Why I Still Read Harold Rosenberg

Mostly because he is not a “thinker” in the manner of Derrida, or Foucault, or Zizek, or Baudrillard, or Deleuze. There are times when I just get so weary of theory, and long for the comfort of frank opinions and honest accounts of personal experience rendered in unrepentantly prose-y prose. It would be unfortunate if Rosenberg were remembered mainly for the fact that he and Clement Greenberg crossed sabres at every opportunity regarding the true significance of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Not to slight Rosenberg’s role as an extremely important interpreter of DeKooning, Pollock, Motherwell, Kline, Rothko, but I value his work for additional reasons.

• Because he cared very much about the act of creation, not just for those specially active individuals we call “artists”, but for all of us created beings.
  

• Because Rosenberg believed the critical enterprise possessed its own social efficacy, as the quote from his introduction to Discovering The Present, a compendium of various magazine pieces, lectures, and sundry, published in 1973, indicates:
  

  In art, “conservative” and “radical” ought to be abandoned and attention concentrated on déja vu. The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight. In America an almost total absence of genuine education in modernist creations and attitudes of the past hundred years is responsible for wave after wave of déja vu novelties. The déjavunik exploits his audience’s lack of education b appealing to its desire to be advanced and its expectation of being repelled by new work. (xi).

  
  
• Because he was one of the few critics, and perhaps the only one, to understand what Philip Guston was trying to do in the new, “crude” paintings he exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970.
  

  Nor do Guston’s new political reveries eliminate his ancient debate with painting, its reasons for being, its probabilities for survival; the artist himself humorously confesses his inability to escape this obsession by presenting a canvas of a Klansman painting a self-portrait… It might be argued that finding art problematical is itself a form of political thinking, in that it considers the kind of society in which art can continue to be practiced and valued. In the last analysis, Guston’s exhibition is more political by way of art and does more for art than politics. The recently influential formalist conception of High Art, pledged on principle to refuse to take note of the destruction of the planet, seems thoroughly played out, and with it the dialectics of an increasingly self-purifying abstraction. On the other hand, the anti-form earth and raw-materials projects that were presented as the antithesis to color fields and minimal sculptures have reduced themselves to an endless lecture on counter-aesthetics. [A person in me really enjoys the counter-intuitive idea that something can be reduced to endlessness.] (”Liberation From Detachment”, The New Yorker, November 7, 1970, p. 140).

  
  
• Because, in the late 1960’s, at a time when culture in America – and, in fact, the world over – appears from our historical vantage to have been anything but boring, Rosenberg wrote a little essay entitled “Virtuosos Of Boredom” (pages 119 to 124 in Discovering The Present), which, in its exposure of the forms of self-aggrandizing collusion that can unite artists and critics, feels to me like it juts a stern forefinger at the writerly conscience to which I answer.
  

  To the critic, the bareness of a work is an opportunity to display his powers of exegesis and to top other critics who might have given up the work as hopeless… The ideal situation from the point of view of the new critics [is he speaking here of someone like Roland Barthes? I have to wonder…] would be for works of art to vanish completely and for nothing to be left but the critical interpretation. Today, no degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating. Even when boredom is the artist’s explicitly stated objective, his intention will be frustrated by decorative inlays from the critical workshop. “It is… disconcerting,” protests Bersani, “to read so many admiring, undaunted analyses of a significance for which [Samuel] Beckett… expresses only boredom and disgust.”… Nothing is boring to the specialist practicing his vocation. Under close scrutiny, an inch of skin or a page of the telephone book will yield wonders of accidental combination, alphabetic pattern, symbolic suggestion. Nor does boredom exist for the partisan or the promoter.
  
  One is bored when the mind is forced back upon itself, the condition of children who have “nothing to do”, or when it is trapped in a situation which it is powerless to affect. Art inspired by the aesthetics of boredom is evidence of how widely prevalent is the disruption between the “I” and things in contemporary mass society. Boring art is the mirror of the repetitiveness, unexpressiveness, abstractness, and obsession with detail of daily life. The “message” of this art – and since it is devoid of pleasure, it is in all instances an art with a message – lies in urging its own rejection as a first step in the development of a free individual sensibility. (pp. 123 – 124)

For me, these are nearly caustic yet inspiring words. (I choose to hear them spoken in such a tone.) And I feel that the issues Rosenberg is addressing are relevant to this day – particularly with respect to music that intends towards a kind of “purity”. This is not to say that I am opposed to such music on moral grounds or find all of it worthless or even unlistenable. Nevertheless, the repercussions of such music are not as “empty” as its component sounds can be perceived to be. Certainly, artists must allow that boredom, real boredom, not instilled or coerced boredom – not the only kind of boredom that Rosenberg discusses anyway – is a valid response to their work, and that perhaps the void is not in those other people who don’t “get” what they are doing, but somewhere in the "done" artifact itself.

"De gustibus, non est disputandum." In one respect, yes, there are no real productive disagreements in matters of taste. But what Rosenberg’s work reminds me is that, unfashionable as the idea may seem, we all of us approach the art which means the most to us in some attitude of truth-seeking. However, I do believe it is difficult, in living with cultural expressions in the way “critics” are asked to, to acknowledge that art fulfills such a need. There’s a vulnerability in it, and maybe even a latent self-rebuke. “You’re more comfortable intellectually manipulating things – books, paintings, records, films, buildings – than you are confronting other people.” So that, more and more, as I live in and through the many positive and negative relationships that my involvement with my own work both proposes and sustains, my faith that there is a system of ethics at the heart of my aesthetics is restored.

Posted by joe on January 7, 2004 7:03 AM