PARTISAN REVIEW
357
RIVERS: I did sell something.
PHILLIPS: You get more than that now.
RIVERS: Yes, but, while I'm up here I may as well get into this other
thing I wanted to bring up. I saw a TV program on Louis Pasteur
the other night and how he discovered rabies and what he had to go
through and the criticism that he received from the Academy and
some of his contemporaries and then I began-I think it was while I
was urinating,-actually, one day, afterwards ... -You talked
about experimental art and experiments as a kind of ideal in art that
I think many of us have, actually without realizing, have been
subject to most of our lives-as if there was something in experi–
menting that almost, in some sense, had the value that experimenta–
tion has in science: that by opening the frontiers you rid man of
disease; you find out ideas about mental health; you broaden his
horizons; you make life more livable, more pleasant. You get rid of
disease; you raise all sorts of comfort levels and things like that and I
was just wondering how much it really means in art. I mean, is the
cancer that experimentation is dealing with in the field of art,
boredom? In other words, if you have disease in the area of health or
science, that you're sort of helping mankind by doing something
about, is experimentation dealing with boredom, which is disease of
another sort. I mean that this is the realm of art; so I was just
wondering how you felt really about experimentation. I mean really
about altering our feelings of boredom.
PHI Ll.IPS: You want
to
answer that? Or you want to let it go . .. let
other people talk?
BRUSTEIN: I could either answer it in one sentence or five thousand
pages, but I would just say two things: one is . ...
RIVERS:
It
was actually directed at Rosalind Krauss too, I mean.
BRUSTEIN : All right.
PHILl.IPS: I can give you a quotation from Ben Jonson. He said, "Art
hath an enemy. Ignorance." That's the cancer.
BRUSTEIN: It has another enemy, boredom, I mean I really think the
mortal sin against the holy ghost in art is
to
be boring.
RIVERS: Isn't experimentation a way of making room for yourself in
this choked river?
PHILLIPS: Why don ' t we go on? Why don't we just say that the word
"experiment" in painting doesn ' t mean the same thing as "experi–
ment" in science. They're really two different processes.
RIVERS: Yes, but I'm saying t.hat artists have been made to feel that
they're accomplishing, that they're involved with a very fantastic
ideal.
