rayrena wrote:
> LBOers,
>
> The NYC culturati is all aflutter this fall over the major exhibits of
> mid-century American abstract expressionists. Everyone is talking about the
> Pollock retrospective at MoMA; the Rothko show at the Whitney is garnering
> lots of ink; there are two de Kooning-centered exhibits in the city;
> Francis Bacon has a show in SoHo. But I have a question: Why isn't anyone
> talking about the Ben Shahn show at the Jewish Museum? Sixty years ago
> Shahn was one of the most famous and influential artists in the world. Why
> has his reputation waned? Well, I think that it has says a lot about the
> politics and culture of fin de siecle USA.
>
> I have a book of Shahn's paintings, and it is stunning. I can feel pain,
> despair, joy, confusion, anger, all these things, when I look at his
> paintings. This is unusual because most painting strikes me as cold and
> distant. The closest artistic kinship Shahn has, methinks, is with John Dos
> Passos. Like Dos Passos, Shahn was not all that original: his style is sort
> of an amalgamation of Matisse, Picasso, Leger. What those two lacked in
> originality, however, they made up for in inventiveness and honesty: The
> work of Dos Passos and Shahn juxtaposed, within the same piece, a vast
> array of people, experiences, viewpoints--in short, all of society--in ways
> that had not been done before. For instance, Shahn's "Study for Jersey
> Homestead Mural," a piece on display at the Jewish Museum exhibit that
> literally shows the tired, the poor and the huddled masses, is sort of the
> visual representation of "USA." Shahn's series on Sacco and Vanzetti
> passionatly portrayed not just those two but also their neighbors, the
> judge in the case, protestors in France, protestors in New York. He showed
> how that case affected the whole world, not just the two victims. Yup, both
> Dos Passos and Shahn tried to be big, they both attempted to capture all of
> society. At times maybe they failed or stumbled. But at least they did not
> aim so small as to be invisbible.
>
> Shahn and Dos Passos are neither one what I would really consider
> "political" artists so much as they are "social" artists. Political artists
> too often come off as whiny, and usually express themselves with the
> sophistication and impact of a high-school literary journal; social
> artists, in my definition, concern themselves more with representing
> society and the individuals in that society, based not so much on what they
> would like them to be as what they *are*. To me, this makes for much deeper
> and more honest art, art that does not aim to manipulate or exploit.
>
> Why the sudden revival of abstraction in art? I think Shahn's description
> of abstract art, in his essay "American Painting at Mid-Century," describes
> these days just as well as it describes the time it was written: "[T]he art
> controversies which in the twenties and thirties would have been on the
> level of polemics--however acrimonious--now [ie, in the early 50s] had new
> elements injected into them: suspicion, accusation, and fear of attainder.
> Artists, perhaps for the first time in history, were visited by government
> agents, quizzed at lengths about their friends, their associations, their
> activities. You may disagree with me that such a political atmosphere can
> have any effect upon the esthetic content of art, to stimulate the trend
> toward abstraction, or toward anything else. I believe that it has.
> *Abstract painting is, politically speaking, about the most non-committal
> statement that can be made in art.[...]Abstract art had left its political
> banners far behind and has for many years gone its way, 'disengaged.'"*
>
> No wonder abstract art has come back so strong in the glorious days of the
> end of the millennium, in the days where there is no need for political
> statement because everything is so *wonderful*. The New York Times review
> of the Shahn show--which is the only one I have seen; those
> lifestyle-rebels at the Village Voice haven't even mentioned it--was
> headlined "Trying to Separate Ben Shahn's Art From His Politics," and the
> reviewer could not seriously critique the exhibit until he had done just
> that (at least to his satisfaction). Shredding this review would be sort of
> pointless, not to mention too easy, but I think the critic indicates what
> art--this includes fiction, photography, theatre, film, etc--is supposed to
> be at the end of the twentieth century: the flights of artist's imagination
> and contemplation, their private idiosyncracies and obsessions. What these
> all really represent, of course, are obfuscation, trickery, apathetic
> abstraction, and meta-artistic statements. Quentin Tarantino is brilliant
> because his movies are full of references to other movies and because he
> makes violence comical; the fact that there is not one human moment in all
> his films, that his attempts at creating meaning are bumbling and
> soulless--none of that makes him any less brilliant. Cy Twombly throws a
> few pieces of twine on a wall and is called a genius; that his aethetic
> refers only to art and never to life doesn't dim his star in the least. No
> wonder normal people don't give a shit about art: it has nothing to do with
> them.
>
> Shahn is not guilty of any of Twombly or Tarantino's transgressions. No,
> Shahn's art does not have a distinct political agenda; but it does deal
> with subjects other than art. Viewing Shahn's paintings I feel humanity, I
> feel compassion and empathy. Shahn was concerned with society and people,
> and didnt think his head was the center of the universe. Give us artists
> who speak to us, not themselves. Give us artists whose subjects are life
> and people and society, not the irrelevant crevices of their minds. Give us
> more Ben Shahns
>
> eric beck