Notes on Clement Greenberg

Notes about Clement Greenberg's critical essay collection entitled "Art and Culture", published in 1989 by Beacon Press, Boston. ISBN 978-0-8070-6681-2

[clementgreenberg]

Questions

1. Greenberg describes the historical past as being dominated by "Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the Old Masters" (pg 4). Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

2. How do you understand Greenberg's concept of the abstract when he urges the poet or artist to turn "his attention away from subject matter of common experience" and instead "[turn] it in upon the medium of his own craft" (pg 6). Is focusing on the medium a means of defining a particular discipline such as painting or sculpture? Or is the focus on the medium purely aesthetic or optical?

3. Greenberg made the comment that "art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles, and what counts first and last in art is quality; all other things are secondary" (pg 133). If art is a matter of experience, then aren't historical events, which signify principles, part of that experience as Picasso demonstrated in Guernica?

4. When Greenberg uses the word "decorative", does he use it to describe the positive or negative aspects of pictorial art? If used in a negative sense, does he imply that the work is lacking in quality or ability?

5. In Greenberg's opinion is the creative process of making pictorial or sculptural art a personal endeavor as it often is in literature?

[clementgreenberg]

"The net result is always to the detriment of true culture, in any case."

-'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', 1939 [p. 12]

Question: What is the high/true culture that Greenberg speaks of here and elsewhere? Who defines this?

Ally: Perhaps Greenberg fancies himself and his audience as the only participants of this high/true culture. This leads to my questions of who is Greenberg's intended audience, who is his actual audience, and why does he still have an audience now in 2010?

[clementgreenberg]

WHERE IS MARCEL DUCHAMP?

[clementgreenberg]

Questions

A. "The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws the lifeblood, so to speak, from the reservoir of accumulated experience." 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch', 1939 [p. 10]

Question: Isn't this the base of all new movements in art? Does Greenberg not see it this way because he does not see kitsch as an intentional aesthetic choice?Could you submit 'Cubism' or 'Postmodernism' for 'kitsch' and hold the statement still true?

B. "One cannot condemn tendencies in art; one can only condemn works of art. To be categorically against a current art tendency or style means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen. It means inquiring into the motives of artists instead of into results. Yet we all know-or are supposed to know-that results are all that count in art." 'Wyndham Lewis Against Abstract Art', 1957 [p. 164]

Question: How does this relate to Greenberg's ideas about kitsch? Does Greenberg contradict himself in other parts of the book in regards to this statement?

[clementgreenberg]

"It may be that we cannot yet see far enough around the art of our own day; that the real and fundamental source of the dissatisfaction we may feel with abstract painting lies in the not uncommon problems offered by a new 'language.'"

[P. 136]

We can substitute whatever the most current and shocking media might be for the term 'abstract painting' in this passage and apply it to any time period. Why can't Greenberg?

Being aware of the fact that we can often not understand an event until it is past, (20/20 hindsight) how do we as observers and writers proceed in our interpretations and analyses of contemporary art?

~allyson

[clementgreenberg]

Hans Hoffman, Le Gilotin, 1953

[clementgreenberg]

The picture plane as a whole imitates visual experience as a whole; rather, the picture plane as a total object represents space as a total object. Art and nature confirm one another as before.

'On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting' 1949 [p. 174]

[clementgreenberg]

Variations in Reproductions of Lavender Mist (via Krystal South)

[clementgreenberg]

The world was stripped of its surface, of its skin, and the skin was spread on the flatness of the picture plane.

'On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting' 1949 [p. 172]

[clementgreenberg]

BYZANTINE PARALLELS, 1958

"Anything that suggests a recognizable entity (and all recognizable entities exist in three dimensions) suggest tactility or the kind of space in which tactile experience is possible. Modernist painting and sculpture are alienated no so much from "nature" as from the nonvisual." [p. 167]

"This new kind of Modernist picture, like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance. And it combines in a similar fashion the monumentally decorative with the pictorially emphatic, at the same time that it uses the most self-evidently corporeal means to deny its own corporeality. [p. 169]

"When something becomes everything it also becomes less real, and what the latest abstract painting seems to harp on is the questionability of the material and the corporeal. A radically transcendental and a radically positivist exclusiveness both arrive at anti-illusionist, or rather counter-illusionist, art. Once again, extremes meet." [p. 170]

[clementgreenberg]

The Crisis of the Easel Picture, 1948

"This tendency appears in the all-over, "decentralized," "polyphonic" picture that relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge of the picture to the other. It is the kind of picture that dispenses with beginning, middle, end*. Thought the "all-over" picture will, when successful, still hang dramatically on a wall, it comes very close to decoration-to the kind seen in wallpaper patterns that can be repeated indefinitely-insofar as the "all-over" picture remains an easel picture, which somehow it does, it infects the notion of the genre with fatal ambiguity." [p. 155]

* non-narrative!

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950.

The parallel I see is more specific. Mondrian's term, "Equivalent" is to the point here. Just as Shonberg makes every element, every sound in the composition of equal importance-different but equivalent-so the "all-over" painter renders every element and every area of the picture equivalent in accent and emphasis. Like the twelve-tone composer, the "all-over" painter weaves his work of art into a tight mesh whose scheme of unity is recapitulated at every meshing point." [p. 156]

[clementgreenberg]

For no matter how shallow the picture becomes, as long as its shapes are sufficiently differentiated in terms of light and dark, and kept in dramatic imbalance, it will remain an easel painting.

'The Crisis of the Easel Picture' 1948 [p. 155]

[clementgreenberg]

THE NEW SCULPTURE, 1948/1958

Industrial materials: iron, steel, alloys, glass, plastics, celluloid, etc. cast, wrought, cut or simply out together; it is not so much sculpted as constructed, built, assembled, arranged.

"Liberated from the monolithic." [p. 142]

"Tied, inexorably, to the third dimension and is therefore inherently less illusionistic. [p. 143]

"Economy of physical substance." [p. 144]

"The constructor-sculptor can, literally, draw in the air with a single strand of wire that supports nothing but itself." [p. 145]

"A work of sculpture, unlike a building, does not have to carry more than its own weight, nor does it have to be on something else, like a picture; it exists for and by itself literally as well as conceptually." [p. 145]

[clementgreenberg]

This means, among other things, renouncing illusion and explicitness. The arts are to achieve concreteness, "purity", by acting solely in terms of their separate and irreducible selves.

'The New Sculpture', 1952 [p. 139]

[clementgreenberg]

BOLD STATEMENT

"The fusion of conceptual with aesthetic meaning does not effect quality." [p. 134]

[clementgreenberg]

Taken by itself, no single one of its parts or aspects decides the quality of an artwork as a whole.

'Abstract, Representational and so forth" 1948/58 [p.133]

[clementgreenberg]

‘Abstract, Representational and so forth’, 1948/58

"The presence or absence of a recognizable image has no more to do with value in painting than a libretto has to do with value in music." [p. 133]

"Not that most of recent abstract art is major, on the contrary, most of it is bad; but this still does not precent the very best of it from being the best of our time." [p.135]

"The abrogation of those spatial rights which images used to enjoy when the painter was obliged to create an illusion of the same kind of space as that in which our bodies moved." [p. 136]

Franz Kline, Painting Number 2, 1954

"Pictorial space has lost its "inside" and become all "outside". The spectator can no longer escape into it from the space in which he himself stands." [p. 137]

"Not only does the abstract picture offer a narrower, more physical and less imaginative kind of experience that the illusionist picture, but it appears to do without the nouns and transitive verbs, as it were, of the language of painting. The eye that has trouble locating the central emphases and is more directly compelled to treat the whole of the surface as a single undifferentiated field of interest, and this in turn, compels us to feel and judge the picture more immediately in terms of its over-all unity." [p. 137]