Both of these themes can better be understood by
knowing some of the Twentieth Century's
Art History.
The following is
an essay by Ronnie Landfield,
who I believe offers
some controversial views concerning
Conceptual Art
--
"LYRICAL ABSTRACTION: An essay by Ronnie Landfield"
tells more about the Conceptual Art
movement then I, with my limited knowledge of art,
ever could.
Although a conceptual artist,
Tava never viewed his art as part of the
"Cold Aesthetic"
Ronnie Landfield describes in his eloquent essay.
Tava's Philanthropic Murals
attempted to uplift
The Conceptual Movement
into
The Realm of Fine Art,
unlike his modern contemporaries
(Warhol, Haring and Mapplethorpe)
who tended toward
Commercial Art Themes --
Warhol being a Prime example of lifting the
"commercial" concept to "Fine Art" acceptance levels.
The Following opinions are excerpts
from Ronnie Landfield's essay:
--
"By 1965 advanced painting and sculpture
had taken reduction almost as far as it
could go.
Post-Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Lyrical Abstraction
were three movements that began to emerge in that
period.
By 1970 abstract painters were
letting it all hang out again.
There is a gap in our understanding of
the crossroads we faced at the end of the sixties.
The avant-garde split into many
different camps; radical academics took
one road; and that road has turned
many of them into successful entrepreneurs.
Marginal elite who got rich . . .
. . . A good friend of mine said to me recently -
'Please donšt tell me too
much of this history stuff -
I'm an art critic and so I
don't need to know it.'
The problem is that there is a need
to speak out on
behalf of the power, force and
meaning that these artworks have. These are our
Valuable Treasures.
The need for
positive emotion in the world has never been
greater than it is today.
As we enter the last years of the
final decade of this
millennium the questions
Asked By Paul Gauguin In 1897:
'Where Do We Come From?'
'What Are We?'
'Where Are We Going?'
These questions are ones that we
now need to answer for ourselves.
The time has come to re-discover our
spiritual and humanistic roots,
and
re-examine our values with a
look at where we have been,
who we are, and
where we are going.
I sense a spiritual vacuum....
abstract art is in trouble.
The art world is in trouble and the world is in trouble
The late sixties and early seventies was a
turbulent period that may
never be totally understood. I think
that period holds
answers that are vitally
important to us in the nineties.
A castle built on a
foundation of sand will crumble,
while a tower with its foundation deep in the
earth can withstand any number of challenges.
I believe a foundation based on
truth will stand the
test of time;
unfortunately, the truth got twisted and the art
worlds' tower is poised for a fall.
Advanced Art in the Twentieth-Century
has traveled along two mainstreams.
One mainstream is represented in
the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Monet:
expressing beauty, sensuality,
primitive power, painterliness,
opticality, art as the
conveyor of emotion primarily thru color,
the spiritual archetypes of Jung,
Art as the uplifting sensibility,
Art as a depiction of idealized life,
Art as a depiction of everyday (existential) life, and
the Act of Painting Itself.
Running counter to this
first mainstream are the works of
Duchamp, John Cage, and Picasso:
expressing
beauty transformed,
ugliness, startling
juxtaposition of images,
the subconscious of Freud,
Art as idea,
Art as found object,
Art as part of everyday life,
Non-art transmuted into
Art,
and often an emphasis on
Social and Political issues.
The forces of European Cubism, Dada,
School of Paris and Surrealism gave
way to American Abstract Expressionism
by the late forties.
The attention of the
art world shifted from the
School of Paris
to
the New York School.
American painters arrived at
center stage by the mid-century.
By the end of the fifties,
Abstract Expressionism had
spawned a second generation.
The sixties ushered in
an artistic revolution by a generation
born in the twenties
and early thirties. ...John
Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg,
Roy Lichtenstein and
Andy Warhol from the Duchamp (Apollonian) mainstream,
were some influential leaders of
that revolution.
In New York City, during the early sixties,
the art of Pablo Picasso, Henri
Matisse, Marcel Duchamp,
Joan Miro, and Piet Mondrian was regularly being
seen, as well as the art of
Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning,
Arshile Gorky,
Hans Hofmann,
Franz Kline, Clyfford Still,
Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko,
Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb,
Ad Reinhardt and David Smith.
By the mid-sixties the newer
work of Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Andy Warhol,Larry Rivers,
Roy Lichtenstein, John
Chamberlain, Claus Oldenburg,
Robert Morris, Jim Rosenquist, Robert
Smithson, Frank Stella,
Tony Smith, Morris Louis,
Jules Olitski, Ellsworth
Kelly, Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held,
Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons and Helen
Frankenthaler were only
some of the artists seen in the
museums, galleries and
in the leading art magazines.
The greatest art of the
Twentieth-Century, flowing from
every direction, came
together in New York City and
produced a vital and flowering artistic culture.
By 1966, the focal point of the
New York art scene shifted from the Cedar Bar
to
Max's Kansas City
[see Tava's photo of Max's Kansas City
On another page of this website]
on Park Avenue and 17th Street.
Max's became the hot
spot and meeting ground of the
important artists, writers, dealers, collectors,
poets and musicians of the time.
An intense exchange between Formalists,
Minimalists,
>Conceptualists,
intellectuals,
the Warhol superstar faction
[see photo of Warhol & Tava]
and hangers on, raged nightly.
I attended the opening of
Max's and was a regular
there throughout the sixties.
I usually hung out up front with the painters and
sculptors like myself.
Eventually, by 1969 the art scene
began to drift south, toward Lower Broadway,
and Soho, to the St. Adrian's Bar.
The mixing of the older with the younger
generations
changed the history of art.
To this day a proper study of that period,
compelling, mysterious and
misunderstood remains to be done.
Formalist Abstract Art in the
sixties was reductive.
Minimal Art as exemplified
by Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and
Donald Judd's serial theories reduced
painting and sculpture to their
basic structure.
Object like, non-illusionistic, with
industrial qualities and non-referential
color were typical characteristics of
Minimal Art.
. . . Ideological differences
irreconcilably broke the two Formalist
philosophies apart.
Minimal Art allied with
Conceptual Art,
Pop Art and other movements, and
formed the basis of what became known as
Anti-Formalism.
Formalism,
with Clement Greenberg as its chief
spokesman forged ahead alone on its elitist path.
In accordance with the
duality of mainstream
Twentieth-Century art
this break
in abstraction was
Apollonian and Dionysian
in nature.
. . .Formalism
and its narrow doctrines became
unpopular and anything associated
with it suffered by proximity.
Formalism
ruled with Stalinist intolerance and
fell by its own infertility by 1973.
Formalism
gave us standards of quality -
however flawed and limited -
those standards of
quality were but its repudiation (and) came about
primarily because the art didn't
deliver on its exclusive claim to
High Quality and Taste.
The art world became
unbalanced in favor of
Anti-Formalism.
Anti- Formalism
ruled with a totalitarian
nazi-like iron hand, a
grip on the throat of the media.
Anti-Formalism
gave us
freedom and license but no
standards of quality and
Rehashed Historical Junk
Prevailed.
Minimal and Conceptual Art
delivered on their
promises and
that is the problem.
Now we have an endless supply of
empty steel boxes, blank walls, empty plates
on the floor, doorways to nowhere.
The brink of the void
- without the courage
or the clarity to fill it,
Cartoons, political slogans,
clever words, videos, neon
body parts, billboards and
holes in the ground,
ad infinitum.
These supposedly
ascetic and esthetic
social critics have scored big and
still benefit from their
pioneering advertising and
marketing techniques.
At least Arte Povera cannot
claim poverty anymore.
Pop Art
also delivered on its
initial promise of social and esthetic criticism.
It generated glamour and
widened the audience for contemporary art.
Whether that
audience was interested in the
merits of the art or its accompanying hoopla
remains to be seen . . .
Where did this
leave the rest of us?
After a
decade of minimal and Conceptual language system,
the 1980's brought us a
decade of unprecedented materialism,
fun and market strategy.
Great art does not
come from phony market strategies.
The art world has been deluded by
semantics
...so what happened to
great painting and sculpture?
Gauguin went halfway around the world
staking his life
on the feelings within his soul and
he died in poverty and despair.
Who among
us is willing to speak out and
take such great risks for painting and sculpture?
The art world needs a new spiritual base.
Painting and sculpture have waited
patiently at the gate, while
the naked Emperor and his entourage
slowly
parade across the field.
The naked Emperor
decides to close the gate.
Across the field
the entourage debates if painting is dead,
the entourage debates if painting is over,
the entourage debates if painting has anything left to say
They Want To Close The Gate.
They have convinced themselves that The Emperor wears splendid attire
and that
Painting and Sculpture is Naked
and wants to inhabit
the Ancient Lands
of
Legend and Myth.
[read Joseph Campbell]
The Times Have Changed,
the triumph of bad over good has come and gone and
a new beginning is here.
Marshall McLuhan
wrote about
hot and cool in his book
Extensions of Man/Understanding Media.
These opposing temperatures are
perfect metaphors for
understanding the two mainstreams of
Modern Art of the last two centuries.
The hot aesthetic in painting and sculpture
is inspired by tradition,the realities of
modern life and spiritual revelation.
Modernist painting and sculpture
is primarily visual and felt . . . the heartfelt,
the intuitive, . . . the poetic, and the beautiful,
are expressions that reflect the hot aesthetic.
Using as sources
the unconscious,
the real world and
plastic space,
the hot aesthetic risks
alienating its audience.
The hot aesthetic in the early years of the
Twentieth-Century is characterized by
artists as diverse as Matisse, Picasso and
Mondrian. Fauvism, early
Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism,
Colorfield Painting,
Lyrical Abstraction and Neo-Expressionism are hot.
The cool aesthetic
depends on irony to
create a mental and
Conceptual statement.
It is primarily a means to
convey socio-political and economic
information.
Using multi-media,
the shocking, the intimidating and the
Concept of Anti-Art,
the cool aesthetic
intends to alienate the audience
and
"titillate"
the appetite of the avant-garde.
Analytic Cubism,
aspects of Surrealism,
especially Salvador Dali,
and
popular trends such as
Pop Art, Minimal Art,
Conceptual Art,
Multi-Media Installations
and
several new avenues and branches that those
philosophies have spawned
are cool.
The dominant climate
in Contemporary Art today is the cool,
and the highly
charged assault of the politically correct.
Exclusive and disturbing
domination of cool art pervades the important museums,
commercial galleries, alternative spaces for
emerging talent and the media.
The Politically Correct
proves to be
incorrect when it
censors,
suppresses
and
fears those ideas
that do not line up with its own agenda.
The Art World
ultimately weakens itself when the
dominating value proves to be
market strategy and commodity exchangent
in place
of aesthetics.
The cool and the collected
cling by their fingertips to the waning
remnants of their power,
losing their grip, stuck and lost in the
very irony and
Cynicism They Created.
An Ideal World Allows All Views,
all sides have a fair hearing,
the public mind
decides for itself.
There have been
times when both sides stood in equal light on
the world stage.
In the sixties
the art of the hot and the
cool were equal in world stature.
However, since the
mid-seventies, the public view and the potential
Appreciation Of The Hot
Aesthetic In Visual Art
has to a large degree been suppressed.
As Bob Dylan said,
'But I care nothing for their
game, where beauty goes unrecognized,
all I feel is heat and flame and
all I see are dark eyes.'"
I believe the author, probably
having known Tava at Max's Kansas City personally,
would agree with me that
Tava
held onto the
"Hot Aesthetic,"
in spite of his conceptual leanings.
I don't believe confeying concepts through one's art
automatically disgualifies the artist from the Formal
Aesthetic.
In fact
I'm very positive that Tava would
Never Abandon It.
The Beauty Bob Dylan Speaks Of
Had Always Meant Too Much To Him!