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Clement Greenberg: HOMEMADE ESTHETICS
Barnett
Newman famously quipped that esthetics were of as much interest to artists as
ornithology to birds. His sometime
friend, the art critic Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential tastemakers
of the century, was more concerned with the exercise of taste than speculation
into its nature: one might say he was a bird-watcher who twitched. Late in his career, however, he turned to
esthetics, first in a series of seminars delivered at Bennington College, a
liberal arts school for women in Vermont, and then in articles worked up from
these lectures which he published in various magazines. He planned a volume to be called “Homemade
Esthetics”, producing a draft of its opening chapter. The book under review adopts Greenberg’s pithy, Emersonian title,
and presents the polished “seminars”, stripped (unusefully) of their published
headings followed by transcripts of the Bennington lectures with a selection of
each evening’s questions (a chronological ordering actually reads better). A begrudging and ponderous introduction by
the British art historian Charles Harrison tries to bury the volume rather than
praise it. Far from being a curio for
scholars, however, this book is a major event.
With extraordinary sparkle, wisdom and energy Greenberg’s voice speaks
to the present situation in art more pertinently and pursuasively than any
contemporary theorist.
By
1971, when he delivered his lectures, Greenberg was in rapid retreat from an
American artscene he had previously dominated.
The purist brand of flat color-field abstract expressionism he
championed had long been displaced by “far out” avant-gardist styles, while his
critical formalist position was isolated and seemed irreversibly discredited. Bennington - dubbed Clemsville at the time -
was the gathering-place of the last of the Greenbergian Mohicans. (It’s a shame, incidentally, that the
questioners are not identified; one knows that the likes of Anthony Caro and
Bernard Malamud were in the audience).
The mood of these seminars, however, is anything but grouchy. They are principled and rigorous, to be
sure, but disarmingly pragmatic, suggestive of a liberal curiosity and catholic
taste. Talk of “advanced art” is rare
and “ineluctable flatness” is banished as the esthetician takes over from the
pundit.
Taste
is Greenberg’s categorical imperative.
Philosophers after Kant, he complains, have evaded the challenge of
arguing for the objectivity of taste, while artwriters think they can get away
without verdicts. “Verdicts are the
warp and woof of esthetic experience”, he insists. As for objectivity, its ultimate proof is the unassailability of
the canon, the historic consensus that forms itself out of accumulated
(“congealed”) good taste. Some names
get dropped occasionally, he concedes, but most argument about the greats
concerns ranking, not qualification.
Although good taste is not objective like scientific fact - because it
doesn’t deal in probative data - it is closer to being objective than
subjective. How much closer is relative
to the degree to which it is cultivated
in a given individual, which only becomes clear posthumously (presumably when
that individual’s tastes meld into suprapersonal esthetic consciousness.) But quality cannot be codified or
prescribed; the essence of living art is surprise. It is the testing of conventions, which are nonetheless vital,
and an evident “weight of decisions”, that ensure quality, that expands the parameters
of esthetic experience. New art needs
to be avant-garde, but paradoxically true revolutionaries are generally
reluctant ones: Stravinsky, Matisse, T.S.Eliot, and even Jackson Pollock are
cited for their reverence for the traditions they upset.
With
more grace than sarcasm Greenberg acknowledges how the “far out” art of the
last ten years (ie the 1960s) had clarified issues that esthetics of the last
150 years had ignored. “Art as such has lost the honorific status is never
deserved”, he concluded, referring to how, inadvertently, Duchamp-derived art
relegated the object as secondary to the esthetic experience it elicits. Unquestionably, though, minimalism and
conceptualism (and the whole swathe of movements springing from them which
increasingly dominate the artscene to this day) represented a betrayal of the
promise of the historic avant-garde Greenberg so exalted. The problem is that such art is “all
surprise without satisfaction”. “Far-out” art is obsessed by establishing a
place for itself “as though each move is recognized as a one-time move that has
to be trumped”. The kind of art that
identifies and discards all conventions, and follows some idea, conception, or
category like serialism, objecthood, literalness, process, or simply of being
far-fetched or startlingly personal, consigns all the “decisive moment of
creation” to an initial choice leaving no space for further intuitions beyond
it: the actual making just becomes craft.
When prevailing taste is swayed by pseudo-innovations – academic
“twists” as Greenberg characterizes them, “academic” because they trade in
received not achieved decisions - the real avant-garde continues
underground. This sounds like a
rallying-call to the Bennington faithful, but Clement Greenberg certainly continued
to look for – and at – new art to the end. “Some people insist on up-to-date
major art”.
This
book is studded with bright apercus, sharp critique, and copious evidence of
refreshingly honest taste-formation. It
is primarily for this last quality, the sense of what it is like to be in the
line of fire of esthetic adventure, that Greenberg’s ruminations
exhilerate. He so ardently believes in
the notion of impersonal taste and the catholicity necessary for its
cultivation, that he looked at everything, including much art he must have despised,
(mis)reading it on his own formalist terms. (“The safest attitude to have in
the face of art is to be ready to be surprised”.) When an anti-esthete artist lets his guard drop – as they all do
- taste at its most conventional seeps in, he believed. Carl Andre’s tiles are better in copper than
steel, he notes, playfully insisting on the relevance of even tiny esthetic
decisions. “Don’t ever let a work of art get swallowed up in its category”, he
warned.
The
irony with Greenberg is the ease with which the ideas of this apostle of taste
can be liberated from the dated abstraction to which his own taste actually led
him. He now enjoys cult status among a
new generation of artworld theorists who have no truck with the artistic values
he held dear: the sociologically-oriented T.J.Clark and the diehard Duchampian
Thierry de Duve, for instance, not to mention Charles Harrison, himself a minor
player in Britain’s conceptual art movement. But for esthetic (as opposed to
strategy-oriented) artists and for retinal-pleasure seeking art lovers
Greenberg’s seminars may prove empowering in ways that the theory-for-theory’s
sake brigade will come to rue. There is
a timely reminder in “Homemade Esthetics” that no amount of theory can help an
ornithologist to fly.