentions he never had. He simply wanted to make open surfaces that incorporated the fluctuations of the ambient light and the shadows of the viewers into the picture. In any case he was much more under John Cage’s influence at that time than any painter’s. He doesn’t address painters, and particularly not painters of the past, for whom he couldn’t care less. No artist works that way, with an eye on the rear-view mirror, the way you and Fried seem to believe. Finally, as far as conviction goes, he said it made no difference whatsoever whether he painted them or anyone else did, “Today is their creator.” Yes, indeed, this one will be tough. So, as briefly as possible: “today,” for him, is “1962 anticipated in 1951,” and for me, 1995. The references I have made to the painting of the past do not come from an interview with Rauschenberg about his intentions, but from my conviction, at the moment when I have the painting before my eyes and I write these lines. If you find it mysterious that I lend Rauschenberg a conviction which I feel (and which suffices, I repeat, to make me say that White Painting is a picture but not a successful one), perhaps it’s because you have forgotten that one of the avenues of reflection in this essay is to try to understand, for aesthetics, why Greenberg was right to extend to all Jews the “self-hatred” he discovered within himself by introspection, and to say that this generalization was not a projection. Finally, concerning the fact that anybody could do these paintings and that Rauschenberg stresses the point: do you think it’s any accident that I said he left them to their definitive incompleteness, Duchamp’s expression for the Large Glass? Of course Rauschenberg’s conviction doesn’t date from the moment he stops painting, he had conceived the paintings to be incomplete even before he started painting them, and to be completed by the “viewers who make the pictures” and who, in this case, cast or project their own shadows on them. That doesn’t make them conceptual art for all that; for conception, see Greenberg in “After Abstract Expressionism.” But the White Paintings are definitively incomplete in another, more specific sense: they must be periodically repainted to preserve their whiteness. The task of repainting them is not confided to just anyone: Brice Marden is among those to have done it. 51

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Albers at Black Mountain College. Albers taught his students such a respect for colors that, Rauschenberg says, “it took years before I could use more that two colors at once,” adding: “I had been totally intimidated because Albers taught that one color was supposed to make the next color look better, but my feeling was that each color was itself.”52 Albers was what can be called a master. And erasing a master, as Rauschenberg would do two years after the White Paintings with Erased de Kooning Drawing, means addressing him. For a modernist painter, seeking to compare with “the painting of the past whose quality seems to him beyond question”—even if that entails destroying it or reducing it, redoing it after nature, killing the father in one way or the other—necessarily means addressing the painters of the past, moved by a demand for recognition. It also necessarily means knowing that if he is granted recognition he will not receive it from them (from the father, the master, the role model, the ego ideal, the symbolic rival, as you like), but rather from the public the painting reaches, a public yet to come or at most contemporary, but certainly not past. The address is indirect, which can be stated in two different ways: either I address my work to those missing addressees who are the masters I admire, who from their residence in the pantheon of art history clearly cannot answer me, and who in a sense delegate their right to judge to the beholders of the future who will be able to make the comparison; or I address my work to the public, to present and future addressees, so that they may judge me and declare me equal to the masters I admire, such that the latter will be forced to make room for me among their legitimate progeny, at the same address. The imaginary character of this interplay of ricocheting addresses is patent. The symbolic character of the pantheon of art history is equally so—which doesn’t stop it from having a down-to-earth address at the museum, where real objects hang on real walls and address real viewers. One may find this description pompous, oldfashioned, and relatively patriarchal—it unfolds directly from the fashion in which Fried relates the painters’ ambitions to the painting of the past. (Myself, I don’t find it false, just ideologically uncomfortable.53 We’re beginning to Interview with Barbara Rose, in Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 23 and pp. 37-38. It is therefore urgent to reclaim each of the concepts burdened with this justified unease. I’ve begun elsewhere for tradition (as jurisprudence), and here I hint at a possible facelift for the concept of the pantheon. The hardest will be filiation, which demands a rethinking of paternity. That’s no surprise, given that the epicenter of the postmodern crisis (which is actually just a hyper-consciousness of the crisis of modernity) is a phenomenal cultural upheaval of the paternal function.

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realize that since Manet, painters paint for the museum—and all the more so when they paint against it. They address themselves to it.) The important thing, for now, is that this description of the interplay of addresses allows us to see that the medium is not only the site of a missing addressee for Clark, but for Fried too, and that both are right. They simply aren’t speaking of the same addressee. For Clark, avant-garde artists address an abdicating bourgeoisie, which does not answer the call, which does not reside at the right address, which fails in its duty of assuring the proper conditions for the reception of art. A class of bad receivers who always want to be in the first person, and never in the second. For Fried, they address artists who are absent because they are dead, who withdraw (like the gods) and live immortally in the museum. A class of pure addressees, in the second person, never in the first.54 Finally, for Clark these absent addressees form a social class, and for Fried, a professional one. These two classes do not inhabit separate worlds: the bourgeoisie runs the museums, and when Fried speaks of artists of the past he is primarily thinking of artists of the immediate past, who are not necessarily dead, but already in the museum. (His conception of history allows him to work his way up the trail.) However, it is on the theoretical and not the empirical level that the relation of first-person addressor and second-person addressee does not coincide with that of sender and receiver. A theory of the address sees an interplay of values where a theory of communication (and even Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetics of reception is such a theory) sees an exchange of signs. To be sure, signs are almost always carriers of values, and all values are in the end exchange value. “To have value” means “to have the value of,” or “to substitute for,” which in turn means “to stand for”—Clark’s timid expression for “representation.” By the same token it also means “to be valid for,” implying that somebody must be there at the receiving end of the exchange for a value to be valid at all. When Clark says that modernist painting’s flatness “was made to stand for something,” or that it was given “values which necessarily derived from elsewhere than art” (and which he lists: the “popular,” “modernity,” “truth of seeing”—positive values for him, as far as I can tell, in spite of the all-encompassing negation), he means to say 54 This is what is meant by “the death of the author.” The museum as pantheon is filled with beings who can be addressed but who address no one. The museum as a social institution, a place of preservation and exhibition, is the repository of works in search of authors, because it is the institution, and not the artists, who address them to the public.

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that flatness has the value of something else because it is valid for someone else—even though that someone may not be the one whom the picture addresses. “The popular” stands for the people. The aesthetic translation of an extra-aesthetic value such as “the popular” may represent nothing, it still has a value—for someone. Especially if “the popular” stands for the people but addresses the bourgeoisie. Why not then say—as a theoretical hypothesis—that there is only value where a substitution is possible, with an addressee taking the place of a receiver? In this way Fried and Clark would both be right. And Greenberg too, who makes such a substitution in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”: The avant-garde’s specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists’ artists, its best poets, poets’ poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs—our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avantgarde belongs.55

Greenberg speaks very clearly here of a substitution, with artists replacing the failing ruling class; but he does not make the theoretical distinction between a second-person addressee and a first-person receiver, and neither does he decide whether the artists or the ruling class should be held responsible for their reciprocal estrangement. Historically speaking, the phenomenon of substitution he describes begins with art for art’s sake, a doctrine which can be translated as: art stands for art. But here again, such a personification of art is a way of speaking; art is what artists do. Clark would probably find the phrase “art stands for artists” absurd, but he might agree to its reformulation as “art has a value for artists.” Thus, in the same way that “the popular” stands for the people but addresses the bourgeoisie, so modernist art, heir to art for art’s sake, has a value for certain artists and addresses certain artists. Are they the same? Greenberg does not consider the question, and that is the weak point of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” When he speaks of artists for artists, he appears to be saying that living artists address living artists; unlike Fried, he doesn’t take into account the temporal 55

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dynamic of the avant-garde, which, however, is the only one compatible with the ambition he rightly assigns it. In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” modernism is derived from art for art’s sake, via Bohemia and an Alexandrianism “in motion.” Now, art for art’s sake, a doctrine given expression by Théophile Gautier, but of which he was neither the first nor the last practitioner, isolates and places above the values of life those “values only to be found in art,” in which Greenberg seems to believe, and whose autonomous existence I think it is urgent to contest, as I said above. It’s easy to see why. If not, the line between art and kitsch would only be a matter of taste. A people of artists would commune in the love of art, exalting at first the “discontinuity between art and life,” then deciding to live by the higher values of art. Aesthetics would then take the place of ethics, and the sublime purism of that people’s production would be charged with proving the morality of its conduct and the sincerity of its intentions.56 By speaking of artists for artists as though it were a matter of living artists addressing living artists, Greenberg makes the birth of abstract painting the heir of art for art’s sake, without seeing the profound difference between the two, where the relation to the other is concerned. He involuntarily refers back to a phenomenon he detested and which his whole doctrine of modernism holds for null and void as far as works are concerned, but which, if one is not careful, corrupts his defense of purism in “Towards a Newer Laocoon” and renders it vulnerable to accusations that make it verge on ethnic cleansing. He risks letting it be understood that there is no pertinent difference between those artists he judges to be the true milestones of the history of modernist painting (all of whom had to erase past masters, in order to address them) and those artists for artists who, finding no one else to speak to, gather together and close ranks, organizing societies, brotherhoods, artists’ colonies, schools, factions, clans, and cliques, continually inventing the ideological glue they need to be each other’s public. Whether a mystique of community or a shared political line, the ideological glue in question is always some doctrine of art for art’s sake, which in practice reveals itself to be a doctrine of life as art. Examples of such communities are not lacking; and even if a careful study would have to Only with the arrival of Jeff Koons has the difference in taste between purism and kitsch been completely bulldozed, so that a universally petty bourgeois artistic community communing in bad taste could claim to be founded on sincerity. 56

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distinguish between founding cases (the Jena romantics), academic caricatures (the French Parnasse), social clubs (Bloomsbury), or backwardlooking versions oriented around style (the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), modern ones oriented to the trade (the abbey of Créteil), and mystics dreaming of the synthesis of all arts (Monte Verità), I think it can safely be said that their common characteristic is to gather together artists who accept or claim to no longer address anyone but artists like themselves, and that, for several such communities (for example, the last two cited here), their political ideal reeks more or less of fascism. In its most radical forms, art for art’s sake identifies artists with a chosen people, but a chosen people without God, the Other, or the Torah. Or more sordidly: without Jews. Everyone here would be a creator and would address himself to all the others as forming at once an earthly society in which the pact is unanimous and a religious community celebrating one and the same cult to art. Each one would be at once the receiver helping guarantee ideal conditions of reception for the others and the addressee from whom the others expect symbolic recognition. In this purist phalanstery, art addresses those for whom it stands and stands for those whom it addresses. Much of the criticism levelled at Greenberg’s formalism accuses him of preaching a soft, secularized version of this religion of art. Once you submit the art Greenberg defended to the test of its treatment of the medium, you realize that this criticism doesn’t hold. In such an art for artists united by the religion of art, the medium is never the site of otherness: most of the time that role is taken by the image. The other, scotomized and foreclosed, returns in almost hallucinatory figurative representations. Symbolism, with its plethora of gryphons, sphinxes and chimeras, is the peak of this otherless art. When abstract art gives in to its spiritualist inclinations—and here again, examples are not lacking, under the influence of Péladan, Blavatsky, Besant, Steiner, Ouspensky, Schoenmaekers—it produces the same denial of the other. It is more difficult, for the medium is far more nakedly visible and calls for the painter’s attention with a technical crudity that forces him into a face-to-face relation with the picture’s flatness. Malevich and Mondrian were tempted, but happily they remained too much the painters to give in. Among the proto-abstractionists issuing from symbolism, like Hölzel or Sérusier, the temptation is strong: Kupka, O’Keeffe, the young Itten, and Kandinsky after 1920 suffered from it consistently, Klee sporadically. Tobey

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and Morris Graves are interesting cases, among the strands of American art that Greenberg favored. And I’ll say nothing of Max Ernst, in his abstract work, nor of the surrealists: I stick with painters whom Greenberg could still call modernists. The path leads straight to Yves Klein: tempted by all types of secret societies and their vague mysticism, he primarily aspired to be a community of one. He did not erase Malevich, as Rauschenberg erased Albers and de Kooning; he denied there was a Malevich before him. He did not negotiate a new convention (a pact) with an indistinct public of contemporaries, in the terms provided by the conventions (rules) of his medium. He claimed to conclude the pact, on terms fixed solely by himself, with a select public of buyers alone. He wanted to name his heirs and leave nothing for the others. He dreamed of an art that would stand only for Yves Klein and would be addressed only to the ruling class. He invented a technique he would share with no one, and which he copyrighted. Though it was powerful—that’s why he remains a good painter despite himself—he preferred to play the artist. No more medium, only the void—a void with the value of gold. With Klein, “art that stands for art” culminates in the sinister and grandiose parody of a medium manifesting itself in the economic form of pure exchange value. The commodity-form, Marx would have said.57 Would I say Klein is kitsch? Before a cast of Arman painted blue against a gold background, before a reduced Victory of Samothrace dipped in International Klein Blue, before Ci-gît l’espace, a parody of a tombstone gilt in gold leaf, before the ceremonial of the Anthropométries executed in a tuxedo for an audience of snobs, before the uniforms of the Republican Guards framing the entry to the exhibition of the void beneath a blue canopy, yes, without hesitation. Before the medium- and small-format IKB monochromes, before certain Monopinks and Monogolds, before the marvelous yellow square of 1957, I’ll do my all to save the painter. I cannot keep my aesthetic judgment from acquiescing to these pictures, from surrendering to the quality of their vibrant flatness. I experience my encounter with them as a face-toface, in something like Lévinas’s sense. They embody the other. But since I am not convinced that Klein surrendered to them, I am not ready to seal a pact with him. Alongside Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Yves Klein’s monochromes are among the works that formed the penultimate test of 57 See Thierry de Duve, “Yves Klein, or the Dead Merchant,” October 49, New York, Summer 1989.

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modernist painting for Greenberg—just short of the blank canvas, poised between “picture” and “successful picture.” Since the blank canvas is not the ultimate test for me, I would say of Yves Klein’s monochromes that some are successful pictures, without being able to decide if they are pictures at all, at least in the modernist sense. Yves le monochrome—as he liked to style himself, revealing as if by a slip of the tongue to whom his painting was addressed (kitsch, as I said above, offers a mirror without resistance to self-love)—is the limit-point and stumbling-block of the Greenbergian conception of the modernist painter. To include him in the history that stretches from Manet to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings would finally lead to the erasure of the historic opposition between the avant-garde and kitsch, bringing them both to culmination in the same place: in a sublime blue flatness, the exclusive property of the artist and his devotees. Greenberg never accused Yves Klein of being kitsch but of being avantgardist. Indeed, if the avant-garde’s resistance to kitsch was what preoccupied him in 1940, twenty-five years later it would be modernism’s resistance to avant-gardism. It’s no longer the same battle. But the case of Klein, whom for my part I would accuse of being both kitsch and avant-gardist, is eminently symptomatic of the point where the major concepts of Greenberg’s doctrine split apart or reconstitute new oppositions. First he shows that modernism and the avant-garde don’t necessarily go together. It is with “Modernist Painting” that Greenberg began consistently to employ the term “modernism” for the same thing he formerly designated by the term “avant-garde.” With one crucial difference (though in truth it isn’t one in his mind, but simply an explanation rendered necessary by recent developments in art): where avant-garde is a general term that doesn’t distinguish among the arts, there is only modernism in painting or in sculpture (or in music, in poetry, etc.), but not in art in general, since “the essence of modernism lies in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself,” and since by “discipline,” Greenberg understands the conventions of a specific medium. Art in general has no specificity. Now, when Klein wants to play the artist the better to be a painter, instead of making paintings so as to be an artist, he clouds the issue and raises the question whether a genuinely avant-garde art can develop outside the limits of painting or sculpture, specifically.58 This is the See my commentary on the Règles rituelles de la cession des zones de sensibilité picturale immatérielle, in “Yves Klein, or the Dead Merchant,” art. cit.

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big question that will pit Greenberg against the minimal and conceptual artists of the sixties.59 It is also the question that will make him expel from the genuine avant-garde what he considers as its avant-gardist perversion. Avant-gardist, for Greenberg, applies to all artistic practices that don’t proceed from the artist’s aesthetic conviction, but rather from a conscious intention to astound or to shock, to come off as new or hermetic, to break a current convention by calculation or strategy; practices that bank prospectively on what can retrospectively be known about the dynamic whereby the successive avant-gardes have been legitimated. For him, the phenomenon is relatively new, dating from the moment when the problem is no longer the lack of a ruling class to be addressed, so much as the lack of a strong academic tradition to oppose, the moment, therefore, when modern art entered the society’s mores by triumphantly entering the museum and became the central reference—in other words, the new convention, the new pact—not only for the artists themselves, but for a public enlarged to include the middle class. Greenberg lived through the creation of the MoMA and the efforts of Alfred Barr, Jr., to popularize modernism, he saw Pollock photographed like a star for Life, and he did not hesitate to contribute to Vogue himself; he accompanied and even accelerated these developments. He could hardly deny them all merit, but could no more easily avoid anxiety. When contemporary art regained a public—not on the basis of hard-won culture but through media travesty and misunderstandings of all sorts—it gradually discovered that it once again knew whom it was addressing, as an entire artworld became institutionalized. At this point conventions cease being uncertain pacts to be relentlessly subjected to an aesthetic test, and become simple social conventions—what Bourdieu calls habitus—capable of marking off from the masses those who, sincerely or by affectation, profess their attachment to the artworld. There’s no need to sketch out the picture in detail. That in the sixties, cultural mediators should have appeared with a role hardly distinct from the artists they frequented— people like Seth Siegelaub, Michel Claura, or Harald Szeeman—is the sure index of a conventionalization of the entire artworld around behaviors and attitudes that denote a quasi-professional knowledge of the rules of the game rather than a technical mastery of the aesthetic rules of the métier. The door

le 59

See “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” chapter 4 of Kant after Duchamp, op. cit.

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is open to concocted art, another of Greenberg’s names for avant-gardism. The métier, in Greenberg’s vocabulary, is called the medium. Thus it was to the medium, to its specificity and its “self-definition with a vengeance,” that he began to cling, from “Modernist Painting” on, to answer the threat of concocted art. It’s more than a pity because, as is well known, the artworld never pardoned him that. To separate his own blindness from the resentment of the many social climbers who flocked to the artworld, and to whom Greenberg was right to deny any true legitimacy, is a difficult and painful study which should be carried out case by case. But on the basis of the analysis attempted here, I would like to set a few things straight. It’s all the more necessary as I share Greenberg’s diagnosis of the artworld, a diagnosis in fact shared by many, Harold Rosenberg among others, since the 1950s. I also find the acceleration of the avant-gardist phenomenon disturbing, the more so because it is often accompanied by a vengeful revisionism aiming to liquidate the very notion of a vanguard, which is only a paradox for those who have not yet understood that the avant-garde is the only tradition worthy of the name—or if you prefer, that the only tradition worthy of the name is the avant-garde.60 Thus I will conclude with three remarks that lay a finger on the failings of Greenberg’s doctrinal positions in the three texts discussed here, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” and “Modernist Painting.” The first remark deals with the relation to the other, and takes support from the clarifications brought by the detour through T.J. Clark’s explanations. The second concerns the relation to time, and is based on Michael Fried’s interpretation of how modernism works. And the third looks out on the relation to life—which, after all, is what’s really at stake in art. Concerning the relation to the other—the social other. Following Clark’s analysis, it becomes possible to understand the extent to which the absence of a “natural” addressee—with the decay of the aristocracy, the philistinism If I retain the word avant-garde, even though elsewhere I have chosen to let it go because of its military connotations and the heavy ideological mortgage that weighs on it, it is because experience has taught me how great the risk of misunderstanding is when one uses the word “tradition” is a non-pejorative way. Certain taboos are most definitely hard to shake, as though “tradition” automatically referred to Bouguereau when it actually signifies transmission. Establishing a termby-term equivalence between avant-garde and tradition means assuming that there is no going back where the modern mode of transmitting art from one generation of artists to the next is concerned— or in other words, where the mode of filiation is concerned—but that one must go forward. Paternity is what remains to be invented, practically as well as theoretically. 60

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of the bourgeoisie, the elite’s disinterest in art, and the cultural abdication of the ruling class in general, in a historical period marked by the Revolution, industrialization, unchecked urbanization, and class struggle—is what pushed painting to its ultimate modernist retrenchments. The more the medium becomes the site of “the lack of an adequate ruling class to address,” the more modernist painters are driven to envisage it in its specific characteristics, in its “purity,” because they have no choice but to address a medium whose conventions are reduced to pacts among craftsmen of the same trade. Painting’s purification of literary allusions and of any confusion with sculpture is a secondary effect of this process. Little matter whether Clark foregrounds the negativity of the purist enterprise—the progressive whittling away that “leads back and back to the black square, the hardly differentiated field of sound, the infinitely flimsy skein of spectral colour, speech stuttering and petering out into etceteras or excuses”—while Greenberg, for his part, has apparently found new optimism by the time of “Modernist Painting” and sees the progressive emptying of all the “expendable conventions” of painting as a “tropism towards esthetic value as such.” The important thing is that in the absence of non-professional partners at the site of the pact, the painters are alone. That held true for the nineteenth century, that may have held true in America up until the Second World War, but it no longer holds in 1960. It has become very difficult to distinguish artists by trade from the semi-professionals of art who surround them. To pursue modernist painting as though its social conditions were still those of its beginnings, as Greenberg recommends (whatever he may say), is to risk making painting without any stake in the otherness the medium should bear. This is what is meant by formalism in the pejorative sense. Olitski paints for his clientele, participants in an artworld that passes untroubled from an exhibition of post-painterly abstraction to an exhibition of pop art, which Greenberg reviles as concocted art. It’s hard to see how one can sustain an irreducible opposition between modernism and avantgardism on such foundations. Greenberg rapidly loses all credibility. Concerning the relation to time—the time of tradition. This loss of credibility casts a retrospective doubt over the difference, so clear for Greenberg, between an art that proceeds from aesthetic conviction, from surrender and involuntary tropism, and an art born of the conscious intent to astonish or shock, to appear new, to provoke refusal, an art that bets by

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calculation or strategy on the “logic” of the avant-garde. If such is the definition of avant-gardism, then David, Géricault, Courbet, Manet, and even Ingres are avant-gardists. Painters have perhaps never developed more deliberate strategies of address—including the numerous variations on absorption and theatricality that Fried has perceived so well—than at the time when they depended to an unequalled degree on their success at the Salon for their material survival. Thus there is nothing new in this phenomenon. Yet I will not conclude that there is no difference between the avant-garde and avant-gardism; on the contrary, I think it is crucial to understand that difference correctly, now that avant-gardism is the new academicism and it is considered chic to put a “post” before “modernism.” The explanation of modernism given by Fried allows us to see what the opposition avant-garde / avant-gardism really entails. The desire of the modernist painter—certainly in the time of Courbet and Manet, but why not also in that of Pollock or Richter—to compare with “the painting of the past whose quality seems to him beyond question” is all the greater when he ceaselessly contests and undermines that painting of the past with his provocations. To grant modernist painting its full force of negativity is not (as I fear it has been for Clark) to give into disenchantment before the rather meager aspect of certain of its late products. It is to rediscover in the best painters of each phase of modernism the snobs and social agitators who master the art of addressing to a particular social class messages drafted in the language of another, and the even more provocative art of not addressing to a given social class messages which have ostensibly been drafted in its language. It is thanks to such artists that “the popular” addresses the bourgeoisie but stands for the people. Their provocation first has the literal sense and the value of a call thrown ahead, this being said without forgetting the theoretical hypothesis—that there is only value where a substitution is possible, with an addressee taking the place of a receiver. In modernism, art has value for the artists of the future and is addressed to the artists of the past. It is as if the avant-garde artist “reasoned” in the following way: my work is valid for the artists who will follow me, it will have value for those I influence, it anticipates their works and can take its place beside them in advance; but it is to the past masters that I address my demand for recognition, it is by the yardstick of their work that my progeny will have to judge mine. In cruder tones: what’s the use of being adulated by my

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grandchildren if they use me to legitimate the idea that anything goes! The level of an artist’s ambition can be recognized by this concern, and it is when one shares such a concern that one can say, with Greenberg, that the avantgarde is the only real defense of the tradition. Avant-gardism is precisely the reverse: to say that art stands for the artists of the past but addresses the artists of the future. The avant-gardist artist would “reason” in this way: my work stands for the past masters, it can erase them, sweeping away their work and acting as a substitute for it; and since they cannot answer me, I address the artists of the future with this perverse calculation: that those I influence will no longer be able to make the comparison, if indeed they have decided that my work achieves the break with the past. This “reasoning,” I’m afraid, too often forms the pact of today’s institutionalized artworld. It is this tacit accord of amnesia that sends the new philistines rushing out to the art galleries, having understood that by collecting contemporary art they can get a cheap deal on a instant, ready-made artistic culture (cheap where effort is concerned, which doesn’t keep them from paying record prices). I said “ready-made,” and not by accident. Duchamp became Greenberg’s bogeyman at the very moment he became the exclusive reference for an entire artworld enraptured with the godsend that a radical paradigm shift due to Duchamp, the pioneer of avant-gardism and the undertaker of the avant-garde, would purportedly constitute. Concerning the relation to life—to life in its symbolic difference from art. Eros c’est la vie, said the enraptured Rrose Sélavy, who also said, less happily (but it was before her sex-change): On n’a que: pour femelle la pissotière et on en vit. (“One only has; for female the public urinal and one lives by it.” 61) Has anyone ever noticed that when Duchamp declares he wants to make eroticism an artistic “ism” he seeks neither to lead his life— and even less that of others—by the elevated and disinterested values of art, be it the art of love in Ovid’s sense, nor to lower art to the level of the notoriously interested values of sexual appetite, indeed to the level of men’s Michel Sanouillet, ed., Duchamp du Signe (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), p. 37; tr. Michel Sanouillet & Elmer Peterson, eds., Salt Seller, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), p. 23. 62 “I believe in eroticism a lot, because it’s truly a rather widespread thing throughout the world, a thing that everyone understands. It replaces, if you wish, what other literary schools called Symbolism, Romanticism. It could be another ‘ism,’ so to speak.” Marcel Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), tr. Ron Padgett, p. 88. 61

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pressing everyday needs?62 As demonstrated by the famous ready-made urinal, he simply puts the difference of the sexes and the difference that separates art from life in the same place. One is as irreducible as the other. The difference is symbolic, on the order of the name (the name-of-the-father for the difference of the sexes according to Lacan, the name of art for the readymade according to Duchamp—but it’s the same). Absolute as it may be, it never way stops the values of life from circulating through those of art, and vice-versa. I’m afraid that many of the artists among Duchamp’s grandchildren may have forgotten just that. They have made Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism” into a matter of decree or of change of context, in either case an institutional affair. Since Duchamp, it’s taken for granted that anything and everything can be art, and today’s artworld lives on the pact which holds that any object whatsoever, as soon as it’s put in a museum or a gallery, presents itself to the public with the pre-installed status of art. All the visitors have to do is take off their hats. Greenberg couldn’t stand that, and I can’t either. But he was mistaken as to the interpretation of Duchamp’s gesture, like his opponents at the time and many of Duchamp’s grandchildren today. Duchamp is a modernist in a generalized sense that Greenberg was not able to recognize; he is not avant-gardist but avant-garde. I said at the beginning of this essay that the “discontinuity between art and life” and the “need to accept a convention” were important points of doctrine for Greenberg, to which I have no objection. It was on the condition, of course, of understanding that to accept a convention doesn’t mean to submit to it but to consider that art is born from constraint; on the condition that artistic constraint be identified with the necessity for a pact to be sealed around the name of art; and on the condition that everything spring from the demand for a pact, that is, from the address to an indeterminate other. I also said that these two points of doctrine served as a foundation for Greenberg’s conviction that there exists “an agreement” resting on “a fairly constant distinction between those values only to be found in art and the values which can be found elsewhere,” another point of doctrine which, on the contrary, I find it urgent to contest. When these “values only to be found in art” flatten into the sterile tautology decreeing that art is what the institution names art, then it is most urgent to challenge such a doctrine. Before another tautology decrees that life is what the institution calls life.

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Wavering Reflections

In an aside to an article on Hans Hofmann in The Nation of April 21, 1945, Greenberg reconsiders his hard judgment of the purist theories of Mondrian, expressed in the columns of the same paper two weeks earlier—a judgment motivated, he says, by his irritation at the painter’s dogmatism: Mondrian attempted to elevate as the goal of the total historical development of art what is after all only a time-circumscribed style. That style may be—I myself believe it is—the direction in which high art now tends and will continue to tend in the forseeable future. But in art a historical tendency cannot be presented as an end in itself. Anything can be art now or in the future—if it works—and there are no hierarchies of styles except on the basis of past performances. And these are powerless to govern the future. What may have been the high style of one period becomes the kitsch of another.1

These lines and the page that follows, where Greenberg traces an astounding parallel between Mondrian’s theories and those of Marx, can be read as a remarkable late postscript to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” or as a no-less remarkable advance warning of the way to interpret “Modernist Painting” some fifteen years later. It is with these two readings in mind that I stress Greenberg’s apparently untroubled remark that anything can be art—if it works. At the time of “Modernist Painting” he began to be seriously troubled, though, and his irritation grew stronger as a new generation of artists abandoned their brushes for an art of the de- and re-contextualized object (pop, minimal, and conceptual), behind which arose the undaunted ironic silhouette of Marcel Duchamp. He was so troubled that at the close of the sixties he no longer deemed it sufficient to answer this new generation, which he disliked, with a judgment of taste. Something had changed for the theory of art, and it had to 1 “Review of an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann and a Reconsideration of Mondrian’s Theories,” The Nation, April 21, 1945; Greenberg II, p. 19.

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be understood. Greenberg was relatively ill-prepared for philosophical aesthetics and pure theory. Resolute empiricist that he was, he dove into it nonetheless, taking constant support from his own experience and hoping to use the dikes of theory to contain the overflow of the “anything goes” that he perceived, or thought he perceived, in the art being created around him. What interests me is not whether he could have attained his aim. He did not, and all the better. When it is not simply futile, the hope that theorizing can dam up artistic activity is dangerous. What interests me is rather that he theorized on the basis of “anything goes.” The observation that henceforth, art could indeed be made out of anything, is what incited him to become a theorist: all the dikes had broken, and aesthetics had to be rethought in new terms. Greenberg turned his efforts to that task in ten articles, all entitled “Seminar,” eight of which were published in various art journals. Though motivated by fear, Greenberg’s undertaking in no way resembles a return to order. When one accepts as a given that art can be made out of anything, then everything is open, the field of practice is unlimited, and the act of judgment which must decide what is worthy of being called art and what is not, or what is less worthy, has no more norms on which to repose. Indeed, that is exactly why the work of theory must be taken up afresh, for it is far less a matter of knowing under what conditions aesthetic judgment can legitimately decide—when anything is authorized there are no more conditions—than of asking how aesthetic judgment works to arrive at its decisions. And whose judgment? And what does it decide? And how is it communicated? A series of questions all linked together, and linked, in Greenberg’s mind, to a struggle for the survival of art. Such questions cannot be answered dogmatically—for one thing because “armchair” theorizing is impossible in aesthetics. It may exist, but it is inherently null and void. The fabrication of concepts must always be verified by personal experience; theoretical reflection must always be an extension in the intellectual sphere of the free use of reflexive judgment that Kant saw as the essence of aesthetic judgment. But another reason they can’t be answered dogmatically is the unbridgeable gap that exists between personal experience and the fabrication of concepts, between aesthetic judgment and theoretical reflection. Sometimes Greenberg forgets this gap—but when he does, it takes revenge and returns in his text. And when he doesn’t, the text as a whole, in its momentum, its phrasing, its rhythm, its punctuation, bears the heuristic mark

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of this unbridgeable gap. Such a mark can be found in all the “Seminars,” as well as in other texts with a theoretical aim, like the famous “Can Taste be Objective?” of 1973. Its return and its variations in the work of Greenberg the theorist is what I would like to investigate here, as so many waverings in his reflection. I propose to submit a rather long excerpt of “Seminar One” to a very close reading, in order to point out a number of these waverings. Some are symptomatic in nature, betraying the art critic’s anxiety before the risks of decline and decadence, and his obsession with finding a scapegoat. Others partake of the theoretical impasse, of contradictions glimpsed but not resolved, and of the pain that results, in particular when the chosen scapegoat is also the source of theoretical illumination. Still others have to do with the writing, with the style and its strict intellectual honesty; these partake of self-reconsideration and something like thinking out loud. Not only does Greenberg interest me in such case s, he moves me as well. Here is the passage in question: If anything and everything can be intuited aesthetically, then anything and everything can be intuited and experienced artistically. What we agree to call art cannot be definitively or decisively separated from aesthetic experience at large. (That this began to be seen only lately—thanks to Marcel Duchamp for the most part—doesn’t make it any the less so.) The notion of art, put to the test of experience, proves to depend in the showdown, not on skilful making (as the ancients held), but on that act of distancing to which I just called attention. Art, coinciding with aesthetic experience in general, means simply, and yet not so simply, a twist of attitude toward your own awareness and its objects. If this is so, then there turns out to be such a thing as art at large: art that is, or can be, realized anywhere and at any time and by anybody. In greatest part (to put it weakly), art at large is realized inadvertently and solipsistically, as art that cannot be communicated adequately by the person who realizes or “creates” it. The aesthetic intuition of a landscape when you don’t convey it through a medium like language, drawing, music, dance, mime, painting, sculpture, or photography belongs to yourself alone; nevertheless, the fact that you don’t communicate your intuition through a viable medium doesn’t deprive it of its “status” as art. (Croce had a glimmering of this.) The difference between art at large and what the world has so far agreed to call art is between the uncommunicated and the communicated. But I don’t find it a difference that holds. Everything that enters awareness can be communicated in one way or another, even if only partly. The crucial difference is not between the communicated and

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the uncommunicated, but between art that is fixed in forms that are conventionally recognized as artistic and art that is not fixed in such forms. On the one side there is unformalized, fleeting, “raw” art, and on the other there is art that is put on record, as it were, through a medium that is generally acknowledged as artistic. Yet even this difference is a tenuous one: a difference of degree, not of experienced essence or of demonstrable “status.” You can’t point to, much less define, the things or the place where formalized art stops and unformalized art begins. (Thus flower-arranging and landscape architecture can be said to belong to either, though I myself would claim that they both belong very definitely to formalized art. There are other such cases. It’s the great theoretical service of the kind of recent art that strives to be advanced that it has made us begin to be aware of how uncertain these differences are: the difference between art and non-art as well as that between formalized and unformalized art.)2

Let us examine this passage sentence by sentence, finding where the reflections waver and making use of this wavering in a way which is itself reflexive, that is to say, heuristic. To do so it will often be necessary to explicate the text with the help of other passages or other texts by Greenberg, in order to locate the precise spot where something is left unexplained, signaling a possible avenue of exploration. I will not exploit all the meanders and nuances of the text and will follow no avenue to the very end, but will simply indicate the departure points which have caught my attention, and suggest where they might lead. Let us begin.

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If anything and everything can be intuited aesthetically, then anything and everything can be intuited and experienced artistically. Greenberg employs the word “intuition” much as Croce does: it is a perception, an unintellectualized synthesis of sensations which can emanate from the possible as well as from the real. (Thus one can have an intuition concerning an imagined or imaginary object.) Earlier in the same seminar, Greenberg establishes a distinction between two sorts of intuitions:

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Ordinary intuition informs, apprises, orients you, and in doing that always points to other things than itself, to other things than the act of intuition itself.… The moment, however, that an act of intuition stops with itself and ceases to inform or point it changes from an ordinary intuition into an aesthetic one.… It’s

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Clement Greenberg, “Seminar One,” Arts Magazine, Vol. 48, November 1973, pp. 44-45.

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implicit in what I have said above that anything that can be intuited in the primary mode can also be intuited in the aesthetic mode.3

This is what explains how anything and everything can become the object of an aesthetic intuition. Until now the word “aesthetic” only denotes a reflexive and non-transitive use of intuition: aesthetic intuition is distinguished from the ordinary variety by the suspension of all practical interest; it lingers over itself. Elsewhere in the same text, Greenberg explains that if you look at the color of the sky for itself (he doesn’t even say, “for its beauty”) and not to see what the weather is like, you make an aesthetic use of your intuition or perception. What remains unexplained is the equivalence of the adjectives “aesthetic” and “artistic.” Perhaps another excerpt will clarify things: Aesthetic intuition is entirely a matter of value and valuing—nothing else but that.… With the same immediacy as that with which ordinary intuition registers the properties of things…, so aesthetic intuition registers value and values. There’s simply no separating aesthetic intuition from evaluation; it can’t be imagined or thought of without that.4

The mystery thickens. How is it that looking at the sky for itself (not even for its beauty) can register value, or values? What is the meaning of the wavering that makes Greenberg hesitate between the singular and the plural? And how is the reflexivity of aesthetic intuition in itself inseparable from an evaluation, that is to say, a judgment?

ng

The intuition of aesthetic value is an act of liking more or less, or an act of not liking more or less. What is liked or not liked is an affect or a group of affects.5

a te on ar,

Liking an affect? Liking being affected? Does this doubling of feeling hold a key to the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment? Are we dealing with an aesthetics of Einfühlung in the manner of Worringer, where the subject enjoys itself enjoying the perception of an object? First we would have to know more about the nature of this affect. Greenberg continues:

ys … to t’s

Aesthetic value or quality is affect; it moves, touches, stirs you. But affect here is not to be equated with anything so “simple” as emotion; aesthetic affect comprehends and transcends emotion; it does that in being value and in compelling you to like it more or less, or not like it more or less. Value doesn’t provoke emotion. Aesthetic value, aesthetic quality can be said to elicit Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 45. 5 Ibid. 3 4

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satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, but this is not the same thing as emotion. Satisfaction or dissatisfaction is “verdict of taste.”6

The distinction between satisfaction and emotion is a traditional one; it situates Greenberg’s aesthetics on the side of taste and not of the sublime, and thus draws it away from Worringer’s. More enigmatic is the equivalence (strongly emphasized by the use of italics on the copula) between the three terms: value, quality, and affect. In Greenberg’s vocabulary the words “value” and “quality” are consistently interchangeable and are most often employed in the singular (as in Croce’s writing, where beauty, aesthetic value, felicitous expression or simply expression are all perfectly synonymous)—but that does not clear away the ambiguity. By analogy: who would say that a moral value and a moral quality are the same? Value is an ideal which holds for the group; quality is what the individual must have to uphold value. The word “quality,” when inflected toward Aristotle or scholasticism, is not far from signifying the same thing as “the property of an object,” which it colors qualitatively (and in the excerpt above, Greenberg could have written “With the same immediacy as that with which ordinary intuition registers the properties of things…, so aesthetic intuition registers their qualities”); whereas the word “value,” if it means anything, must imply something shared, an appreciation shared by a group. It has a social, collective, or community dimension which the word “quality” does not, and which could put us on the track of the equivalence between aesthetic and artistic intuition, to the extent that the domain of human activities called art necessarily implies a system of values instituted by and for a group. But Greenberg never follows this lead, and it is the identification of the notion of value or aesthetic quality with its subjective counterpart, affect, that allows him to continue in this way: From everything I’ve said so far it ought to emerge that aesthetic judgment is not voluntary.… Your aesthetic judgment, being an intuition and nothing else, is received, not taken. You no more choose to like or not like a given item of art than you choose to see the sun as bright or the night as dark.7

Were it not for the wavering in “quality” and “value,” Greenberg’s silence about any social—that it is to say, more or less instituted—dimension of aesthetic quality ought to lead him, if pushed far enough, to accept that if 6 7

Ibid. Ibid.

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I feel no affect before a painting by Rembrandt, for example (in other words, if I register no quality, even though I do register the properties of the object), then the painting is not art. And in fact, in another of his “Seminars” he goes exactly that far, though one might of course guess that it is not Rembrandt he has in mind here, but rather, Jasper Johns or Robert Morris: It remains: that when no aesthetic value judgment, no verdict of taste, is there, then art isn’t there either, then aesthetic experience of any kind isn’t there. It’s as simple as that.8

What we agree to call art cannot be definitively or decisively separated from aesthetic experience at large. (That this began to be seen only lately— thanks to Marcel Duchamp for the most part—doesn’t make it any the less so.) The level of general consensus that holds around Rembrandt is, of course, sufficiently high that it would be extremely difficult, not to say absurd, to deny that Rembrandt’s work is art on the pretext that it does not make me feel any affect. But what about a readymade by Marcel Duchamp? It is clear that the consensus of the contemporary artworld, which has hailed Duchamp’s work since the fifties and sixties, was not considered sufficient by Clement Greenberg; on the contrary, everything he wrote since roughly 1965 was destined to counter that general accord. Now, given the reasoning above, either Greenberg liked the group of affects that the vision of the readymades elicited from him, in which case they were to be considered art, and good art—it’s as simple as that—or he didn’t like it, in which case they were also to be considered art, but execrable art—and it’s just that simple. Not for an instant did Greenberg deny that the readymades are art, and that he was affected by them; everything is there to prove it. One can speculate on what his reaction might have been if Duchamp had actually realized his project: “Reciprocal Readymade = Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.”9 This would have been the ironic counter-proof to his aesthetics, because affect or no affect, the mere reestablishment of a transitive and not reflexive use of the artwork ought to be enough to block any aesthetic experience. But the readymades do not block aesthetic experience. On the contrary, they were essential to the understanding that “what we agree to call art cannot be definitively or decisively separated from aesthetic experience at large.” 8 9

“Seminar Seven,” Arts Magazine, Vol. 52, June 1978, p. 97. Salt Seller, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, op. cit. p. 32.

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Greenberg goes so far as to say, on several occasions, that the readymades have demonstrated as much: Since then [Duchamp’s readymades] it has become clearer too, that anything that can be experienced at all can be experienced aesthetically; and that anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced as art. In short, art and the aesthetic don’t just overlap, they coincide.10 And yet once again: something has been demonstrated that was worth demonstrating. Art like Duchamp’s has shown, as nothing before has, how wide open the category of even formalized aesthetic experience can be. This has been true all along, but it had to be demonstrated in order to be known as true. The discipline of aesthetics has received new light.… Art as such has lost the honorific status it never deserved as such; and aesthetics will never be again what it used to be.11

There is no waver at all in the various formulations of the lesson learned from Duchamp. Greenberg acknowledges a demonstration which in his opinion has been made once and for all, and which forever changes the discipline of aesthetics: aesthetic experience, intuition, or judgment (these three things all coming down to the same) can be extended to any and everything, and this any and everything can become part of “what we agree to call art.” But here, in this last little phrase, gapes an abyss. An agreement, a consensus, is postulated, which in its turn postulates a community or a collectivity, leading one to ask: who is this “we”? And—a corollary betraying no small anxiety—what is the degree of civilization or barbarity, of culture or ignorance, of sophistication or philistinism attained by this “we,” if indeed one observes that its accord is based on a smallest common denominator having lost all honorific status? There is more than a waver here, there is a quaver of fear, and we will have to wait until further along in the text to see whether it opens a breach or fills one. In the meantime, let us note that for Greenberg the word “art,” the name of art, when applied to a readymade, has a most peculiar critical-theoretical status (one which interests me to the highest degree): it is the smallest common denominator of aesthetic experience “at large.” Art is the name received by the simple fact of being affected by an intuition which, rather than being transitive, lingers over itself and “receives” value. “Counter-Avant-garde,” Art International, May 1971, reprinted in Joseph Masheck, ed., Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 129. 11 “Seminar Six,” Arts Magazine, Vol. 50, June 1976, p. 93. 10

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The notion of art, put to the test of experience, proves to depend in the showdown, not on skilful making (as the ancients held), but on that act of distancing to which I just called attention. Art, coinciding with aesthetic experience in general, means simply, and yet not so simply, a twist of attitude toward your own awareness and its objects. Slightly before the passage analyzed here, Greenberg had indeed called attention, as he says, to “a mind-set... whereby that which enters awareness is perceived and accepted for its own immediate sake,” and “not at all for the bearing it might have on your interests or on any one else’s interests.” I will leave aside the possible evocation of the Kantian theme of disinterestedness (though it is not unrelated to what we are dealing with here) and I will only note in passing that by attributing to aesthetic distancing the meaning of a change of attitude, Greenberg places himself, probably without realizing it, at a theoretical crossroads where he risks having to trade his theory of taste for a theory of aesthetic attitude—with an important consequence he seems not to perceive, which is that contrary to aesthetic intuition, aesthetic attitude can be voluntary.12 Had he followed through on this consequence, he would have opened in theory the very same path he reproached Duchamp for opening in practice: the path of what he calls “concocted art,” art which is not born of involuntary aesthetic experience and therefore no longer legitimately deserves its name, but simply obtains it by decree, by the sole virtue of a displacement into the institutional context of art. But Greenberg stops short on the subject of aesthetic attitude, as if that allowed him to exempt Duchamp and his readymades from the disastrous consequences he accuses his posterity of having brought forth. For the readymades can still be put to “the test of experience.” In “Counter-AvantGarde,” the paragraph analyzed above is repeated almost word for word; but the last sentence shows that he was indeed thinking of the readymades when he reduced aesthetic intuition to the simple act of distancing: The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skilful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing—an act that can be performed even without the help of sense perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such 12 The notion that aesthetic theories from Joseph Addison to Edward Bullough have been split into theories of taste and theories of aesthetic attitude has been proposed by George Dickie, who— and this is what must be stressed here, in a context haunted by Duchamp—claims to refute both types in favor of an institutional theory of art. See George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. I, # 1, 1964, pp. 56-66; and G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art.13

Greenberg remains silent on the “twist of attitude” that converts any and everything into a work of art. Does he say something more about the act of distancing that effects this conversion? Of what distance does he speak, a distance from the object or a distance from the subject? “Seminar Five” contains a curious answer: That any and everything can be experienced aesthetically amounts to saying that experience in general, presumably all experience, can double back on itself. Aesthetic experience is the experiencing of experience. (Hence “aesthetic distance,” which should mean removing yourself by “doubling” from any possible consequence of experience.)14 The waverings of “double back” and “doubling” make the text particularly enigmatic. Distancing is in any case a question of reflexivity, of taking things at “one remove.” But how far does that process go? The following passage is even more enigmatic: But there’s one kind of experience that can’t double back on itself, and that’s aesthetic experience itself. If it could that would mean receiving aesthetic judgments of aesthetic judgments, which can’t be done.… You would have to separate a judgment from its object or occasion in order to experience the judgment aesthetically, the judgment all by itself; if you couldn’t effect this separation you would simply be duplicating or trying to duplicate the original experience of that judgment.15

This is a remarkable if laborious attempt to think through something which resists precisely because Greenberg hesitates or refuses to embark on a theory of aesthetic attitude (rightly, in my opinion) and sticks at any cost to the positions of an aesthetics of taste (wrongly, in my opinion). Let us recall that in “Seminar Five” as in all the theoretical texts of this period, his debate is with the demonstration that he attributes to Duchamp, after which “aesthetics will never be again what it used to be.” Now, the experience of the readymades (the whole question being: in what sense is this an aesthetic experience?) seems indeed to double back on itself, as if indeed we had an aesthetic experience of our aesthetic judgment, as if the act of distancing that “Counter-Avant-Garde,” art. cit., p. 129. “Seminar Five,” Studio International, Vol. 189-190, p. 191. 15 Ibid. 13

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converts a snow shovel or a urinal into a work of art could really be enjoyed “at one remove.” Greenberg himself can’t escape that pleasure, despite his resentment of Duchamp and above all of Duchamp’s followers. When he credits them for having done aesthetics a “great theoretical service” (as he will do further on in the passage we’re analyzing), it’s easy to sense that he takes an almost narcissistic joy in the fact of having understood it. I myself readily admit that in my own work on and around the readymade, a great deal of this pleasure “at one remove”—a properly intellectual pleasure which I have a hard time not calling aesthetic, just as the mathematician’s pleasure at finding an elegant equation is aesthetic—has entered. And I won’t deny what is narcissistic about it, even and above all if I know better and better, with every day that passes in meditation on these things, that it was Duchamp, and not Greenberg or myself or anyone else, who deposited in the readymades a theoretical discovery he had the elegance to let others extract. Anyway, whoever has meditated even a little on the act of distancing provoked by Duchamp will agree that if the readymades, individually (snow shovel, urinal, etc.), form the object of a direct aesthetic experience, at no remove, they mostly and almost immediately set off a inquiry concerning the readymade, in general. But what is the readymade, in general, except the idea that if a particular urinal is a work of art, then all urinals can be works of art, and that if a urinal, a snow shovel, a bottle rack, and a comb are works of art, then any object whatsoever can also be one? Whether he recognizes it or not, it is to just this question that Greenberg is led by Duchamp. And it is this same question, I believe, that causes him to ask whether an aesthetic experience “at one remove” is possible. He answers in the negative, and rightly so: What makes aesthetic judgments different is that their objects or occasions are unique—one-time things at any given time. This is why it’s impossible to detach or abstract aesthetic judgments from their objects, which in turn is why it’s impossible to gain aesthetic distance—the distance essential to aesthetic experience—from aesthetic experience itself.16

Greenberg is right. Here I must open an autobiographical parenthesis: I had to leave the first chapter of my book Résonances du readymade slumbering in a drawer for over eight years, because I had not correctly 16

Ibid.

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resolved the same problem. In that chapter, entitled “Artefact,” I said that “the readymade is not an artwork in the ordinary sense of the word, but an artefact of an artwork, an artificial work at one remove: neither simply art, nor art for art’s sake, but art about art, or better, to use one of Duchamp’s favorite expressions, art apropos of art.”17 Thus I had fabricated an object (the readymade, in the singular) which satisfied the impression of aesthetic experience “at one remove” rejected by Greenberg. And yet I did not really place my faith in it any more than he, since the object in question remained a purely theoretical one, defined as the statement “this is art,” when it is tacked onto any object whatsoever. To function as a theoretical object, “this is art” had to be valid a priori for all possible objects, while having actually, empirically, been tacked only to Duchamp’s readymades, as objects in no way predestined for the name of art. It gradually became clear to me that unless I was satisfied with the distant gaze of a Martian anthropologist on the artistic mores of my time, I had no right to press ahead immediately to this theoretical object at one remove, skipping over a more straightforward “this is art” bearing not on the readymade in the singular, that is to say, in general, but on the readymades individually, that is to say, in the singular. Thus was I led, not only to state loudly that I liked the readymades and that they were art, but also to endlessly inquire into the theoretical and historical meanings of a culture for which the paradigm of aesthetic judgment on art no longer took the form of a sentence like “this is beautiful (or sublime, or anything else of the sort), as painting, sculpture, music, poetry, etc., that is to say as art,” but instead crystallized in the naked phrase “this is art.” I won’t go back over the solutions which I think I have found, and which allowed me to complete and publish “Artefact.”18 But I will admit that even today I am not certain of being much more advanced than Greenberg, where the temptation of a kind of infinite regress of the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment is concerned. And this for a very simple reason which I’m sure is shared by many, beginning with many conceptual artists who have sought precisely to “gain aesthetic distance from aesthetic experience itself”: I am 17 Thierry de Duve, “Artefact,” first chapter of Résonances du readymade (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 1989), p. 15. 18 I was, however, not totally satisfied with “Artefact,” because it failed to bring out clearly enough the distinction between “this is art” as aesthetic judgment and as statement (énoncé, in Michel Foucault’s sense). Its latest and at last satisfactory version is chapter 7 of Kant after Duchamp, entitled “Archaeology of Pure Modernism.”

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not able, in all honesty, to simply say of a readymade “this is art” without bringing into play all those reflections at one, two, and multiple removes that I, like so many others, have been led to by the bedeviling Marcel Duchamp. And when Greenberg attempts to cut short any temptation of infinite regress by saying, “You would have to separate a judgment from its object or occasion in order to experience the judgment aesthetically, the judgment all by itself; if you couldn’t effect this separation you would simply be duplicating or trying to duplicate the original experience of that judgment,” I often think not only that this is exactly the type of experience touched off by Duchamp’s readymades (there is in fact no need to see them in order to enjoy them as art), but also that an entire school of art has followed suit, an art of the replica (Sherrie Levine gilding Duchamp’s urinal or Elaine Sturtevant painting “true-false” Stellas)—and that I see little future in such practices. I’ll close the parenthesis by repeating that Greenberg is right when he maintains that “it’s impossible to detach or abstract aesthetic judgments from their objects.” This is the mainstay of all aesthetic theory and the best remedy against the siren songs. It remains, however, that the question is one of distancing, not of detachment or abstraction, and it is indeed with respect to the object that aesthetic experience—which is “the experience of experience”—takes its distance. But Greenberg also understands distancing in another way, as distancing from the subject, and this latter understanding may be more important than the first. In “Seminar II” he declares: No sane human being lives shut off from aesthetic experience of some kind. But not all sane human beings develop taste beyond a certain point—taste in any art or medium. The impediments here are mostly social, but often they are temperamental or owed to circumstances of upbringing that have nothing to do with social or economic factors. Yet whatever their origin, these impediments do tend to make themselves felt as natively personal (like many other things actually owed to circumstance). They settle in as an aspect of your very individual, private self, and thus as part of your “subjectivity.” Now it’s precisely the subjective that, more than anything else immediate, gets in the way of the distancing which is essential to aesthetic experience. The “subjective” means whatever particularizes you as a self with practical, psychological, interested, isolating concerns. In aesthetic experience you more or less distance yourself from that self. You become as “objective” as you do when reasoning, which likewise requires distancing from the private self. And in both cases the degree of

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objectivity depends on the extent of the distancing. The greater—or “purer”—the distancing, the stricter, which is to say the more accurate, your taste or your reasoning becomes. To become more objective in the sense just given means to become more impersonal. But the pejorative associations of “impersonal” are excluded here. Here, in becoming more impersonal, you become more like other human beings—at least in principle—and therefore more of a representative human being, one who can more adequately represent the species.19

Greenberg equates his “distancing from the private self” with an effort toward objectivity, but this objectivity (which he puts between quotation marks), and the analogy which he draws between it and reasoning, in no way implies that aesthetic judgment becomes rational and ceases to be subjective, because in this context “subjective” means essentially that aesthetic judgment remains passive and involuntary.20 The exhortation (and there is one, though discreet) to go beyond “the subjective” in the other sense, namely as “whatever particularizes you as a self with practical, psychological, interested, isolating concerns,” not only rejoins the Kantian motif of disinterestedness, but also recalls the same philosopher’s maxim of a “broadened way of thinking.”21 There is nothing to take issue with in that, nor in the qualification of this effort toward objectivity as impersonal. But a wavering appears in the final sentence of the passage above, and sets the stage for dangerous slippages. What is the sense of this “at least in principle”—transcendental claim or empirical arrogance? The idea that a given human being can really and empirically “more adequately represent the species,” on the pretext that his “Seminar II,” Art International, Vol. 18, # 6, summer 1974, p. 73. “Yet rational conclusions can no more be chosen than esthetic ones can. Thus even if esthetic judgments could be arrived at through ratiocination, they would still be involuntary—as involuntary as one’s acceptance of the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4.” “Complaints of an Art Critic,” Artforum, October 1967; Greenberg IV, p. 268. 21 In § 40 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant recalls the three maxims of common sense, the first one being the maxim of understanding, the second that of judgment, and the third that of reason: “(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; (3) to think always consistently.... As for the second maxim concerning [a person’s] way of thinking, it seems that we usually [use a negative term and] call someone limited (of a narrow mind as opposed to a broad mind) if his talents are insufficient for a use of any magnitude.... But we are not talking here about the power of cognition, but about the way of thinking [that involves] putting this power to a purposive use; and this, no matter how slight may be the range and the degree of a person’s natural endowments, still indicates a man with a broadened way of thinking if he overrides the private subjective conditions of his judgment, into which so many others are locked, as it were, and reflects on his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), tr. Werner S. Pluhar, pp. 160-61.

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taste is better formed and more “distanced” than the average, seems to me particularly dangerous. But I fear this is exactly what Greenberg means, if only because philosophically, as a good American pragmatist, he has absolutely no understanding of what the transcendental means (and his every reference to Kant makes that clear). Greenberg is not at all basing the maxim of broadened thinking on the mere transcendental idea that there ought to be a sensus communis shared by all humanity, which would lead everyone exercising his or her faculty of judgment in an equally impersonal way to judge freely in agreement with him. Instead he seems close to confiscating the privilege of best representing the species for himself and the class of people who have sufficiently developed their taste. Even though this representational privilege does not extend beyond the aesthetic sphere, it is not reassuring. Let us leave these reflections where they stand, recalling that a slight wavering—even a slippage—around the word “objective” is what clears the way for other slippages, whose consequences are hardly negligible. We will return now to the body of the text, in which Greenberg draws a major conclusion from the perfect overlapping of art and the aesthetic, and their extension to any and everything: If this is so, then there turns out to be such a thing as art at large: art that is, or can be, realized anywhere and at any time and by anybody. In greatest part (to put it weakly), art at large is realized inadvertently and solipsistically, as art that cannot be communicated adequately by the person who realizes or “creates” it. Both the irony and the theoretical audacity of this paragraph are worth savoring. Here, at the conclusion of an insightful reflection on Duchamp’s “demonstration,” Greenberg invents a concept which he is the first, in my knowledge, to formulate as such and to adequately define: the concept of “art at large.” I insist on its theoretical audacity, for the doxa has too commonly made Greenberg a formalist clinging desperately to modernist painting and viscerally opposing the most advanced trends of his time, starting with conceptual art. No doubt he was opposed, and in many cases rightly so. But not viscerally. “Art at large” is actually a much more illuminating way of designating the various approaches grouped under the convenient label of conceptual art. It also stresses their theoretical aporias, beginning with solipsism, which was proclaimed as an artistic doctrine by at least one conceptual artist, Mel Bochner, and which colors a great number of

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conceptual pieces, for example this statement by Robert Barry: “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 P.M.; 15 June 1969, New York.” As for the irony, perhaps it surfaces more obviously in another formulation of the same argument: There turns out, accordingly, to be such a thing as art at large, art that is realized or realizable everywhere, even for the most part inadvertently, momentarily, and solipsistically: art that is private, “raw,” and unformalized (which doesn’t mean “formless,” of which there is no such thing). And because this art can and does feed on anything within the realm of conceivability, it is virtually omnipresent among human beings.22

Clear enough: we’re all Monsieur Jourdain, unwittingly making conceptual art. Accredited conceptual artists differ from the common lot in that they practice their art consciously, “at one remove,” by theorizing it. I’ve shown elsewhere how the doctrine of the most theoretical of all conceptual artists, Joseph Kosuth, is in reality overdetermined by that of Greenberg, and how both position themselves on either side of a single dividing line, which is the “demonstration” effected by Duchamp’s readymades: for Greenberg they demonstrate the perfect coincidence of art and the aesthetic, for Kosuth, the absolute separation of the two.23 With the following corollary: for Greenberg the coincidence comes at the close of a historical development, that of modernist painting retrenched in its ultimate specificity, flatness, while for Kosuth the separation signals the beginning of a whole new history which, having abolished all specifics, now only concerns art in general.24 But for Greenberg, it is clear that the possibility of a solipsistic practice of art in general in no way abolishes the specific characteristics of the different media. On the contrary, the artistic media are what draw art in general out of its solipsism, in order to “adequately communicate it”: “Counter-Avant-garde,” art. cit., p. 129. Thierry de Duve, “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” third chapter of Kant after Duchamp, op. cit. 24 Greenberg: “Art turns out to be almost inescapable by now for any one dealing with a flat surface, even if it is mostly bad art.” “How Art Writing Earns its Bad Name,” Encounter, December 1962; Greenberg IV, p. 141. Kosuth: “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art…. That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art.” “Art After Philosophy I and II,” Studio International, October and November 1969, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art, a Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973), p. 79. 22

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The aesthetic intuition of a landscape when you don’t convey it through a medium like language, drawing, music, dance, mime, painting, sculpture, or photography belongs to yourself alone; nevertheless, the fact that you don’t communicate your intuition through a viable medium doesn’t deprive it of its “status” as art. (Croce had a glimmering of this.) At first glance, the argument is solid and the media are enumerated, even if one can wonder at certain omissions, like cinema, and even if one can ponder over their order of appearance in the sentence. But as soon as the argument has been laid down, “nevertheless” seems to take it right up again. Greenberg would have suddenly seen what for Croce was only a glimmering, namely that an intuition not communicated in a viable medium still does not lose its “status” as art. In my view, Croce had no such “glimmering”: the word is far too weak. He postulated at the very outset of his aesthetics that intuition and expression were one and the same cognitive activity, and from this postulate he derived a series of consequences, including some, such as the identity of the aesthetic fact and the artistic fact (and therefore their common “status” as art) which resonate very well with what Greenberg discovers and elaborates in the text we are analyzing, but also others which run exactly counter to Greenbergian modernism, such as the banishment from aesthetics of any technical consideration and any specific difference between the arts.25 In any case, what kind of “status”—the word figures rarely in Greenberg’s vocabulary—is at stake here? The only “status” (the quotation marks are appropriate) that Greenberg grants works of art is their quality or their lack of quality, and there can be no question of anything else here, since he is speaking of aesthetic intuition. But just imagine him suddenly considering the example or counter-example of the readymades, which obviously do not belong to any of the listed media. Now the brusque appearance of the word “status” becomes comprehensible—so much does he shrink from ascribing the readymades any qualities, and so much does he fear they may legitimate a whole range of contextual art which owes its recognition solely to the institution that confers it a nominal status. The slight wavering over “status” is in fact a symptomatic slip. Indeed, it causes “viable medium” to waver with a similar uneasiness. For despite Greenberg’s recognition—Duchamp demonstravit—that one can henceforth 25 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1978).

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make art with any and everything, he is still far from admitting that all urinals, snow shovels, and “any and everything” in general can form a medium in the same sense as painting or dance. As to the media whose list he establishes, he calls them viable, but one can wonder whether some uneasiness is not hidden in this organic metaphor which lends them a less than certain life-span in the future. Having accompanied the evolution of modernist painting all the way to the flatness of the blank canvas, he must have realized that certain doubts can be entertained about its life—or afterlife—beyond that threshold. In the end it is the very word “medium” which ought to waver here, but since this word is the touchstone of Greenberg’s aesthetics, an almost imperceptible wavering lodges in “convey” and “communicate” instead, to which Greenberg immediately returns in the next sentence:

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The difference between art at large and what the world has so far agreed to call art is between the uncommunicated and the communicated. But I don’t find it a difference that holds. Everything that enters awareness can be communicated in one way or another, even if only partly. This is a fine example of thinking in action, and of a writing that erases nothing, but prefers instead to share its doubts with the reader. Greenberg assertively lays down a limit, changes his mind and withdraws it, then opens a new paragraph and explains in a short sentence just why he changed his mind. Meanwhile, he has allowed himself a formula of unusual grandiloquence: “what the world has so far agreed to call art.” Above, we recall, he spoke of “what we agree to call art” without specifying who this “we” might be; while elsewhere, in “Seminar Six,” he rests content with an even more vague turn of phrase: Experience says that formalized art, the kind that most people agree to call art, offers greater satisfactions by and large than any other kind of aesthetic experience.26

“We,” “most people,” “the world”: there is a kind of graduated consensus here, gathering distinct aesthetic judgments—each seated in a private, individual “I”—into ever-broader, even universal agreement. How far will

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“Seminar Six,” art. cit., p. 90.

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that extended agreement lead Greenberg? Yet, quality in art is not just a matter of private experience. There is a consensus of taste. The best taste is that of the people who, in each generation, spend the most time and trouble on art, and this best taste has always turned out to be unanimous, within certain limits, in its verdicts.27 The best taste develops under the pressure of the best art and is the taste most subject to that pressure. And the best art, in turn, emerges under the pressure of the best taste.28 About these bodies of art, practiced taste—the taste of those who pay enough attention, of those who immerse themselves enough, of those who try hardest with art—speaks as if with one voice. How else account for the unanimity, if not by the ultimate objectivity of taste?29 It’s the record, the history of taste that confirms its objectivity and it’s this objectivity that in turn explains its history.30 The objectivity of taste is probatively demonstrated in and through the presence of a consensus over time. That consensus makes itself evident in judgments of aesthetic value that stand up under the ever-renewed testing of experience.… And there’s no explaining this durability—the durability which creates a consensus— except by the fact that taste is ultimately objective. The best taste, that is; that taste which makes itself known by the durability of its verdicts; and in this durability lies the proof of its objectivity. (My reasoning here is no more circular than experience itself.)31

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These passages are mainly drawn from “Can Taste Be Objective?,” a text contemporary to the “Seminars.” They call for various comments. Let us first salute the wavering inside the parentheses of the last sentence. With rare intellectual honesty, Greenberg offers the reader the chance to reject his whole argument as circular—and none of the quoted passages are exempt from that circularity. But here he is right. The circularity in question is not that of tautology but of the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment, in Kant’s sense. It is quite another matter when Greenberg feels authorized to draw the conclusion that taste—or aesthetic judgment—is objective, from the observation that the reflexive judgments of individuals not only follow one after another, but are cumulative and come together in unison over the “The Identity of Art,” Country Beautiful, November 1961; Greenberg IV, p. 118. “Can Taste Be Objective?,” Artnews, Vol. 72, February 1973, p. 23. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 27 28

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course of time. To be sure, the reputations of Homer and Dante, of Rembrandt and Cézanne (a few of the names he cites in “Can Taste Be Objective?”) are “on the record”; but in my view that only authorizes the conclusion that the jurisprudence which weighs in favor of these artists is impressive and hard to overturn, and not that taste is objective. Indeed, it’s strange how this text can stand in such flagrant contradiction to what he says in the more or less contemporary “Seminar II”: I don’t think it’s appreciated enough that aesthetic judgments, verdicts of taste, can’t be proven or demonstrated in the way it can be that two plus two equals four, that water is composed of what is called oxygen and what is called hydrogen, that the earth is round, that a person named George Washington was our first president, and so on. In other words, that aesthetic judgments fall outside the scope of what is ordinarily considered to be objective evidence. Kant was the first one I know of to state (in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) that judgments of aesthetic value are not susceptible of proof or demonstration, and no one has been able to refute this, either in practice or in argument.32

Since Kant is called in for reinforcement in “Seminar II,” Greenberg will have to pardon my cruelty or temerity when I recall that he wrote the following, at about the same time, in “Can Taste Be Objective?”: I realize that I take my life in my hands when I dare say that I’ve seen something better than Kant did—Kant, who, among so many other things he did, came closer to describing what went on in the mind when experiencing art than anyone before or anyone after him.33

For Chrissake, what did Greenberg think he saw better than Kant? The matter is worth delving into, when the same doxa that sees him as a rigid modernist also takes him for an orthodox Kantian, to the point where some are ready to throw the baby out with the bath water—I mean, Kant’s aesthetics with Greenberg’s. … and the problems of taste boil down to one: namely, whether the verdicts of taste are subjective or objective. This is the problem that haunted Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, and he stated it better than anyone I know of has since.… He doesn’t solve the problem satisfactorily. He posits a solution without proving it, without adducing evidence for it. He deduces his solution from the principles of his “transcendental psychology,” and it’s a wonderful deduction, 32 33

“Seminar II,” art. cit., p. 72. “Can Taste Be Objective?,” art. cit., p. 92.

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but it doesn’t really advance the argument that the verdicts of taste can be, and should be, objective. Kant believed in the objectivity of taste as a principle or potential, and he postulated his belief on what he called a sensus communis, a sense or faculty that all human beings exercised similarly in aesthetic experience. What he failed to show was how this universal faculty could be invoked to settle disagreements of taste.34

It’s a bit embarrassing to have to give Greenberg a philosophy lesson, but it’s unavoidable. Kant was not in the least haunted by the problem of the subjectivity or objectivity of taste, he was the first to take the antinomy of taste seriously, which means that both parties are right. He does not deduce his solution “from the principles of his ‘transcendental psychology,’” because, contrary to the deduction of the categories in the first Critique, the deduction of the judgment of taste in the third leads only to a presupposition, even if it is a necessary one. He does not believe in the objectivity of taste, if only because the third Critique is no more a matter of belief than the first two, and also because he takes care not to confuse subjective universality with objectivity. The sensus communis is only a postulate in a very particular sense, that of an idea of reason, a transcendental idea which cannot be proved but which must necessarily be supposed to account for aesthetic judgment’s claim to universality. An incurable empiricist, Greenberg not only refutes Kant on the basis of experience, but also lends him an empiricist reading of his own philosophy, which is properly aberrant: It was well and good for Kant to postulate a sensus communis on the basis of experience—empirically, that is.… But his deductions from the postulate didn’t advance his case much: what they showed mostly is that we want to agree in our aesthetic judgments and may be justified in so wanting.35

It’s useless to drive the point further home. An art critic of Greenberg’s caliber, who was an autodidact in philosophy as in so many other things, can be pardoned for his imprudence in presuming to correct Kant on the latter’s terrain. One can even be generous and amplify the wavering of the halftruths contained in his text. When he says, for example, “practiced taste speaks as if with one voice,” it would be enough to lay the accent on the “as if” to bring it back to something essential in Kant’s notion of reflexive 34 35

Ibid. Ibid., p. 23.

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judgment. It’s true that had Greenberg done so himself, he would have come to quite different conclusions. And I repeat, when he says “my reasoning here is no more circular than experience itself,” he’s right. Since Greenberg situates his supposed demonstration of the objectivity of taste on exclusively empirical grounds, it is on such grounds that he ought to be answered, for example by countering him with the notion of jurisprudence, as I have done elsewhere, to account for the undeniable fact that the best taste, which is indeed formed through contact with and under the pressure of the best art, has a cumulative effect on culture and produces a consensus.36 It is also on empirical grounds that one can violently disagree with him when it is a matter of judging, case by case, what is the best taste or the best art. Finally, it is legitimate on the same grounds to rise up against the arrogance of his aesthetic judgments and against his sometimes excessive pretension to impose his taste on his contemporaries, as though he really believed himself to “more adequately represent the species” than you or I. But what is this empirical ground on which not only consensus but also dissent is fabricated, if not “the world,” “most people,” or “we”—something that finally has to be called society, collectivity, or community (these three appellations being in no way equivalent)? Led—I should say forced—by Duchamp’s demonstration to admit that inner, private, solipsistic aesthetic experience can be called art, or “art at large,” Greenberg retorts that what “the world,” “most people,” or “we” agree to call art must be communicated in order for agreement to be possible, or at least to know on what such agreement might bear. But the criteria of communication is not enough: The crucial difference is not between the communicated and the uncommunicated, but between art that is fixed in forms that are conventionally recognized as artistic and art that is not fixed in such forms. On the one side there is unformalized, fleeting, “raw” art, and on the other there is art that is put on record, as it were, through a medium that is generally acknowledged as artistic. Two expressions—“forms that are conventionally recognized as artistic” and “a medium that is generally acknowledged as artistic”—serve to circumscribe the domain of formalized art and to distinguish it from art at large, to separate the raw and the cooked, in short. Each word counts, and on each word there is more than one wavering, which the following passages

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of “Seminar Six” are intended to set straight. However, they only make things more uncertain. First of all because instead of drawing us away from communication, the notion of formalized art leads right back to it:

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Formalizing art means making aesthetic experience communicable: objectifying it, making it public, instead of keeping it private or solipsistic as happens with most aesthetic experience. For aesthetic experience to be communicated it has to be submitted to conventions—or “forms” if you like—just as a language does if it’s to be understood by more than one person.37

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Second, because if Greenberg hurries us along here, from communication to convention, what he means when he speaks of “conventions—or ‘forms’ if you like” is far from clear. Indeed, having established that association, he immediately attempts to take it apart: Convention isn’t “form”; rather it’s a limiting and enforcing condition that functions in the interests of the communication of aesthetic experience.38

And so we go back to communication. Let’s note in passing that throughout Greenberg’s writings, the notion of form is one of the least explicit— something which cannot fail to be paradoxical, given the reputation for formalist criticism that sticks to him like glue. As to the notion of convention, it too seems incapable of being specified with precision, which in appearance at least is no less paradoxical, considering that Greenberg’s modernism is a doctrine bound like no other to the notion of the medium’s specificity: We have to go along with the notion of convention, for the most part, as with the notion of art: as something recognizable but not adequately definable.39

This sentence follows a list of conventions, all “old-fashioned,” borrowed from music, poetry, and the novel, no less than from sculpture and painting (for the latter: perspective, shading, design, the integrity of the picture plane). I will suggest further on why I think Greenberg is right to characterize conventions as being recognizable, but hardly more definable than the notion of art itself. For the moment we need to stay close to the text and understand with him why the important thing is not what conventions are, but what they do: Conventions put resistances, obstacles, controls in the way of communication at the same time that they make it possible and guide it. The particular satisfactions 37 38 39

“Seminar Six,” art. cit., p. 90. Ibid., p.91. Ibid.

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we get from formalized art are due, in some essential part, to the sense gotten of resistances coped with by dint of choices or decisions (intuited decisions or what I call judgment-decisions).40

Now, in modernism most assuredly, but perhaps in any artistic practice: The artist receives judgment-decisions—inspiration, if you like—from his medium as he works in it.41

What is a medium, viable or not? Earlier on, Greenberg had established the list (language, drawing, music, dance, mime, painting, sculpture, and photography), and as we have just seen, he gives no other definition of their respective conventions than an enumeration (yet another list). Conventions are inherent to a particular medium: those of poetry are not those of painting, because the constraints which make language resist the efforts of the poet are not, materially and formally, the same as those which make the painting resist the efforts of the painter. That alone suffices to disqualify the idea that the medium can be reduced to a vehicle of communication for aesthetic intuition, a simple means in the service of an end. To which can be added that Greenberg is of course quite conscious that conventions are not immutable, being the first to say that “a tradition of art keeps itself alive by more or less constant innovation.”42 Therefore we must return to the two expressions which serve to circumscribe the domain of formalized art and distinguish it from art at large— “forms that are conventionally recognized as artistic” and “a medium that is generally acknowledged as artistic”—and stress the extent to which these easy words (“conventionally,” “generally”) remain unthought. The first refers back to the notion of conventions of the medium, while the second refers to the supposed general agreement on these conventions. The same holds for “recognized” and “acknowledged”; Greenberg says that it is impossible to define conventions, even though they can be recognized. Indeed, their only definition is an enumeration, and that’s what he provides (for painting: perspective, shading, design, the integrity of the picture plane, all of which are conventions that appear to the painter as technical prescriptions). Now, to enumerate the conventions is to use words that “show” them, so that they can Ibid., p. 90. “Seminar Five,” art. cit., p. 191. 42 “Seminar Six,” art. cit., p. 91. 40 41

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be recognized. Yet words show nothing, they only evoke the experience one may have had of such conventions, which means that they point to the works or the memory of works in which those conventions are “active.” No doubt the word “perspective” refers to an ensemble of conventions which can be studied as such—to a symbolic form, as Cassirer and Panofsky would have said—still it does not evoke the same experience in the painting of Piero and in that of Uccello, and even less (to perceptibly widen the range) in the painting of Fouquet and in that of Vieira da Silva. One begins with the “concept” of convention, only to note that it is indefinable yet recognizable, and one ends up with proper names. There is food for some reflection here, as to the nature of this “concept” which, as Greenberg himself says, and rightly so, is hardly more susceptible of being defined than the notion of art itself. To evoke works or the memories of works where the conventions of the medium are “active” is to evoke works where these technical prescriptions or constraints are either being established, respected, or transgressed. There are rare (and indeed debatable) moments when a new convention establishes itself before our eyes: such would be the case, to return to the convention of perspective, with Masaccio’s Trinity at Santa Maria Novella. The opposite case is more frequent. Paradoxically, it is when they are transgressed or abandoned that conventions become the most visible: thus with shading in Manet, with linear perspective in Cézanne, with figuration in Kandinsky’s first abstract watercolor, and so on. But it is between their appearance and disappearance, when they are simply respected, that they are closest to their meaning as convention: a pact sealed between the artist and his public. This meaning is clearly not absent from Greenberg’s thought, but it is constantly left implicit and unsaid, as though it were self-evident. Here is an enormous blind spot: for if one recognizes that a convention is a technical constraint with which the artist struggles and to which he reacts by intuition or inspiration, that is to say aesthetically (either by deciding to submit to the convention because he judges it relevant and capable of pushing him beyond his own limits, or on the contrary by judging he has the right to leave it behind in order to say what he has to say), then one should also recognize that with this very action the artist seals, unseals, or reseals an imaginary pact with an equally imaginary public. Now—and I follow Greenberg closely here—it is under the aesthetic pressure of these technical constraints that an artist worthy of the

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name creates, accepts, or breaks a convention, that is to say, the pact. Must we not then conclude that the converse is also true? Is it not under the pressure of a pact that the artist creates, accepts, or aesthetically transgresses a technical constraint—a pact which he can sense as natural if he is in harmony with his public, and as illegitimate, violent, unjust, inadequate, absurd, “outmoded,” scandalous, or morally or politically unacceptable if the public with whom he is supposed to seal it is not the one he dreams of, or the one he would like to address, or the one he deems worthy of his art? What remains unthought in Greenberg’s doctrine (and I think this has motivated all the political animosity he has suffered from his detractors), is that he seems never to have reflected on the fact that a convention is also a pact. When he unceasingly repeats that the function of the avant-garde has been to keep the tradition alive and transmit it at it highest level of exigency, he is clearly right. When he understands by “tradition,” not the vulgar sense of respecting conventions, but obedience to an intuition prescribing that the artist not submit blindly to the technical constraint, but judge it aesthetically and translate this judgment in his own technique, then he is right once again. But in “tradition” one must also understand treason, along with translation and transmission. Greenberg does understand it that way at times, but only in one direction, for example when he links the emergence of academicism to the abdication of the cultivated class, and the emergence of the avant-garde to that small fraction of the cultivated class which he feels has not betrayed tradition. But one would search in vain through his texts for the least understanding of a reciprocal treason, the least sympathy for a deliberate and consequent breaking of the pact by avant-garde artists, the least affinity for the hatred resulting from the forced alliance with a cultivated class which, even if it had not abdicated, would still be illegitimate in its pretension to “more adequately represent the species.” To say nothing of the other hatred, the one resulting from the need to seek alliance with a class which anticipatively claimed to represent “humankind,” but which in actual fact has never had access to the tradition and was dispossessed of the necessary aesthetic culture. That love of art and social hatred have entered into painful marriage under the name of the avant-garde is something which has truly been repressed in Greenberg’s conception of modernism, and this repression is all the more flagrant in that modernism—in the Greenbergian sense more than

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any other—is characterized precisely by the fact that the conventions are no longer self-evident, or in other words, that one no longer knows between whom the pact is sealed, nor between whom it ought to be sealed. Now these, let’s note in passing, are two quite different things which Greenberg, the eternal empiricist and pragmatist, distinguishes poorly. He is quick to recognize that the avant-garde has linked its destiny to the enlightened bourgeoisie which collected its works and to which it remained attached as if by “an umbilical cord of gold,”43 but he prefers to ignore that this real public is not the artists’ imaginary public, and that if artists break a technical convention, it is also in order to symbolically break that particular pact. Or again, situating the origin of the avant-garde in the “denial” of bourgeois society and in “an emigration [of the artists] to a Bohemia which was to be art’s sanctuary from capitalism,”44 he strains not to see that the denial and the emigration undo a symbolic pact in order to seal another one, an imaginary one. The alliance with Bohemia, with the Commune, with the Spartakist revolution, with the Soviets, with the wretched of the earth, against le bourgeois, the Versaillais, social-democracy, the Mencheviks, or the society of the spectacle, is nonetheless also a constant of certain vanguards. The art produced by these vanguards may not have managed to please Greenberg, but that is no reason to repress the painful contradiction of affects—in other words, the dissent, a word to be understood as laden with both subjective, sentimental discord and objective social struggle—that has been the driving aesthetic force of all the avant-gardes, whether defended by Greenberg or not. Lacking, perhaps, a theoretical articulation like that of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic (or, what may well have been more crucial, a correct understanding of the difference between the empirical and the transcendental, which would have allowed him not to believe in the idealism of so many vanguards, yet without reducing everything to social reality), Greenberg turns a complex aesthetic-technical-social imbroglio into a simple dichotomy between “forms that are conventionally recognized as artistic and art that is not fixed in such forms.” As soon as this dichotomy is established, however, it wavers: Yet even this difference is a tenuous one: a difference of degree, not of experienced essence or of demonstrable “status.” You can’t point to, much less 43 44

AGK, Greenberg I, p. 11. TNL, Greenberg I, p. 28.

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define, the things or the place where formalized art stops and unformalized art begins. (Thus flower-arranging and landscape architecture can be said to belong to either, though I myself would claim that they both belong very definitely to formalized art. There are other such cases. It’s almost touching: when Greenberg represses the violence of the social cleavages hidden beneath what he modestly calls differences between formalized and unformalized art, he does so by making exotic references to ikebana or Capability Brown, whereas what really worries him is the fate of the avant-garde. But as he says, there are other such cases. In passing, let’s note the wavering signaled by the quotation marks around “status” and the transcendental illusion (as Kant would have it) contained in the idea of an “experienced essence.” Always the radical empiricist, Greenberg well knows that experience never reaches the essence. Experience is not even able to define or to point to (these are his words, and the wavering here interests me to the utmost degree) a difference of which it is nonetheless cognizant, or which it recognizes in itself, that is to say in its own judgments accumulated over time: Experience says that formalized art, the kind that most people agree to call art, offers greater satisfactions by and large than any other kind of aesthetic experience.45

Accustomed as we are to the circularity (justified, I repeat) of certain threads of his argumentation, we might expect now to see Greenberg conclude in return that this same experience (singular aesthetic experience as accumulated in jurisprudence) is invested with the responsibility—and the liberty—of tracing the borderline between formalized and unformalized art, through case-by-case judgments resting on the yield of satisfaction they confer. Such a conclusion would have done justice to the anticipated pact that artists seal with their imaginary public when they hope to establish jurisprudence; it would also have accounted aesthetically for the fact that in return, the conventions which bind formalized art to its tradition (transmission-translation-treason) are only visible retrospectively, when they have actually established jurisprudence. (To put the same thing differently: such a conclusion would have done justice to the transcendental within and despite the empirical.) Instead of which Greenberg falls back, empirically, on the 45

“Seminar Six,” art. cit., p. 90.

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kind of art “that most people agree to call art,” and takes shelter in the wooly consensus of a majority which he leaves vague and whose judgment is based on past experience only. This, I think, is the explanation for the conclusion of the passage we are analyzing. Even though it begins with the admission that “what we agree to call art cannot be definitively or decisively separated from aesthetic experience at large,” Greenberg cannot convince himself to include in this “we” the artist, art critic, or art lover who proposes or appreciates art that can be “realized anywhere and at any time and by anybody.” Where would the pact have gone? Even though he renders unto Cesar what belongs to Cesar (“That this began to be seen only lately— thanks to Marcel Duchamp for the most part—doesn’t make it any the less so”), he cannot convince himself to accept that in the wake of Duchamp any and everybody can win his artist’s stripes so cheaply, without even being a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a musician, etc. Where would “the resistance of the medium” have gone? Even though he admits that readymades are experienced aesthetically and does not deny that their experience is “on the record,” he can only perceive this recording as a matter of theory and not of experience: It’s the great theoretical service of the kind of recent art that strives to be advanced that it has made us begin to be aware of how uncertain these differences are: the difference between art and non-art as well as that between formalized and unformalized art.) This is the first mention of “the difference between art and non-art.” The terms of this difference are deployed on either side of an uncertain, mobile, unplaceable line, just like the terms of the difference “between formalized and unformalized art.” But “just like” is putting it a bit weakly: if you recapitulate the entire argument that Greenberg develops in the passage we have analyzed, you will realize that these two differences are in reality one and the same. If anything and everything can be intuited aesthetically and therefore can also be seen as art (even if only solipsistically), and if the crucial difference is not between the communicated and the uncommunicated but between “art that is fixed in forms that are conventionally recognized as artistic and art that is not fixed in such forms,” then the true difference, the only one, is the one that puts on one side of the line the kind of art “that most people agree to call art,” and on the other, “the kind of recent art that strives to be advanced.” One senses in these last quoted words what kind of gloves Greenberg donned before

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touching on the art which, in the early seventies, appealed to the same “theoretical service” as he did. And one equally senses that even when he reluctantly thanks Duchamp for theoretical services rendered, he’s not far from cursing him for his practical posterity. To the point of making him a scapegoat: All the same, Duchamp did by intention set himself against formal and formalized art. He did, in effect, try to make free-floating, “raw” aesthetic experience—which is inferior aesthetic experience by and large—institutionally viable (showable in art galleries and museums, discussable in print and by artinterested people). His “raw” art turned out, however, to be less than raw insofar as it has its own orientation to conventions; only these weren’t aesthetic ones, but the largely un-aesthetic conventions of social propriety, decorum. The point became to violate these.46

Duchamp’s “raw” art is “cooked up” for Greenberg. Not for me. Let the cleverest declare themselves capable of strictly distinguishing social propriety and aesthetic convention, and let the fearless claim to generalize on that subject. Wherever there is a pact—and there is a pact in propriety just as in convention—only case-by-case examination should hold. Greenberg did not have the curiosity to examine the Richard Mutt case (the adventure of the urinal at the Independents’ Show in 1917, which marked the enthronement of the readymades in the imaginary museum of modern art); I did, and the examination says a lot about the nature of the social proprieties, and even more about the structure of the aesthetic conventions that Duchamp violated on that day.47 It’s true that a great many of the artists whom Greenberg stigmatizes for their attempt to be “advanced” have not shown that curiosity either, confident that they could bet in practical terms on the “theoretical service” which they believed Duchamp had rendered them, in hopes of sealing a new pact with a public as well informed as themselves. I am not so sure this pact has a great future, and I might also add parenthetically that it rests on some profound theoretical misunderstandings and that it entails some dangerous practical betrayals with respect to modernity—misunderstandings and betrayals of which the various returns to order we have witnessed over the last ten years are the symptoms. But let’s leave that aside, and return to Greenberg. To conclude, I would like to underline (with irony but 46 47

Ibid., p. 93. Thierry de Duve, “Given the Richard Mutt Case,” Kant after Duchamp, op. cit.

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without pleasure) that he commits the same misunderstandings as his opponents when he closes the paragraph analyzed here (and its parenthesis) on a “theoretical service” supposedly rendered by the art he despises the most (Duchamp and his posterity). As he says elsewhere: Yet Duchamp and his sub-tradition have demonstrated, as nothing did before, how omnipresent art can be, all the things it can be without ceasing to be art. And what an unexceptional, unhonorific status art as such—that is, aesthetic experience—really has. For this demonstration we can be grateful. But that doesn’t make the demonstration in itself any the less boring.48

Personally I don’t find the demonstration boring in the least. I find it funny and painful all at once, but that’s because I think nothing has been demonstrated. Neither, as Greenberg hoped, that the art born of Duchamp only gives rise to an inferior aesthetic experience, one that will be wiped off the record when it is understood that “the best taste” can resist it. Nor, as he feared, that the aesthetics of taste must give way socially before the theory of the aesthetic attitude, or worse yet, before institutional aesthetics. Nor even, as he reluctantly conceded, that aesthetics will never be again what it used to be. To conclude and to bid Greenberg goodbye, with his writing still wavering, I would say that his difficulty in the seventies, his suffering, but also his sudden theoretical passion before the art inspired by Duchamp (pop, minimal, and conceptual) are of the same order—but how much more true, more lived, more distant from armchair aesthetics—as the false confidence of George Dickie, who, having based an entire institutional theory of art on Duchamp’s readymades, still dares to write without laughing: “As works of art Duchamp’s readymades may not be worth much, but as examples of art they are very valuable for art theory.”49 Amen.

48 49

“Seminar Six,” p. 93. G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, op. cit., pp. 32-33.

A Public Debate with Clement Greenberg The University of Ottawa, March 30, 1987

THIERRY DE DUVE: It is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Clement Greenberg, who hardly needs an introduction. He is simply the best-known living art critic in the world—that’s a fact—and in my humble opinion, one of the very best—and that’s a judgment. What you can learn from an art critic of the integrity of Clement Greenberg is not to see art through his eyes, but to use your own and strive for the same integrity while using them. In inviting Mr. Greenberg to speak here tonight, we at the Visual Arts Department of the University of Ottawa wanted to give our students, the art community, and the Ottawa public at large an opportunity to share this learning experience. It does not preclude debate, controversy, even dissent. To the contrary: Clement Greenberg welcomes discussion and he has generously agreed to engage in a discussion and to answer whatever questions you may have for him. He will give a brief speech on the topic of “Idea and Art,” after which the question period will be open to the public. Clement Greenberg… (Applause.) CLEMENT GREENBERG: Thank you, Professor de Duve, you’ve been very kind. This is my second visit to Ottawa, and l’m having a much better time on this occasion. And this time, I brought a quotation from someone in the Education Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who is quoted in The New York Times, 6th of March, and who says—I’m excerpting from a sentence: “Works of art in the twentieth century are fifty percent idea....” I don’t think this sentence applies that much to literature. It may apply more to music but I don’t think all that much. Its author had visual art in mind, I’m sure, and I think he was wrong in so far as he meant art before Duchamp, art before the dadaists, art before the surrealists. But I think he was quite right if he meant fifty percent of the art done since pop art, since the early sixties. Art as Idea is for those who don’t ask enough from art, don’t ask enough of art, don’t ask for truly aesthetic experience but rather for something classifiable, identifiable as new, and new on the instant.

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Now, I’m going to bring what might seem a trivial factor in. Literature has to be read, and is spared this demand for newness, and literature can’t function as an idea. Because reading takes time, and over time you experience boredom. And the same is more or less true of music. I think that’s a good part of the reason why new, “ideational” music doesn’t get the same attention as new “ideational” visual art. Anyhow, there’s nothing new in literature or new music that goes as low—and I’m talking about purportedly high new literature and high new music—that goes as low as the most criedup new visual art of this time. I had an experience with a young man who is the counsel for the Art Dealers’ Association of the United States. He happens to be a lawyer and is the secretary of the outfit, and he takes a great deal of interest in art. We had met at a New York gallery, and as it happened, the gallery was showing Canadian landscape painting from about the time of the Group of Seven on. We were walking through the show, talking, and there were some delicious pictures in it, mostly small. We had been talking for about five minutes when this gentleman turned away brusquely and he said, “I don’t get this art, it’s not for me.” I was struck. Here was someone who was interested in painting, and this art wasn’t for him. I thought: “Good God, if you’re interested in painting and you can’t like these delicious landscape paintings, how do you look at art, how do you look at painting?” And then I realized that he spoke for the multitude of those attending to new art nowadays, at least in New York, in the metropolises. The landscapes were all entirely painted, uncontaminated by idea or ideas, and that was the trouble with them for this gentleman. They were just good painting. And recognizably good painting—as we’d say in the South: good country painting. Idea in art. It began with Duchamp, it took over in our time with the beginning of trends, and trends began in New York only after abstract expressionism, with pop art, and then with minimal and conceptual art. Conceptual art was idea art à outrance. Then came decorative pattern painting and neo-expressionism and now neo-geo. They all go over as idea because, as art, with some exceptions they’re not only bad—bad painting doesn’t necessarily have to be boring—but most of this stuff is boring. Anyway it’s not art as something relished or experienced. I can’t otherwise explain the success of the likes of painters like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, or Susan Rothenberg, or Jennifer Bartlett, or Frank Stella’s relief constructions with their awful color. Idea, idea somewhere. Just hope your eyes don’t feel hurt by Stella’s bas-relief constructions. To approve of that, I

DEBATE WITH CLEMENT GREENBERG

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think you’re lying to yourself—not that people do lie to themselves. Of course, many people collect Picasso who prefer Norman Rockwell, but they are ashamed to say so, even to themselves. It’s a common case. Now, am I talking here about a decline of taste? I’d say, rather, a departure of taste. Not a decline, it’s just gone away. And maybe also a misapprehension that’s come up since the sixties, as to what to want and to expect from art, from new art in this time. I’m thinking of my daughter for example, a fair representative of the young generation. But then I remember a conversation I had with a very cultivated Italian man of letters in the late forties. He remarked on something I’d printed in The Nation and he said, “You talk as if modern art wasn’t that new, you write as though it hooked on to the past.” Of course I did. And then I was struck, even then, and I said, “Oh yeah, I remember when I was at college. Yes, we thought that modern art started something entirely new, all by itself, that it had nothing to do with the Old Masters, and so forth. This big jump had been taken and we had a kind of art that was sui generis. And I realized that many people still felt that way, that there’d been a new dispensation in art, not just new art, but a new dispensation. Well, I’ll come back to what I said earlier, the fact of time: if visual art took more time to deal with, if you couldn’t walk through a gallery so fast, if you had to stop as you do with literature or with music, I daresay that the likes of conceptual art would never be put up with. It’s so utterly boring. In an instant you know you can classify it as new. Because the fact is, a masterpiece as well as a dog can be grasped in the split second. An instantaneous look, and you can see how good Titian is when he’s good. I think it’s the same with sculpture, except it may take you some time to walk around a free-standing sculpture if you want every view possible. Now, I grew up in a generation that always wailed that things were going to pot historically. When I was in college, the right thinkers wailed about the state of the times, and so forth. We all did. Yet I’m old enough now to look back over many, many years—to the fifties and the forties and the thirties. And I remember how I used to cry out then about the new art that was going over, what I saw at the Whitney Biennials, and so forth, and what the Museum of Modern Art acquired in the way of brand-new art, and I’ve been crying about new art that went over ever since then. But the new art I complained about back then, I recognize sadly, was better than the brand-new art that goes over now. The new art in the days of the Salon and The Royal Academy, the new art of Bouguereau and Cabanel and Lord

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Leighton, that art was better than the cried-up new art of our day. And I’m allowing for relativity of tastes here. I say it’s a fact, to defy Professor de Duve who objects to my presenting of judgments of taste as facts. I still maintain it’s a fact. So I conclude here this instalment of my litany. Well there it is, I’ve left many strings untied, and it’s up to you people to find the untied strings and bring them to my attention. (Applause.) TdD: So, who wants to pick up a few strings? CG: Let me say, don’t be afraid when it comes to asking a question: Stupid questions are okay. (Laughter.) Malicious ones are not so okay. Q: Hello Mr. Greenberg, welcome to the University of Ottawa. I’m wondering why it is so easy for me to come up here and to have the honor of asking you the first question. So I ask a question on behalf of my father who’s not here. He asked me to ask you: Was Ad Reinhardt the beginning or the end? CG: The Oracle at Delphi might have asked that question. (Laughter.) I think that Reinhardt was a sort of agreeable painter before he got influenced by Newman and Still and began—now I’m going to get technical—to bring his dark and light values closer and closer together. He learned that from Still. And then he finally had his idea, and his idea was to bring them so close together that you could hardly make out the color differences, it was all a very dark grey. But you can’t escape your own sensibility. And Reinhardt had a rather conventional sensibility. He was a small, somewhat delicate painter, and the paintings were dark and they went over—still, they were rather soft and delicate, and not that good. Now, one of the reasons they went over was we had become so afraid since the late fifties, early sixties, since the consecration of Pollock, so afraid of committing the same mistakes as had been made in the past with regard to Manet, the impressionists, the neoimpressionists et alii, that there was a resolve arrived at by unspoken consensus that we’re not going to make that kind of mistake again. Nothing is going to be too far-out for us. Nothing’s going to be too baffling, too shocking, or too boring. We are going to accept it all. That, I think, had a lot to do with Reinhardt’s relative success. We will not be left behind this time, we’re going to catch the next Pollock. Yes. And all of us thought Reinhardt had a new idea. So, did he begin or end something? He was in at the beginning of trend art, trendy art. You can tell your father yes, he was a kind of beginning. He was in at the beginning, he wasn’t the beginning in himself. I don’t know whether that’s an adequate answer, it’s the best one I can come up with.


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Q: Thank you. TdD: Maybe that was not the first case. Wasn’t it said, even, say, about Courbet, that he went far out, that he was too boring to even be...? CG: No, he wasn’t accused of being boring. I’ve never read that. He was outrageous, yes, but mostly on account of his subject. Because he wasn’t an unconventional painter, unlike Manet. No, no, no. TdD: But this judgment’s about the far-out, over-the-edge, over-thelimit, effect for the sake of effect.... CG: Test the limit. TdD:...shocking for the sake of shocking, this judgment has accompanied the whole history of modernism. And in retrospect we can say they were all wrong. CG: True. It has accompanied the whole course of modernism. But then people were genuinely shocked, they were. They weren’t genuinely bored. You’re afraid to admit you prefer Rockwell to Picasso, that’s part of it.... And I hate to use Rockwell as an example because he wasn’t that bad. (Laughter.) Q: I have other questions. This would be mine and it deals somewhat with T.J. Clark’s interpretation of your theory in an article he wrote a few years ago. It deals with the avant-garde and, specifically, with the negativity of the avant-garde. This is the question: has not the tendency of the avant-garde been the negation of conventions rather than a firmer entrenchment of the medium in its area of competence? CG: Uh, T.J. Clark happens to be a friend of mine and there’s much in what he writes that I admire, and there’s much in what he writes that I’m shocked by. The avant-garde doesn’t negate conventions, it grapples with them and in the end maybe cancels them but it grapples with them, it doesn’t just negate. Q: However, could it not be said that modernist painting’s tendency toward flatness led it to negate painting to the point of mere flatness? CG: Oh again, that’s a vulgar misinterpretation. The way a Manet worked, and the way the impressionists worked, was not with revolutionary purposes, rather with the idea: how can we make painting as good as we want it to be? And they found themselves—especially Manet, the first revolutionary— reluctant revolutionaries. “What do we do in order to paint as well, but not

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like, the Old Masters?” That was on their minds. “How do we maintain the standards of the past? We know we can’t do it by imitation.” They found themselves forced to grapple with, to reduce—all right, to negate—certain conventions in the name of quality, for the sake of excellence. That wasn’t true just in painting, it was true in poetry too. The great innovators were reluctant innovators, whether it was James Joyce or someone like Gerard Manley Hopkins, a great poet he was. He wasn’t an eager revolutionary, he found his hand forced. In order to be good he had to innovate, and in innovating he defied certain conventions. What the cubists—Picasso, Braque, Léger—did, they were trying to save a convention: the principle of light and dark shading, and it boomeranged. They ended up with so-called flat painting. None of the three except Léger counted as abstract. And so, flatness... T.J. Clark makes too much of that, and he misinterprets me as so many people—including some present—have. I don’t think that flatness is a value. It’s not, it’s just a condition, it’s not a value. You can’t isolate anything specific in art, any art, and attribute value to it. Value belongs only to works, to whole works, and the business of flatness, na.... I don’t like it. If I had my way the best painting, the new painting, I think, would be like Fantin-Latour or Vermeer—the paintings Vermeer did with a shadow-box, he used this artificial means. Or paintings like Van Eyck’s Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata in the Philadelphia Museum. It looks like a colored photograph, only it’s better than any colored photograph I ever saw. If I had my way, yes, that’s the way I’d want painting to go. When I try to make art myself, I can’t go abstract, I insist on shading too much. The artist wants to make it as good as he can. And if ever an artist wanted to shade and model and carve it’s Pollock, and he found out it wouldn’t work, it didn’t work, that’s all. He had to go flat, as it were, in order to make it good. TdD: But why wouldn’t that be the case with Stella and younger contemporary artists? What makes you say they want to be flat for the sake of flatness? CG: I didn’t say that! I didn’t say that! They don’t set any score by flatness. They try as hard as they can. TdD: No, you said that ideas began inflecting art in the sixties. CG: Inflecting is mild, let’s say.... TdD: Infecting.


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CG:...infecting, yes. They did because you had... the new, the category of the new. TdD: But why not say that Stella went new because that’s the only thing he could do, feeling that he had the same ambition as the other people you mentioned? CG: He didn’t because just wanting to be new isn’t enough. You want to be good. TdD: What if my eye told me that Stella is as reluctant an innovator as Manet? CG: Then your eye’d be all wrong. (Laughter.) TdD: Well, so be it. CG: I got a cheap laugh that time, I know. Yeah, I’m sorry. Q: If we look at the art of the twentieth century, it seems that there is a very strong preoccupation with form and, as you’ve just outlined yourself, with something new. That’s particularly true with the front-line, with the avant-garde of whatever generation it was throughout the twentieth century. At the same time we’ve seen kind of a regression of that other dimension of art which is called content. I’m not saying it’s absent, indeed in its best examples it’s just as good as it has ever been. But it seems that there has been a kind of exacerbated preoccupation with form, and with a new exploration. In fact, a very intellectual pursuit of aesthetic and formal value as opposed to content. I’d just like to have your reaction on that situation. CG: That’s a big, big question. I maintain that if a work of art works, it’s got content. An American philosopher whom I don’t admire that much, the late Suzanne Langer, said that content—and she was distinguishing it from subject matter, because you can paint a portrait, load it with content, but you can’t say the content is just the portrayal of a face—she said content was ineffable. She brought up some examples, and I think that for me the great example is Shakespeare. What’s the content of any Shakespearean play—the best or the poorest? People have tried to interpret Shakespeare, and they have done so unconvincingly. What’s the content of Titian’s Deposition in the Louvre? Or is it the Pietà? No, it’s the Entombing. You can say, “Yes this is religious,” and so forth, but good Lord, you look at the painting—and it’s not one I prize particularly, I know better Titians—but if you talk about the content you’ll be talking about the subject matter, and yet, there’s more to the

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painting than its subject matter. There’s more, there is the content there. But as Suzanne Langer says, it’s ineffable, we can’t master it with words. It’s an old argument among literary critics, who are more sophisticated by and large than art critics. You say today among modernist artists the preoccupation is with form. When the form works, it’s got all the content that’s needed. There’s as much content—and more content—in a good Mondrian as there is in... well... no, no, no.... (Laughter.) I was thinking of an example, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion in Venice. It’s exaggerated, but you can’t really show that there’s less content. TdD: You can’t even quantify it, or can you? CG: Exactly. You can’t. Of course not. And the business of form versus content, let art be good enough, and it’s got content. The fact that words can’t grab the content—there’s no subject matter there, subject matter which is not the same as content—that doesn’t matter; a work of art can’t succeed without content. TdD: Isn’t there a misunderstanding about form, subject matter, and content, enhanced by the fact—which you underlined in your early writings and throughout your career—that modernism took its own means of production, so to speak, its conventions, as subject matter? CG: Yeah, that was my brash and rash youth. I wouldn’t say that the same way now. TdD: By the time you wrote “Modernist Painting,” that was not your brash youth anymore. CG: No, that... I didn’t say anything like that in “Modernist Painting.” I said nothing like that. TdD: “To use,” if I quote you from memory, “to use the means of a discipline in order to analyze that discipline.” CG: No, no. I said, to criticize it, to criticize it. TdD: “…not in order to subvert it but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” CG: True, true, true. I know I was being quoted. But that is not the same thing as making the means of art the subject matter of art. It’s not. TdD: Could you clarify that please? CG: I can’t. (Laughter.) I just point.


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TdD: Okay, you don’t want to engage in a discussion of concepts. I myself, in reading you, got to understand that formalist criticism was a way of integrity and honesty towards art. Indeed, content is ineffable and therefore we shan’t speak of content, and the only thing one can speak about is form. And then form.... CG: What you can see. TdD:...form, when inspired enough, can lead to content, yield content, and make it appear, so to speak. Content being equated with quality if I understand correctly. CG: True. Without content, no quality. Or less quality. TdD: That’s a very interesting account of what actually happened in modernism because it saves the whole history of modernism from the accusation of being formalist for the sake of being formalist. CG: Well, anyone who says modernist art is formal for the sake of formalism doesn’t know what he’s talking about. TdD: Yes, but many people who have read you claim that you’re saying that. CG: No, no, no. TdD: I’m glad to hear that corrected actually. And yet, what about the historical awareness that led so many modernist painters—in the sense that you give to the word modernism—to take their own historical conventions for subject matter and discard them or show that they have become expendable at some point? To test them to the point where they can drop them when they prove expendable? There is the issue of quality. CG: That wasn’t their aim. TdD: I’m not saying it was their aim. CG: It happened. It happened on the way to good art. TdD: But since it is not the aim at novelty, nor even the revolutionary tendency of a lot of the discourse around modern art but rather the practice of the best painters or artists themselves that led to that, it certainly must imply some kind of awareness of what’s going on in the world at large that pushes them into that corner. Because after all, it’s a corner, when you feel that you can’t paint a landscape anymore and all you can paint is something about painting.

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CG: It is a corner. Yes, you are pushed into a kind of corner. But it’s not such a confining corner. As I said, whether in literature or music or in the visual arts, the great innovators were reluctant ones. They weren’t revolutionary, not with intention. They were forced to say, “Oh good Lord, this is the only way I can make it good.” It’s like Pollock who wanted so much to shade deep and all that. He couldn’t, he couldn’t... the pictures didn’t come out good, that’s all. So he had to renounce it. Q: I think the time has come that someone should ask a stupid question. I understand—I am not an academic, I am an artist myself—that all of the basic feelings in this art form which you have written so much about is that it should reference to nothing else but itself. A sort of a taking-further the tenets of almost a hundred years ago that art should be made for art’s sake. And I have often seen people who are very proud of the fact that artists came up with this idea that something should be for its own sake, that something should be done just for itself. But when I look around in the world, the thing that most disturbs me is that economists do economics for its own sake; medics do medicine for its own sake, not for the patient; politicians do politics for politics’ sake, etcetera, etcetera. I’ve never understood what is so great about this, that we do something—sort of channel it off from everything else in this world—and then just look at this little area of what we call art. And that we cannot accept that the artist precisely looks out to create interactions and relationships and tries to bring things together. CG: Let me say, aesthetic experience is an end in itself. It’s not the highest end, though. There are higher ends than aesthetic experience, but it’s the nature of aesthetic experience to be an end in itself. It’s not a means to anything else; politics, medicine, other things are means. They don’t embody values that are self-sufficient, that are ultimate. Now I don’t say the aesthetic is the highest ultimate value but it is an ultimate value, and that’s what the nineteenth century found out. Yes, you may paint a religious subject and all that. But in the end how good is it as a picture? That’s what the aesthetic is: an ultimate value. It’s not politics and it’s not medicine. Science is not an end in itself, it’s a means. But art may help fill your life. It doesn’t do you any good except as a way of filling your life. Just like loved ones fill your life, they don’t necessarily do you any good. (Laughter.). Q: Being an artist, I’m personally a little bit allergic to people who write about art; not completely but a little bit. I submit to you that any good


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piece of art is far more complex than you can ever write about or that you can ever talk about. CG: I agree. Q: Do you agree? CG: Yeah. (Applause.) Q: I have a very simple question. I thought it out carefully, it reflects a personal interest: what kind of an influence do you think the popularization of the notion of art-as-progress has had, and is there any hope of it going away? CG: People who believe that art progresses are misguided. It’s just that it’s a fallacy, and how you can get rid of that fallacy, I don’t know. Just hear it said that it’s a fallacy. We can’t say that art has gotten better. Let’s say that art got better in 1912—that great year—than it was in 1500. You can’t say that. I happen to think it was better in 1500. Does that answer your question? Q: Yes it does, but I was wondering whether you could pinpoint the exact time when the rhetoric of the avant-garde became absorbed into the public to the point to which the public came to galleries expecting to be shocked as you said? CG: Oh, I’ve said that often: there was a turn-around at the beginning of the sixties—that it came so late is a little surprising, I think Pollock’s success had something to do with it—when a new generation of artists, and museum people, and collectors, came up and took a look at the past and said, “Hmm, in the last hundred-and-twenty years, all the best new art that entered the scene shocked people at first. It’s as though this new generation of artists drew a conclusion that “since Manet, at least since Manet”—not Monet, Manet—“all the best new art scandalized, we’re going to do that.” That wasn’t so conscious, but that motive was there. TdD: It happened in the sixties in your experience but it had happened before, certainly from the futurists on. CG: Yes, but you’re not talking about a mass recognition here. The futurists were an elite after all. I’m talking here about a mass of people. Q: You said before that the aesthetic experience is an end in itself. Then you said it’s not like science, which is not an end in itself. Now scientists often say that their research is an end in itself. Yet that research, as we all know, has very important social consequences. Does the aesthetic

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experience not have some kind of social consequence as well, just like research has a social consequence that scientists discard? And if it does have that type of consequence, is the artist justified in discarding it? CG: Well, we don’t know about the social consequences of art, we know about the social consequences of science. We do. Now, treating a means as an end in itself is nothing new. In the old days when shoes were made by hand, I’m sure the shoemaker—a good shoemaker—treated the shoe as an end in itself while he was working on it. You can work on means as an end in themselves, but they’re not experienced in the end as ends in themselves. The people who wear the shoes don’t experience the shoes as ultimate values. I guess when you do something well—let’s say you’re making a car on an assembly line, and you do the best job you can at the moment—you treat the job, the means, as an end in itself. But we know that the car has utility. We don’t know that art has utility, or that good art has more utility than inferior art. This question has been thrashed out by better minds than mine and it’s been tossed aside. Someone like T.J. Clark—whom I have respect for—still will say, “Well really, art should serve the working classes.” But that’s because he’s a vulgar Marxist. He’s not a vulgar man but he’s a vulgar Marxist. TdD: I want to take you up—not on vulgar Marxism because I share that opinion, not necessarily about T.J. Clark but in general—but rather about aesthetic experience being an end in itself. To me the alternative is not between the end and the means. It’s not as if we had to choose between art, or aesthetic experience, as an end in itself and, on the other hand, aesthetic experience as a means to something else. You said something that I found, if I may say so, quite symptomatic. You said that the fact that aesthetic experience is an end in itself was a discovery of the nineteenth century. Indeed, that led to the belief in art for art’s sake. But then you should not wonder, if you endorse the belief that aesthetic experience is an end in itself, that art for art’s sake has given way to novelty for novelty’s sake or something of the like. I take my lessons on that chapter of aesthetics from Immanuel Kant, and it doesn’t lead to the alternative between art as a means and art as an end in itself. In his day Kant was speaking about beauty in general and not so much about art, even though what he said about beauty turned out to be valid for art all the the same, but that’s another story. Anyway he said that art, or aesthetic experience, is not autonomous but heautonomous, and that has a lot to do with the nature of the reflexive judgment which finds an “as if” end in itself. The “as if” is the very


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movement of the mind by which we extract content from the form of works of art. It is unconscious, accompanied by a feeling, and not something that has to do with concepts or ideas. I share your opinions in general about concocted art, and I hate it as much as you do. I don’t believe, however, that all the artists that you think concoct art do actually concoct art. But basically we do have, on occasion, to resort to aesthetics—in the philosophical sense, not in the empirical sense—and from that vantage point I believe that the aesthetic experience is neither an end in itself nor a means toward something else. It’s far more mysterious than that. CG: Okay, okay. (Laughter.) You ought to know better, Professor de Duve. Kant contradicted himself towards the end of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, you know, when he said something about aesthetic experience putting you in touch with something transcendent. TdD: No. You can’t get in touch with something transcendent, that’s precisely what transcendental philosophy is all about. It’s the recognition of a world beyond the visible and the sensible, and that precisely you can’t touch. To believe you can touch the untouchable is magic. CG: Well, I disagreed with Kant too, but that’s what he said. TdD: No, that’s not what he said, I’m sorry. CG: Towards the end of the Third Critique. TdD: No, he said the contrary. He said exactly the contrary. He called that Schwermereien. CG: We’ll get the book out. (Laughter.) Because that part of Kant has been quoted against me. TdD: Well, you’re not the first to misread Kant, especially in the American tradition. CG: All right, okay, okay... okay. TdD: With all due respect. Because it’s one thing to look at art, and it’s another thing to think in terms of aesthetic philosophy. CG: Yeah, true, true, true. TdD: Kant didn’t look at art. CG: Obviously he hadn’t seen much art but he had a head the like of which never was, and he got to the heart of it, and then he contradicted himself, and I’ll give you chapter and verse, but we don’t have the book here.

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TdD: Let’s save our quibbles for some other time. Other questions? Q: Hi. You said before that you felt that ideas were infecting art at one point, but it seems that purely aesthetic art in itself has an implied idea of just the meditative aesthetic reaction. To me it seems an ideal of unquestioning. If the emphasis is on the idea that is there in aesthetic art, I was wondering if you could clarify why you feel that ideas are a bad thing? CG: Ah, that’s a tough one. It’s not saying that art has nothing to do with ideas, but art as idea…. Let’s take conceptual art. I’m not going to show you a work of art, I’m going to give you a dictionary definition, blow it up, photostat it—that’s what Kosuth does—and put it on the wall, or put some loose-leaf notebooks on the table for you to go through. There’s one idea operating there, it’s that we’re going to go so far out, we’re going to show you that art doesn’t have to be seen. It’s idea that way, not ideas but idea. Frank Stella’s idea, I’d say, in his bas-relief constructions is: “Bad color, I’m going to get away with it, I’m going to show you this awful color, and you make something of it.” TdD: How do you know it’s an idea? CG: Well it looks like an idea. Because the color’s so bad I don’t think it’s involuntary. (Laughter.) And so I think, “some idea”…. Oh, you start with the futurists. Again, they wanted to show motion, you know, that was an idea. TdD: Indeed, but the futurists are not on the level of Frank Stella. CG: No, but I’m giving you an example. So what difference does it make? We’re just illustrating. And I think as far as the late Stella is concerned, most of the futurists are on a higher level. Now, there’s a young lady, there… Q: Hello Mr. Greenberg. I’d just like you to qualify the difference between conception, invention, and idea, if you can, because I’m uncertain. There seems to be a distinction between idea and what’s considered aesthetic art. And I’m not quite clear how you see that, so if you could maybe clarify that? CG: Idea again. When Kosuth blows up a dictionary definition, frames it, glasses it, and hangs it on the wall, there’s an idea, that’s his idea. Conception: I started using that damned word when I was talking about Barnett Newman’s art and, you know, what people said all along about new art, good new art, since Manet’s time, “My child could do something as


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good as that.” You look at a Newman and you say, “Yes, it’s not my child, anybody with a ruler and some tape can paint a picture as good as that.” It’s not so: Newman’s use of color and his proportions are his conception. And the execution didn’t require skill, it required application, but not skill. It’s true anybody could have painted a Newman. But first, he had to know to choose his colors and he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t choose Newman’s colors, and he couldn’t choose Newman’s intervals either. His proportions. His relations. But the conception yes, the conception was there, you can say, in Newman’s head, as it were. You know, it didn’t quite work out that way. Q: Was it voluntary? CG: Yes it was, it was voluntary, quite, quite. Look, Pollock was voluntary too, despite all the mythology to the contrary. But Pollock wasn’t deliberate, let’s put it that way. TdD: Isn’t that a touchy thing to say? If it’s voluntary, then it might be concocted. It could be seen with a pejorative overtone. CG: Yes. True. Concoction is too deliberate, it’s too willed. Pollock was voluntary, but not overwilled, let’s put it that way. And then when you decide to draw or paint from nature, or sculpt from nature, a real decision is made, and you try to, let’s say, make the drawing or the painting or the piece of sculpture as true to nature as you can, and that’s quite deliberate, yet you might produce a great work of art. Look, Rodin’s—what is it?—that Age of Bronze, people thought it was a life-cast when he first showed it, back in the 1880s, was it? Because it looked so true to nature. It was a great work of art at the same time. It was quite voluntary, but I don’t think it was deliberate. Concoction means putting things together the way Schnabel does, or Salle, putting it together with no compulsion in the unity. You can’t will good art. You can will what you set out to do, if it comes out good, you fish for this word, “inspired,” that’s all. For lack of a better word. TdD: It’s not a bad word. CG: Well, it lends itself to misunderstanding, that’s what I mind about it. TdD: But not more so than “voluntary but not willed” or “overwilled.” It’s difficult to draw a line. CG: It is difficult to draw a line, but when you say that, those words don’t have the connotation that “inspiration” has, the connotations that “inspiration” has picked up, alas, alas....

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JOHANNE LAMOUREUX: Good evening. I would like to ask you once more a question I already asked you last summer in Baie Saint-Paul, because I thought your answer then was rather challenging. It has to do with the trendiness you refer to in the sixties, when the avant-garde turned into some kind of avant-gardism. You accounted for that by explaining that everything came to be recognized. But if we recognize everything, how could we miss good art? You say that the sixties recognized everything that was produced for fear of missing the next Pollock. Yet you think that we’re leveling everything through the same kind of blanket judgment, for fear of making individual judgments on quality. Then, how do we miss the great art that is being done?

CG: We don’t, because, as I think I already said at Baie Saint-Paul, art is malicious. You think you’ve figured it out, and then art turns around, and throws all your calculations awry. The fact is, a lot of good art is still being produced but it doesn’t get recognized that readily. You’ve heard me say this at Baie Saint-Paul: it’s been the rule, not a laid-down rule, it’s been the rule of experience, that the best new art since Manet stays in the background for a while; that the new art that gets hailed and cried out, the new art that occupies the foreground has been invariably inferior art. And then in the course of time, ten, fifteen, twenty years, the best new art makes its way to the foreground. Somehow. The process is mysterious. You saw that happen with Manet and the impressionists. In the 1880s, before Manet died, he got some pictures in the Musée du Luxembourg, and before the impressionists died by the late 1880s, they were being bought and beginning to be celebrated. The same thing happened with the neo-impressionists, and the same thing happened with Matisse and Picasso. Varying amounts of time, it’s true, and the recognition came faster between 1900 and the First World War than it had before, for the best new art. Now people are making the same mistakes, the mistakes they are afraid of making, the mistakes of the past, because the best new art stays in the background. More or less. JL: Would you argue that whereas one of the historical functions of the avant-garde and of avant-garde art had been to work in isolation, to preserve itself from that kind of rapid recognition, but also.... CG: No, no, I disagree. Any artist who’s a normal human being wants success. I don’t care whether he’s Cézanne or Manet or Matisse. JL: You yourself have linked the function of the avant-garde to one of acceleration.


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CG: No, no, I never.... JL: You said the avant-garde was a carrier of a factor of change and of movement in this century. CG: No, I said it moves, it moves, I don’t say that was its function, or that it carried acceleration or anything. Fashion does that. JL: You said it moved. CG: Yes, it does. Good art always moves. JL: Okay. Would you agree then that the best art now has to change speed, that it has to move more slowly instead of moving faster and faster? CG: That’s right. JL: Because of this kind of very rapid recognition and of what you call trendiness? CG: No, because of bad new art. JL: The function would be to work at a different pace and to work more slowly? CG: That doesn’t enter a decent artist’s mind. Doesn’t enter his mind. JL: I’m not talking about individual artists here, I’m talking about art in general, as when you refer to avant-garde practice. CG: I’ll say that the best new art is sneaky. It is. It tends to be easel painting or, in sculpture, it tends to be abstract sculpture, let’s say, in the David Smith line and so forth. And it doesn’t look all that new, in this classified, spectacular way. JL: So then you maintain a strategy of resistance? Art resists our trendiness by pretending not to be new. CG: No, the artists involved can’t help themselves. They make as good art as they can and it turns out it’s new in a way that looks subtle by comparison with, let’s say, Manet’s newness, or Cézanne’s newness. But that’s one of the paradoxes that afflict art. One of many paradoxes. And art will always cross you up. We’re getting nowhere, are we? (Laughter.) TdD: We’re getting somewhere. Q: Do you think that a lot of the people that would have been artists in the last century have become, say, filmmakers or photographers in this century, and that a lot of what you see that is really good art is found in,

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say, photography or film? CG: Oh, I’d agree with the last, but I don’t know about whether people who in the past would have become painters now become filmmakers. I don’t know, that’s unanswerable. Q: I was wondering, have you found a sort of distinct Canadian-ness to the Canadian art you see in the States, or is there any difference between us and the Americans? CG: Maybe in landscape painting, not otherwise. Q: To return to the issue of content and subject matter, I agree with your bottom line, that real good art has that quality of content that’s ineffable. But what about the dimension of utility in art and the fact that people look for some essentiality in art? I’m referring to the religious dimension that art had in the Middle Ages. With the regress of religion, the utilitarian aspect has fallen by the wayside, but in fact the essentiality of art kind of remains. CG: By the utility of art, you mean art at the service of religion in the past? Q: Yes, the functional relationship to it. CG: For an illiterate congregation, you painted pictures from the Scriptures on the walls of the church if there was room, or in stained glass. Yes, art as illustration in that respect no longer has a function in a literate society, where people can read, okay? Nevertheless, some of that originally utilitarian art—and almost all of it was, until the nineteenth century—we prize for itself as art, and that’s the answer. TdD: We moderns. CG: When I say we, I’m not talking about someone who lived in the fifteenth century. TdD: Doesn’t the present crisis somehow have to do.... CG: There’s always a crisis. Excuse my rudeness, but there’s always a crisis. TdD: Yeah, but I’m specifically talking about the present crisis. CG: What is the present crisis? TdD: Well, I think it’s the one we’ve been in for the last hundred-fifty years. CG: All right, so what is that crisis? TdD: It used to be called modern, and now it’s called postmodern, but I


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believe it to be the same crisis in the long run. CG: Okay, so? TdD: At the beginning of this crisis, the value of art, if it’s a value, was put aside, as something separate. In fact religious art lost its utility the minute you took a Madonna out of a church and put it in a museum, that’s rather obvious. And isn’t the issue now that art should seek to get away from its superb isolation and somehow reintegrate the social fabric? The superb and romantic and sometimes very arrogant isolation of art for art’s sake, and all the rest that followed, that is part of the present crisis. There are many people who would call this a desperate situation and who feel that art should go back into society somehow. CG: I could say that the artist who wants to make the best of what he knows how, is in no position to choose. He may want to integrate himself, but he sees no means of integrating his art. TdD: Right. In our present historical situation, do you see any possibility for art at large to find a place in society that’s of any value or resonance? CG: No. And I think it’s enough for art to be good. Good art is an end in itself in any case. TdD: That is what you call modernism indeed. CG: I think it probably antedates modernism, art for art’s sake antedates modernism. Q: I have another question, if I may, about the future of art. It seems we are entering a new era where the physical support of art is disappearing in the same way books are disappearing in favor of electronic media. What do you think about the transition period we are obviously heading for? CG: You don’t predict when it comes to art. You don’t! Q: Mr. Greenberg, to return briefly to the issue of concoction that was being discussed earlier: you spoke about the cubism of Braque and Picasso as not an example of that—in the sense that, as you put it, they couldn’t help themselves—it just had to be done this way. Would you qualify the work of Juan Gris as a departure from that? CG: Yes. Q: Would you say that it was a concoction?

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CG: It’s too good for that. Q: And what about others latching on to this, those under the mathematical influence of, say, Princet, using cubism as a sort of a stylized form rather than a legitimate creation? CG: Cubism produced many imitators. It went over. There was a funny kind of speed in those days. There’s not enough evidence here, but it went over fast—in the space of five or ten years—and that produced a lot of imitators. But that happened with impressionism, it happened with all the other movements, it happened long before impressionism too, it happened with Florentine painting, it happened with Venitian painting, it happened with Dutch painting, that imitators appeared. That’s nothing new. Let’s say, uninspired artists. They weren’t all dismissable. TdD: We mustn’t turn our back to them because they are imitators. CG: Yeah, we overdo that, because we don’t pay enough attention to minor art. Q: In the interest of maybe getting an interesting discussion going on Duchamp, I’d like your views on his readymades, particularly. I understand our new gallery will have a Duchamp room with readymades which will not have been made by Duchamp. I would like your comments on how this to you is art. Why is it art? I mean a gallery, the National Gallery of Canada will be showing pieces that Duchamp will never have seen, they’re not his real pieces. How does aesthetics come into this? CG: Well, number one, anything can be experienced aesthetically, and we can’t define art, we can’t say what is absolutely not art and what is art. In Duchamp’s case, those readymades were demonstrations, you know, they were making a point. They weren’t made to be relished in themselves, though I happen to think the bottle-rack isn’t bad, by accident, and the urinal, as I told Professor de Duve, would be much better a sculpture if it were much bigger. (Laughter.) But the fact that these Duchamps are duplicates isn’t so bad, because they’re just demonstrations. Duchamp himself didn’t invest much in their quality as art. He was demonstrating, he was also being an enfant terrible. TdD: Would you care to tell us what the readymades demonstrate, and what the point was that Duchamp was making, or purportedly making? CG: Without realizing it—because I think his intentions were more those of an enfant terrible than a theoretician—he demonstrated that anything can be art.


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TdD: Did that need a demonstration? CG: Apparently it did because it took a long while before it sunk in. (Laughter.) Otherwise it wasn’t common knowledge that anything could be art. TdD: And since when is it the case that anything can be art? CG: Well, it happened to be true. TdD: Yeah, but since when? CG: Since when has it been recognized, that’s the question. TdD: Oh, you mean it has always been true? In the whole history of art? CG: In principle, yes. But it hadn’t been recognized, now it’s recognized. Works of art depend on how, in the long run—in the showdown, not the long-run—how they’re treated. Now these works, the bicycle-wheel, the bottle-rack, the urinal are treated as works of art, and now it’s recognized that they can be art. Not good art necessarily. (Laughter.) TdD: Of course not. It doesn’t take much of an implication or an inference to draw from there that if anything can be art then anybody can be an artist. Especially since anything that can be experienced aesthetically can also be experienced artistically. CG: No, no, no, no, no.... Anything can be experienced aesthetically, you can experience a landscape aesthetically, it doesn’t convert the landscape into art. TdD: But why would it do the trick to a urinal? CG: The recognition is forthcoming because the object can be put in the museum, it can be shown in a gallery. And that’s all it amounts to. TdD: How does it get in the gallery in the first place? CG: The status of art is not.... TdD: I mean, a gallery is hardly the natural place for a urinal, I believe. (Laughter.) CG: That’s part of the enfant-terriblism. TdD: Sure. CG: Yeah, that’s part of the kick. TdD: But that doesn’t explain how it got there.

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CG: That explains how it got there. That’s the point of how, why, Duchamp offered it as a work of art. And the fact that people accept it that way, it’s this demonstration, it’s a sample of the demonstration. Now all you need.... TdD: Let me tell you something: if someone had demonstrated to me that anything can be art, even though not everything is art, of course, then I would hang myself. CG: Oh, you’d take it that seriously? (Laughter, applause.) TdD: Yeah. (Laughing.) CG: Well! That’s overrating art. TdD: And you know why I don’t hang myself? Because I think nothing has been demonstrated at all. And certainly not that. CG: Okay, all right. TdD: But if I were you, I would hang myself. Because if someone had come to a demonstration of such a nature, that certainly would wash away the necessity of aesthetic judgment altogether. CG: Mm, no, no, no, no, it doesn’t follow at all. It’s not good art, that’s the point, it’s not good art—though the bottle-rack has its merits, I must say. It’s there in the National Gallery but.... Anything can be art, but good art, that’s the issue. The status of art is not automatically honorable, honorific. TdD: Of course. CG: Okay. And most art made over time has been bad, or inferior. It’s art, okay. Now, the philosophers of aesthetics—this is curious, that includes Kant, that includes Croce, we talked about that earlier—won’t deal with the question of bad art. No they won’t. They always talk about art as good art. It’s good art they’re talking about. Well, what do we do about bad art? Croce says it’s not art, that’s all. He dismisses it, he says, “If it’s bad art it’s not art.” That’s a cop-out. It still is art. TdD: Didn’t he say that at about the same time Duchamp did his readymades? CG: I guess so, yeah. TdD: It must have been in the air.


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CG: Well, okay, maybe, but Duchamp was the one who demonstrated it, who in effect demonstrated Croce’s cop-out, that bad art is still art. TdD: Doesn’t that mean that the urinal compels us to judge it aesthetically? CG: In its context, yes. It’s certainly not for use out there. We’ve got better urinals since then, anyway. (Laughter.) Q: This isn’t my question but, historically, urinals did not exist at the beginning of the century, so it was more industrial design that Duchamp was looking at, with a sense, perhaps, of awe. And if we look at the work that was demonstrated at Documenta this year, they’ve reintroduced industrial design as part of the art scene as well. So I don’t know whether that’s how we have to perceive Duchamp’s urinal. It’s just making us aware of what industrial design is bringing forth. CG: We were already aware of that, I think, before Duchamp put his bottle-rack or his bicycle-wheel in an art gallery. You know, the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century, and their followers, especially in Germany, improved the aesthetic quality of industrial products. Duchamp wasn’t new in relation to industrial design. He was new in so far as he took these objects, that were indifferent, fundamentally, in aesthetic terms, and put them in an art gallery. Q: My question is: you talked about the departure from taste as being something that we are presently experiencing. Is it not the gallery owners who are setting the standards of taste? Are they not the patrons of the twentieth century? If we look at the Medici in the fifteenth century—you said you liked the art of the fifteenth century—we have a man of vision, a humanitarian person who commissioned his squires to go to Flanders to bring Van der Goes to influence the Italian artists. Is it not important for the gallery owners to be more sensitive and more humanitarian and not serve us just concoction? CG: Let’s make a distinction here, ma'am. The gallery owners sell art, it’s the people who buy art who decide things for gallery owners. If the gallery owner can’t sell art he goes out of business. It depends on the collectors. They’re the patrons, not necessarily the art dealer. He may be but that’s not a necessary part of his function. The collectors are part of the public for art. And if blame has to be assigned, they’re to be blamed in the first place, much more than the poor art dealer who’s trying to make money, that’s all.

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Q: Does he not have a responsibility? CG: No. Let the collector have a responsibility. He’s just trying to make money, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t ask him to lose money in order to elevate the standards of art, that’s inhuman. TdD: Perhaps you were speaking of public galleries too? They are not in the business in order to make money. Q: But they are influenced by the galleries, where a lot of work is sold. A lot of hype develops around an artist, and it sort of mushrooms. If enough people are buying it, it must be good. CG: True, true. That’s mysterious. I’ve been around in art for a long time. I still haven’t watched, nor has anybody ever reported to me the process by which an artist goes over. Take David Smith, or take Pollock, recognized great artists now, just how they began to go over is a mystery to me. Pollock began to sell only in the last two years of his life. What happened? I don’t know. Smith really didn’t sell well during his own lifetime, and why, about a year after his death, he began to sell, I don’t know. It wasn’t because of his death. As for hype, hype doesn’t assure the permanency of the art’s standing, it doesn’t. In my experience, it has kept certain artists going for a while, but almost always—I’m sure there are exceptions—if it’s just hype it doesn’t last. Q: Another question about patronage, if you don’t mind. You quite happily judge art works to be good or not good. As you look back, do you see any relationship between the goodness of art works and the source of their patronage, whether the church, the state, or the modern market? CG: Let somebody demonstrate the relation. Nobody has yet. TdD: Good. More questions? Q: I want to know what you feel, what your aesthetic judgment is, of works of art when they get messy. By that I mean, when they start crossing the boundaries that contain painting, sculpture, music, etc., when they start mixing the media, when they appropriate the conventions of other media, when they fabricate. And I’m not so much interested in whether you think that such works could possibly be good art, I’m interested in your own experience of art in the last fifty years, if you’ve seen some such works. Supplementary to that, I’d like to ask you about your promotion of Anne Truitt’s work, which seems to me to be a hybrid of painting and sculpture. Don Judd’s work…


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CG: May I interrupt you for a moment? Don’t use the word promotion, that’s an error of tact. To praise somebody’s art is not to promote it. I know that error of tact has been committed often lately. Okay, go ahead. Q: You praise Anne Truitt’s work, which is, to my eyes anyway, a hybrid of painting and sculpture. As far as I know, you did not praise, for instance, Don Judd’s work, which he calls specific objects. I want you to reflect back on work that crosses these boundaries, and what work has been good in your eyes? CG: These hybrids in my experience have rarely achieved success. I’m interested in saying that that doesn’t mean they can’t. So far, it’s been a dodge, usually: from two dimensions to the third dimension, and so forth. In Judd’s case, he was a bad painter. I’ve seen some of his painting, and I’d say his art has fared better as sculpture, though I’m unhappy with the fact that I’ve never seen a box of his that couldn’t have been improved by having an inch or two cut off from the top. That sounds funny but… Anne Truitt just didn’t have the—what they say about race horses—didn’t have the bottom to keep going. She was the first minimalist, and I didn’t praise her because she was the first one. There was something to her picket fences, and to her boxes, and to her gates. She faded nonetheless. She painted her boxes; when the color worked it was good, when the color didn’t work it wasn’t good. But sometimes, hypothetically, the color may have failed and the sculpture might still have been good. I know I can’t point any instance in her work or anybody else’s, but… You know, the Greeks painted their sculptures. In the Acropolis museum, the korai, the female figures, show enough traces of paint because they had been buried when the Persians invaded Greece, and they were not dug up again because they were thought too old-fashioned. So they were preserved with the color. And the color works, they’re better with the color than without. But most Greek sculpture that has come down to us is just bronze or stone. You can’t generalize here. Everything is specific. Q: I wasn’t so much interested, as I said, in the possibility, I was really interested in your experience. CG: My experience is, I’ve seen very few hybrids where… Q: To Anne Truitt, could you name someone else? CG: No, I’m hard put to, but there must be examples that I’ve forgotten about. Q: Another question. You used the words purity and quality…

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CG: Not purity. “Purity,” always between quotes. Go ahead. Q: In quotes, in “Towards a Newer Laocoon” ? CG: Oh, that was past too. Go ahead. Q: Is art without purity without quality? CG: I don’t believe there is such a thing as purity in art, or pure art. That was a useful illusion for the avant-garde, for many years, but I don’t believe there is such a thing. Now, when I wrote of art in “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” it was too new to put the quotes around the words pure and purity. TdD: Maybe that’s because the illusion was still around then. CG: I was reporting an illusion without realizing it was an illusion, yes. Olivier Asselin: A rhetorical question: do you still believe that History is the final judge? CG: No. No, no. OA: You once did? CG: No. OA: You never did? CG: I never said anything to that effect. OA: Okay. So, another question, then. In his article, “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried quotes you in a footnote, and, assuming your position, he says that now, the question of definition—whether of art or of painting—is dissolving into the question of quality. The only relevant question now, he quotes you as saying, is not the question, “What is a painting?” but “What is a good painting?” CG: Yes, I did write that. And I thought Newman and Still very much were occupied with that. OA: You wrote that in “After Abstract Expressionism.” CG: Yes, I thought that, for them, the question was not of defining art, but: let’s get the definition of good art. OA: You are the one who introduced this problem of definition as a central one, aren’t you? CG: No, I didn’t. I reported their view. I didn’t say it was my view, I said it was their view, their aim.


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OA: But in “Modernist Painting” you focus on the question of the definition of painting as the most important aspect of modernism. CG: No, not the most important. And it wasn’t a definition, I didn’t use the word definition. OA: No, of course not, but Fried is using this word. TdD: Not exactly. OA: Maybe not exactly. I think he is talking about a question of definition and a question of quality, and opposing the two, and saying that the former dissolves into the latter. Then, to shift grounds: don’t you think that Duchamp might also have noticed that the two questions—the question of definition and the question of quality—were related and that maybe it’s the opposite that happens: that the question of quality is dissolving into the question of definition? CG: Well, the question of quality never dissolves. OA: This is what Duchamp might have been thinking. CG: Only he was wrong to think the question of quality dissolves into the question of definition. He did do something in the way of demonstrating the limitlessness of aesthetic experience and the impossibility of defining art. But that has nothing to do with quality. TdD: I don’t think it had anything to do with definition either. Certainly Duchamp never thought that. Art cannot be defined. There is no such thing as an ontology of art, I believe. CG: I agree, I agree. TdD: I have a related question. Could we take five minutes to handle the problem of aesthetic judgment again, and the issue of prescription versus description? The reason is that I believe that lots of people who have read you—or rather, misread you—in the last twenty years, have taken your descriptions to be prescriptions. CG: Yes, indeed, yes indeed. I thought that maybe this would come up, so I brought this quotation along. Someone named Lionel Robins—I don’t really know whether he is a sociologist or a scientist—wrote the following in the Times Literary Supplement, in August 1975. He said: “A substantial proportion of the public, including some academics, seems to be congenitally incapable of distinguishing propositions involving ‘is’ from propositions involving ‘ought’.” What follows from that? Okay, I’ve said:

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modernist art proceded so and so. That’s been thought by a substantial proportion of the reading public as meaning: that’s the way I think art should go. They thought that my descriptions were prescriptions. Whenever I chance to meet one of the culprits and I say, all right, now show me where I prescribe, they can’t find the adequate quotation. TdD: Maybe Kant is a key to this issue. Could you tell us if, in your opinion, aesthetic judgment in itself is prescriptive or descriptive? CG: Neither. Neither. TdD: When you say, “this is beautiful,” is it prescriptive or descriptive? CG: It’s an assignment of value, that’s all. It’s not descriptive. TdD: Well, isn’t a value a prescription? CG: Look, if I say that this picture is beautiful, that’s not a description, it’s an assignment of value. TdD: So, it’s not an objective fact? CG: Oh, objective fact. I’d like to tease you about that. TdD: Go on, tease me. CG: I might as well treat it as a fact, for me, that’s all… although it is not a fact. TdD: Right. But then when you say “this is beautiful,” aren’t you saying: “everyone ought to find this beautiful” as well? CG: I go along with Kant, yeah. TdD: So there is an “ought” there, to quote Mr. Robins. CG: That’s not prescription. We’re talking about art that’s already been made, we’re not talking about how to make art. TdD: But doesn’t every work of art tell you, “You should find me beautiful,” rightly or wrongly? CG: Right, but what has prescription got to do with that? There the work of art is. And the question of how art should be made doesn’t come up. We’re talking about the made. TdD: Which is why people misread you when they assumed that you were being prescriptive, in that sense. But telling people how art should be made is not just prescription, it is norm. I think a distinction should be made between normative and prescriptive.


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CG: All right. TdD: And if, when you say, “It has been the case until now that the best painting of this century oriented itself toward flatness,” you concluded from there: “therefore in the future it has to do the same,” then you would set a norm. I’m absolutely convinced that you never did that. CG: No, I didn’t. TdD: But people misread you because they thought that was the case. Now, if I may say so, aren’t you giving them fuel for their critique when you deny that you were being prescriptive? Prescriptive in the sense that when you said that the best painting of this century oriented itself toward flatness, it was a value judgment, and so it meant that everyone, here in this room, or on earth, should agree as far as the existing painting is concerned. CG: There are two separate questions there. Yes, the aesthetic judgment always demands assent, universal assent. Kant said that. TdD: Right. CG: He was the first to say it. That has nothing to do with prescriptiveness. It’s just invoking, inviting, not demanding but hoping that everybody agrees with you. Prescription means: because Titian painted this way, good painting should be made Titian’s way. TdD: That is not a prescription, that is a norm. CG: Of course. TdD: There is an inference there that is not allowed. CG: Norms are things to be obeyed. TdD: Right. Let’s take the categorical imperative in Kant. It is a prescription… CG: That’s right. TdD: …and it sets no norm, on the contrary. It says: whatever you do, do it in such a way that everyone could agree with you. So, it sets no norm. CG: That’s right. TdD: That’s even the only thing it forbids. Yet it is a prescription. CG: Yes, if I wanted to do some logic chopping, I’d say there’s a norm there. Yeah, there is a norm implied.

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TdD: Universality as a norm? CG: No. The norm is: act unto others as you want others to act unto you. Why not? I know he didn’t say that, I know he didn’t say that, I’m making it more viable. In effect he said that. TdD: Yeah, but maybe the distinction between prescription and norm is the core of the matter, between you and so many of your readers, regarding the issue of what exactly we mean by aesthetic judgment. We can’t avoid going into that if we want to reopen the case and reinterpret, reread, not only Kant but also Clement Greenberg. CG: I grant you that my rhetoric in “Modernist Painting” left something to be desired. I should have put in disclaimers, all along. I didn’t think it was that necessary. Close readers—there are some close readers—have discerned that I didn’t legislate, that I reported. TdD: I don’t pretend to be among the closest readers, but I did discern that. CG: Yes. TdD: Which is why I find it all the more startling that you would resist what I say on a more philosophical level. CG: Because I don’t see the philosophical level. I’m not aware of it. TdD: To see it would be to see the difference between transcendentalism and empiricism. CG: Yeah, I am an empiricist. And how! When it comes to art, I should say so. TdD: Yes, indeed. But this empiricism has led you to say in that famous article, “Can Taste Be Objective?”: “I dare take my life in my hands when I say that Kant got it wrong.” You said something like that. CG: I didn’t say he got it wrong, I said he didn’t say enough. TdD: No, I’ll quote you, if my memory doesn’t fail me. CG: Go ahead. TdD: “… when I dare say that I’ve seen something that Kant hadn’t.”1 1 The actual quotation is: “I realize that I take my life in my hands when I dare to say that I’ve seen something better than Kant did—Kant, who, among so many other things he did, came closer to describing what went on in the mind when experiencing art than anyone before or anyone after him.” For a commentary on this passage, see my chapter 3 in this book.


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CG: That’s right. That’s what I said, right. Yes, I did think, I still think that I saw.… TdD: But then, how can you blame people who say: if Greenberg says that taste is objective—by which he means of course his taste—then he is setting norms? You set the stage for all those people to attack you. CG: But I like so many different kinds of art, so which kind is…. TdD: That is what fortunately puts your critics in a difficult position, and I’m glad to say that you always come out on top. But can’t you grant us that in saying this about Kant—which I believe to be a perhaps tiny but crucial misreading—you open the door to all the criticism that threw out the baby with the bathwater? CG: I don’t think that’s what opened the door… As I recall, that piece of mine, “Modernist Painting,” was misread long before I wrote this business. And then, on misreading Kant, we’ll argue some other time. But, sensus communis, okay. Well, he just postulated something. TdD: Of course. CG: And he didn’t deduce it, he didn’t demonstrate it. TdD: Of course. CG: He just postulated it, and I find that it doesn’t work, that’s all. TdD: Let’s not go into that, although… There is another question there. Q: My question is about elitism. Avant-garde art seems to be geared to a minority of people, who can gain access to it through education, or through money if they can buy it, or if they can go on trips to New York or Germany or whatever, while the rest of the world will have to do with kitsch. I wonder if you agree with that and how you feel about that. CG: I do think that in order to develop your taste in art, usually you need dignified leisure, comfortable leisure. Not the leisure of an unemployed, poor person. That’s been the case so far, and that’s why it’s elitist. Q: How do you feel about that? Does that bother you? CG: It doesn’t bother me because there’s nothing I can do about it. I regret it, yes, I do regret that. Q: And don’t you think there’s anything artists can do to change this?

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CG: No. I don’t see what they can do. Q: That’s sad. CG: It is sad. It was sad all along since the founding of cities. We’ve been a minority, usually a very small minority of people who live well— comfortable, dignified leisure, and so forth—and a great, great majority who have to sweat and toil in order to make a living. Q: You seem to have said that good art needs a search for excellence, and a rejection of just looking for the new. Therefore, would you say that the artists of the sixties, who you said were bad or boring, were necessarily not concerned with excellence? CG: Yes they were. I’ve met many artists. I’ve never met one, I’ve never heard one who was truly cynical, though many artists have been accused of being cynical. I can’t think of an artist who didn’t want to be a great artist, even though in many cases they have to say, “Well, that’s impossible, I want to be good.” But what makes for bad art is… God, I wish I knew. I’d be a greater philosopher of aesthetics than Kant then. I could say I know untalented artists around. I can only call them untalented, like Richard Serra, or Nancy Graves, but that’s begging the question. Then you say, “Why are they untalented? What’s wrong inside them that makes them untalented?” I can’t answer that. Q: Do you think that by following these trends they were compromising themselves? CG: Not compromising themselves, they were doing the weak thing. The weak thing, yes. Q: Thank you. Q: I would like to know whether inspired or conceptual, good-quality art can transpire outside of the context of taste. CG: It never has. Q: Do you think it’s possible? CG: Oh, it has by accident, yes, yes. Q: But isn’t quality sometimes accidental? It’s not really something that you will. CG: Sometimes, yes, at times. It’s flukey then. It’s a fluke. Q: Good evening. You haven’t talked very much about photography. Is


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that a personal choice or is it because photography seemingly doesn’t take so much time in doing the actual picture? CG: No, I haven’t talked about photography because it would, oh... confuse the subject, maybe. I happen to think photography can be as good as painting. Not much of it has been but that doesn’t mean it won’t be, it has to be. There’s been great photography, yes. But writing about photography, I found it tough, tough, tough. Because you take factors like the daguerreotypes—they’re on copper or metal supports. They almost always have a quality. And sometimes I think maybe it’s the period flavor that makes them so good, and then I think, “No, that can’t be the sufficient answer.” I’m stumped there. But then when calotypes were invented, you could preserve photographs on paper. There was some falling off in quality, in this automatic quality that the daguerrotypes achieved, and I don’t know what to make of that. And then there were great photographers, or damn good ones, like Emerson, or some of the accidental photographs of someone like Gardner or the Civil War photographers, and usually it seems to me to depend on subject. But not entirely, somehow. I’ve been trying to write something about that for many years and I can’t quite get it figured out. What I do know is that abstract photography stinks. And why? Because in order to be a good abstract photographer you’ve got to be the equivalent of a good painter. I said that once, talking to an audience of photographers at the Metropolitan in New York, and I got howled down, literally howled down. If you’re going to try abstract photography, you’d better be a good painter, or the equivalent of a good painter. TdD: I remember a piece you wrote which was very interesting to me. It was on Edward Weston, and you compared him to Walker Evans and you favored Walker Evans.... CG: Yes indeed. TdD: ...over Weston by far. And then in the discussion of the work you said that, usually, when photography strives for effects that painting can do, it fails, and I certainly agree with you on that. CG: I would’ve said it differently now. I would’ve said Weston wasn’t a good enough painter, that’s all. TdD: Do you think the invention of photography has to do with the advent of modernist painting at all? As a threat, I mean. CG: That’s exaggerated. Uh, Uh. I disagree with you about that.

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TdD: I know, but would you care to elaborate? CG: Well, I don’t think that the threat bothered Manet or the impressionists. No, I don’t think they felt threatened by photography. TdD: But you also said to me that they didn’t cope with photography. CG: They didn’t cope with it. They didn’t have to. They didn’t feel the threat, that’s why they didn’t cope with it, they didn’t feel it as a threat. And incidentally, Walter Benjamin’s famous article is written by someone who obviously had very scant experience of pictorial art. TdD: Let’s leave Walter Benjamin aside for the time being and let’s come back to the impressionists. You have said about them, and about Monet in particular, that for the first time in the history of painting, they sought to capture time as instantaneous instead of as continuity. CG: I never said that. Would I have repeated something that’s been said that often? You know, it’s not worth repeating. TdD: Here: “Instead of shaping, organizing, or elegiacally celebrating the flow of time as previous art has done, it [Impressionism] holds and fixes discrete moments; without faith in the future, without faith in the external reality of the past, it seeks to grasp the instant as if it were all.”2 CG: Did I really write that? Good God, I have said it! TdD: That sounds to me to be a pretty good definition of photography. CG: That’s repeating commonplaces, yeah. TdD: But it is a good definition of photography, isn’t it? CG: I disown it! (Laughter.) There’s plenty I regret in what I wrote in the past, plenty. Just bromides, that’s all. 1946, wow! Q: Would you say, in remote relation to historical time, that contemporary art is maybe not good art but it’s good for art? CG: That contemporary art is good for art? Q: In general, yes. In relation to historical time. That contemporary art is not necessarily great art in relation to the whole, but that what is happening is good for art. CG: No, I can’t. I don’t understand how inferior art could be good for 2 “The Impressionists and Proust: Review of Proust and Painting by Maurice Chernowitz,” Greenberg II, p. 96.


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art. There is some very good art, still. Q: If you look at it in a bit of an historical perspective, what’s happening now is relatively insignificant. But if you look at it in the way of a sort of an art history spring cleaning, you’ve opened the windows and everything’s been shaken right to the core. The air has blown around and a lot of the dust maybe has come off. So now you can close the windows and see what comes, what settles down. So that what has happened in all these mediums that have been shaking the institution to the core is that now you can close the window after your spring cleaning and say, “Okay, now. We needed fresh air, where do we go from there? Something good can come from this.” CG: I can’t think of any time in the past when art needed “fresh air” quite in the sense you mean. Because you mean we’re talking about the inferior art of this time, while there’s some superior art. I don’t see that it’s getting any dust out of the way. I don’t see it tidying up. I think inferior art was never good for art, it may have been good for other things, but not for art. It’s a contradiction in terms. I think you had some other point in mind, if I may presume to say so. Q: Well, I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t clear but... I think you answered the question. CG: But I still think you’ve got another point in mind. Q: You’ve confused me now. What was my point? (Laughter.) CG: You may discover the point tomorrow. TdD: Ladies and gentlemen, art may not need fresh air but we’ll soon need some. As they say in bars: this is the last call. Q: Good evening. When I look at a work of art, I observe how I feel about it and then I subject it to an objective measuring stick. I wonder if you would unveil how you conclude that a work of art is good or bad. CG: Oh ma'am, that’s the question that better minds than mine again have not been able to answer. Intuition is involved, aesthetic experience is intuitive. We don’t know yet what goes on in intuition, but you can’t tell a color-blind man—and color blindness only strikes males, incidentally—what red is like, the intuition of red. And now the intuition of red is not necessarily aesthetic but it’s intuitive, and aesthetic experience is intuitive too, though there’s a distinction here. As I said, nobody’s been able to arrive at a.... TdD: Are there people that are congenitally aesthetically blind, or can

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taste be nurtured and to what extent? CG: I don’t want to believe that there are people who are what the Germans call amusisch, people who have no relation with the muses for congenital reasons. I don’t want to say that and I don’t know. I hope not. I hope that every human being can develop taste and no one is handicapped congenitally in that respect. TdD: Let us end on this note of optimism and.... CG: Hope. TdD: Hope, even better. What would you advise the young students here to do in order to nurture their taste and aesthetic abilities? CG: See as much art as you can. But when you say that to people outside a big center like New York or Paris or London, you recognize at the same time: how are you going to see enough art without travelling, and how will you travel without money? Living away from great art centers is a handicap for those who want to cultivate their taste. I think that’s why painting, at any rate, got centralized so much over the centuries. Sculpture can reproduce, you can always cast something. You can reproduce literature, and you can play the same piece of music in an infinite number of different places at the same time. But you can’t reproduce oil painting satisfactorily, and I don’t just mean using photographs. You can do better with water colors, of course, and drawings, of course, and prints. As a result, painters have had to travel. At the end of the Middle Ages, with the emergence of “free artists,” if we could call them that (they might have been the same during the Middle Ages around the Court and the Church), at the very beginning in the fifteenth century, there were the centers in Italy: Florence, Siena, Venice. And in Flanders: Bruges and Ghent. And then, as time went on, Rome, Venice, Florence. Siena faded as a center. And then, up north came Antwerp and Amsterdam. Mind you, small countries. And then by the eighteenth century it was just Rome, Paris, and London. And in the nineteenth century it was just Paris for major art. And it stayed Paris for a long time. And then people, painters, travelled. Sculptors too. And now, in our time it’s in New York and, as you see, New York is loaded with foreign artists, it’s much the way Paris used to be. Artists come in order to see, to look. One of the reasons for the post-war rise of American painters is that in the thirties, in New York, we saw more of artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky and Miró than you could see in Paris. And Klee too. And that was American money that did it. The collectors were over here, over in New York or in the States.


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That was a great good fortune for American painting. I know when I went abroad for the first time in ’39 and met artists in Paris, they’d never seen a Paul Klee in the flesh, or only two or three. Kandinsky was living in Paris at that time but was not being shown. And Miró was there too, he was shown there from time to time, but his market was in the States, and so in New York we saw more Miró than you saw in his working place, in Paris. And that was—I can only repeat—great good fortune, because still, in the thirties, among painters like Gorky and de Kooning and to some extent the others, there’d be a race on to get the new number of the Cahiers d’Art, a French art magazine. Most of the reproductions were in black and white incidently, but you found out what Picasso, and what Braque, and what Matisse were doing or had done lately. You could feel the eagerness with which especially Gorky, others also, ran to Brentano’s to get the first copies. With all those reproductions, you don’t get the color. I’d say it freed them from Picasso’s bad color. At the same time we were seeing, not the very latest Matisses, say, but we were seeing more Matisse than you saw in Paris. My point is the artists who later became the abstract expressionists knew that the best new art came from Paris. There was no question about it, that’s where it came from: “We have to keep in touch with Paris. And we can’t afford to go there, and so thank goodness for dealers like Neuberger, Pierre Matisse, Valentine Dudensing, and so forth, who bring enough of the stuff over.” They weren’t cultivating their taste alone, they were cultivating their art. Well, nowadays, you see everything in New York, everything new that’s of any note, good and bad. If you want to really cultivate your tastes, acquire enough money and go to New York often, that’s all. TdD: One more question, the last one. Q: I asked the first, Mr. Greenberg, I’ll ask the last, with some emotion in my heart. Mr. Greenberg, can the arts survive modernism, beyond the excentric definition that is sometimes given to it? CG: You’re asking me again to predict. Q: Yes. CG: I can’t. I can’t. Obviously it’s a question for you. There’s some pessimism in your question too, isn’t there? Q: Certainly. CG: I think, uhh, are we in a decline of culture? That’s a question. Is culture in decline? You know, in the way the culture declined in the Roman Empire? Some people say yes, and call the decline headlong. I’m not ready to

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say. I know that in Paris in the 1840s, 1850s, people like Baudelaire, Flaubert—and maybe Gautier, I’m not sure—felt that art and literature had fallen off from the highest standards of the past. That’s how the avant-garde started, that’s how modernism started. And Manet was, uhh, dissatisfied with the Salon art he saw all around him in Paris. He thought he saw a falling-off there too, though he didn’t express himself like that. TdD: So avant-garde art started then. Would you say it started integrating the very enemy? CG: The enemy was Salon art, not the past. TdD: No, not the past, the possible decline of culture due to popular culture, or so-called popular culture. Kitsch. Flaubert got his inspiration from department store catalogues and things like that. CG: And Stendhal from Code Napoléon prose. TdD: This may still be the case. CG: Well, some of the impressionists were influenced by the images d’Epinal. Is that incorporating the enemy? The enemy was decline. The enemy involved might have been the bourgeoisie, or the enemy was the Salon or the people who ran the Salon, and so forth. Today, can we think we’re going to cope with the decline in culture? Well, who’s responsible for it? Kitsch is not responsible for it. TdD: What is the responibility of artists and of future artists? CG: To be as good as they can be. TdD: Thank you very much. (Applause.)

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