Thursday 18 December 2014

8 words about Lichtenstein



I've just come across a text Sylvester wrote about Roy Lichtenstein in 1997 (soon after the artist's death, I believe), which prefaced a slim volume containing his two interviews with the Pop artist (from 1966 and 1997). I wanted to write something quickly about the last sentence, because it's one of those instances where I'm reminded again what I like most about Sylvester. To put it in context, it concludes a paragraph discussing Lichtenstein's 'constant tentativeness'. I'll give the final few sentences:

With Pop Art, where, as Lichtenstein says, "before you start painting the painting, you know exactly what it's going to look like", it might be supposed that the artist, before he starts painting any painting, knows exactly what he's trying to do. But Lichtenstein did not know exactly what he was trying to do- for all the acuity of his intelligence- did not quite know what he was aiming to achieve in terms of form, was far from being sure what his attitude was towards his subject matter. He says that Cubism was the main source of his style. Among the Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger knew exactly what they were trying to do. Braque and Picasso were working in the dark. It probably always is like that in art.

What I like about it is how Sylvester demonstrates such precision and conciseness but doesn't get carried away by it. For argument's sake, imagine that by some miracle I'd managed to write the sentences above, bar the last. At that point, I would be feeling so pleased with myself for having written the sentences 'Among the Cubists...in the dark' that I'd be thinking 'now for the final flourish', the same way I sign my name with an ostentatious swipe at the end. I can imagine myself, or many other lesser writers for that matter, concluding with either 'That's how art is' or 'That's how it goes'.
What I definitely wouldn't do is put two adverbs together- 'probably always'? Anyone who does that isn't putting style first. I expect Sylvester could've come up with something more emphatic and elegant, even by just leaving out 'probably', which would fit better in a sense. But like Lichtenstein, he wasn't certain. Even as he puts his case so persuasively, he doesn't preclude the chance someone will come back with a counter-example. He doesn't try to dazzle you with his style, even if he nonetheless does.
 

Monday 8 December 2014

not writing

The inverse of looking at Sylvester's writings is the shape of all the things he didn't write about. I started thinking about this when looking at the contents of his selected essays, About Modern Art and considering the decisions made to arrive at that selection. Very few writings about British artists, for example (as with the Tate Modern show he was working on at the end of his life, and which opened posthumously).
I started listing all the artists who were significant to Sylvester at one point or another in his career but were absent from the final selection- Freud, Nolan, Paolozzi, Laurens, Richier, etc. And of course the compilation of About Modern Art is significant as a combined verdict on the artists Sylvester wrote about, and his opinion of his own writing on them. I don't doubt, for instance, that he would have refuted any suggestion that the selection was purely based on either the quality of the artists, or the quality of his writing.
But at this moment, having stumbled upon an unpublished declaration from him that 'Velasquez is the greatest painter' (as Francis Bacon would surely have agreed), the more interesting question is: why did a critic of Sylvester's calibre write so little about Velasquez and the old masters he admired so much? In the preface to About Modern Art he expresses regret over this 'silence' on so many subjects- antiquities, pre-nineteenth century art, modern architecture.
Since critics make a living from giving their opinions, it's unsurprising that many are willing to hold forth on any given subject. Listening to the New York Times' Roberta Smith at Tate Britain recently, I was deeply impressed but her commitment and pragmatism to the metier of the critic. Among my list of quotes from the event is something about

'cyclical pain + enforced amnesia of criticism, always the next deadline > continual redemption'

although some of those words should perhaps be attributed to Adrian Searle of the Guardian, who was in the audience and spoke in relation to this.
Sylvester spent a decade or so writing regular criticism for weekly magazines and was no doubt familiar with the pain of quick and partial judgments. For one type of critic, this pain is alleviated by the continual cycle of constant redemption (the old canard about try-fail-try again-fail better might apply). And certainly the abiding impression left by Smith's talk recently was how inevitable she made her work sound. When the questions from the audience included a couple of familiar concerns about the method behind her work, she brushed them aside effortlessly. (The most memorable moment was when she answered a question about the criticism's relation to market forces with an eloquent pause which said all she needed to. What she subsequently said was merely a reiteration). But Sylvester wrote that working for the New Statesman 'was by its nature using me up'. Entropy set it. Over time the writing got harder, not easier, and while he continued to write regularly (particularly in the 1990s), it tended to focus in on a select group of artists whose work he knew well. He turned down invitations to write about artists whose work he knew inside out if he had nothing new to add, and wrote that it could take him twenty years to find something to say about an artist. In many cases that day never came.
Certainly, one way of considering the critic is someone who can turn their hand to anything, and Sylvester's radio broadcasts show that he could perform admirably in a Front Row/Culture Show setting for a time, although again over time his pauses became longer, and he became increasingly resistant to the quick-draw sport of TV and radio panels. I've been told that for Sylvester, taking everything equally seriously was a way of coping with the world, but if so that didn't cause him to think he could write about everything.
Some people would see that as a weakness, but I see it as Sylvester's recognition of his abilities and place in the world which is deeply serious and reasonable. I can't imagine the frustration it must have caused him not to have written a remarkable essay about Velasquez or Michelangelo, and to have reconciled all of those fragmentary affirmations found throughout his writings. But he seemingliy preferred to regret the things he hadn't written to those he had.