Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words,"
The New Yorker , March 29, 1969. From page 110:
"An advanced painting of this century inevitably gives rise
in the spectator to a conflict between his eye and his mind;
as Thomas Hess has pointed out, the fable of the emperor's
new clothes is echoed at the birth of every modemist art
movement. If work in a new mode is to be accepted, the
eye/mind conflict must be resolved in favor of the mind;
that is, of the language absorbed into the work. Of itself,
the eye is incapable of breaking into the intellectual system
that today distinguishes between objects that are art and
those that are not. Given its primitive function of
discriminating among things in shopping centers and on
highways, the eye will recognize a Noland as a fabric
design, a Judd as a stack of metal bins— until the eye's
outrageous philistinism has been subdued by the drone of
formulas concerning breakthroughs in color, space, and
even optical perception (this, too, unseen by the eye, of
course). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that paintings
are today apprehended with the ears. Miss Barbara Rose,
once a promoter of striped canvases and aluminum boxes,
confesses that words are essential to the art she favored
when she writes, 'Although the logic of minimal art gained
critical respect, if not admiration, its reductiveness allowed
for a relatively limited art experience.' Recent art criticism
has reversed earlier procedures: instead of deriving principles
from what it sees, it teaches the eye to 'see' principles; the
writings of one of America's influential critics often pivot on
the drama of how he failed to respond to a painting or
sculpture the first few times he saw it but, returning to the
work, penetrated the concept that made it significant and
was then able to appreciate it. To qualify as a member of the
art public, an individual must be tuned to the appropriate
verbal reverberations of objects in art galleries, and his
receptive mechanism must be constantly adjusted to oscillate
to new vocabularies."
New vocabulary illustrated:
Graphic Design and a Symplectic Polarity —
Background: The diamond theorem
and a zero system .
