Yve-Alain Bois

Nostalgia of the Body

Shortly after Lygia Clarks death in 1988, I was asked to write her obituary, and, despite my initial acceptance, given immediately and without the slightest hesitation, Ifound it impossible to do. Once again asked to write a short critical article on her work five years later, and despite my feeling that, should Ifail to do so, I would somehow be shirking a duty, I cannot find a way of doing it. For the time being it is impossible to don my professional robes with regard to her and play the university scholar. That may come later, once my mourning is over and once I am able to abstract my imagination from the huge burst of laughter with which she would have greeted this notion. What I can do today, however, is provide a few memories of Lygia as I knew her. I am not in the habit of dwelling on the personalities of artists or on my personal relations with them, but, although her entire oeuvre aims in some way at the disappearance of the author, it seems justified to me in this case. I believe that Lygia lived her art like no one has ever done. Flash One: I met Lygia Clark for the first time in her studio apartment in the Citi des Arts, a building on the banks of the Seine where the City of Paris houses foreign artists. It was in 1968, shortly after the events of May, and she had just returned from the Venice Biennale, where she had represented Brazil. The excellent dossier ean Clay had devoted to her in Robho had not yet appeared, and I had no idea what I was going to find. The studio was filled with boxes of all sizes, and Lygia was visibly very depressed (depression for her assumed a monumental, oceanic character; it was not rare but abrupt, falling like a bag on her head and quite out of proportion to its apparent reason). Very quickly, however, I witnessed a kind of transfiguration: touched perhaps by my youth (I was sixteen), irritated no doubt by my respectful attitude (I had heard her spoken of too often as a great lady), Lygia began to show me her things, that is, to let me feel them, handle them, inhabit them. First what was scattered over the tables, then the contents of the boxes she began to open for me one by one. I saw, yes, I literally saw the dark specter of depression vanish in a matter of minutes: I think that was what sealed our friendship and later made me one of her most called-upon (and most faithful) resources at times when the figure of melancholy would again swoop down on her

On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman

Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), p. 125, but long before the issue of blackness had any relevance to him. 13. The white on white invitation to Newman’s second solo show at Betty Parsons in 1951, which included his two large white-on-white canvases, The Voice and The Name II, was already perceived by Hess at the time as an allusion to Malevich. See Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), where the author recalls his thoughts upon receiving this card (p. 43). Hereafter cited as Hess 1969, Barnett Newman. 14. SWI (hereafter cited in the text) is an abbreviation for Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). 15. Newman was not included in the exhibition (which went from the twenties—Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, Walter Kuhn, Charles Sheeler, etc.—to abstract expressionism), and he was not even mentioned in the catalog essay by Lloyd Goodrich. By contrast, Gorky, Tobey, Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, de Kooning, Baziotes, and Marca-Relli were presented as “leading figures” of the new movement. The show ran from July 25 to September 5, 1959. A copy of the catalog, and several press clippings, figure among Newman’s papers. Abraham 11 Newman. Sketch after Rodchenko. 1965. Museum: “The exhibit of abstract art is interesting because it shows sterility of technique,” declared Zamoshkin. “It has transcribed a full circle. More than thirty years ago the Russian artist Malevich painted a famous black square. Now abstractionists, after two generations, have not advanced beyond that point.” Barr’s rejoinder is remarkable: “Sometimes it is said that art travels in a circle, but every generation must paint its own way. It is not satisfied with the black square which Malevich did. Each generation must paint its own black square.”16 But with regard to Abraham, however, Newman was not fundamentally appeased by Barr’s astute and profound retort. Before turning to the various claims made by the artist in his statements about or around the painting, it is worth wondering if his lifelong preoccupation with its historic status is not directly connected to its signification—if the very issue of “firstness,” in other words, is not part and parcel of the canvas’s meaning. A title functions for Newman as a metaphor giving a clue to “the emotional content or the emotional complex that [he] was in when [he] was doing the painting” (SWI, p. 305). Though one cannot dismiss the possibility that the artist became obsessed with the priority of Abraham long after having painted it—but neither can one date its titling with any precision, as it was shown for the first time under this title at the 1957 Minneapolis exhibition—priority seems indeed to have been for Newman one of the main semantic attributes of this canvas. Speaking to O’Hara about its title, for example, he declared: “It tries to evoke the meaning of the work and that I would call it Abraham because of what I thought was its tragic honesty of the first black painting.” Abraham is probably the first painting to which Newman gave a title that is a proper name. And Abraham, the biblical man, is a quintessential first, a point of origin almost equal to Adam—as Newman will stress himself in his 1966 text on Stations of the Cross: “Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why?. . . This question that has no answer has been with us so long—since Jesus—since Abraham—since Adam—the original question” (SWI, p. 188). Furthermore, this usual connection between the two biblical characters might have played a role in Newman’s decision to send both Adam and Abraham to MoMA’s 1958–59 traveling exhibition. (Let us note in passing that Newman reverses the usual typology when he relates Abraham to Jesus, whose calvary is traditionally compared to Isaac’s: Abraham is precisely the one who was not forsaken. But Newman’s somewhat uncommon [existential, not allegorical] reading is consistent with his secularization of Jesus’s passion: like Christ, Abraham is a “knight of faith” who believes in the word of God and risks all in His name.)17 OCTOBER 12 16. “U.S. Abstract Art Arouses Russians,” New York Times, June 11, 1959. To Newman’s request for the full text of the conference, Barr replied on September 11, 1959: “The Moscow lectures were given from the briefest notes, plus a great many slides, so that I had no text. Otherwise I would be very pleased to send you a copy.” 17. Answering my query about this issue, Professor Jean-Daniel Causse (Faculté de théologie protestante, Montpellier) confirms that the usual link is between Isaac and Jesus (interpretation of the sacrifice of Isaac through the notion of a God who gives his son’s life for the salvation of mankind), and he adds: It is quite possible that Newman’s Jewish origin kept him away from this interpretation. But it is even more possible that Kierkegaard’s interpretation functioned here as model, Abraham is the first patriarch (and the first proselyte), the one who made a Covenant with God—who promised him in turn a miraculous son (in his old age, from his unfertile wife), and through him a multitudinous seed, equal in number to the stars of the heaven. (Among the paintings dating from 1949, Covenant and The Promise are obviously linked in theme to Abraham, but one can also add Galaxy to this Abraham 13 Newman. Above: Covenant. 1949. Left: The Promise. 1949. semantic chain.) Abraham is the progenitor of the vast portion of humanity that follows any of the three monotheist religions, the “father of all believers.” He is the first man to have argued with God, and to have won his legal battle, even if, in the end, God had it His way.18 Finally and perhaps more importantly, the Talmudic tradition, of which Newman was well aware, depicts him as the first iconoclast, who destroys the idols shaped by his own father.19 None of this, of course, is as important in the myth of Abraham as the story of the sacrifice, or rather the nonsacrifice, of Isaac, which historically legitimated the end of ritual human sacrifices. But there seems to be a link in Newman’s mind OCTOBER 14 even unconsciously. For Kierkegaard does not mention either the parallel between Isaac and Jesus, and thus departs from the classic sacrificial reading. This is because he has to posit Abraham as a unique and incomprehensible figure, and not make him enter into a theological logic. . . . Even if Kierkegaard does not explicitly state it, the link for him is rather that proposed by Newman: Abraham/Jesus. What’s important for his Abraham is that he is left with the question as question, with the why? This question cannot be shared, is not transmissible, and it reduces him to silence (Abraham would provoke horror if he spoke). In such a line of thought, Abraham and Jesus are two singular figures understood not from the point of view of God’s project, but from that of Man—of a questioning Man; they are two distinct figures of a relationship to the absolute, that is, in Kierkegaard’s words, to the credo quia absurdum. The problem of sacrifice is replaced by that of faith as a question in the face of the absurd. Perhaps then the Adam/Abraham/Jesus link is there to mark the inaugural character of the question each time: each time the question is raised anew. The question is asked as if for the first time and thus it founds a solitude, an impossible sharing of the why? [Letter to the author] See also Causse, “Eloge de l’avant-dernier,” Études théologiques et religieuses 75, no. 2 (2000), pp. 251–60. The relation between Abraham and Jesus, though again not explicitly stated, was also implied by no less than Calvin (whose sermons, incidentally, speak of the sacrifice of Abraham, thus insisting at the outset on the patriarch’s existential drama). On this issue, and its importance for the Reformation in Geneva in the sixteenth century, see Hubert Bost, “La mise en scène genevoise d’Abraham sacrifiant,” Études théologiques et religieuses 76, no. 4 (2001), pp. 543–61. 18. The battle in question is for the sparing of Sodom: Abraham, through a succession of legal steps that might have greatly amused Newman, leads God to promise that He will not destroy Sodom if ten innocent men can be found in the city (Genesis 18:23–32). On this issue, see Anson Laytner, Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990), pp. 3–7, 45–48. 19. Newman possessed several Talmudic compilations, but even if he had not consulted them he would most probably have remembered the story of Abraham’s iconoclastic gesture, commonly taught in Hebrew school (which he attended in his youth). Louis Ginzberg gives several versions of the story in the section dedicated to Abraham in his classic The Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold, vol. 1, 1909 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 195–198, 213–217. In all of them Abraham destroys the idols that his father worships, but in the version entitled “The Iconoclast” it is specified that his father was their creator. Newman owned the posthumous one-volume condensation of Ginzberg’s hefty seven-volume opus. Entitled The Legends of the Bible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), it only gives one version of the iconoclastic story (“The Preacher of the True Faith,” pp. 92–94). By contrast, the cabbalistic text quoted by Hess (Hess 1971, Barnett Newman, p. 61) in order to present Abraham as the “first man to create” and “the godlike artist,” is utterly arcane (even though Hess’s source, Gershom Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism [(New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 61], figures as well in Newman’s library). Not only could Newman not have known the text in question when he painted (or even baptized) Abraham, for Scholem’s study appeared in English only in 1965, but this text concerns a legend according to which Abraham was able to create “golems,” slaves of clay, at will—a fact that Hess edits out, quite manipulatively. Given Newman’s utmost rejection of represe

Fake News and Alternative Facts: Three Antidotes from History

Yve-Alain Bois introduces three historical texts—Heinrich von Kleists “Primer of French Journalism” (1821), Bertolt Brechts “On Restoring the Truth” (1934), and Alexandre Koyrés “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” (1943)—that address the age-old but still urgent question of how to address blatant political lies.

François Morellet/Sol LeWitt: A Case Study Revisited

Resuming his examination of pseudomorphism from October 154, Yve-Alain Bois argues that the striking resemblances between works by François Morellet and Sol LeWitt are the result of structurally different notions of systems. They each arrived at results that might look similar, but only from a superficial, morphological point of view. Very early on, Morellet set out to purge elements of personal taste—which seemed to him akin to the worst aspects of European postwar abstraction—from his systematic approach. It was through the attempt to suppress choice, and thus composition, that he finally adopted adopted chance as a master organizer of his work. While the premises of Morellet and LeWitt are often identical (both rejected the arbitrariness of composition and the subjectivism of gestural abstraction), and their respective toolkits have many elements in common, as in any other case of pseudomorphism, the works themselves have a different meaning—or assert differently their authors craving for meaninglessness—because the historical and geographical context of their occurrence is different.

Kobro and Strzemiński Revisited

An introduction to Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemińskis 1932 treatise on sculpture, Composing Space/Calculating Space-Time Rhythms, this piece discusses how these authors carry the essentialism and historicism typical of geometric abstraction of the interwar period to unprecedented levels. Includes critical remarks about the authors’ omissions (of Rodin, of Hildebrand, of Cubist sculpture) and their connection to Russian Constructivism.

The Wild and Company

A photograph taken by Eric Pollitzer (page 80) makes it perfectly clear: the five untitled “skinny” paintings from 1950 (as they have sometimes been nicknamed) are closely related, and they belong to the same family as The Wild (CR 48) of the same year.1 The photograph is not dated, and it would be tempting to assume that Pollitzer took it while the artist was preparing his second one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery (April 23 to May 12, 1951): Untitled 1, 1950 (CR 39), Untitled 2, 1950 (CR 40), and Untitled 3, 1950 (CR 41) are already framed, ready to go, while a framing solution has yet to be found for Untitled 4, 1950 (CR 42), Untitled 5, 1950 (CR 43), and The Wild. (We know for sure that The Wild and the four first Untitleds were included in the show2: were the hypothesis correct, it would confirm that Untitled 5, 1950 was also

To Sing Beside

OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, pp. 133–142.

Klein's Relevance for Today

painters may be perpetrating frauds; the tone of an impostor, who suggests that he may share in the activity he is criticizing; and the tone of a real artist, who by breaking the artists’ taboo and allowing the imputation, even about himself, that some artists may be hypocrites shows how sincere he is.37 In short, in a world in which everything has become myth and spectacle, only the spectacularization of myth and spectacle can contain a parcel of truth: as their indictment. And here we come back to Adorno and Wagner.

Francis Picabia: From Dada to Petain

Biographers are fixated on their heroes in a very peculiar manner. They frequently select the hero as the object of study because, for personal reasons of their own emotional life, they had a special affection for him from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization, which strives to enroll the great man among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, their infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his lifes struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything savoring of human weakness or imperfection .