Leo Steinberg: Other Criteria

 Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public

Steinberg, Leo.  Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. 1975.  Read

Leo Steinberg voices his complex experience of approaching art (Neo Dada) that he, great critic that he was, did not immediately understand.  His reaction is an important lesson in humility and learning.

Leo Steinberg (36) “My own first reaction was normal.  I disliked the show, and would galdy have thought it a bore.  Yet it depressed me and I wasn’t sure why.  Then I began to recognize in myself all the classical symptoms of a philistines reaction to modern art.  I was angry at the artist, as if her had invited me to a meal, only to serve something uneatable…I was irritated at some of my friends for pretending to like it—but with an uneasy suspicion that perhaps they did like it, so that I was really mad at myself for being so dull, and at the whole situation for showing me up.”

Leo Steinberg 38-39

“I am alone with this thing, and it is up to me to evaluate it in the absence of all available standards.  The value which I will put on this painting tests my authenticity as an individual.  Here I can discover whether I am man enough to sustain an encounter with a completely original experience.  Am I escaping it by being overly clever?  There things that I see—are they really me, or have I been eavesdropping on conversations?  I have been trying to formulate certain meanings seen in this art; are they designed to demonstrate something about myself, or are they really an inward experience? Do the things I have just written seem very good to me? This threat of vanity is more serious than the mere rise of nonsense; and yet I wonder—ten years from now, I will I look silly if It should become universally obvious that all this was junk?  Or have I failed myself already in asking these questions, being overly conscious about myself, instead of surrendering to the experience which is reaching out to me?

"Alfred Barr, of hte mOuseum of Modern Art, has said that if one out of ten piantings that the Museum of Modenr Art has acquired should remain valid in retrospect, they will ahve scored very well.  I take this to be, not a confession of inadequate judgment, but an assertion about the nature of contemporary art."

"[Modern Art] demands a decision in which you discover yourself, your own quality as a man; and this decision is always a 'leap of faith' to use Kierkegaard's famous term."

Comparing Modern art to Exodus 16.  "When I read this much, I stopped and thought how like contemporary art this manna was; not only in that it was a God-send, or in that it was a desert food, or in that no one could quite understantd it--for "they wist not what it was." Nor even because a part of it was immediately put away in a museum--"to be kept for your generations"; nor yet because the taste of it has remained a mystery, since the phrase here translated as "wafers made with honey," is in fact, a blind guess; the Hebrew word i sone that occurs nowhere else in ancienct literature, and no one knows what it really means.  Whence the legend that manna tasted to every man as he wished; though it came from without, it's taste in the mouth was his own making."


  =Art always makes its public feel othered—great new art always makes us uncomfortable, makes

anxieties of the modern moment felt and real.

            +This has been true since at least Cezanne.

=Leo Stein’s example: hated Matisse but went again and again to see the paintings and after a few weeks decided he loved them and bought them up.  This is necessary humility when approaching new great art.

=”Contemporary art is constantly inviting us to applaud the destruction of values which we still cherish.” …. “It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator.”

=Steinberg laments his anxiety of “not getting it” with Neo Dada, particularly J. Johns, but sticks with it.

=”If I dislike these things, why not ignore them?” – well most people do, but the heroicism of the art critic is his humility and doggedness to stick with things he doesn’t like and persevere, to understand precisely why or why not, to not simply give a glib kneejerk reaction.

=Art as analogous to god-sent mana (a hapax legnomenon, no one knows what it is) – manna tastes to everyoy man as he wished; the gathering of manna and art must be done as a leap of faith.

Steinberg, Leo “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art”

Steinberg notes the wide range of critical responses to Johns, many of them wrong (this is the mark of great art)

            =Then he hones on in the 8 basic attributes of Johns paintings (p.26)

                        +Most critical is the flatness, the unification of signifier and signified.

1.      All man-made objects.  Man-made assuresthat they are makeable; non man-made things can only be simulated (skies, trees, space)

2.      All objects are commonplace – but Johns doesn’t give us the commonplace in a painting, he gives us the commonplace as a painting. What Johns loves about the commonplace is that they are nobody’s preference, not even his own (this is the paradox).

3.      All respected ritual or conventional shapes.  Using conventional things so he can worry about deeper issues.  Did you pick these letter types because you like them or because theats hwo the setencils come?  JJ: But that’s what I like about them, that they come that way.

a.       He likes things that are, in their quotidian state, seem not to be art yet.

4.      Johns subjects are wholeentities or complete systems; full objects, whole primary colors, can be looked at from any angle or side.. meh okay. He is playing with the limits of meaning making.

5.      Johns objects/systems predetmine the pictures shape and dimensions. Naturally. 1:1; ratio.

6.      Flatness – you can’t smoke Magritte’s pipe, but you can throw darts at Johns targt.

7.      Non-heirarchic – maintaining “alloverness” democrartic equality to all parts fo the painting.

a.       “Moral: Nothing in art is so true that its opposite cannot be made even truer.”

8.      Johns objects associate with sufferance, not action. They are receptive things; they let things happen.

What is painting? ß central question of Johns.

Johns advances many hypotheses.  What is the surface of a painting? Not a window, nor an uprighted tray, noran object with projections into actual space…. He want spictures to be objects alone.

In conclusion: Johns puts two flinty thingsotgether in a picure and makes them work against one another so hard tha the mind is sparked.

“The elements of Johns’s picture lie side by side like flint pebbles.  Rubbed together they could spark a flame, and that istheir meaning perhaps.  But johns does not claim to have ever heard othe invention of ifre. He merely locates the pebbles.”

“Becoming a painter is like groping one’s way out of a cluttered room in the dark.  Beginning to walk, he tubmbles over another man’s couch, changes course to colloide with someone’s commode, then buttsagainst a work table that can’t be disturbed.”

“It is in the character of the critic to say no more in his best moment sthan whay everyone in the following season epeats; he is the generator of the cliché.”

To achieve Pollock’s effect through absolute banality, without the pretension of heroism and hypermasculinity.

John Andrew Rice: Rector of Black Mountain College

Written after he was ousted from his position as founder and rector of the Black Mountain School (he had been sleeping with his students), John Andrew Rice wrote an autobiography called I Came Out Of The 18th Century (1941) in which he describes his remarkable mission as a teacher and provides some insight into his downfall.

“At the first meeting of a college that was to start the revolution in American education the frist speaker called was the permeanent caretaker, who would explain fire precautions.” (321) … “We had, by an insticting as old as man, gone up on a mountain, there to make our living sacrifice.  We would conquer or die.  One could almost hear the old worlds, the old wrong words.  The wise, the really wise, know, have always known, that they are wrong, that the order is wrong, and the ‘or’ is wrong. “Die and conquer,” those are the words and the order. Humility, the wise have said, is the beginning of life. We had no humility, not a tittle.” (321)

"Teaching is a secondary art. A man is a good teacher if he is a better something else; for teaching is communication, and his better something else is the storehouse of the things he will communicate.  I have never known a master in any field who was not also a master teacher; but to be a master teacher in Black Mountain one had to be a master man.  In other places education was part of the day and part of the man; in Black Mountain it was round the clock and all o fa man.  There was no escape.  Three meals together, passing in the hall, meeting in classes, meeting everywhere, a man taught by the way he walked, by the sound of his voice, by every movement.  That was what it was intended to be, the fulfillment of an old idea, the education of the whole man: by a whole man." [322 -- what a goal!]

“I used to say ‘This is a school for giants.’ I meant that every one of us should grow to the giant that it was in him to be; not some one else’s giant, but his own.  Few are by nature dwarfs, however many may have been dwarfed.  Few are by nature stupid; most of the rest are stupefied.  That was what I believed.  That is what I believe.” 322-23

"People thing they want something new and different, think they want freedom, but what they really want is the old things changed enough to make them feel comfortable."  [328]

"The center of the curriculum, we said, would be art. The democratic man, we said, must be an artist. The integrity, we said, of the democratic man was the integrity of the artist, an integrity of relationship… The artist, we said was not a competitor. He competed only with himself. His struggle was inside, not against his fellows, but against his own ignorance and clumsiness. The painting was his integrity, the score, the words of a play, and, at last, understanding, the will and the skill to do with his fellows, with the corporation, what he had done with paints and sounds: the integrity that was a relationship between himself and the corporation.  But just as the painter must learn to paint, starting with ignorance and clumsiness, so this new artist, this creator of integrity between himself and his fellows, must know and know how, must have knowledge and skill.  Also just as the artist would not paint his picture with muddy colors, so this artist must see clear colors in humanity; and must himself be clear color, for he too was his fellow artist’s color, sound, form, the material of his art. But, different from pigment, bow, granite, not used up in the use; rather, made more of what he would be, a note within the symphony, the clearer for having been written; giving up, and asked to give up, nothing of himself. That was the integrity of the artist as artist. That should be the integrity of man as man." [328-329]  I Came Out of the 18th Century.

“The English, in their blundering intelligent way, had found the answer: not a college, but many; a community of colleges, a universityas; perhaps they would not all be fools at once.. Our sanction, we said, was intelligence.” ßcompare to moral obligation to be intelligent, Erskine.

The disposition to consider intelligence in peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance...  [There exists an] assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief  that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the heart and the mind are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head. --Erskine

"They [unworthy guests of Black Mountain] could not adjust themselves to the world and the pig-headed world refused to adjust itself to them, so they retired from living and went in for "life" ... Besides the permanent staff of seekers after happiness  there were the visitors  T hey tagged themselves when they walked in the door--sometimes earlier....There we other visitors, 'a citizen of the world,' oriental philosophers fresh out of the occident, devotees of 'The Dance' (the ultimate dehydration of art); disciples of Confucius and heralds of confusion, vegetarians and single-taxers (two in one); reformers  that is, creators of a world in their own image, intellectuals a little on the sparse side when it came to intelligence; labor leaders, trained for their mission by fours years of Harvard, graduates of the Union Theological Seminary, yearners all--these and many others.  They had only one thing in common: disgust of themselves transmitted into disgust of the world. They rejected the college in time, as completely as the Foundations had: they had come looking for experiment and found experience." [330-333]

 334  I knew too much; for I let people talk themselves out.  But, while they loved to spill, they hated to have spilled, and came to hate the listener.  All of us, I as well as they, might someday have become individuals, artists with the artist’s integrity; but meanwhile we were individualists and dreaded to leave some part of ourselves out of our control, and that is what confession, in frank speech, does….The majority of the men had been unhappy in childhood and hated their fathers.  I knew that, as I was to know what it meant.

                Modern man is looking for a savior, someone to save him from his individualism.  But he cannot find him, for he insists upon the terms of his own salvation. He wants, and needs, to be saved, but he must be, he says, just as he was before.  He is like a fifth century Athenian, all brain and little heart.  He has this choice: to retreat, as the Germans have, to slavery, from which another Christ may come to rescue him—that was what the early Christian was, salve made into man—or else by pushing his individualism as far as it will go, he may come to realize, as Socrates tried to teach him, and failed—Socrates was, after all, an Athenian, as Christ was a Jew—the limits of sheer thinking, and , unafraid, look about him and see his fellows all in the same predicament, speak to them with his heart as well as his mind, acknowledge that they as well as he are both thinker and lover, and losing nothing of himself, find all of himself within all humanity.  If he does, if he ahs the will to go on, he will discover that he needs no leader, that he is in himself both leader and follower…to be the Christian Socrates, Socratic Christ.

On Keeping a Notebook

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.  Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.  We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.  We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."  --Joan Didion

Mid-Life Crisis Hobby

For when it comes.  This + surfing + good food = living well, dying well.