There was a story on National Public Radio recently about Peter Milton, the artist known for his photorealistic black-and-white engravings and etchings. It explained that in 1962, Milton was a young painter who taught art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He had a show of his paintings and was horrified when a reviewer noted the "warm and ... pinky" quality of his landscapes.
"Warm and pinky" was not what Milton intended. He made an appointment to have his eyes checked at Johns Hopkins University. It turned out Milton had deuteranopia -- red-green color blindness. This isn't an unusual condition. About 10 percent of men (and a lot fewer women) are afflicted with some degree of color blindness, and deuteranopia is far and away the most prevalent kind. That Milton had gone so long as a painter without the condition being detected speaks directly to the problem of writing about art. No one sees, much less decodes what they see, in the same way as anyone else.
This is what we mean when we say art is subjective, that it is "in the eye of the beholder." All of us are experts on our own experience, we all know whether we find something provocative or resonant, whether we are stirred by an image or a sound or the way certain words knock against other words and shed sparks. It is a critic's job to somehow coax and corral meaning from art, while acknowledging the essential elusiveness of the artist's intent.
Milton's work is not discussed in Art in America, 1945-1970; Writings From the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism (Library of America, $40), most likely because he came to prominence after the volume's closing date. (And after giving up color for monochromatic work.) But editor Jed Perl, a former painter who gave it up for a different kind of black-on-white work -- he has been the art critic for The New Republic since 1994 and was in on the founding of The New Criterion in 1982 -- has collected a great riot of voices (not all of them harmonious) to make a wonderful collage that tells the story of the most tumultuous and exciting era of American art to date.
It's not exhaustive. At 847 pages, it is sometimes exhausting, especially when you're plowing through something as didactic and stultifying as painter Hans Hofmann's "The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts" with its droning sentences like "Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects" and "A plane is a fragment in the architecture of space," but it's altogether a wonderful, lively compendium of writing about art before the language became so stilted and jargon-shot.
It probably helps that Perl is not focusing entirely, or even primarily, on criticism. The book isn't about "the best essays" written about art or limited to opinion-giving. Important critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg -- the Siskel and Ebert of Abstract Expressionism -- are predictably represented, but the heart of the book lies in the artists themselves. Jasper John's "Sketchbook Notes" instructs us: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it."
The chronologically organized book starts off with "My Painting," a charming and unpretentious piece by Jackson Pollock on his methods, and follows it up with two short and insightful essays by Mark Rothko. Perl makes good use of novelists, including chapters from Anton Myrer's 1951 novel Evil Under the Sun, sections of William Gaddis' The Recognitions from 1955 and pieces by the likes of Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, John Ashbery and Ralph Ellison. Dwight MacDonald writes about the Museum of Modern Art; James Agee on the photography of Helen Levitt.
We also have Truman Capote's "comments" that accompanied Richard Avedon's 1959 coffee table book of portraits, Observations. And Jack Kerouac's quaintly beat introduction to photographer Robert Frank's book The Americans which begins: "That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he's traveled on the road around practically 48 states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen on film ... After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing anymore whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin."
While there are certain deficiencies to the volume -- it is very New York-centric and I suspect there's a lot that could have been included on the Los Angeles scene -- it is useful and great fun. You get the sense that Perl understands that some of the the painters whose writing is reproduced here -- Barrett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Hofmann -- weren't terribly good writers; he has included them because it's impossible to tell the story without them.
"There has never been a period when the visual arts have been written about with more mongrel energy -- with more unexpected mixtures of reportage, rhapsody, analysis, advocacy, editorializing and philosophy," Perl writes in his introduction. The rest of Art in America proceeds to make the case, as a reference to be dipped into, as a souvenir of a time when, as composer Morton Feldman writes, "nobody understood art."
"That's why it all happened," he continues. "Because for a short while, these people were left alone."
There was no one to point out their color blindness.
...
There was a television commercial in the rotation a couple of years ago that featured a tweedy professor lecturing on why "everyone had a right to be published." The reality was that it was too expensive an undertaking for most potential authors. (While it isn't really germane to my point, a student immediately corrected the old fool as to the economies afforded by desktop publishing.)
While I doubt a "right to publish" exists, the reasons why people want to publish are sometimes pretty interesting. Life Is a Tango (Balboa Press, $17.99) by Alice Holeman of Little Rock recently came across my desk. It's a first novel that combines comparative religious studies with romantic adventure. I asked her, via email, how she came to write it.
"About four years ago, I attended a spiritual/metaphysical conference where an intuitive [psychic] was one of the speakers," she responded. "After her presentation, I talked with her and told her I was 68 years old and had done all I had planned to do. I wondered what was left for me. Her response? 'You're supposed to write a book telling that, at the core, all the religions are the same.'''
Holeman says that while the idea resonated with her, she considered herself neither very religious nor a writer.
"However, I took that advice home and tried it on for size," she says. "I read book after book on religions and writing. I felt supported and assisted through that whole process. Eventually, I realized that I didn't really want to write yet another book on religions (and believed no one would want to read it anyway). So I decided to write an adventurous romance novel and let the characters do the talking to get the concepts out there to the general public in a painless, entertaining fashion ....
"The characters are real people. Sophia Said was my Muslim inspiration, and her fictionalized story is in the book. I attended an interfaith dialogue at Trinity Cathedral in Little Rock that Sophia and Susan Sims Smith presented. I was there because I've been active in interfaith functions and organizations since starting this project.
"I very much want to get the word out, the real facts and commonalities, on the various and beautifully diverse religions. I hope to help dispel some of the misconceptions and stereotypes presented in news sources. I found a new respect for these religions myself, during my research and interactions with my characters. I believe we've got to stop saying that each separate religion is the only way, the only language to use to reach God. We've got to stop killing each other over our faiths."
Life Is a Tango is available from Balboa Press (balboapress.com) and through the usual outlets.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 01/18/2015