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Takes on Clement Greenberg
A peculiar exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, which went up in May and will remain on display through September 21, 2008, is organized not around the relationship of these artists to their era, nor a real or imagined relationship between the two, but instead on the comparison between two of their (perceived) standard-bearers: the magazine critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The museum says,
Two rival art critics played a crucial role in the reception of the new American painting and sculpture: the highly influential New York intellectuals Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. In the pages of magazines as diverse as Partisan Review, The Nation, ARTnews, and Vogue, these critics wrote incisively about seismic changes in the art world, often disagreeing with each other vehemently.
They certainly had a rivalry, though it’s difficult to evenly pitch Greenberg, who was a serious theorist in his own way, and essentially defined the American approach in his era, with Rosenberg, who, at least from what I gather of admittedly limited exposure to his writing, was an interesting writer, but a very limited critic without anything at all like his rival’s organized, coherent perspective. Obviously, though, setting up a binary opposition like this — rather than what might be more reasonable: say keeping them each around as a mile marker in the vast spectrum of cultural context that might be used to compare the artists — emphasizes explicitly the Jewish element of the project, which is presumably desirable from the perspective of the museum.
And that said, I do find it interesting when a major cultural institution even acknowledges critical discourse prior to the 1980s; and revisiting these guys is enlightening, even now that many of the issues they hotly contended are more or less retired. In the enlightening (and very different) excerpts that follow, there is some evidence of the significance Greenberg has continued to have for a wide range of critics, though he seems to be mentioned less and less. I was at first surprised that he was, despite his hermetic ultra-formalism, treated generously and unusually incisively by the French theorist and October editor Yve-Alain Bois. This fragment is purely analytical, but in another part of the essay (“Resisting Blackmail”) he speaks for taking a similar angle or sharing a sort of attitude about the manner of conducting criticism (he contrasts it with what he sees as the belle lettrist strain in French art writing). This is more purely about Greenberg’s practice:
If Greenberg’s discourse was flawed, I realized, it was because it deliberately disjoined the two levels and chose moreover to speak only about the first one, leading to such insipid statements as “the quality is the content,” and to the transformation of structural oppositions (“opticality versus tactility”) into purely morphological criteria of judgment. … Although he speaks about the medium of any art as its principal horizon, he seldom discusses the actual stuff of any work of art (or when he occasionally does, it is with gross errors: Barnett Newman, for example, was absolutely enraged when reading Greenberg’s assessment of his color-field canvases as bearing a “dyer’s effect”). Form became an a priori for Greenberg, an idea preexisting its actual “projection,” its actual descent into the realm of matter, just like the “image” had been for Sartre.
And, as usual, we rely on Peter Schjeldahl for a very pretty, steady and precise wide-angle shot. From “An Inclement Critic” (1981):
Seeing him makes it easier to grasp his intellectual terror tactics as tactics and to start imagining why someone would want to employ them. I picture a man who loves his own response to art so extravagantly, so beyond all reason, that reason in his hands is just a device to protect and generalize that love. No mere Bernard Berenson-style King Connoisseur or even a T.S. Eliot-like Voice of High Culture, Greenberg historicized his love and rolled it into the present—art for art’s sake on tank tracks. Almost incidentally, he organized the unruly data of modern art more persuasively than anyone else.