Visual Art: The Current Situation

Leonardo,Vol. 5, pp. 63-68. Pergamon Press 1972. Printed in Great Britain DOCUMENTS The Editors willpublish in thissectionof Leonardo,from time to time,documents that may cast a new light on signiJicantaspects of contemporaryJineart. Such texts may be in theform of manifestos, ‘conversations’ between artists, reprints of articles long out of print, translations, etc.,Readers are invited to recommend to the Editors materialfor possible publication in this section. ~ ~~ VISUAL ART: THE CURRENT SITUATION* John Ferren** First, let’s admit that it is impossible to talk about the art of art. The language of prose, at least, can onlyattempt to talk aboutthe ideas of art. And even then, a thought of the literature of our current exhibition catalogues and exhibition reviews can turn a brave man pale. There is as much conflict between noble, pious and ‘sincere’ ideas as there is between the little ones, and I have no wish to heap confusion on confusion. I suggest that you take my ideas as ‘little’ ones-even if they sound pious. David Black sentme somequestions from the faculty and students which seemed to boil down to the title of Gauguin’s picture: ‘Where are we and where are we going?’or, in other words, ‘What is the direction of art today? Of course, any answer of mine is that of an individual and it would be presumptuous, on either my part or yours, to take it in any other way. However , in receiving your question, I find that I am in no mood to give you a technical run down and a guessfor the future oranyparties ondefense.Iwould like to step over into the other half of art and speak not so much of its form but of its content and its direction. Therefore, in one sense, my answer is no answer. It will help no student decide to base his work on Andrew Wyeth or Kline, or Rothko, or the Chicago Image of Man makers. Yet, I feel that it is the only meaningful answer and the only one that accurately describes this thing of being an artist today. ~ * Unpublishedlecture givento the art facultyand students at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. in February 1960. (Received 17 May 1971.) (The text has not beensubjectedto theusual editorialproceduresof Leonardo.) ** Artist born on 17 October 1905 at Pendleton, Oregon, U.S.A.anddiedon24July 1970atEast Hampton,New York. I will have to take a step backward, if you will bear with me, before I can take a step forward. It is a poet who, early in the century, has most simplyand conciselydefinedthe direction ofmodern art. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote an article which was entitled the Cezanne Inscape. The sun of Cezanne’s landscapes is not of this world, nor are his shadows those of this world or of some mythical underworld; they belong to an inner world. If you look at the struggle of the artist as in the terms of the romantic drama, then the drama of Cezanne is the heroic effort by the small, shy son of a provincial banker to reconcile the beauty and character of his native countryside (its landscape) with his own, selfilluminated , Inscape. Since Cezanne, the direction has been more and more inward; using every tool that could come to hand, the Freudian ideas of Surrealism, the mystical, theosophical ideas of Kandinsky, the purism of Mondrian and abstract expressionism. Mondrian, for instance, didn’t say that he was producing a design basis for modern architecture, or a pattern for magazine lay-out or the faGades of modern architecture, all of which the arthistorians. .[sic.]. He did say,withoutanytraceof ambiguity, that his horizontal represented Earthand hisverticalrepresented heaven,andthat hispaintings were about the tensions of man between theEarth on which he existsand his God . ...Cubism borrowed the authority of science and recreated the world in its image, believing as everyone did at the turn of the century, that this was truth. But it was a temporary truth. The aim of art sincethen has been the conquest of man ...in depth and breadth, not his surface. ..and not the conquest of nature as conceived in the popular sense. Nature, herself, has been greatly conquered, time and again (it...