MIXED MEDIUMS FOR A SOFT REVOLUTION
Thomas B. Hess
A lively, in places a brilliant exhibition, titled "New
Mediums - New Forms," at
the Jackson Gallery [June 6-24], informally poses one of the most interesting
questions that concerns modern art 1960 It assembles free-standing works and
reliefs made of sponge, wood pegs, tacks, a smashed fender, folded paper, ping-pong
balls, playing cards, spikes, a stuffed chicken, a cut-out bird, tar, garter-belts,
coffee-grounds, a railroad tie, styrofoam, polyesters, corrugate, pillows,
an electro-magnet - rubbish and valuables, "garlic and sapphires in the
mud . . ." Chronologically the start is ancestral objects by Arp, Schwitters,
Calder (but
where is St.
Marcel?); there are established artists whose works
here seem brimming with dignity - Cornell, Dubuffet, Mallary, Zogbaum;
there are the latest "sensations" from just below Tenth Street and
the far-out colonies of the Coast and Continent. Quality is as varied as materials.
Bare-foot
crypto-Bohemian farce and art-student efforts elbow their ways through works
of severe insight and hardwon originality.
Previewing the exhibition in a spare
room (that looked like Citizen
Kane directed by a Collyer
Brother) hardly afforded
the opportunity for leisurely observation.
But the jumble made the issue of the show even clearer: a great many artists
today seem dissatisfied with the basic limits of Art, not for esthetic reasons,
but for
social ones. There is a kind of protest in many of these works, but it is not
against the values of middle-class society as were the Dada manifestations.
Rather the new protest is in favor of society - or for People in general -
and against
the invisible, crystal-hard barriers that an oil-on-canvas or a sculptured-sculpture
place between the witness and the finished object. It is as if many of these
artists were trying to reach out from their works to give the spectator's hand
a good shake or nudge him in the ribs. You are invited to touch and move things,
open hinged boxes, switch playing cards around, to rearrange "compositions":
be a participant homo ludens - in a game with art. The only rule kept is that
there must be at least two people in each game - artist and onlooker. One gets
the feeling that many of these works could die of loneliness. Thus it follows,
it seems to me, that the human (i.e. ethical) quality of the audience will
directly affect and modify the esthetic quality of the work. Art becomes an
event and
its audience's response is a function of art's equation - indeed it is the
X which the artist wants to keep unknown and, in so doing, gambles his work
on
each pair of eyes and hands with which it collides. To over-simplify: such
a work might be handsome and amusing among a group of artists and disgusting
and
boring at a chi-chi private viewing - depending on who is in attendance.
Not
all the works in the exhibition, of course, break with that ambiguous stasis
which has been the strength and the purity of the fine arts since long before
its definition by Aristotle and which will endure until generations from now.
Cornell and Mallary, for example, by the perfection itself of their craft and
vision (you must look closely at the parts to see the logic of their unities),
re-establish a "distance," a remoteness of art. This separation,
magic quality of scale, exists in the lush imagination that is behind Rauschenberg's "combine" and
Zogbaum's throne for a boulder. It is present, elsewhere, too. But an attack
on the aristocracy of art by and with art is the main point of the exhibition
- although "attack" is too aggressive a noun for the witty, ingratiating
social activity to which so many of these works are dedicated. Is there, perhaps,
a new collective dive into sociology, into the streets, to the crowded sidewalks
where barricades have become only romantic souvenirs? A soft Revolution? It
is a subject to which this writer hopes to return in a more extended observation.
Art News, Summer 1960: 45, 62
