ANY MORE LIKE A DOG AND IT WOULD HAVE FLEAS: WOOF

Tom Wolfe's infamous article is just as infuriating now as it ever was. Yes one could agree that for certain artists their work is so informed by theoretical writings that it might as well be an illustration of the written word but Pollock for example was barely able to understand what Greenberg write about him and artists like Rothko and de Kooning detested the critics who supported them. Wolfe clearly has no alternative conception of what a different modern art could have been nor could he. My heart sinks when I hear artists talking about most of the theoretical baggage they pick up in art school. I get a headache when I hear someone using the term "deconstruction" as if it were a synonym for "interpretation" but this is not necessarily a problem either. There are countless incidences of great art being supported by bad theory (Cubism) as well as great theories leading inexorably to dreadful results (the 1980s). Wolfe is an able satirist but to take him seriously is a ridiculous idea.

Funnily enough for someone who delights in parading erudition ("cenacle" anyone?) his is a profoundly anti-intellectual view of modernism as well as a profoundly short sighted view of the kinds of responses that people can have to the works themselves without ever having read a word about them. You would never know from reading Wolfe that I have seen many people cry in front of Rothko's works, that I have been so excited by seeing "Lavender Mist" for the first and only time that I had to run on the spot for a bit to disperse the kind of energies it filled me with. His own view of the art is dry and academic. He obviously just doesn't respond to it (god knows what art he actually likes) and then projects this first of all onto the writers who first attempted to make sense of these new forms and then onto the painters themselves. I first saw "Blue Poles" as a child on a visit to Canberra sometime in the 1970s then again as a teenager on a school visit and last saw it a couple of years ago. Obviously in the intervening years I had read Greenberg on Pollock but I hardly ever think about the theory when I see what is one of the greatest paintings in the country. Next to Pollock's visual acheivements, the music he makes, any theory is feeble and Wolfe's is the most feeble of all.

As usual the other essay is so close to my way of thinking it's almost funny. I do think that Tenney's music is not quite so interesting as his ideas but i fully agree with most of what he says.