by Frank Vickers

Transcript of a talk presented at FORum, February 2, 2003, with illustrations. (No converts were made.)

Good afternoon. The title of my talk today is “Green Squares and Bags O’ Poop.”

Allow me to preface this with a short story calculated to prejudice my audience just a little bit. A couple of summers ago I was in the Hirshhorn Museum, on the National Mall – a wonderful museum for anyone interested at all in Modern art, highly recommended – I’d gone back for a second time on this trip to Washington to revisit a few favorites, the day before leaving. Now, the Hirshhorn is a cylindrical building with an open courtyard in the center, and if you were to look at the floor plan it would look something like a subdivided doughnut, with their collection set to run in a clockwise pattern, in chronological order, through the 20th and on into the 21st Centuries. I was sitting in a room dominated by paintings by Willem DeKooning and Francis Bacon (the 20th Century British painter, not the 16th and 17th Century politician, philosopher and scientist) when a clamor arose! It was the voice of a woman slowly dragging a hapless companion counter-clockwise through the galleries. As they came into view, a sweeping gesture of the arm accompanied the phrase “…and if ya’ ask me! It’s all an insult ta’ intelligence!”

The dozen or so of us in the room quickly exchanged knowingly bemused, perhaps even smirking, looks as the pair faded back into the first half of the 20th Century and perhaps beyond, and we all went blissfully back to admiring the "Emperor’s New Clothes."

Well, be all that as it may, my intention here today is to, first, present a brief statement as to what I consider one of the most important functions of the arts and their use to society – I’m going to focus on the visual arts, but I mean this to apply to all the arts to some degree – and, then, to hypothesize about two types of  “insult to intelligence.” On the one hand, one fairly specific type of painting which for the purposes of this talk I’ll temporarily call the "Green Square School of Art,” and, on the other hand, one general tendency in art which, again, for the purposes of this talk I’ll temporarily call the "Bag O’ Poop School of Art.” And, I want to talk about them both in terms of that function and use to society, rather than conventional explanations one would find in the books on these things (due to time constraints and lack of research on my part).

Art has many uses, from matching the couch to stirring the soul, and not only all points in between, but entire surrounding constellations. Culture is the sum total of institutions a civilization maintains and hands down, and art is one of the most important of those institutions. One of the most vital functions the arts provide is something roughly analogous to what psychologists call the “subconscious.” Not the unconscious, which they say can’t be directly accessed, rather, the part that can be brought to consciousness, but is currently out of focus. It’s not entirely dormant, there’s always something going on. Just like what we mean when we say we are “working on something in the back of our mind,” there is always a big, indirect conversation going on in the arts. It’s the area where we are working on problems indirectly – and probably also trying to figure out “how to get what we want anyway,” despite those problems and their necessary answers.

(To cover both the obverse and reverse of this coin, art at the same time keeps the human mind nimble and adaptive, but there is no time to go into that today.)

In addition to the fine computation of details and collating of data, and sorting and sifting out, part of what I think happens is that parts or aspects of specific works of art – whether a play, a poem or a statue – detach and take on an additional meaning within society. This relates to an often repeated quote of the aforementioned Willem DeKooning, whose work I was revisiting in the Hirshhorn. He said this: “Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny, very tiny, content.” To me this suggests that a work of art has lots of contents - in the plural – but also one or two other essential, elusive things that have additional significance.

For example, has anyone here ever gotten a line from a song stuck in your head and realized you were trying to tell yourself something about a situation in your life? It’s happened to me.

Or, has anyone ever experienced an epiphany out of the blue? I don’t think that it’s just “beamed” into your head from outside because you’re this special person who happens to need it right now. I think society is continually putting together its own epiphanies in the arts.

This necessarily leaves endless possibilities for progress in a healthy society, and it also necessarily leaves endless possibilities for regress in a healthy society. I think that that has to be accepted, and I don’t think I’d get any argument against the idea that an unhealthy society is one that also tries to clamp down on the arts. Society values art, even if it doesn’t fully realize why, as a way to work toward not just survival, but human happiness. We’re truth-seeking animals, despite our distasteful tendency to be truth-imposing animals.

The Fellowship of Reason’s twice-monthly Philosophy Tapes activity is always followed by lively, thoughtful and thoroughly enjoyable discussion (not to mention plenty of good food). The reason I bring this up here is that those discussions were the source of my two areas of focus this afternoon – Green Squares and Bags O’ Poop.

There were occasions when references were made to Modern art, ostensibly to illustrate some other point. I’m not here to “correct the philistines” or to “defend” the art in question, but I thought it would be fun to use them to sort of “hang” my talk on today.

Green Squares. I have my friend Chris Snider to thank for inspiring this portion. One Tapes night at Michael and Vera’s, Chris was trying to make a point I’ve now forgotten by relating a story of being in a Museum in London - I believe it was the Tate. He said that everything in there was an insult to intelligence. No, I’m just kidding.

What he said was that he’d come upon a painting, likely an Ellsworth Kelly from the 1980s or 1990s, I think, and that it was a big…green…square. He contemplated for a while, and, getting little more than “big, green square” from it, he approached the title card, presumably hoping that it might suggest at least a clue to some further, metaphysical reference or grand concept. This effort yielded: “Green Square.”

I could see Vera, beyond Chris, nodding and shaking her head, with a look of intense sympathy on her face, as if to say, “You poor man, how awful for you!”

Well, this painting could be explained in terms of the rigorous examination of the elements of painting known as Formalism, or the overlapping project of 20th century art – one of many – the reductive dismantling of the art object to locate the “art-quality”, which around mid-century (for the conceptual artists at least) resulted in the elimination of the art object itself - and you still had art. Imagine that.

It could even be explained in terms of physiological reaction. My ex-brother-in-law, Don, is usually very articulate (in fact, sometimes I wish he’d stop articulating and go in another room, but that’s another story). One day we were in a museum in Miami and he beckoned me over to an Ellsworth Kelly consisting of several panels running from warm at one end to cool at the other. He stood at one end and threw his palms out in front of him and then strutted to the other and threw his palms out again and said, “Eh?”

But I knew what he meant. I have physiological reactions to color. Particularly to large fields of color. You can probably relate if you think of the sides of those large tractor trailer trucks with soft drink logos on them – the large fields of red with the wave running through it (Coke) or the big red and blue areas (Pepsi).

But what about in terms of that idea of the analogue of the subconscious and its use to society?

At around the same time as Ellsworth Kelly started doing his major work, Frank Stella also was doing his first mature paintings. The series known as the Black Paintings consisted of thick black stripes with thin “pinstripes” of raw canvas between them, filling the canvases in different geometrical configurations. This is where the artificial “Green Square School” I’ve concocted comes up. There is another often-quoted passage of a statement Mr. Stella made at the time of the Black Paintings show.

“I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the ‘old values’ in painting – the ‘humanistic’ values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen is there…All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…what you see is what you see.”

Well. Yeah. Okay. But, why? Why would it be important to anyone to do this? And why would this be taken to be important by a significant number of intelligent, educated people? Are they all – are we all – just dupes?

Some folks would say “Yes.”  But – fads, embarrassments and irrelevancies in the art world tend to disappear into the storage rooms. Yet, things that fit this “Green Square School” are still prominently displayed in major institutions all over the world and avidly sought-after, a half-century after they were done.

Is this where that “glimpse,” that detached element comes in? This has led me to speculate that maybe, just maybe, this has something to do with the concept of Philosophical Materialism – the idea that maybe, just maybe, THIS is all there is to “life, the universe and everything.” (Bear with me a moment).

And, without pretending to answer that question, or that the art answers it one way or another – I think that people on all sides of that question would agree that it’s been in the air and in the backs of people’s minds.

So – why wouldn’t a painting that is “nothing there but what you see” have some appeal to that as a way of examining the possibility, a way of talking about it indirectly instead of focusing on it and running into all the obstacles that get thrown up defensively around the subject met head on?

(In the survey I’ll never conduct on this subject, I’m sure I could find someone to both agree and disagree…)

Moving quickly on to the next “insult ta intelligence,” it may seem at odds with the previous one. But the arts are multifarious and messy and not tidy at all.

One night while we had been listening to the series of Nietzsche tapes at John Grover’s studio, my friend John – who couldn’t be here today, now he can’t attack me for misquoting him – said something to the effect that he’d rather see something like a photo collage created on a computer than some other kinds of art, and that, “now, art could be a – a bag of poop!”

I wanted to defend what I’ll loosely call the “Bag O’ Poop School,” but preferred to hear more talk of the author of (fitting title for this last portion of my talk) Human, All Too Human, as well as other books.

Well, John – Ladies and Gentlemen – I don’t know whether I’m happy or sorry to tell you: things may be worse than you imagined.

In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni created Merda d’Artista.  Merda d’Artista, yes, Artist’s Shit, carefully weighed out in units of 30 grams, sealed in a can and signed on the lid, in a multiple edition – a multiple edition of at least 160 pieces.

Kind of supports the notion that Modern Art is just a bunch of crap, doesn’t it?

Now, most of Manzoni’s art doesn’t fit into the so-called “Bag O’ Poop School,” as he was a conceptual artist. (One of my favorite works of his is The Magic Pedestal, a sort of sculpture stand that “contained” an “art-transmitter” which could turn you, yes, you, into a work of art when you stand on it.) But there have been other uses of excrement in art. Recently, famous art historian and critic Rudy Guiliani had a tiff with the Brooklyn Museum over some elephant dung. There is Andres Serrano’s infamous photo of “our Lord and Savior,” that asks whether it is more disrespectful to turn it into a cheap, plastic trinket, or to submerse said trinket in, ostensibly, the artist’s own urine. Not incidentally, this is a classic example of a combination of images to drop into that societal “subconscious” – I mean, “come on, fellow Christians, what are we doing here?” Serrano is identified as a lapsed Catholic, and I’m told he takes these things quite seriously.

There is also the notorious series by Andy Warhol, of different combinations of panels that had been coated with a metallic paint that had then been left flat to react to the acids in the splashes and puddles from he and his assistants urinating on them. I’ve seen several of these paintings and the colors and patterns are actually quite lovely. Go figure.

This type of art could be taken as a skewering of the cult of personality of the artist, or as criticizing the commodification – commode-ification? – of art, and the art market. It could even be considered some grand practical joke, which I don’t think would necessarily disqualify it from being art.

But to bring this a little more into focus, what I’m calling for my purposes here today the "Bag O’ Poop School” would include other artists like the sculptors Louise Bourgeios and Kiki Smith, and painters like Philip Pearlstein, Lucien Freud (yes, related to that Freud), Alice Neel and the aforementioned Francis Bacon whose work I had been visiting in the Hirshhorn, and many others – all who have been part of a general trend in the 20th century of depicting and dealing with the human body in other than an idealized fashion, in a way that is as unafraid of examining reality as, say, an oncologist would be (though I should’ve said a proctologist, here).

Doing work of this kind focuses on the one thing we all have in common. The one thing we can’t get away from, no matter what we believe: our carnality. Our bodies – “our breathing and eating, our sexuality and excreting,” we’ve got the makings of a nice little couplet there – and in doing so, it can’t help but to fall into that function of art, of sorting through our ideas in the big conversation that goes on in the back of society’s mind that is the analogue of the subconscious: the arts.

In closing, I don’t feel like I’ve answered a lot of questions for anyone here today. In fact my intention is to do the opposite of creating any dogmas. I hope I’ve done a little of what good art tries to do, to juggle and unclog a few of the assumptions and accretions that can settle in and prevent the creative interpretation of a work of art. When you look at the arts, allow suggestions to form, even if they are not in line with the intentions of the artist or the orthodox status quo.

I’m not trying to make any converts to Modern Art – if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I’d simply like to encourage everyone that when looking at art, especially art that’s received the sanction of the art world, you might find it fruitful to not be so quickly dismissive of art that you don’t understand. Even if it’s just a piece of crap, or there’s nothing there but what you see. Thank you.