Technique and Ambition – by Piri Halasz

Craftsmanship is supposed to be one of those old-fashioned virtues that went out of style with Jackson Pollock–at least, if you couldn’t see rhyme or reason in one of his poured paintings, and there were many people who couldn’t, including Harold Rosenberg.

Technique and Ambition

by Piri Halasz

Craftsmanship is supposed to be one of those old-fashioned virtues that went out of style with Jackson Pollock–at least, if you couldn’t see rhyme or reason in one of his poured paintings, and there were many people who couldn’t, including Harold Rosenberg. In his famous article on "The American Action Painters" he suggested that the act of making an abstract expressionist painting was more important than the result, and, thanks among other things to his line of reasoning, there are lots of innocents who believe that sloppy and slapdash can be evidence of genius, and the sloppier and more slapdash, the better (one thinks of the amazing popularity of Joan Mitchell in this connection). But the people who (along with Clement Greenberg) realized that careful thinking and controlled execution were necessary to create Pollock’s poured paintings are still aware of the need for craftsmanship, though they may not call it by that name. Instead, they talk about an artist’s "technique," but even they realize that technique isn’t everything. As Pollock said, "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." In other words, good craftsmanship can be a virtue or a vice, depending upon the ambition for which it is being used, and so too is the case with ambition itself, which can be desirable or undesirable, depending on the type of ambition involved.

Take the Chass�riau exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some critics and historians say that Chass�riau was "ambitious," but they base this claim on the fact that he tried to impress people with large Salon "machines" like The Tepidarium (1853)–in line with the fashions of the day, just as he also sought (and obtained) high-level patronage for murals and other official commissions. This, to me, is the wrong type of ambition–ambition for social prestige and/or commercial success as opposed to the type of ambition that I heard Willem de Kooning voice, back in 1967 when I interviewed him for Time Magazine. I and my researcher and a photographer all flew out to East Hampton, but de Kooning must have been drunk by the time we got to his studio, because all he wanted to do was paw my researcher and me. There was only one quote he would give us, before he curled up on the windowsill and went off to sleep: "I am ambitious, ambitious to be a fantastic artist." That is the kind of ambition I applaud (and Greenberg applauded, too).

Chass�riau used fine craftsmanship, but perhaps less widely appreciated is the technique that Jules Olitski brought to his latest show at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art. His paintings had a common motif: a wobbly-edged disc or oval, sometimes atop a field of contrasting color, sometimes surrounded by bright or darkly-clouded areas of other colors. The thickness of the paint varied from very thin (in which case it had often crackled) to very thick (possibly with acrylic gels mixed in). The larger paintings had dozens of colors in them, superimposed or worked together. An artist from Florida was in the gallery when I was. He showed me what he thought about how the paintings had been made, sometimes with the lower layers of paint shining through upper layers of medium. All this was craftsmanship of a high order, but the paintings were also created with the highest ambition, since Olitski paints–as he has always painted–the best pictures he knows how to paint, and trusts that viewers will adjust themselves to his vision. My favorite picture was With Love and Disregard: Radiance. It was dominated by one large yellow oval and mostly dark but variegated surrounding fields of color that appeared to be pressing in onto it, but without obscuring its ongoing motion

At the Leslie Wayne show in the Shainman gallery, I ran into a younger artist whose work I respect. He admired Wayne’s use of oil paint to achieve density of color, and had just been to see what he called "a funny," Jim Torok at Bill Maynes. While he didn’t tell me to see it, I did, finding more fine craftsmanship wedded to a droll concept: four tiny self-portraits, widely separated on four walls, droll because of the contrast between expertise and scale. Also displayed were larger comic strip pictures (euphemistically called story boards). They told serio-comic tales about Torok’s life as an artist and so on–amusing, since their humor wasn’t acerbic, but I’m afraid I have had it with comic strip art. Little did Roy Lichtenstein realize what he was starting, but really all the comic strip art in galleries nowadays is ultimately descended from his notion that comic strip conventions could be used in high art. To me, "conventions" is another euphemism, this time for visual clich�s, and clich�s (whether in painting or writing) are signs of stale thinking.

My younger friend recommended the Martin Kline exhibition at Marlborough in Chelsea. Kline works with encaustic, building bits of beeswax up with a brush, layer by layer, to create a nubbly surface, with panoplies of what look like little fungi. Sometimes, this had been done with monochromatic paintings, and the results were too minimal for my taste, but some sculptures were much more rewarding. Here I mean those in which the artist had cast a whole small nubbly picture in bronze, carbon steel or stainless steel, together with its support–canvas, stretcher and structure upon which the stretcher was mounted. The result was curious iconic figures standing on neat stalks, the most of successful of which–such as Golden Icon–vaguely resembled Polynesian shields or African masks. Considering the long, difficult process which brought Kline’s sculptures to fruition, it was remarkable how insouciant and individual they still appeared.