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Max Kozloff
ART AND THE NEW YORK AVANT-GARDE
Art
in the sixties belongs to an American generation still
under forty, aware of its origins in Abstract-Expressionism, but com–
mitted to a development that has profoundly :altered the look of
pictorial and three dimensional activity. And more important, the en–
vironment of
art
has been practically reversed. The humanistic con–
text within which visual art has been most frequently experienced and
judged is 'no longer relevant. Painting as the expression of its author's
vision or emotion, or paintstrokes as the last uniquely individual handy–
work in man-made objects, are notions which are more and more
dis–
credited. Equivocation of form and content is now the principle of an
art which strangely begins to evoke our condition and our times. Even
when one is dealing with painting that is decidedly allusive,
if
not
literal in the objects and images it depicts, one cannot respond as one
does to representational art. The story of this metamorphosis, and what its
implications are for the future, is the story of the New York avant-garde
of the last seven years.
The
eminence grise
of post Abstract-Expressionist
art
is Jasper
Johns. In 1958 he first showed his celebrated "targets" (target forms on
canvas, above which were horizontal compartments containing plaster
casts of parts of the human body). At that point, a predicament in
criticism materialized and American
art
was put on its present path.
No one could have imagined then how illustrative of the future were
his schemata, which figuratively seemed to be making a target of frag–
mentation of the whole man and the disintegration of a <;ontinuous
organic process of vision and construction. That Johns himself explained
the invention of his flags as the outcome of a dream in which he had
seen that motif clarioned, is hardly a clarification. No Abstract-Expres-