Blogger Book Club II: Two-Lane Flattop

By Matthew Guerrieri

Here's where he really lost me:

In the restructured modernist dynamic, the role of the beholder is to be dominsated and awestruck by the work of art, which undergoes a sex change and is recast as a simulacrum of the male artist's autonomous, impenetrable self.
...
Under these revised priorities, the validity of receding illusionistic space in painting was immediately called into question. This imaginary space had been traditionally, and quite rightly, perceived as "community property," shared by the work, its creator, and its beholder. The new, modern priorities insisted that no such community existed. The flat picture plane came to represent the property line dividing the mundane world of the beholder from the exalted territory of the artist's incarnate philosophy. (pp. 41-42)

Earlier (p. 36), Hickey really lays down the law: "Today we are content to slither through the flatland of Baudelairian modernity, trapped like cocker spaniels in the eternal, positive presentness of a terrain so visually impoverished that we cannot even lie to any effect in its language of images--nor imagine with any authority--nor even remember."

As someone with an Ellsworth Kelly print hanging above his piano, I can only say, this is not the way I perceive beauty. I think the problem is this: Hickey is very concerned about modernism's elimination of the illusion of three dimensions in Renaissance painting. But he doesn't seem to be considering that the plane of a painting is a convenient fiction as well--all paintings are three-dimensional objects, we experience them in three dimensions, because we experience the world in three dimensions. And the "flat picture plane" is just as much an illusion as Renaissance perspective.

A big difference between the two is how that illusion changes as the work is regarded from different angles in the real, three-dimensional world. For traditional, representative perspective, any viewing angle but straight on collapses the illusion. But for abstracts, the different angles produce different images, different proportions--the "flat plane" illusion not only holds, it enables--the illusion of a flat picture plane makes possible manifold relationships between the work and the viewer.

My initial reaction was that this difference--between seeing abstraction as a boundary and seeing it as a source of possibility--might be roughly analogous to reacting to analysis of a piece of music and reacting to a live performance. But the more I re-read the book, I find it hard to see how any of its arguments about beauty and the relationship between art and audience can carry over into any music that doesn't come pre-packaged with a programmatic frame of reference. This might be because the book doesn't ever explain what Hickey likes about abstraction--he gives Frank Stella a hard time but elsewhere gives an approving shout-out to Morris Louis, which is a little cognitively dissonant to me. (I'd be really interested to know what he thinks about painters like Seurat or Matisse.) But going on what's there, beauty seems to be defined at the intersection of a work's visual pleasure and its representative content--which I can see for representative, figurative art, but falls apart when the content is not immediately recognizable or easily agreed upon.

Page 71: "So we talk, because the experience of American beauty is inextricable from its optimal social consequence: our membership in a happy coalition of citizens who agree on what is beautiful, valuable, and just." I have real problems with that one--not because I don't think it accurately describes a lot of the way people perceive art nowadays, but because Hickey seems to think it a good thing. Notice that this is now shifting the viewer's pleasure from their viewing of the work to the crowd's validation of their opinion. I think this need for validation inevitably warps artistic values to market values--but those market values aren't a reflection of artistic value, but of ease of marketability. On both these counts--a privileging of representative art and a need for like-minded validation--an awful lot of the music I find beautiful--any music, really, that doesn't have an obvious textual or cultural frame--is bound to come up short, because it a) such music tends to require a less passive interpretive engagement on the part of the listener, which means everyone's going to build up their own different, individual interpretive framework, and b) music is hard to talk about. The fact that I still experience such music as beautiful isn't diminished by the possible lack of a "happy coalition." The secret ballot is a hallmark of democracy as well.