From: ‘WHITEOUT: THE NOT-INFLUENCE NEWMAN EFFECT’ by Richard Shiff. (Temkin et al. 2002, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Press, pp. 76-111)
The younger generation preferred to interpret Newman by phenomenological means. Rather than asking how the artist may have felt when he made the work, they asked how a visual and bodily encounter with the work made them feel. As Richard Serra (fig. 54) put it, “When you reflect upon a Newman, you recall your experience, you don’t recall the picture.”[95] Newman believed that the one feeling should entail the other. If the artist had arrived at a genuine emotion, so should a viewer; and one’s experience of a painting should involve oneself, the painting-object, and some sense of the artist as well. But communication from one sensitive soul to another was not necessarily the concern of those Newman “influenced” (that is, not-influenced), nor were the younger artists expressing an existential “self” as he was. With the advent of Pop art and other forms of “New Realism” during the early 1960s, Rosenberg observed that “the self of the artist [is no longer] engaged by the process of creation.”[96] in an interview in 1967 - refusing, as usual, to name names - Newman remarked that “a young painter” had advised him to stop talking about the self, presumably because the art world took no interest in it; to Newman’s detriment, the idea was dating him. Younger artists, Newman complained, wanted their works to be “anonymous” in character: “without the self … outside of man … an object, a thing. People talk about painting as if it didn’t belong to a person.”[97] In this respect, Newman’s prominent signatures made the act of his “self” and the participation of his “person” obvious (fig. 55) They also frustrated depersonalized formalist readings, appearing as a set of incongruous graphic marks, an element of horizontality in a pictorial order that seemed to proclaim verticality.[98] There was at least one consistency, however: if the scale of Newman’s work was “heroic,” his analogously all-to-evident signatures only added to that connotation. “Newman considered himself a kind of hero, in a way that now perhaps embarrasses a number of younger artists,” Kozloff commented shortly after the artist’s death.[99] However, it was not Newman’s existential self and signature that had spoken so convincingly to his 1960s admirers; it was the extremity of his phenomenological effect. To that, many within the new art world responded with a welcoming wonder. (Temkin et al. p.86)
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[95] Richard Serra, interview by Nicholas Serota and David Sylvester, May 27, 1992 in Richard Serra: Weight and Measure 1992, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), p. 25. Newman himself remarked of his work that “at one instant one gets the whole painting, and the painting can be unforgettable and at the same time there’s nothing to really examine” (interview by Alan Solomon, 1966, preparatory to “Barnett Newman,” telecast July 12, 1966, unedited transcript, p. 27, Alan Solomon papers, AAA). If there’s “nothing to examine” then one’s attention turns from the object to its felt experience, as Serra suggests.
[96] Harold Rosenberg, “The Game of Illusion,” The New Yorker, vol. 38 (November 24, 1962), p. 167.
[97] Interview by Allene Talmey, 1967, audiotape, BNFA. An example might have been Robert Smithson, who, naming his opposition to Newman and certain others, insisted that “abstract art is no a self-projection, it is indifferent to the self”; see “The Pathetic Fallacy in Esthetics” (1966-67; unpublished during Smithson’s lifetime) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 338.
[98] Newman may have provided a rationale for this effect when he referred to Ingres and Whistler as artists who could “stamp on a a symbol as if it were outside the picture. I try to do it when I sign my paintings” (“‘Through the Louvre with Barnett Newman,’ by Pierre Schneider” [1969; remarks recorded in 1968], SWI, p.298).
[99] Max Kozloff, interview by Claire Loeb for “Sour Apple Tree,” KPFK, Los Angeles, 1970, audiotape, BNFA, transcribed by Melissa Ho.
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And fragment of related conversation ….
ME: This paragraph stood out for me when I was reading it not so much because I have a problem with his signature screaming out awkwardly from the otherwise sereneness but because of the relationship of the artist-object-spectator which Newman said less than 20 years before Wollheim but reversed the relationship to one where the viewer should be seeing the painting as the painter in order to make the object ‘painting as art’. The signature makes the viewer aware that what he is seeing does not originate with him but with that guy hanging around down there at the bottom of the painting. It’s that continued sense of ownership that drives Jim Dine to ‘correct’ paintings he supposedly finished and sold off years prior when he sees them hanging in an exhibition, maybe? And finally, if he’d signed it on the back … like we’ve been encouraged to do by those who told him he shouldn’t be signing his paintings on the front … then is the signature akin to one of those stamps/labels on the reverse sides of paintings which detail and document the authenticity of the work?
See, that roadway is an endless tangle, curving in and around itself!
RESPONSE: I understand the argument but for me it is entirely an aesthetic issue...the paintings are elegant and the signature is clumsy and awkward... …Newman's idea that he saw himself as some kind of hero...and that just because he 'felt' something as he made the work so a sensitive viewer should likewise feel something... … ...and guessing he would've been prescriptive too about what sensitivity meant?...
all that said, his paintings certainly stand as 'objects' and seem as radical now as then...
ME: I see your point and am in agreement but then I don’t sign the front of my work and for a time I only signed along the edge of the canvas where I’d stapled it neatly to the stretcher bars not wanting to mess up the pristine back!
Newman’s presumptions regards to his own sensitivity (self importance) and the viewers seem to go with the territory then as well as now. In a way it is what makes Wollheim’s thesis interesting (and counter to the previous generation) … and ironic given the painters he cited (Picasso … really?!); Wollheim gave too much credit to those guys, and, in my opinion, it doesn’t hold water based on the examples he gave but it is an interesting proposition to consider when creating/painting nonetheless. A matter of not just “how am I seeing/experiencing this?” but “how might someone else see/experience this?” and this leads to the “how does this experience relate to authenticity?” Maybe it is simply a matter of bringing a bit of empathy into the work? Does empathy make something more authentic? Is lack of empathy (or ability to be empathetic) related to inauthenticity? And is bringing empathy into the work in this way something that can be done while remaining true to what one is feeling/experiencing and without playing to the market or whoever else - in other words being ‘authentic’?
So the questions continue to unfold, one after the other as I roll down the road …