On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART Picasso offers a clue: "In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a...
...The violence exhibited at Finch College must be seen, after all, as the simulacrum of destruction—a series of ritually formalized experiences...
...Harry Soviak seems to have made a career of revising contemporary works of art...
...Mon Levinson may have used sheets of burned and punctured plastic, but the results are strictly elegant...
...A favorite quotation from John Donne, too, suggests a nihilism that is beneficial: "I am re-begot/ Of absence, darkness, death...
...These By James R. Mellow The Limits of Destruction have either gone through a process of destruction in order to get where they are (which is, precisely, in a museum), or are now in the process of being demolished...
...Pol Bury's elegant rearrangement of a Bouguereau Venus, and J. Kolar's futuristic splicing of a Roger Van der Weyden alter piece are successful depredations of old art in reproduction...
...The artifacts of this not altogether momentous series of events—the uneaten portions of the book, the dust-jacket, library card and vial—have been packaged up, a la Marcel Duchamp, in an attractive leather-bound case...
...Van Saun's Brass Corrosion consists of several sheets of brass lying in a bath of slow-acting acid, doomed to remorseless disintegration during the lifetime of the exhibition...
...Destruction Art, now in progress at the Finch College Museum of Art...
...Varian notes, destruction art now enrolls the services of international artists, musicians, film-makers, writers and poets...
...things which are not...
...it had been requested by a student...
...In May 1967, Latham received a card from the library asking for the return of the book...
...Ortiz' destructive method (he is represented by a thoroughly mangled Victorian sofa or chair whose tormented springs and sprawling innards have been treated with a plastic preservative) is apparently intended to be a therapeutic measure based upon primitive traditions...
...All of this is accompanied by an electronic score by F. Richard Morse that provides some striking ephemeral effects: crescendos of sound bursting forth and gradually tinkling away as the color erupts and dribbles off into a corner...
...The latter event, it seems, was prevented by a last-minute surge of humanitarian feelings...
...Two days later, he received notice to the effect that his services as a teacher would no longer be required...
...These provide the most explicit forms of political commentary in the show...
...Other endorsements of the principle also come to mind...
...and then presented for a week in May, with poetry readings and happenings at the Judson Theater and film showings at the Finch College Museum...
...Varian's catalogue text...
...The varieties of destructive experience on view at Finch College are quite ingenious...
...He took the vial to the librarian and gave her a detailed account of what had transpired...
...An entry from a Czech-oslovakian artist, Maknizak, includes a badly charred copy of what appears to be a Russian book on Maxim Gorky, as well as another book labeled The Target which has been the object of rifle practice...
...I do a picture—then I destroy it...
...But what he is referring to specifically is a principle of destruction that is the artist's prerogative?a source of inspiration and invention...
...One could claim that these marred, charred, stricken works of painting and sculpture are directly representative of the times—that their violence is an exchange between art and life...
...He has been willing to destroy worn-out pictorial conventions (his own included) and to rehabilitate worn-out, broken and discredited materials by using them in making his junk sculptures and collages...
...they range from tokenism to finality...
...Paul Thek has contributed facsimiles of the horrible: amputated arms and legs with the bloody ends rendered very naturalistically in plastic...
...As Mrs...
...Elayne H. Varian, director of the Museum's Contemporary Wing, the show includes works in various media by some 30 artists...
...After describing a Papuan ritual in which ceremonial masks are killed and then consumed by fire, Ortiz goes on to say: "Our culture and its rituals must evolve to absorb urges which not only interfere with ours and civilization's evolution but nakedly threaten survival...
...He is represented by an altered James Rosenquist print—a double field of Franco-American spaghetti and green turf on which Soviak has superimposed some sprightly decou-page tulips...
...Generally, though, the destruction has been applied in the process of creating works that are as carefully composed as any product of the old masters...
...The most elaborate use of literature, however, is John Latham's Art and Culture Distillation, the remains of an event that took place in London two years ago...
...Fass' Autolytic Slides are handsomely colored abstractions projected onto a small screen...
...Apparently subscribing to the Baconian theory that some books should be thoroughly chewed and digested, he asked several friends, students and artists to a cocktail party and invited them to tear out from the book and chew up the pages of their choice...
...The destructive principle has had a long tradition in modern art, ranging from Picasso's Cubist revolution through the calculated effronteries of the Futurists and Dadaists who wanted to overthrow art and bum down the museums...
...There is no doubt that it has gained for certain art forms a force and character, a rationale, that they would not otherwise have had...
...There are, for example, burned neckties preserved under glass (by Lil Picard), and a bristling assemblage of bottles, beakers and glass jugs that have been melted or smashed with the pieces arranged in a sparkling department-store display (by Stella Waitzkin...
...Yet political events have a way of circumscribing esthetic theories...
...The distillation was then placed in a bottle and labeled...
...Martin's School of Art...
...In New York this spring, a second symposium was initially postponed by the death of Martin Luther King Jr...
...But in the end, it is the art—not the destruction in Destruction Art—that survives and is meaningful...
...In my case a picture is a sum of destructions...
...Ironically, while his statement acknowledges the destructive impulse, it also confirms the indestructibility of art...
...Like many modern artists, Picasso has shown that destructivism is a double-edged sword...
...Confronted with the murder of Dr...
...Arranged by Mrs...
...But the real finalists of the show are Jack Fass and John Van Saun...
...His contribution to the exhibition is a room strung with overhead wires that give the audience a slight shock: art as pure sensation...
...Significantly, he goes on to add: "In the end, though, nothing is lost: The red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else...
...It can serve the cause of political change but can seldom effect it...
...King, with the deaths, riots and burnings that followed from that real act of violence, the mimetic character of esthetic violence is exposed...
...That the destructive principle is not necessarily new or even a sophisticated modern invention is attested to by the quotation from Ralph Ortiz, one of the participating artists, fixed at the head of Mrs...
...The knife may have been taken to Lucio Fontana's canvas, the flame to Otto Piene's, but the effect is a very gracefully slashed canvas on the one hand, and on the other, a beautiful nebula image trailing wisps of black smoke...
...True, the movement is only a loosely organized confederation at the moment, but in 1966 it did hold a Destruction in Art Symposium in London that included the public burning of a motor-scooter, the bloody dismemberment of the carcass of a lamb, and the near-assassination of some canaries...
...Unfortunately, at the time I saw the show, the slide projector proved uncooperative, flipping ahead before the destructive process was completed...
...Since the modern visual arts have always maintained a healthy hostility toward literature, it is not surprising that books have received a good deal of attention...
...Under the heat of the slide projector, the color and the forms begin to bubble, melt and dissolve...
...art's real impact is primarily upon itself...
...The brief history of the episode is as follows: In June 1966, Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg's collection of critical essays, Art and Culture, from the library of St...
...What is interesting about the current status of destructivism, however, is that it has moved beyond the individual approach to become a public cause...
...The masticated remains were spat into a container, treated with acid, followed by a neutralizing bath of bicarbonate of soda...
...This ambiguity should be kept in mind when viewing the very interesting exhibition...
...Works which seem intent upon destroying the audience include Jean Toche's eye-blinding Eye-Blinding #2, a bank of flashing high-intensity lamps that puts the viewer's sight out of commission for several seconds, and Enrico Baj's crushed mirror that wildly distorts the image...
...I recall (though I can't put my hand on the source at the moment) a remark of Joseph Conrad's counseling young writers to immerse themselves in "the destructive element...
...Have culture, will travel...
...Les Levine, who has previously minimalized the art object, creating mass-produced environments in see-through plastic, has finally eliminated it altogether...
...Art feeds on life, turning everything to account...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 12
