John Updike & Alex Colville - Two Marvellers
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
 |
| Photograph by Benno Friedman |
This will probably be a rambler of a blog,
not exactly an American Motors kind of Rambler but in some ways the theme will
be about stuff that is not going to be coming back.
Coincidentally today is the day I must
return this delightful rambler about art, Just Looking - essays on art, written by John Updike. I never had a chance
to photograph the man but I may still have an opportunity with that other
writer I admire Joyce Carol Oates, after all she is still alive.
Coincidentally today I read in my Vancouver Sun (I get a
daily delivered if you must know) that my favourite Canadian artist, Alex
Colville died. I went to my files and was surprised that I wrote a little piece
about him for the December 1995 Equity Magazine.
The slim connection between Updike and
Colville (others might find many) as far as I am concerned is that Updike wrote
about art and about a type of art that had been transformed to something that
he Updike saw no wonder in anymore. Updike who adored John Singer Sargent, Andrew Wyeth
and Winslow Homer probably would have adored Colville,
too. Colville who did not suffer fools would
have admired Updike for his keen mind.
Updike’s book is delightful. I have re read
it several times. I will risk the copyright hounds by placing here Updike’s
opinion on the Museum of Modern Art, a museum he had seen as a boy, then as a New York City resident. He
left for New England and he would then return
to MOMA every once in a while as a tourist. He wrote this in the initial
introduction to his book (published in 1982) called What MOMA Done Tole Me.
I moved to New England, yet often returned,
a visitor now among the swelling tourist crowd, yet still a marveller, as the
old masterpieces of modernity underwent an occasional shuffle in the exhibition
rooms, supplemented as they were by ever bigger and prouder abstractions, and
then by the grim hilarities of Pop – Rauschenberg goats and spattered
assemblages, Warhol silk screens and stacked Brillo boxes – and by Jasper John’s
neoclassical targets and flags and maps and beer cans and Robert Indiana’s
stately lettering and Lichtenstein’s comic strips and Op Art’s dazzling brief
parade of vibrating stripes and spots. Op was the last art movement I enjoyed,
and Minimalism the last one I was aware of; I could not adjust to artworks that
lay on the floor, brick and tiles and coils of ropes that could be accidentally
kicked. Outside the museum, on Fifty-third
Street and beyond, the world changes, becoming
experimental to the point were nothing art could do seemed revolutionary or
subversive in the way that Pollocks’ drip paintings and de Koonig’s hectically
brushed portraits of women had seemed in the gray flannel world of the Fifties.
Life in the Sixties and Seventies, and not merely painting, had become
expressionistic performance. And the Japanese and Germans and Vietnamese and
Saudis were cutting America
down to size, and the art world was swamped by money bloat and by national
tired blood.
Irrationally, I felt betrayed when Picasso’s
Guernica, which had for so long greeted visitors to MOMA’s second floor, was
returned to a suddenly democratic Spain, and again when, as part of a plan to
cash in on the condominium boom with yet another midtown high-rise, the museum’s
exhibition space was doubled, making it one more museum too big to wander
through without getting a backache. When does modern end? It began, MOMA says
in its own literature, “about 1885”; over a century has gone by, and the dignified
course might be for the museum to declare itself a closed treasury, like the
Cloisters and the Frick. But it has opted, instead, for a greedy open-endednes
and a bigger souvenir shop; it has led the transformation of museums into
gorgeous tourist traps, where once they were sober and even torpid enhancements
of local civic life. The steeples cathedral of artistic faith I used to visit
is still there, but as a box within boxes, its message diffused and its relics
scrambled. The last time I walked through, I couldn’t find my favorite Gris, or
Hid-and-Seek, or The Eternal City, or Arp’s Mountain, Table, Anchors, Nave, or
that construction of paper and string that long ago had looked to my childish
eyes like a kite preserved in an attic.
Below you will find that transition from assignment to reality of my little piece on Alex Colville.
