The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistence of Genre in Recent Art Author(s): Thomas Crow Reviewed work(s):

Source: October, Vol. 63 (Winter, 1993), pp. 41-67 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778864 . Accessed: 19/02/2013 12:23
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistenceof Genre in Recent Art

THOMAS

CROW

In talkingabout the finearts today,at the seeming end of modernism,at therecomes a built-in a diminishingpoint even of a perceived postmodernism, old. Their time of expanding vitality has the itself that subject grown expectation seems now to belong in the past-in the period fromthe Renaissance forward But the more thatone tries to the heroic modernismsof the twentieth century. it becomes to avoid the to make sense of recentart practice,the more difficult conclusion thatthe fineartsare among the youngestof the categoriesof formal are still increasing with culture, and that their power and cultural centrality time. when disembodied information about the smallest How can it be otherwise event in a studio in a Brooklyn backstreetor a Venice Beach alleyway can and intellectualattentionon a mobilize human energies, financialtransfers, of cultural the extent of which-in material That sort scale? leverage, global terms-would have to be measured in multipleorders of magnitude,is new in withthatof the filmindustry, the world. Contrastthisextraordinary efficiency so often seen as the quintessentialmedium of our historicalmoment: there And are required to returneven a minimumlevel of profit. massiveinvestments the same can be said of professionalsports,which demand elaborate formsof in order to secure the enorconcentration,monopoly,and state intervention involved. While governments mous financialcommitments and large corporations have plainlyacquired a stake in contemporary the level of investment art, is minuscule by comparison. With their low costs of entryand potential for exponential returns,the fine arts seem closer in this respect to computer software, the most potent form of intellectualpropertyof our era. Art seems well adapted to a world in which marketsare completelyinternationsimilarly alized, politics are subordinated to them, and economic exchanges, unconstrainedby timeand space, are expressed in disembodied,quasi-fictional forms of information transfer. And this success plainly has nothingto do with the presence or absence of a work of visual art in the technicalsense establishedduring the golden age
OCTOBER 63, Winter 1993. O 1993

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

42

OCTOBER

of old-masterproduction: it is most apparent when no such work is involved. Disembodied intelligenceis the medium of art's enhanced power; the logical corollaryof this fact is that the same separation of the mental component of visual art from its varyingphysicalmanifestations must always have been the of fine-art definingcharacteristic practice.That process of separation has had a long historyin European culture,extendingat least fromAlbertiforward. came withthe conArguablythe most decisive momentwithinits long history of the FrenchRoyalAcademyof Paintingand Sculpsolidationof the authority instrument for that consolidation ture under Louis XIV. The key intellectual was a fixingof the order of genres in painting, and it is questionsof genre that will be the principalconcern in what follows.

How can the archaic-sounding idea of genre remainimportant forunderof is need the condition art? There to elaborate how hardly any standing in it was and Neoclassical bora Baroque powerful concept practice.Though criticism-from the divisionof poetryinto epic, drama, rowed from literary lyric, elegy,and so on-the notionof genre proved,in fact,to be more cleanly and effectively adaptable to painting,where the principalcategoriescould be into a clear hierarchy.The ordering principle was derived from arranged taskof art was to imitate from his observation thatthe mostimportant Aristotle, Thus action. the human highestcategoryof art was what the representative of la peinture translation French called history d'histoire): painting(an imperfect from the Bible, the events antiquity, compositionsenactinggreat multifigured of the Church and the nation'srulingdynasties. They descended from history human presence involvedand the there according to the degree of significant extent to which the mind was engaged with general truthsover and above Thus generalized human figures merelylocal interestsor sensual attractions. of history. Next came portraiture, would rank as a subsidiary frommythology in descending order followed of the to the social rank sitter, graded according would of scenes correspondto comedy anonymoustypes(which by picturesque status and rewardswere apporstill life. Official in literature), and landscape, in which of the to the rank tioned to artists theypracticed.' genre according That systemprevailed for a good two hundred years until,in the midthe appearance of an artistic nineteenthcentury, avant-gardebroughtabout a comedic scenes (in What were essentially of thathierarchy. drasticdestabilizing between comedy and tragedy),landthe sense of the Aristoteliandistinction replaced history paintingas vehiclesforsuperior scapes, and intimateportraits
de is the preface to Andr6 F61ibien, of the hierarchy The founding formulation 1. Confirences et de de 1668). (Paris, sculpture royale peinture l'Acadimie

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

43

intellectualand moral ambition.2From Courbet forward,the claim is madeand increasingly accepted-that the greater alertness,breadth of comprehenin the observer will be sion, and potential for psychologicaltransformation inferiorto historicalnarrative demanded by subjectsonce deemed intrinsically in preciselythese respects.The analyticCubism of Braque and Picasso brought this development to something of a culmination in consistently yoking the on the viewer's concentration and to demands the humblest intelligence highest of anonymoustypes. classes of subject matter:stilllives,interiors, and portraits The great disparity between the conceptual and thematiclevels particular to this art has been a powerfulencouragementto the belief thatsubject matter is either a pretextto the real business of art or dispensable altogether.In the context of such belief, even the idea of generic criticismhas come to seem redundant. Unusual circumstances have been required to revivepreoccupation with genre in any explicit form.One such momentarrived in the days of the Popular Frontin America,at the Artists Congress againstWar and Fascism held in New York in 1936. There Meyer Schapiro launched a strenuousdefense of the continued relevance of historypaintingagainst modernistappropriations of its erstwhileprestige.3 His polemic reveals thatbeneath the standard distinctions between conformist public art and avant-gardefreedom,between accesto the and masses esoteric abstraction,was an argument about the sibility of he for indicted,with great eloquence, the avant-gardists hierarchy genres; the crime of reducing adventurous art from the historicalgenre to the status of stilllife: It is essential in this anti-naturalistic art thatjust those relationsof visual experience which are most importantfor actionare destroyed of a passive spectator, colors by the modern artist.As in the fantasy and shapes are disengaged fromobjects and can no longer serve as a means in knowing them. The space withinpictures becomes intraversible;its planes are shuffledand disarrayed,and the whole is reordered in a fantastically intricate manner. Where the human figure is preserved, it is a piece of picturesque still-life, a richlypigmented, lumpy mass, individual, irritable, and sensitive; or an accidental plastic thing among others, subject to sunlight and the drasticdistortions of a design. If the modern artistvalues the body, it is no longer in the Renaissance sense of a firm, clearlyarticulated, but as temperamentaland vehementflesh.4 structure, energetic

2. For a perceptive discussion of this shift,see Leila W. Kinney,"Genre: A Social Contract?" Art Journal46 (Winter 1987), pp. 267-71, especiallyp. 271. 3. Meyer Schapiro, "The Social Bases of Art," in proceedings of the First American Artists' Congress against War and Fascism (New York, 1936), pp. 31-37. 4. Ibid., p. 36.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

44

OCTOBER

I have added emphasis to certainwords to point up how fundamentally AristotelianSchapiro's criteriaremain. What he wants to discount is the fact that taken over not only the outwardprestigeof tradiabstractionhad increasingly mind over tional historypaintingbut also its crucial functionof representing matter.What he wanted instead was a connectionbetween the rhetoricalrequirementsof history paintingand a public space definedin democraticrather thanauthoritarian terms-as he put it,an artthatwould "ask thesame questions thatare asked by the impoverishedmasses and oppressed minorities."5 The question that he did not ask, however,was whetherthe high genre had ever, or could ever, ask such questions. The historicalrecord is not encouraging on thisscore. The capacityto read a paintingin termsof itsvalue as abstracted,generalized truthhas been linked to an elite position of mastery codifiedwithin the French fromthe momentthatthegenrehad been definitively in later vision control remained central and The between Academy. equation academic theory.In England, Sir Joshua Reynoldsdefined citizenshipin "the republic of taste" by an individual's abilityto abstract from particulars: to behind visual phenomena was to demcomprehend the constantregularities of onstratethe breadth of vision necessaryto comprehendthe general interest the body politic.This requirementwas assumed, it need hardlybe said, to be the exclusive possession of a genteel minority.6 That conjunctionwas substantially repeated in the most powerfularguin painting-and of abstraction mentsofferedin our own time forthe priority excoriatedby Schapiro had thisis one of the clearestsigns thatthe abstraction of history inheritedthe erstwhile painting.While fewif any of the prerogatives advocates of modernistabstractioncontended that the ideal viewer demonstrated a fitnessto rule through his habits of attentionto works of art, the equation persisted between the competence to read an abstractwork and a subjective position of undivided masteryand control. To cite, as an almost of the autonomythesisin the example, Michael Fried's formulation obligatory 1960s: a successful abstract work, by means of its allover activationof the separate fromthe acpictorialsurface,achieves an instantaneouspresentness, cidents of its actual use or setting;the viewerwho can grasp this presentness will be elevated to a condition of disinterested self-sufficiency, joined to "an intellectual . moral and . . passion ... informedby inspired by enterprise discrimination" uncommonpowersof moral and intellectual (emphasisadded).7 a challenging to discovera unifiedorderwithin To see adequately intoa picture,

5. Ibid., p. 37. fixed on the mundane details of earning a The lower orders, withtheir minds necessarily 6. living,were by definitionexcluded. For an account of this aspect of academic theory,see John to Hazlitt:The Bodyof thePublic (New Haven Barrell, The PoliticalTheory ofPainting Reynolds from and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Louis (New York: Abrams, 1971), p. 10. Michael Fried, Morris 7.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

. ,

..... .. ..... . . .++

....

. .i

...............

. .. ..i !ii~ i. i.. . . i?i!i~ .......!iii!!!!i ....

. .. ...

..

TimScott. Quadreme. 1966.

was forhim to activatea superiorformof inner fieldof complex visual incident, life in a societythatofferedfewcomparable occasions fordoing so.8 In the 1960s, as a young criticand historianvisitingLondon, Fried encouraged the developinglinkbetweenAmericanpaintingand Britishsculpture then centered on Anthony Caro's work and teaching at the Saint Martin's School. From this conjunctioncame some forcefulstatements by artistsof the of the historicalgenre criteria ideational the between traditionally continuity virtueof that have the further and those of modernistabstraction (statements or of Fried Clement than the less familiar oft-quotedpronouncements being in stated in remarks William The 1967, Tucker, published sculptor Greenberg). thathis art was meant as "a propositionabout the physicalworld,about a finite about our existencein the world; the order (completeness),and by implication itselfbeing toward the general, away from the perdirectionof the activity mental states and generalizationfrom sonal."' This fixationon contemplative in an underscored was by Tucker's colcommentary accompanying particulars it is acts Tim Scott: modernist and fellow by displacement; "Sculpture league of physical of experience,thestate of feeling, thestate the state of being, the state
of thispositionwould be Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in 8. The mostconcentratedstatement MinimalArt,ed. GregoryBattcock(New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 116-47. 9. Tim Scott, "Reflectionson Sculpture, A Commentaryby Tim Scott on Notes by William 1961-1967 (London: WhitechapelGallery,1967), n.p.; on this,see Tucker," in TimScott:Sculpture in his essay,"Sculpture's the importanceof these statements Charles Harrison, who has identified Since 1965, ed. Terry Neff (London: Thames British Recent Past," in A QuietRevolution: Sculpture on modernism; and Hudson, 1987), p. 14. I am much indebtedhere to Harrison'sgeneral thinking see also his Essayson Art& Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1991), pp. 1-62.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

46

OCTOBER

of confrontation awareness and sensation,the state by physicalphenomena, not these thingsthemselves."' The prestigeof such beliefsin that period marks the persistenceof the genre hierarchyinto the postwar period, in the sense that a conservationof capacitiesof the painting'sfunction-appeal to the highestgeneralizing history of a its traditional over conservation forms,or themes, intellect--prevailed technical means. In the common psychologicalspace of modernism,the old paragoneof painting and sculpture (itselfa dispute about relative rhetorical thatencompassed both." elevation) could be dissolved into a metapictorialism value of the highest genre was continuallyreinforcedeven The differential of the others had ceased to be consciouslyrecwhen the independent validity ognized.

The question, then, is what happened to the other genres? To a large desire extenttheywere dispersedintovernacularforms. Today, ifone's primary as opposed to is for a landscape over the mantelpieceor a boardroom portrait, a landscape or a portraitthat happens to be by Matisse,one generallyleaves Where the old hierarchyhad apthe realm of validated fine art altogether.'2 to level according to a rhetorical each of artistic seriousness shares portioned notion of decorum (there was a rightkind of stylefor a given subject), the modes of figurative devaluation of subject matterhas left"merely"functional of at all. art to the status no claim with virtually representation No sacrificeon this scale could take place withoutthere being a considseriousnessinto of artistic erable price to be paid. The collapse of the definition the criteria exclusive to historypainting has made unrealisticdemands for thatassumed itsduties and its abstraction on the modernist comprehensiveness mostsubtlekindsof awareand the to elicit asked been It has deepest prestige. ness from its audience while being deprived of any substantialcapacity for were claims of modernistcriticism referenceto the world. The more fantastic a direct product of this historicalanomaly,but this is not to say that such new, eitherin visual art problems withthe highestcategoryof art are entirely
on Sculpture." 10. Scott,"Reflections on 11. Such a conflationruns against the grain of the overt fixationin Greenbergiancriticism withoutbeing boundaries between media, but one can accept the appropriatenessof thatcriticism for that criticism so fixated.This is why an unacknowledged,deep structure (postulated here as of genres) has to be sought.Consciousnessof media boundaries is, to begin the historical hierarchy with,a unifyingcomponent of the attentionthat its ideal viewer pays to painting or sculpture indifferently. 12. The demand for these kinds of objects, it seems to me, persistsindependentlyfrom the art and extendsintovariouskindsof craftand amateur manufacture; marketformuseum-oriented discussionof the question,see the author's"Hand-Made Photographsand Homeforsome further October 62 (Fall 1992), pp. 123-32. less Representation,"

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

47

or in the literarymodes from which its hierarchyof genres was fashioned. was long recognized as an attitudethat impoverUnrelieved high-mindedness withtheirprotocolsof ished and undermined the veryclaim of the high styles, in theme and expression,to representthe widestpossible compass of "nobility" knowledge and experience. The lessons of several centuriesof European art and literaturehad been that the celebrationof heroic values in art could best survive comparison to realityby including the contraryvoice and outlook of common life. From the timeof Virgilforward,faltering beliefin the transcenfromthe instantitis solicited) dent virtueof rulers(and such beliefalwaysfalters elevated the rustictype,the shepherd or swain, to the place once occupied by Achilles,Alexander, or Augustus. In this formof courtlyconceit, the poet or the lordlypretenseof representing all of society(l'itatc'est moi) paintertransfers to characters who derive their representative status from their ubiquity and fromtheirpresumed closeness to nature and the basics of life. The name traditionally given to this incorporationof the commonplace withinthe exalted-and vice versa-has been pastoral. Its basic and original sense is thatof a class of poetrythatcelebratesthe pleasures and song of simple was already underway in herdsmen,but a steady expansion of its significance the Augustan eighteenthcentury.Samuel Johnson, in 1750, generalized its scope to designate a "poem in whichany action or passion is representedby its effects of rural nature . . . exhibiting upon a countrylife [,] . . . a representation the ideas and sentimentsof those, whoever they are, to whom the country affordspleasure or employment."'3 That finalqualifier--"whoevertheyare"the basic character of implies pastoral contrast: those who fashion or enjoy cultivatedformsof art are compelled to compare their own condition,which withthatof the rusticwhose existenceaffordsno such permitsthisrefinement, but who luxury enjoys,by compensation,a natural, more "truthful" simplicity of life. One teststhe truthof one's sentiments them,withinthe by translating circuitof the poem, froma complex idiom into a basic one.14 The idea of the pastoral owes its currencyin our own time most of all to the writings in the 1930s of the English criticWilliamEmpson. Fully conscious

13. Samuel Johnson, "The True Principlesof Pastoral Poetry,"The Rambler, no. 37, in Samuel Selected and Prose,ed. Frank Brady and William Kurtz Wimsat (Berkeley and Los Johnson: Poetry of California Press, 1977), p. 171. Angeles: University A useful,systematic 14. definition of the termhas recently been offeredby the literary historian David Halperin in Before Pastoral: Theocritus and theAncient Tradition (New Haven ofBucolicPoetry and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 70-71: "Pastoralachieves significance by oppositions, by the set of contrasts,expressed or implied, which the values embodied in its world create with other ways of life. The most traditionalis between the littleworld of natural simplicity and the ordered society,established codes of behavior, and great world of civilization,power, statecraft, in general." This passage is just one part of an extremely artifice subtle discussion of the multiple criteriainvolved in identifying the workingsof the genre. For further work of definition, see Paul 8 (Winter 1981-82), pp. 437-60. Alpers, "What Is Pastoral?"Critical Inquiry

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

48

OCTOBER

he revivedthe termas a wayof designating of itsarchaismin modernliterature, this play of contrast,whetherthe traditionalthematicmarkersof the genre were present or not. For him the pastoral emerges from any movementof true" to "'true about people in thoughtthat shiftsfrom"thisis fundamentally even those you wouldn'texpect,' and this implies the tone all parts of society, of humility normal to pastoral. 'I now abandon myspecialised feelingsbecause I am tryingto find better ones, so I must balance myselffor a moment by imagining the feelingsof the simple person. . . . I must imagine his way of feeling because the refinedthing must be judged by the fundamentalthing, mustbe learntin weakness.'""'In Empson's handling,pastoral because strength on the powersof the artist is seen as a means of ironicreflection alongside those work in which a distinctive of the ruler or courtier; it comes to identify any voice is constructedfromthe implied comparisonbetweenan author'ssuitably limitedhorizons and modest large artisticambitionsand his or her inevitably of a set conventions Pastoral offers through which that disparity strengths. between exalted ends and finitemeans can be given figuralexpression and made itselfa matterfor art. of painting,thereare obvious analogues to the older forms In the history of Giorgioneand Titian proceeds from of literary pastoral. The Fetechampetre the same courtlyculture that generated the Virgilian pastoral poetry of the Renaissance. Poussin's Phocionlandscapes articulatethe virtuesof the heroof a nature the provinceof majesticnarrative-through the testimony normally Arcadian to the the viewer And he directs labor. human shaped by ordinary existence. of truth most fundamental the of for Shepherds knowledge mortality, art when But can pastoralismstillbe said to have any place in twentieth-century codes of iconographyhave ceased to operate? such clear and well-understood in In lightof the foregoingdiscussionof the fateof the genre hierarchy the still form but in its the twentieth providing explicit century-repudiated terms according to which value in art is communicated and assessed-the answer would be yes. FollowingEmpson, one can distillthe essential pastoral contrastfromits traditional subjectmatterand see it as the principalmeans by the narrowedconfines whichthe suppressed lower genreshave returnedwithin to and in fact Pastoral of fine-art protestsagainstthatnarrowspeaks practice. one voiced by Schapiro in 1936, as the such an external as not ness, complaint but as an integralcomponent of the most ambitiousart making. And it has in the of high abstraction been conspicuous at two key momentsin the history conand the of Cubism aforementioned the twentieth analyticphase century: 1950s. the solidationof AmericanAbstractExpressionism during In the firstinstance, Picasso's portraitsof 1910 to 1912 can stand as
revisededition(New York: New Directions,1974), 15. WilliamEmpson, SomeVersions ofPastoral, p. 19.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Pablo Picasso.The Poet. 1911.

Xm

I:

'9-:
i:A A: , 4-1~~8

:::Ne

7 Imal:.:

r;:

. .... *

and self-consciousness concernexamples of the most developed sophistication and representation in general. They include ing the issues of formalabstraction a depictionof the suitably refinedfeaturesof Kahnweiler, his dealer and intellectual advocate, and in such a painting subject matterand technical means seem entirely at home withone another.But thathuman presence is shadowed uncultiby one of another kind,one thatis aggressively simple and mockingly vated in character.The so-calledPoet,'16 paintedin the summerof 1911, conveys thisother brand of humanity. What attitudeis the viewermeant to take to this this bohemian idler,whose existenceis the nominal reason for the personage, The of pipes, togetherwith his quizzically inebriated painting? proliferation him marks as a witha penchantfor useless self-gratificacharacter expression, and Picasso makes the autoerotic of that activity more than tion, implications one at waist level and its explicitby placing large pipe transforming bowl into an erect phallus pouringout smoke. This also happens to be one passage in the calls attentionto the artificeof the painted sign; the picture that insistently constructive stroke of the "pipe" is here pointedly solid, juxtaposed to the fluid
16. For a discussionof the painting'shistory and provenance,see Angelica Zander Rudenstine, ThePeggyGuggenheim Venice Collection, (New York: Abrams, 1985), pp. 611-13.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

50

OCTOBER

withthinned-out scribbling pigmentthatproduces the "smoke"(the loose smear obscures the underlyingstructure, the fundamental yetenhances, by contrast, of that The created the structure). solidity diagonal by phallus is then doubled (this time encircled by a descending hand) and rhymedseveral timesover to serve as the principaldevice thatintegrates the lower zone of the pictureinto the overall lozenge-shaped architecture of the compositionas a whole. This passage invitesus to exercise our virtuosity as sophisticated viewers, to abstractfromparticulars, and thus to confirm our membershipin the comof the visuallycultivated. We are givenall thatwe need to reflect munity deeply on the processes of seeing and representing, but it is difficult to remaincontinFor those processes generate this simpleton uously serious about that activity. -even the squintingexpressionof his eyes is at the same timea keyanchoring We cannothave theone readingwithout pictorial geometry. pointof the abstract the other.The pictorialprocess makes him,and we see it as him; he is its hero. His capacity to appear comic and rude depends completelyon the success of the painting as seen throughthe high discourse. As such, he representsthat concern withthe universalproblems discourse and the entire high-modernist themas also somehowthe property as such,and he represents of representation man. of the (or properties) simple What then does the paintergain fromthis double game? Firstof all the or pretense of humility:I am like this, the figure is a playful self-mockery a useless onanist,drunk on my solitary pleasures. His willingpaintersuggests, ness to poke fun at what is, in every other respect,a project of the highest of our confidencein that projectand the rightness seriousnessonly reinforces our shared belief in it. Further,it lends a feeling of scope to the image by esotericartistic language can encompassa broad range assertingthatthishighly of human life.Thus it bolstersthe claim of itslanguage to a universality posited a certain kind of universality: in the intellectwith another, complementary The sophisticated generosityand capacity for expansive human sympathy. comic with the also Picasso viewer, representative identify implies,may strongly of Cubist procedures and thus find another,agreeable way of imaginingthe communal bond shared between the avant-gardeartistand his audience. The artist,through this imagery,proposes that we can take the measure of our common situation only by looking at it both from above (from our shared tradition)and frombelow (fromthe positionof understandingof the high-art the misfits and second-ratersattractedto any avant-garde).Picasso explicitly of the following included his audience withinthisgame in the Aficionado year, where the onlooker (in the guise of a pompous enthusiastfor the second-rate French bullring)occupies the place of the poet withhis pipes."7
For a parallel discussionof this painting,see the author's "Une vie plus simple,"in L'Amour 17. en France,ed. Thierry Prat and Thierry Raspail (Lyon de l'art contemporain de l'art: une exposition Biennale, 1991), pp. 72, 388.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

51

Empson has identifiedthis persistentform of modern pastoral, which replaces the chivalrous shepherd of earlier times,as the ironicjoining of "the idea of everything being included in the rulinghero" to "the idea of everything in included the humble thing,withmystical respect for poor men, fools, being and children."'8The painted thematics of thePoetor the Aficionado run parallel to the rude disruptionsof collage materialsfromcommonplace sources undertaken by Picasso and Braque in these same years. And a similar corrective movement, using some of these same means, was undertaken by the most sophisticatedAmerican artists during the 1950s. Its object,however,was not so much their own art as that of their immediate predecessors,the majestically scaled abstractionof the foundersof the New York School. The membersof thatfirst generationof the postwaravant-gardein America were among the last believers in heroic adventure as a resource for art. statureto warrantrepresentation Finding nothingin theircultureof sufficient at such an exalted level,theyextinguished the betterto retain explicitfiguration the formalcharacteristics of heroicizingart fromthe past: large scale, expansiveness of effect,the rhetoricof action and risk. In this sense, their art was old-fashionedin itsambition, a throwback to the seventeenth of Rubens, century summon Lebrun, and Bernini-that is, to the timewhen art could confidently in belief Vir Sublimis cite the title of one of Barnett Newman's Heroicus (to up works)and in itsown capacityto representthe qualities and actions triumphant of superior individuals. Such ambitionignored the parallel tradition of skepticism and doubt about which was the means which the heroic protagboth, paradoxically principal by onist in art had been kept alive from the times of royal absolutism into the twentieth century.While many in the next generationof artistsstayed to the others-Robert Rauspath establishing by De Kooning, Pollock,and Rothko,19 and chenberg Jasper Johns being the leading figures-made common cause with the ironic and mock-heroisms in other media in New York. flourishing Baudelaire's derelictragpickeras majesticprotagonist of the modern cityreapin the of the hustlers of the scene celebratedin Mailer's peared guise fringe jazz The WhiteNegro. At the opposite end of the pastoral spectrum from such aggressive types was the figure of the holy fool embodied in the work and akin to the supposed person of John Cage, who offereda cultivatedsimplicity innocence of the child, open to play and an uncensored apprehension of the world. One can findtracesof Mailer's stance here and therein the fine-art world: in a Rauschenberg combine paintinglike Hymnalof 1955, withits thematicsof urban anonymity brokenonlybycrimeand police surveillance, or in the rhetoric
18. Empson, SomeVersions ofPastoral,p. 21. 19. Fried's election of Louis to stand as the paragon of high,unalloyed seriousnessis pertinent here; see note 7 above.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

52

OCTOBER

But it was the latterpositionthatseemed of Allan Kaprow's influential essays.20 in that most to suit the artists decade. The mute simplicity of Johns's emerging numbers,flags,maps, and diagrams,along withhis compositionalprincipleof withthe drillsof the mantralikerepetition, bridge the blanknessof meditation child's lesson book, the absorption of the puzzle box, and the rituals of the playing field. And this retreatto the experience of childhood was passed on as Pop."2 whole to the cohortthatcame to be identified on the subject,has percephe is more severe Buchloh, though Benjamin that the discerned aesthetics" encouraged in worksbyJohns "participatory tively and Rauschenberg were deliberatelykept "at so infantilea level as to invite to wind up a musicbox, to clap theirhands, or to hide an object.""22 participants and those who came after,were in this. These artists, But there was strength reconnected to that long, complex line of European pastoralismfrom which the first generationof the New York School had been separated in its pursuit of unalloyed grandeur of utterance.This included Duchamp, in whose readymades and chance pieces the cult of the child has always been a large and underestimatedcomponent. In his work and then in that of his American voice to be constructedfrom a epigones, this strategyallowed a distinctive and a simultaneous ambitions artistic between contrast large pastoral childish child and of the the consciously surrogate awareness-figured through activities-of everyone's limited horizons and modest powers. Through this ironic reduction of the heroic point of view (the child is powerless,but the child's vantage point confersthe power once again to observe the world),they without provinciality. lapsing intoantimodernist managed to recoverfiguration The results were inevitablyless glorious but arguably more sophisticatedand betterinformed because more realistic by history-than aspirationstoward an abstractsublime.

The artistAnnetteLemieux recently said, "when I use a flag . . . viewers And when God, no one are reminded of JasperJohns. people say that,I think,

20. See, for example, Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,"ArtNews 57 (October 1958). Forthcomingresearch on Kaprow by Robert Haywood will provide a detailed account of thisaspect of his practice. The link in the iconographyof Pop art to the 1930s and 1940s, the childhood yearsof the 21. artistsinvolved,is far strongerthan any engagementwiththe up-to-dateproducts and media of the 1960s, even though the latteris emphasized in most accounts.This connectionbetweenchild30 (December cult and Pop is treated furtherin the author's "The Children's Hour," Artforum 1991), pp. 84-88. Warhol: 22. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "AndyWarhol'sOne-DimensionalArt,1956-1966," in Andy ed. KynastonMcShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 45. A Retrospective,

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

53

remembers Betsy Ross."23That remark illuminatesJohns's work as well as it does her own. His Flag of 1954 recoded the grandly periodizing notion of "American-Type Painting"-canonized shortlythereafterin Clement Greenberg's well-knownarticle of that title-in termsof everydayvernacular patriotism,using a design thatbegan lifeas an improvisedpiece of handicraft by an is Lemieux that her of choices seamstress.24 expressingworry ordinary imagery are too easily assimilatedinto a formof criticism thatvalues theoriesof appropriationover the matterbeing appropriated.Johns'sFlag has likewisebeen too easily reduced to a simple conundrum-is it a painting or is it a flag?-and made a point of origin for highlyabstractmeditations on the statusof artworks as context-dependentsigns. This mode of interpretation has largelyreplaced the modernistone exemplifiedby Fried, Tucker, and Scott; it and the art that it privilegeshave since come to constitute the high genre. More recentpractice in a pastoral mode has thereforehad to play withinand against an even more severelycerebral formof abstraction. A sternly of thistransformation came fromAnnette impressivestatement Michelson in her lengthy on the of Robert Morris,published in essay sculpture 1969.2"This was, as far as I know,the first of art criticism to cite Derrida piece on the metaphysics of presence,years in advance of his translation into English and assimilationinto the largeracademic culturein America.26 She saw the high modernismchampioned and articulatedby Fried, withitsdenial of contingency and temporality in the viewer's experience, as bound by such a metaphysics. Morris's sculptures,by contrast, were to be seen not as embodying or essentializingsculptural ideas or categories,but as proposing a patient investigation, profoundlyinnovativein its sharpness and intensity of focus,of the conditionsfor a reconsideration of sculpturalprocesses,a redefinition of its param-

23. From an interviewwithJeanne Siegel, "AnnetteLemieux: It's a WonderfulLife, or Is It?" ArtsMagazine 61 (January 1987), p. 80. 24. ClementGreenberg,"American-TypePainting," in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, reprinted 1962). The Betsy Ross storycontains a banal pastoral ironyin itselfin that those humble origins stand in implicitcontrastto the symbolization of global power by then carried by the same object. This Johns redeems by using the design to turn the normal prioritiesin abstractpainting insideout. The abstract overall unityof the painting,agonizinglywon by the likes of Pollock and De of small figurative incidents,is achieved Kooning through the accumulation and self-cancellation at a strokethroughone great figurative incidentof unimpeachable flatness and coherence. Greenberg was the firstnervouslyto observe this (Greenberg, "AfterAbstractExpressionism,"in New York 1940-1970, ed. Henry Geldzahler [New York: Dutton, 1969], pp. 364Paintingand Sculpture: 65). Underneath it, fullyvisible,is a bed of dense, randomlytorn newspaper collage. The buried Cubist grid floatsto the surface,in the archaic medium of translucent encaustic,leavingbehind the freneticactivity of expressiveimprovisation as a formof waste or detritus. AnnetteMichelson,"Robert Morris:An Aesthetics 25. of Transgression,"in Robert Morris(Washington,D.C.: Corcoran Galleryof Art, 1969), pp. 7-79. 26. Ibid., p. 9.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

'iiiii-iiii''iii~iiiiliiii:iiii: :: :: ?::::?:: :::.:.::::,ii:::i:i:i:i:i:i iiiii:iiil-i:iii.iiiliiii:':':'-:':':' : : ::: ::: -i:i::ijii~:iiiii-iiii'ii''iiii-:i:: i:iiil .:i:i:::i:i:::::::? : : ?.::::::. ::': :: :~::: :-::-i-i::::_'i:l::?:i:i i:i:i .:.:. -:,:: -:i:i:i i:i:::::::::::? :::i:i: ::: ?: : :: ::: :: ::.:.: ... ::. -:-: -::: : :::

-:::::

:-:: ::: :: :::: ::: :: ~s~i~ssssrassssssssssp~ii-:~.:~:a::-8~lr : : ?:: :: ::: :: ::::. :::: :::: ::: :?:?::::::::? :::: . ?:: . ::: ::i:: :::: :: : ::: : :::: :: ::?:: :: ::: :::: ::::: :: :::: :::::::::: :::: :::::: -::i-::?i::::-i:iliiiii:_:,::::,:i:--::: . ::_::::i-:::-::-:-::::::::::: ::::::::::::::?:: :::: :.:::::.: .:::::::_ ... .:..: :::: :.: :::: iiiiijiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii:iiiiiiiii ::::::::::::i:: i:::i: iii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii :::: :::::: ::::: ::::::::: :?: :: ::::: :-:::: _-i::-:-' :i::-_-l-i---i:i-: ::::_:dsa~aa~as~ ::::::-:::::::::::::::::::: :::::::-:::::-:::-::-:.:::-:-:::::::i:i: ':iiii:i'iii? iiiii:',iii,-jij: i:i:i-i:iii'i:i: i:. iiiii-i:i:jiiiijiiiiiiijii:i: ::::: i:::i :::: i::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::'.:.: :':::::::::: ::::::::::: ::::::::: :~:': ::::::::::::i:i:i:::i::::l:i:i:i:i:i:::i ::::: ?iiiii:i:iiiiiiiii-:::i:i:i:i:i :::::i:i:i::: :?:?::i:i:i :::::?::::::?? :?:i:: ::::::::: -:::i:i:i:i: :iiii'i'i': ,:i:iiiii'iiiii:iiiii::iii::,:i:i i:iiii::iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii: ?::?:::::-:c:::,:i:::::::::::: :::::?:?:iii::::?::::.:i:i;:i::i:i:i:::i :i:i::i:::i:i:i:i:':':: ':: 'i::::::::::::: ::::: :::i:::,:::-:':l:':':': ::::::::i:iiii::liii.i:iiiii-iiiiiiii:l: iiiii :iiiii: :iiiiiii.iiiiiiiii:i::::::::i:i:??-:::::::::::::::::iiii-.ii: i??:?:.?i:i:sii-iii??i~iii:iiiii~::''iii :i:i:i:::::i:i:;i:i::i:i:i ::::i:i:i:i:::::i:i:i:i:i

: : ::: ::::::::-:::_-:::-~ : : :::::::::::::? :: ::::?:?:::: ..:.::: :::: : :::::::?:?:::: : ::.: :::::::?:?: : ::::::::: ::?:: --:. :::::::-:::.: :::::::i:i ::: :: ::-: ::_: :::: -__ -::_:_-i-'_ -I:::_i:l:i-i:i:i: :-:::: :::: ::::: :::::: ::::: :::::::::::::::: : ::::: :_ : : - : ::: :::::::::::::::::::::::-:-:::'-: ::':' -:::::--::-:-':'::-':':':::':' ::::::::::: ::::-::::::: : ::: : : :::::':::::::::: ::? ::: ::':::: :::: ::?: :-:-: :-:?: :-:':-iiiiii-iii:iiiiii:iii :::::: :::: ::::: : ::: : ::::-::: i:::: ::::: :?::-:: --:-::::::::-:::-:-:I:-:-::::::-i:i::?i:i:i::, :-:-: :-::::::: ??:?::?:: :: ::::::::: ~i-i-i-i .:.:.:. i-i:i i-iii:iiiii?:li'iii?; ::: ::::::::

in emphasis in notions as well,a shift of value,as of gratiimpelled, of itslogic,thevalidity fication. It is theconsistency and clarity and of its the intellectual described trajectory by development, amplitude which thatdevelopment givespleasure.2" This is an austerenotion of pleasure, consistent with thetenorof Michelson's at the start of heressaythatMorris's as well as with her announcement prose which ofthesingular resolution with a sculp"commands enterprise recognition in a culture not committed on tor has assumedthe philosophical taskwhich, with the wholeto speculative devolves particular stringency upon its thought, artists."28 fortheexactThis laststatement is amongthemost accurate justifications and Conceptual art imposes thatthe bestworkin Minimal ing requirements in a culture where upon itsaudience.One could expandupon it to say that, intotechnical between has been largely withdrawn acaexchanges philosophy in theDuchampian has come to demicprofessionals, artistic tradition practice issuescan venuewheredemanding providethe mostimportant philosophical kind ofacademy, a substantial It hasprovided another be airedbefore laypublic. forlearnedamateurs an almost antiquevariety analogousto thoseassociations theEnlightenment. And one ofthesurest thatsprang up acrossEuropeduring
27. 28. Ibid., pp. 35-36. Ibid., p. 7.

eters. . ... Demanding an attention in time for its apprehension, it

Robert Morris.Untitled.1965.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheSimple Life

55

in thattradition is thatthe attendant dangers of narrowing signsof the strength vision were recognized in practicealmostat the momentthat Minimalismushered in the new dispensation. In 1966, Dan Graham had contributed an articleto Arts Magazineentitled "Homes for America," a gesture that has latelyand withjustice begun to be of the 1960s."2" But itssuccesswas achieved recognizedas one of the keyartworks with a text that ostensiblytakes its reader a world away from Michelson's elevated concerns.It beginswithan alphabeticallistof twenty-four names given of houses to clusters private,single-family (Belleplain, by propertydevelopers

Dan Graham, "Homes forAmerica,"Arts 29. 1966-67), pp. 21Magazine41 (December/January Possessable House to the Quasi-DiscreteCell of '66." Recog22. Its subtitleis "Early 20th-Century fromBenjamin H. D. Buchloh, as is nitionof its importancecame earliestand most importantly the case with Michael Asher's work discussed below, and this essay is much indebted to those see "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic For one of his recentdiscussions, recognitions. October to the Critiqueof Institutions," 55 (Winter1990), pp. 122-24. Its growing of Administration 89 (November/ can be seen in Brian Hatton,"Dan Graham: PresentContinuous,"Artscribe currency December 1991), pp. 66-67. p gfrouKping overall otwisc anssd part s m mal g flow qhl 1!: RKc n'n p11n ad pli

vhe a WC11 pt'ruol hNC ll Into A'separe inio l as kti ltsn qjobh~cxkok dvtltoperwnf Of Of f KIC0 A &I U1493 sICU 41.Jl onIn01MILng of A of twxkses alated qsype %%?wwwisilly starol havv urnifoorm whtch to WnIAomAl VchK The r$l part attap top plan A H8 FoHr 111mAIMC, Of modlWCS? 1CAlrpe housWe tIXr
arInd land I.lots. whe cnwr
A dcvelop"ont contains

of.swutlwcks
numn limiKt, mart

ri in 1:111 toenvrilotnwr h from another uhcrrw crjcoir,, then whu torw

foMur ot ths,, XISshilith iaAs An arblelrar i hri then rto seklitl tAhrnw: Irf c-hTTmo k wh4 m I c nh:,] unki , rl$Anl ,remmlininA tolorm rhcn h.: hfour from inother 'l ,.nw n v oh wh* h ur14h h ki l A vi SWht muXlIsl

rt tour thest h anhr home w-h1h W11'11141t Aorflny f r

rhte wr;lhtlc4u.ehis tI,rr:rur vvpLo:pn*rtus

:. r.t Dec', ulmqair a Altl A +tl r retIllrlnhipt Mand nrl

nuxil and sir e ghl colorS unllzs a singkl or four or two C-olorn), arnt finlly uillse

wkrfWMr:oIS . Bkotlh arAM andi d herlle :er rthrnrisred lr wparatle prfts orderr SynIthet".

d sknthorNurw'nsc eA~J Land altn *reas, Nar. Thre tro atemprto wlhitand n,:$rrcllI ro(r , Imund th oi isno orpn, unit :connr:ting

follows syI a

en.r C plan

C:oirl+l a Flkolda proepLaIV :lvwiernrseghl rm.a dIffer

A The I:ontsa 1 Ther(.'nmcro C The Pt, ur&: F Tie StB~d Aroc G The N" 11 TheRhwpady

xt~

r Corarl Pink Cklonisl Red is a self-oataincd Fuahblockof vhours - there is no devlopmnct--W wuqwuinc arranmrtfrom he poesibie eptablek was I As an exaple, if a scnoion mntm, fourmodel of whxih comnain s bhoucs b usE. anyof thnepermuas tob were ryrpe be ued: tioil ppiobilrtf cwuW ABCIDABD AABDCCI> BA)DCABDC AABBDDCC ACBDACKID AACCBBDD ACDBACDBS AACCEOMB ADBCWAD AADD( CCB AI)XADCDB AAODDIOiKC BAEKBAD BAACC"DD BADCBAD BBICCAADDO KMDAB)ACD BI CDDAA DACODAC BBDDAAC(C IB(AD(DCA HItOXCAA CAMDCABDM (.CAABSB*) CADBCADS MAADDBB CCBIDDAA C~ADCBAD CDACKIDA CUBAADD C(MDAABDAB C)DAA

neM thatsinglaseme forone modeland c mht follow Th.s serial con l colotr unlit at tihe dn. it inObruptly uVArmly
ctui hluses, lumtbr yirds or famoriea

ing alley, shopptinplaas.,car hops,Jds.

rtrmiated by pr mica.ti t highw.ays,hotwlM

CCDDBBAA
DDAABDCC

CDRACDBA
DACIDAC(B

ir s perhaps sine actheic AlthMoughh preedencein dt row houseswhichar" to manyoleletc:iti alon. the nditLemxas AndbuiltWilhunfom d as coast, ftar and wt-bKksearly hit.ovMry. houslin a an ardhiecturl phem*.w devtlopremts sm peculiarly oanm irpilo us?Theyexit of 'aod .Cnhusc mtandards ptor apn from n buiIt o uridyinulvidual trre, They were owneris comnplesly eds or tass , nThe
~ tangential

c, tlert rI ldi nor colors:

is Ia :hoice of rdigh x-

Mnhfl nasn Grey SNickki 1 Scarn Glve

l,,m

awn I nn Grlo

DSWK.DCA DDBBCAA D(ASCABX DDCCAABB D(CACA.BA DDCCO:AA van" ind& s i Criaus tuiY As thlk2ior eri of di model x a boblck of pl-nd:ntly hixse motkls~ ad fo~at utilinlgfour eightl havefor +tiht timn fornty colorsmight arrangeamnts, tighor 2t.04 popdiMde use,perhpi, A gven l.,aopmpnm nilhbt

Botharchitecture o be thrown ind Away, as aluesare ubvered byrhe ctmmsmanuhip aMd aoilyduplidepedencme omsmlpti~ied of fabricanon rd cMted anlt wthniques stamf plasn ingluc, suchas modul*ar nmm productonwhnoogy Uaidland use Ctrs nal deceimorts. iodw mae the economics denying

i~ Cr WMt e dEIit r ne sit Fesgd n 'M u aumedisae of t o eratiom.; and ousud 'lt mand now'comerxtit isuseles iieine

home sat rtity pownsbk in the old

thel product' compltion.

His

,'4,m.,rt n,,a. ARTS MAGAIIlNE

tmo.o, L

"Homes 1966. Detailfrom Dan Graham. forAmerica."

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

56

OCTOBER

Brooklawn,Colonia, Colonia Manor,etc.), followedby prose of emphaticplainness and declarativesimplicity: the new city. Large-scale "tract"housing "developments"constitute located not bound to are are everywhere.They particularly They fail to either charactercommunities; they regional develop existing These "projects" date from the end of istics or separate identity. World War II when in southernCaliforniaspeculatorsor "operative" builders adapted mass productiontechniquesto quicklybuild many there.30 houses for the defense workersover-concentrated The article continues to describe, in the same vein, the economies of scale inherentin thosetechniquesand the waysin whichtheydetermineeveryformal feature of these manufacturedcommunities.Toward the end of the piece, Graham deduces that They theyexist apart from prior standardsof "good" architecture. were not built to satisfyindividual needs or tastes. The owner is completelytangentialto the product's completion. His home isn't really possessable in the old sense; it wasn't designed to "last for generations";and outside of its immediate"here and now" context it is useless, designed to be thrown away. Both architectureand as values are subvertedby the dependence on simplicraftsmanship and standardized fiedand easilyduplicated techniquesof fabrication modular plans.31 or layoutof Graham's modest article There is nothingin the typography art-world from the to distinguishit directly adjacent pieces of straightforward in it that in its context more embedded all the begins in the journalism; it is where the off and ends leaves article where the same column of type previous his of the next is inserted.32 facts, along with unstylish, pedanticexposition Only transforms to a fine-art of the the marginalappropriateness subject periodical, this last passage suddenly into somethingelse entirely:withoutever breaking characterand ceasing to be an account of its ostensiblesubject,it becomes an and self-consciously on thelevelof thehigh-minded analysisof minimalart,fully consolidate come to would Michelson that of criticism mode by 1969. stringent it remains abstract, yetby finding commensurately By its faultlessindirection,
30. Graham, "Homes for America,"p. 22. 31. Ibid., p. 23. The layout in Artsdid not conformto Graham's originalconception(see Claude Gintz,ed., 32. uneperspective L'art conceptuel, [Paris: Mus&e d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989], p. 156). This have been discussed by Charles Reeve in an unpublished and other aspects of Homes for America of BritishColumbia, 1988. No reasonable editorial paper, Department of Art History,University of the piece; in fact,such however,could be said to have impaired the logical clarity intervention, intervention mightbe said to have completedit (pace Hatton,p. 71).

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

57

an appropriatelyplain language of descriptionfor a mode of life common to a vastlylarger numberof people than are affectedby advanced art,it has a claim the gento be more powerfuland comprehensive.By inscribing, furthermore, buildersonto the studied and stylish uine anonymity of assembly-line anonymity he deftlyexposes the lattergroup's unrenounced pursued by the Minimalists, addiction to avant-gardist heroics.33 have misled some into seeing the point of The accompanyingillustrations the piece as identifying correspondences between Minimalistforms and the The piece character of the suburban built environment.34 blandly anonymous is not about such patent likenesses of appearance, which perpetuate a lateof visual aspect; it is about larger condimodernistfixationon self-sufficiency modtions in the common life of societythat have undercut characteristically them of possession and individuality, archaic and ernistaffirmations rendering unrealistic. Minimalism,one sees, gains its pertinence by concentratingand enactingthe logic of those conditions,whichare equally on view in a systematic That system-rather than the pheanalysis of the postwar housing industry. nomenal artifacts, the housing tractsand industrialparks,thatresultfromitconstitutes the work'sobject of imitation. The promise of realism contained in the plain diction of the piece is confirmedat the level of abstractcriticalallegory.35
33. Richard Meyer,in "Pin-Ups: Robert Morris,Linda Benglis and the Sexualization of Artistic Identity" (unpublished paper, Department of Art History,Universityof California, Berkeley), describesthe extraordinary lionizationof Morrisin theartworldin the 1960s,and quotes a pertinent passage froma recentautobiographicalarticlewhere Morrisdescribeshis youngerself as a kind of witha circularsaw: "At 30 I had myalienation, Nietzscheancarpenterslayingmodernist metaphysics my Skilsaw and my plywood. I was to rip out the metaphors,especiallythose that had to do with of transcendence.When I sliced into the plywoodwithmySkilsaw, 'up,' as well as everyother whiff I could hear, beneath the ear-damagingwhine,a starkand refreshing 'no' reverberateoffthe four walls: no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing visual experience" ("Three Folds in the narrative,valuable artifact, structure, intelligent interesting Fabric and Four AutobiographicalAsides as Allegories [or Interruptions]," Artin America 77 [November 1989], p. 144). This kind of thingmakes Homes seem more incisivethan ever. forAmerica 34. Battcock,in MinimalArt,reproduces some of photographswithoutthe text,observingthat surfaces and structures as they are found by the artistin naturethey illustrate"Minimal-type in the suburban landscape. They suggestthat Minimal formsare not totallydivorced particularly fromnature, and that theyare subjectiveand social" (p. 175). 35. It is frequently and rightly observed about Minimalismand site-specific work of the 1960s to give an account of the work,practitioners that,in the face of the inadequacy of existingcriticism like Morris, had to generateinterpretation as theyworked. Judd, Bochner,and Smithsonthemselves As Michelson writes("Robert Morris,"p. 13): Criticism's were roughlythe following: response . . . was a crisis.The symptoms of new epithets. 1. A general and immediateproliferation to findhistorical, 2. Attempts formalprecedentswhichmightfacilitate analysis. 3. A growingliterature about the problematicnature of available criticalvocabstandards. ulary,procedure, Artistsresponded with: 1. A growingpersonal concern and activeinvolvement withcriticalpractice. 2. Serious attemptsto re-definethe limitsof criticism. 3. A correlativeattemptto reformcriticallanguage and descriptiveterms.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

58

OCTOBER

The tendencyof critics to asserttheirprerogatives a forbidby cultivating difficult has of course increased since the of time Graham's only dingly language Its tenor has been mirroredin a correspondingly austere quiet intervention. and demanding installationaestheticdeveloped withinConceptual art. Here denial of the senses Europe took theearlylead. Landmarksof thatquasi-Puritan can be found in such worksas the Art& Language Indexat the 1972 Documenta exhibitionor Hanne Darboven's Century fromabout the same period. A recent, to the persistence less-heraldedexample, whichattests of thismode, was a 1991 in the formerspace of the Brouwn installation by pioneer conceptualist Stanley the Durand Dessert Galleryin Paris, where an absolutelyplain, white-painted series of connectingrooms was altered only to the extentof slightly changing the dimensionsof the openings betweenthem.It seemed the pointof the piece describedin a discreetand laconic text,be on the veryedge thatthisalteration, in the viewer'sfieldof movementand vision. of perceptibility Michael Asher has likewise sought and achieved this kind of sensory in a cumulativeprojectof museum installation works.He is able weightlessness to match the austerityof a Brouwn but at the same time attach his equally in the space of exhibition to a strongly minimalinterventions figurednarrative in a fieldfarwiderin space and timethan about the conditionsof spectatorship thatprovided by the galleryor museum.The workthatis, forme, the strongest of these findsa pastoral means to thisend, in thiscase the iconographyof the American as pioneer and predator. mythological to the exhibition"The Museum as The occasion was Asher's contribution Los was at the which Site," Angeles County Museum of Art in 1981.36 staged The piece, called Sign in thePark, consistedof three parts. In one, a wooden "Dogs Must Be Kept on Leash Ord. 10309" was sign carryingthe inscription the same spot from in the park surroundingthe museum at precisely replaced which a previous sign had been liftedby "vandals," or so we are told. The markerwas produced by the park's workshopto matchthe rustic,handcrafted look of the missingsign and of the other noticesposted in the park. It signals on animal freedomand also calls to mind the ancientdanger urban prohibitions
to art magazines. What Graham This largelywent on in polemical or explanatorycontributions accomplished,in his expansion of the concept of site to include thejournalisticcomponentof the entirely support system,was to make the normallyseparated momentsof practiceand criticism comes into focus all coincide. As one comes to the end of reading the piece, its second inscription at once as an account of the Minimal art on which Graham's project both depends and which at the same time it supersedes. 36. (Los Angeles: Los Projects Stephanie Barron, Artin Los Angeles:The Museumas Site: Sixteen and an extended description Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981), pp. 35-36. For illustrations and Montage Procedures:Appropriation of the piece, see also Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,"Allegorical 21 (September 1982), pp. 50-52. in ContemporaryArt,"Artforum

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Michael Asher. Detail from Signin thePark.1981.

ii

'll .All" j...

. ~ lt l: . !ii ..............

. ............. ... ..

Pi

to unwary beasts posed by the tar pits that dot the park, pits which have mammalsand whichare produced a famous bountyof fossilsfromprehistoric a magnet for visitorsin themselves.(Asher's catalogue photographof this element of the piece shows the sign directly juxtaposed to the protectivefence around a pit,the sheen of the watercollectedon itssurface,and a large concrete to visitors.) These dull-looking, statueof a Mastodon supplied as an illustration Los in most that the are, addition, Angeles floatson palpable sign placid ponds a lake of oil. still photograph, both Second, a poster in color and a black-and-white film were from The Kentuckian, scene the identical an Hollywood showing mounted in the main entrancecourt of the museum inside a glass displaycase for visitors.In the scene, two where the museum normallyposts information the Burt title confront role, as he steps into a forest Lancaster, playing gunmen a a and a woman, boy, dog on a leash. Here Asher clearing accompanied by the that the piece existed:a laconic descriponly public acknowledgment placed tion of its elements,along with marks on a map of the park and museum to indicate their location (withinwhich the sign of the titleis described as being "on the path between the B. G. Cantor Sculpture Garden and the lake pit"). Third, as the viewerwas informedat this spot, the museum's permanentcollection houses a paintingby Thomas Hart Benton entitledThe Kentuckian.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Detailfrom MichaelAsher. Sign in the Park. 1981.

ig
llll .i~iiii!lii!lllilii iiii :i!?!iii

10,

i~

zv

'pipll

:lei:;;;;;'-Hi

It is left to the visitorto discover that the work,dated 1954, had been commissionedto coincide withthe release of the film, and thatit had belonged to Lancaster himselfuntil he donated it to the museum in 1977. The painting depicts the actor as a pioneer explorer,stridingover a mountain ridge with bedroll and musket,followed by his dog and a boy carryinga heftypowder horn. Characteristicof Benton, and like the film as well, it is an idealized celebrationof America'swestward The expansionismin the nineteenth century. museum is, of course, geographicallylocated at the end of one path of that expansion and endowed withwealth fromboth the exploitationof the West's of the filmindustry. resources (preeminently Inside oil) and the myth-making it, the visitorcould find Benton's paintingin its usual place in the permanent to Asher's temporary collection,withoutany additional information referring of it in the completionof his piece. His catalogue photographdocenlistment umentingthiselementis a wide shot thatincludes the paintingon one side and on the other a sign on a waist-highpedestal reading "MEMBERS ONLY": is barred fromfurther beyond this point the ordinaryvisitor penetration;"the Kentuckian"himselfappears headed in thatdirection. the pleasures Though Sign in thePark workson the museum,it withholds

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

61

The museum or gallery has of obvious aggression against the institution.37 become only too happy to be commented upon, defaced, or dismantled and therebyenhanced in its importanceand prestigeas a provider of stimulating In Asher's piece, withthe same kind of defteconomy momentsof perception.38 Graham achieved in Homes the institution is shown to be vulnerable forAmerica, as something to a nearlyeffortless otherthan the enlightenedand redescription culturalproviderit wants to be seen to be. disinterested On the individual level, Asher's piece denies to the practiced viewer of conceptual work the normal ritual associated with the encounter: the echoing in the bare, underpopulated gallery, the table,placard, or bound pages footsteps his for or her concentrated attention.Instead, the viewer so, placed just waiting is enticed into a series of pastoral identifications-the credulous viewer,the of tourists, the pensioner walkinga dog in strangerto the museum, the family the park, the child forwhom the tar pitsare the great object of fascination, the vain actor and museum patron pleased to identify witha heroic fictional himself role. Attendingto a map of signposts, Asher onlymarks thesholds,and barriers, an itinerary around Hancock Park tracedby manybefore him,but it is one that manages to articulatean extensivenetworkof relationsbetween contemporary of thisspecific practiceand the social,the economic,and even the naturalhistory site. Sign in thePark performsthe essential pastoral trick;that is, by adopting what the great world would regard as limited points of view, it achieves the largest possible comprehensionand scale. The extreme reticence,bordering on invisibility, achieved by Homesfor America or Sign in thePark cannot be raised to a general requirementfor any art that would resistinstitution-enhancing modes of display and distribution. But where more conventional installationsof texts and photographs are involved, the dangers are obviously greater and have to be deftlycountered. ChristopherWilliamsis a younger artistwho works in the lattervein, but one who has found ways, like Asher, to shadow the gallery/museum closely while the of the work far outside its boundaries. And crucial to relocating meaning that success has been his abilityto join the most sophisticatedtheoreticalpositions to the "wrong" kinds of looking. As his art has developed over the 1980s, he has pursued a set of rigorous distancingprocedures in making photographs,or ratherhaving them made by others according to his instructions. His centralsubject matter--following that of much high-profile Foucauldian theory-has been the archive,thatfrequently
37. Credit should be given to Stephanie Barron, the curator of the exhibition,for recognizing this: "His piece does notjust deal withthe architecture, or even withthe institution's 'museumness,' but veryspecifically withthe Los Angeles County Museum of Art,its own site in Los Angeles, and its relation to Hollywood" (Barron, Artin Los Angeles, p. 35). 38. See the acute remarksof Harrison on the institution-affirming tendenciesof installation work (Harrison, Essayson Artand Language,pp. 45-46).

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

62

OCTOBER

discussed intersection betweenphotographic trace,knowledge,and power.One earlypiece took him to an archivewhere the indexingand displayof power are unmistakable:the Kennedy PresidentialLibraryin Massachusetts.His characteristic of procedure is to impose fromthe outset a simple and rigid criterion selectionfromthe larger repository of images: in thiscase, the piece consisted of all photographs of John F. Kennedy,taken on one chosen day in 1963, in which he appears withhis back to the camera. The group of four prints(three monochromeand one color) generatedby thisprocedure were then uniformly and cropping.39 subjected to an identicalregimenof rephotography, enlarging, The selectioncriterion-he calls it a "filter"-transforms the ordinarily radiant into a momentary void or occlusion. The effect centerof such portraiture is to in to the cultivated viewer that the "best" of the is use, theory signal sign presence being acknowledged as an illusionpredicatedon absence. But that highlycerebral awareness of abstractsystemsof information is unavailable without a simultaneous recognitionof meaning on the level of failureis historicalfolk memory:the visiblebody at the point of portraiture's the body revealed as unaware and vulnerable in the year of its death. The of power; the outlaw assassin is the dark followerand productof the publicity than relied that more intensified and upon publicity any of its Kennedy regime its notable victim. the become most to Inscribing premonition predecessors,only of death into his distanced and impersonalprocedures, Williamsgives to his all of the real coldness that is common to both his theohistoricalportraiture reticalarmatureand his raw material. The topic of politicalmurderhas returnedin his mostrecentprojects,but with a marked differencein level and scale. One of them, entitledAngola to introduced the topic most commonly associated with pastoral, the Vietnam, of wild nature.40 The images are taken from the collection of glass bounty botanical of Though a magspecimens housed at Harvard University. replicas netic draw for a large lay audience, its display is markedlyunassuming and encountersa crowded seriesof glass-covered the visitor cabinets, matter-of-fact; each containingan array of what appear to be actual cut flowers, seeds, and pods: it seems more the space of a homeworkassignmentthan an agreeable
"SOURCE: The PhotographicArchive, The titleof the piece consistedof these instructions: 39. Columbia Pointon DorchesterBay,Boston,Massachusetts, 02125, U.S.A.; John F. Kennedy Library, CONDITIONS FOR SELECTION: There are two conditions: the photograph or photographs must be dated May 10, 1963, and the subject, John F. Kennedy,musthave his back to the camera. All photographson filefulfilling are used. TECHNICAL TREATMENT: The these requirements photographs are subjected to the followingoperations: rephotography(4 x 5" copy negative), and cropping(1/16"is removed enlargement(from8 x 10" to 11 x 14"by use of the copy negative), from all sides of the rephotographed,enlarged image). The finalcomponent of the title,PRESand the name and ENTATION, is a variable,as it cites the name, title,and date of the exhibition, address of the venue, followedby the name of the artist." 40. See the book versionof the piece, publishedas AngolatoVietnam (Ghent: Imschoot,Uitgevers Voor IC, 1989).

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

V7
Al

Williams. Angola. Detailfrom Christopher

1989. Angolato Vietnam.

attraction the mostboringtourist diversion(and I have heard itcalled, unkindly, in America). inertLos Angeles tar pits,remains like thatof the dusty, Yet itsattraction, that constant. Much of' perennial appeal lies in the knowledge of the artifice firmof Dresden craftsmen, the in the involved the display: productof a family 1887 and the 847 between 1936.41 Blaschkas, who produced replica specimens The flowerswere produced by a fatherand son until the death of the former in 1895; the son then carried on alone for another forty years. Their complex skills have, for practical purposes, been lost, so that the archive is no longer years of the collection,exbeing added to or duplicated. And since the first Blaschkas' around the stories have grown supposedly secret techtravagant niques. Williams has subjected the collectionto an initial,mental rearrangement that does no disturbance to the empirical purposes of the display: he has reclassifiedthe models froma botanical taxonomyto classification by country. then comes fromanother map of the world,that provided by a 1985 His filter AmnestyInternationalreport on countriesin which political disappearances have been documented. The yield is twenty-seven specimens,which Williams
at Harvard 41. See Richard Evans Schultes,WalterA. Davis, and Hillel Burger,The GlassFlowers (New York: Dutton, 1982), pp. 1-12.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

64

OCTOBER

has had photographed,and he displayseach printwitha descriptive label limited to country of origin,botanicaldata, collection indices,and technical specification of the photograph itself.The close-up framingof the specimens parallels the conventions used by Harvard's own photographer.42 But, where the official alive, Williams's images, in sparklingcolor, make the flowersappear vibrantly choice of monochromeminimizesspurious illusions. The sombernessof the monochromeprovidesthe visual decorum appropriate to the subject. The subdued understatement proceeds from a general detachmentand balance that prevailsin the piece and is generallyappropriate to a work in the high genre. Its most abstractcharacteristic, the principle of selection that determinesnumber and interval, is just as appropriatelydrawn in thatitsmaterialexistsbecause of the fromthe realm of international politics, to exercise a global dominion of scientific desire of an imperious institution expertise. Yet the piece leavens thatratherchillingabstraction by callingon a common yearningfor a seasonless natural world thatis a place of healing,beauty, and abundance; the glass flowersexert theirpower by standingas tokens for this redemptivewish-as art itselfhas oftendone. What is imagined as a lost art approaching alchemy has conjured life from an inanimate substance. By of feeling,the abstraction thatdefinesthe piece at the virtueof thatsubstratum a tristes where the murderous denial of same time concretely figures tropiques, all more for human fulfillment and modest desires that everyday such*longings, in a and our rulers is them, reality permit frequently accompany encourage our attention to breaks and rename. Williams'sphotographspay straightforward withtheflowers up an aspectof popular fascination pairs in the models,pointing that runs in the opposite directionfromthe illusionof permanence.The literon the fragility of the models: theirsusceptibility ature forvisitors concentrates The circumstances and permanentextinction.43 to accident,abuse, catastrophe, fromthe community, each permanentsubtraction that led to each lost flower, and inquiries are carefully explained. Clearlyrespondingto the preoccupations of the lay audience, thisliterature makes the glass replicasseem more alive than cannot like human individuals, theirnatural referents-more alive in thatthey, of human be replaced.44Their receptionis already marked by the imagination and death, an anthropomorphizing empathyto whichhigh theoryis suffering hostile. normally
See the photographsof Hillel Burger in The GlassFlowers, 42. pp. 20-113. 43. See Schultes et al., The GlassFlowers, pp. 12-16. 44. The final image of the piece is not drawn fromthe same source or produced in the same way as the others. It is an appropriated cover of Elle magazine, reproduced in full color, which features the smiling faces of a multiethnic group of models, each wearing a hat labeled with a to different countryof origin.This even more soberingmap of the world cancels any temptation for the invisiblehuman beings who haunt the previous reverie withits awful,everydaysubstitutes photographs.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TheSimple Life

65

In gauging the success of the piece, I find myselfrecalling an old and resonantremarkof Clement Greenberg's:"The best visual art of our time,"he has least to do with wrote in 1947, "is that which comes closest to nonfiction, as art."45 and asserts itself time maintains at the same and illusions, exclusively that dictum the terms of has fulfilled That Williams (in ways that demanding and would have never would himself probablynot now imagined Greenberg detour from his in no small comes endorse) throughpastoral. The same part could be said of the Graham and the Asher.The logic and order of each piece, as art,is drawn fromthe same enlarged view,the thatwhichgives it its identity or the Kennedy and Harsame administeredworld thatengendered Levittown vard archives; and such has always been the fate of the highestgenre. Their common reticenceincorporatesa realist'srecognitionthat the power of art to command attentionand resources on a global scale is so great that any interventionin the system beyond the mostminimalis likelyto become a redundant, Each piece accepts that system of false subjectivity. embellishment obfuscating

Green45. Greenberg,"The PresentProspectsof American Paintingand Sculpture,"in Clement of Chicago Press, and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. JohnO'Brian (Chicago: University Essays berg:TheCollected 1986), pp. 169-70.

'Hi

ii-iiii

i'

....

,'

ii

'
?,:
iiFiiii

i::

!iiii

"f

il8+l,litt

..

...

iiiiii

intotwohearses fortransport Loadingtheglassflowers theBotanicalMuseum,1976. from

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

66

OCTOBER

on its own terms;each manifests an almost-Apollonian economyof gestureand abhorrence of vulgar excess. Yet thatmodestyof authorialpresence,whileretaining its unimpeachable of those elevation,findscrucial common ground withthe everydayanonymity for whom being or not being "an Author"will never be an option. Each work, framesthe unpredictable vernacularuses detachment, byvirtueof itsrestrained theimaginative of itsmaterial, transformations effected out in theworld, already over historical time,throughthousandsof unremarkedindividualtransactions. Asher and Williams,both setting out to displace spectatorship beyond contemin one rediscover the or another manifestation aestheticism, plative spectator of pastoral heroism:in the pilgrim, the assassin,the seeker in the garden. The into whichtheirpieces fall-the landcorrespondinggenres of representation the still life-are but only the statesman's portrait, again able to function, scape, themselves because the park users and museum visitors continually arrange the of cognitive and emotionalresponsethattheartist materialintopatterns exploits of but cannot any longer create or impose. An unapologeticacknowledgment the strange world dominion of abstractart proves to be a confessionof its it cannot live forlong withoutthe abandoned relativeweakness and limitation: lower genres and must now depend on the people in whose modest keeping those genres have fallen.46 a prisonerof itshistory. Fine-artpracticeis, like any formalizeddiscipline, It cannot cease to be a highly requiringconsiderablelearning specializedactivity and primary audience-not withand patientapplicationfromitspractitioners of the genre hierarchy out ceasing to existat all. The emergenceand persistence has drawn a boundary between the disciplineof art and the wider realm of this to extinguish in all of itsmanifoldforms.To attempt visual communication or of a historical record idle denial of the either of an is the boundary product wish for an entropic loss of articulatenessand differencein cultural lifeThat the finearts have somethingwhichis proceedingquicklyenough anyway. but for a far of academic philosophy, acceded to some of the formerterritory of and a mark its democthis of a direct is discipline product larger audience, ratizingpotential. It is difficult nowadaysto talkabout the capacitiesof advanced art without being caught up in a polarized debate about elitism,canons, and claims to

The presentessay representsa developmentfromworkon three previousessays published 46. Show(Boston in exhibitioncatalogs: "Versionsof Pastoral in Recent AmericanArt,"TheBinational KunsthalleDilsseldorf, of Contemporary Museum of Fine Arts/Institute Art,Boston and Stdidtische ExtraMuros:artsuisse (La Chaux-de1988); "Art contemporainet march6de theorie," contemporain de I'art de l'art:une exposition Fonds: Mus6e des Beaux-Arts, 1991); "Une vie plus simple,"L'Amour en France(Lyon Biennale, 1991). I want to thankthe curatorswho commissionedthem contemporain Edmond Charriere,CatherineQueloz, for theirencouragement:Elizabeth Sussman, David Joseilt, Dieter Schwarz,ThierryPrat,ThierryRaspail, and ElisabethKlimoff.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Simple Life

67

commensurate prestigelodged on behalf of more accessible kinds of cultural production. As in so many things that seem to be discoveries of the present even ifcommentators moment,thishas long been an issue in seriousartpractice, and historianshave been slow to recognize it. Everyartistwho findsa pressing need for the already-handled,already-transformed expressions of vernacular culture admits to his or her creativeproject a multitudeof anonymous collaborators. Those discussed above, from Picasso to Williams,have built into the core of their practice a recognitionthat assured sovereignty over their means and materialscould be as much a problem as a source of power. Pastoral forms of ironywithinadvanced art function as correctives to the congealingof professional codes of competence, to facility that too easily makes formula look like invention,to the constraintsimposed by relentless high-mindednesson the breadth of human sympathy. the limitations They transform imposed by hierand specialized protocols, division,the costs of exclusivity archy and artificial into matterfor art. And pastoral entails a final recognitionthat the fine arts' to transform themselvesfurther, to become a genuine culture for all, inability remains theirgreat and defininginadequacy.

This content downloaded on Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:36 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions