554 / 676
554
MAX KOZLOFF
tic preoccupation in many camps. To
be
concerned with what are
literally the most tawdry and repellent appearances in American civiliza–
tion is not an activity that would have succeeded, I think, without a
correspondingly intellectual interest in redefining the nature of the
work and our perception in its own tenns. This endeavor, finally, for
all that its origins might be traced back into Abstract-Expressionism,
continues and make both spectator and artist uncomfortable, and by
implication keeps the avant-garde spirit alive.
In recent art, intellectual current has been switched from physical
performance and emotional continuity-the failure of which produces
a most immediate kind of anxiety-to doubt about the distinctions
be–
tween media and styles, artifact and art, which in turn discharges a
less intense, but far more pervasive anxiety. The whole of the European
and American twentieth-century past is being recapitulated for nourish–
ment, to be churned up by the kind of inner challenge of this program.
If
the Dada and Surrealist elements of our tradition were the first to
be reappraised, the Constructivists and Bauhaus were the next to fall
under a scrutiny of American artists, whose sense of the contemporary
makes them fundamentally disrespectful, and whose local experience
becomes more and more vicarious and irrational.
To put it more positively, the discoveries of contemporary art have
to do with the nature of the contained emotional complexes in a pic–
torial or three-dimensional work. It has been by no means proved that
an agitated brush mark connotes emotion, or that a flat, uniformly
applied paint surface signifies detachment. These are only the crudest
psychological notations, or rather prejudices, about the content of a
work of art. Most important, the insight is already upon us that our
intuitions of spontaneity or calculation may have nothing to do with
the emotional state evoked within us--for neither takes into account
the artist's own separation of conception and execution, consequences of
which are becoming ever more apparent in the galleries. Time and
again, he disproves the mistaken idea that intention equals result which
was at the core of many theories about Abstract-Expressionism. Cued
by a wealth of infinitely subtle contexts, an "hysterical" square is
al–
together possible. What one sees at the present time are manipulations
of such contexts--mutations of anaesthetized passion. Behind such
masks, the ambivalences of contemporary civilization are finding per–
turbing expression.