The Painted Word: Tom Wolfe

Will we look back on Modernism in a hundred years’ time as we look back now on images of Akhenaten, that is, as an aberration, a blip, well maybe but I’m still in love with much of Modern art. I still find the modern section of any provincial art gallery the most interesting. I would still rather go to the Tate than the National.

When falling in love with modern Art I passed through various phases and afterwards each phase seemed abhorrent to me. First the beloved poster of the Fighting Temeraire was taken down. Later then I realised that the thinking person scorns Impressionism. Undeterred in my love I combined regular bike rides to the Tate with reading histories of Modern Art and my quest for knowledge climaxed when I took A316 Modern Art: Practices and Debates with the Open University. One of the texts for this course is called Modern Art and Modernism, A Critical Anthology and presents all the crucial words on the subject written by artists and key critics. For me the course involved long battles to try to understand what the texts meant and thus what Modern Art was about. Even at Art College the art history lectures were painful discussions on what Greenberg was driving at. I felt inadequate in that I couldn’t really see how the Minimalists had created a new type of art object that wasn’t sculpture or painting. That didn’t stop me loving Minimalism. I can see that the guided tours that I subsequently led at Tate Modern were really a debate with myself about the art and those ideas. In the end I came to think that a lot of what fills Tate Modern is pretty second rate especially after I went to the Modern in New York whose collection makes that of the Tate seem pitiful.

On my OU course the words of the artists were examined as given truth, like the bible they were accepted in their entirety and the reader had to rise to the challenge of comprehending them. Tom Wolfe’s book should been on the reading list as an antidote to all of that kowtowing. It is a very entertaining book. Wolfe , the cynic, hits out at Greenberg and Rosenberg but mostly at Greenberg. Suddenly I looked afresh at Greenberg’s theories and thought “actually that is rubbish did I really spend so long castigating myself for not understanding it?” Of course Wolfe dares to question the art as well as the theory and here again I breathed a sigh of relief and said: “yes a lot of Abstract Expressionism isn’t much good”

If I had read and understood Wolfe when I was doing A316 I would have seen the utterances of the artists in a new light as mostly balderdash but important balderdash. They are ramblings written for the most part by people who weren’t writers. These texts need to be seen in the socio-political and artistic context in which they were written. Theories of art are important because they influence artists, create movements and change the nature of art but are mostly drivel when you look at them with cold eyes. For instance the optical theories that spawned Impressionism and Pointillism were just wrong. The novel religion of Theosophy that was behind the ideas of Mondrian and Kandinsky was barking. For the longest time I thought I was stupid not to understand the obscurantist rhetoric of artists - no there is nothing to understand - it’s just the Word - as Wolfe calls it. I feel it’s a bit late to come to this conclusion well yes but I can now look at the NewArtSpeak of the exhibition catalogue and say “you must be joking”.