Apocalyptic Tract on Art:
WACKER, JEANNE
Apocalyptic Tract on Art The Insiders. ?y Seiden Rodman. Louisiana State. 130 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Jeanne Wacker Former instructor in philosophy, NYU and University of Pennsylvania. Though...
...If we substitute "moral" for "religious," the definition fits Rodman's text exactly...
...Seldom have envy, frustration, resentment and rage found such naked literary expression...
...Rodman's book is emphatically both...
...Nothing Rodman says is apt to make the powers-that-be of the art world change their minds...
...The author's definitions of key terms such as "Insider" and "commitment" are intolerably vague, his discussion of the critic's case for formalism is embarrassingly flippant and abusive and his supporting evidence for the wholesale indictment of modern art is superficial...
...These are the Insiders of our time who have maintained a spiritual link with the greatest art of the past and are creating a "humanist" art of "total commitment...
...He proposes to demolish formalist criticism in the space of five pages, to instruct us on "Form and Content in Western Painting" and on "The Modern Artist and Science" in eight pages each and to enlighten us on eight additional topics, all similarly grandiose, in a grand total of 64 pages...
...A tract, which by its nature belongs to no discipline, is, in Webster's excellent definition, "a pamphlet issued for propaganda, especially one containing religious exhortation...
...I doubt that Rodman will achieve his goal...
...Now tracts need not be either uninteresting or uninformative...
...his tone, fervent...
...the first half is an indictment of those artists and critics who have been corrupted by formalism...
...Only a few artists and critics, rejected by the affluent art world and by a bewildered public, have remained faithful...
...The trouble with tracts as a genre is that they must presuppose, between writer and reader, a community of beliefs and values which alone makes exhortation effective...
...Their blinders are to be torn off, their corruption exposed to their own eyes and the single path to complete redemption shown...
...Rodman is a resourceful interviewer of contemporary artists, but the fascinating bits of dialogue he records here— with painters such as Mathieu, Tworkov, Newman, Rauschenberg, Dali and others—serve strictly to coat the polemical pill he aims to have his readers swallow...
...Rodman wants us to believe that Western art and artists have progressively fallen into moral irresponsibility, that is, formalism, while critics who should have been sounding the call to duty have abandoned their posts...
...It certainly didn't make me change mine...
...Rodman's motivation is revealed in the chapter called "Art for Art's Sake: The Critics...
...He says: "Not only have they endeavored to crush those artists who refuse to exclude man from their works, they have all but cornered the media of propaganda and are well on the way to cornering the marketplace as well— the galleries, the juries, the exhibition places, and the museums...
...In this case, unfortunately, moral fervor is the enemy of both logic and substance...
...Granted that tracts are by their very nature brief, they need not be pretentious...
...Though Selden Rodman describes his book as art criticism, it is more aptly classed as a tract...
...Whatever they do believe, the powersthat-be of the art world do not believe that art should be subordinated to morality, especially if what passes for morality is the sentimentalized and sublimated politics of The Insiders...
...The object of Rodman's tract is plain: The powers-that-be of the affluent art world are to be alternately reviled and exhorted, shocked and shamed, until they admit their conspiracy to suppress the artists Rodman admires...
...The last half of Rodman's essay celebrates the art of this saving remnant...
...Rodman's message is apocalyptic...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 15
