Art: A Beauty Really Bare

Does the ancient Puritan connection between virtue and boredom still run beneath the glitzy, pleasure-roiled surface of American culture? For the answer, go and visit the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's paintings, sculpture and prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It will dispel your doubts, without necessarily offering you lots in the way of superior pleasure. The Puritans, as descendants of the men who tried to destroy the whole legacy of English medieval art, exalted the Word and the Idea and distrusted the visual icon. It was blasphemy to represent the face of God, idolatry to gaze on any likeness of his saints and angels, loathsome vanity to employ the arts for sensuous gratification. Hence the legendary discomfort of early Massachusetts furniture--and the almost total absence of any kind of figurative painting, other than the "shades," or family likenesses, that were needed for dynastic memory.

This strain of Puritan denial of the graven image seems never to have quite vanished from American art. But how can you create a way of painting that is devoid, or at least as short as possible, of the delicious pleasures of light, shade, drama, color and suggestive texture--not to mention the primal infantile pleasure of smearing colored mud around on a virginal surface--associated with making a picture? The piety of this search, seen as an act of exemplary denial, is the ghost that haunts the machine of American abstraction--and the emotionless grids of LeWitt's work in particular. Not all abstraction, of course, some of which (most famously, Abstract Expressionism) is as lush as Frederic Church's skies or Marilyn Monroe's cleavage. But enough of it to make up a distinct subspecies of American abstraction, the big effusion of which came to be known, in the 1960s, as Minimal Art.

The austerities of Minimalism were taken to be the drastic and morally bracing purge needed after the increasingly routine, splish-splosh indulgences of the would-be heirs of de Kooning, Pollock et al. One thing that late AbEx clearly showed was that nothing is easier to feign than the marks of intense emotional feeling. Those marks too become conventional signs, like the rococo trills of an energetically dying diva. You may enjoy them, but not as unmediated passion.

So, the Minimalists asked, what about an art in which "feeling"--other than the feelings of boredom and of nagging guilt at being bored--was, if not quite eradicated, at least not paramount? Wouldn't that be more honest? An art that, like Euclid in Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, proposed to look "on Beauty bare"--in the utterly plebeian form of stacked cinder blocks, logs of Styrofoam on the gallery floor, industrial scrap, identical stripes without end or even just arrays of numbered cells on sheets of paper. Wouldn't this surpass the "bourgeois" desire for art as rare commodity and democratize the whole artmaking process (since, in some cases, almost anyone furnished with the right instructions could copy a simple piece and thus share an "unownable" idea rather than merely committing the sin of plagiarism)?