Research for the Evan Lee catalog essay sent me back to Clement Greenberg's late writings on aesthetics, collected in the posthumous Homemade Esthetics (Oxford UP), which find him grappling with Kant and Croce, trying to tunnel his way into their thinking on the basis of his own firsthand experience of art works. This is remarkably lucid, brave writing; lucid for its avoidance of specialized or technical language, brave because of his frequent admissions of doubt and uncertainty. Received artworld opinion -- cited by Charles Harrison in his sober introduction -- casts Greenberg as an authoritarian monster, a caricature not borne out by the experience of actually reading the essays, which are full of agonizing self-doubt and acknowledgements of previous wrong turns.

Two assertions jump out at me:

1. "If anything and everything can be intuited esthetically, then anything and everything can be intuited and experienced artistically. What we agree to call art cannot be definitively or decisively separated from esthetic experience at large."

2. "If this is so, then there turns out to be such a thing as art at large: art that is, or can be, realized anywhere and at any time and by anybody."

Think about those sentences and their implications for a while. I actually shivered on the bus when I read them this morning; then I read them again to make sure they said what I thought they said. Then checked a third time. Anywhere, at any time, by anybody. The ostensibly arch-conservative "formalist" (I put the word in quotes because I personally don't believe it has any meaning, outside of the clear intent to diss whom or whatever so labelled), the champion of bizarre figures like Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro, coming right out and siding with his arch-foe Duchamp. Anything and everything. A blank canvas, carved wood, solar energy, "red," US Navy SEALs, a shark in a tank, fluorescent tubes from the hardware store, copper plate, bronze sculpture, oil on plywood, language, "oral communication," photographs.

No more craft boundaries. No more guilds of skilled makers circling the wagons.

I thought about these words all day, wandering New Westminster's streets under huge looming skies. Snow on Mount Coquitlam and Cathedral Peak and the Lions, but warm like summer down on 6th Street by the mall.

I never thought that I would derive comfort from a critic's writing, but I took some today from Clement Greenberg. Thanks, CG!
- posted by cjb @ 9:48 PM