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Well that is the prevaling ideology. But you see what that means in terms of art education, and the role of the arts in the intellectual life of a community. It means their disappearence and reduction of the arts as elements of life.
There are other problems too, especially with teaching. Art is practice and requires learning by doing. It also requires a non-verbal analytical capacity, thinking through a symbolic world that exists in a mostly non-verbal realm. However, that also has to be passed on somehow through more than practice---by a narrative accompaniment.
While the guys were slugging each other in the chest down at the Cedar bar, they were also arguing over their art, its meanings, its stature in US culture, and US arts' potential to over throw Paris. Get America into the history books. And on and on.
I didn't get any of that from school or art history books. I got it from my buddy Hub who had been a friend of my stepfather in Mexico. Central to his analytic painter mind was psychology in a broad sense, which he experimented with in paintings that owed a lot to Clifford Still. Hub's NYC work was big, heavy impastos, applied with various flat blade tools. He also borrowed the general psychological dimensions of Rothko's work, through his use of color combinations to evoke the state sought. The way to really see a Rothko, is to spend time with it, without thinking anything. Slowly the psychological state that it is, will come to you.
The only overt psychology they knew was Freud, so there was a lot of freudian influenced art criticism of the period---that competed with Rosenberg's marxist take and Greenberg's formalism. But what was going on in the art itself was the replacement of explicit narrative, for a diffused sense of mood or states. This is what linked AE up with music, particular the jazz of the period and some of the film. The other big influence was the surrealism crowd who blew in from Europe to escape the Nazis. Part of the theory of gesture technique is the releash of control over movement, in order to release the `unconscious'. You can see this in Franz Kline or Arshille Gorky in different ways. Kline studied Japanese ink painting, which uses accident as the starting point to build up a painting. Gorky went the more explicit route following Picasso and Juan Miro.
I got to see Gorky's techniques through one of his students, Hans Burkhardt who taught at Northridge. Burkhardt was one of those speechless guys who really couldn't talk. He had to show you by doing. This really pissed off most of the people in his painting class. But I figured it out, so whenever he came over to my easel, I just handed him my brush and let him wail away.
A lot of that world were deliberate creations, and not some mystical thing that artists did. So the way I see it, is how those creations were made, is an important part of the social cultural history of the period. It's the kind of subject that disappears, if you haven't had a living connection with it. What that means is important parts of the history disappear.
Getting back to Warhol, where I have ambiguous and mixed feeling about him and his work. Warhol didn't like the entire AE sensibility from its masculinity to it's theory talk. In the Deitch article, Warhol is quoted as saying business art is good art, not art art. In other passages W goes on about the democracy of Coke a Cola. The President drinks the same coke as the bum on the corner.
Where is that bullshit coming from? It is a rather amusing reaction from a guy who really didn't understand what I would call the philosophical dimension to the visual arts. In particular Warhol represented a reaction to the AE linkages with existentialism, surrealism, and the whole depth psychology crowd.
In the historical US narrative, Warhol represented and embodied the anti-intellectual element reasserting itself in the arts. When I discovered Warhol's first big one man show was the one I saw in LA, a whole lot of things clicked together. That's one reason I really liked the Tomkins essay. NYC back in Warhol's early days was considered not only the place to go for painters, but also the promise of finally connecting to the best intellectual avant garde in the US. Everybody just knew LA had no intellectual community, and represented the consumer society par exellence. Probably no big gallery or museum would touch Warhol back east.
LA and Warhol were a match made in heaven-hell. That big LA show changed the LA art crowd almost overnight. Guys struggling with paint brushes in rundown storefronts trying to figure out what it all means changed over to various photo-silkscreen techniques, photo-transfers like Rauschenberg, and a whole list of industrial production techniques and other materials, never found in art stores anywhere. I was afraid Grumbacher would go broke. Robert Irwin et al. and Ferris grew out of this change over. They were running their own war against the richer gallery set on La Cienga where most of the work was still NYC based.
There was a whole other culture-money war going on between East and West Coast art and theory. It was a real cultural set-back that the LA elites use the communist menace to run the German emigres out of LA. The central importance of that crowd were the sensibilities, arts, and philosophies (the culture) they brought with them from Weimar. New York on the other hand managed to keep much of its EU influences.
Anyway. Below is a link to Robert Irwin talking about art, making art, and one kind of philosophy that arises out this realm. It's very good and captures a lot of the deeper theory stuff embedded in or grew out of the AE to Minimalist movements:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajsEebw89g
This is getting too long. I'll repost the link and start another post on the narrative-anti-narrative divide. It is also something I've struggled with a lot and still have no rsolution. I gave up trying to incorporate the two, and intentionally made a division in my own styles, one follow the minimalists and the other following Caravaggio. Fuck constancy, I am never getting a show anyway.
CG