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MAX KOZLOFF
intimate, sentient, frequently grey toned pictures of Johns welcome
critical analysis but remain wonderfully enigmatic.
Just the same, their historical importance has been immense. From
Johns and Rauschenberg (who has an equal but considerably different
form of brilliance) have issued the basic esthetic of much recent as–
semblage and Pop art. And Johns in particular has cast influence upon
certain forms of abstraction which could never have developed with–
out the spectacle of his contrariness. I am thinking now of the very
young Frank Stella (born in 1936), who cannot be spoken of as the
leader of a group but who has nevertheless crystallized a sensibility
very germane to the aspirations of a number of his colleagues. Repre–
sented in the "Abstract-Expressionist and Imagist" show of the Gug–
genheim Museum in 1961, the ''Geometric Abstraction in America"
exhibition (Whitney Museum, 1962), and "Toward a New Abstrac–
tion" (Jewish Museum, 1963), Stella stood out in perverse relief, as
if he were the conscience of his peers. That conscience manifested
itself, apparently, in nothing more than parallel alignments of stripes,
executed most often in metallic colors, separated by the tiniest chan–
nels of unprimed canvas, and contained within frames that varied from
U forms
to
polygons, the centers most recently holed out. That Stella
is a perfectly non-objective artist there can be no doubt, and that he
makes of each of his pictures a solid object is equally obvious. His
accent on the oddness of the shape-which destroys the picture con–
vention of a rectangularity-the "thingness" of the paint, which sug–
gests a substance, metal, and the width of the stretcher, three inches,
all point to a view of painting as artifact.
Thus, 'Stella, like Johns, quite aside from simulating manufacture
and seemingly abdicating a great deal of personal responsibility, operates
by the principle of displacement. What is odd here is that he has been
able to displace completely within the realm of abstraction. He accepts
each form as it is, as unalterably real-annihilating one of the basic
premises of abstraction-but does not trespass into anything in the
least observed or associated. After establishing this essential paradox,
Stella, now unlike Johns, persists in keeping his still point, and di–
minishes all possibilities of "relationships." In fact, his art concerns
itself with such problems as boredom, monotony, even hypnosis (as
hinted at by concentricity). By eliminating any kind of connectedness
between any two areas other than what
his
initial choice of system
predicates, Stella totally thwarts visual probing. The befuddled spec–
tator then tries for conceptual significance, only to be warded off by
the painter's purposeful blankness of mind.