What we have here is a middle finger in epistolary form, three guys in 1943 Brooklyn, broke as hell probably, telling some poor bastard at the Times that his confusion is the whole goddamn point. And they’re right, which makes it even more dangerous.
This isn’t a manifesto, it’s a divorce decree from the entire notion that art owes you an explanation. They’re saying what every real thing worth a damn has always said: if you need me to hold your hand through this, you’ve already missed it. The “consummated experience between picture and onlooker”, Christ, that’s not flowery bullshit, that’s the actual transaction, the only one that matters. Everything else is marketing copy.
We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power.
We refuse to defend them not because we cannot. It is an easy matter to explain to the befuddled that “The Rape of Persephone” is a poetic expression of the essence of the myth; the presentation of the concept of seed and its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would you have us present this abstract concept with all its complicated feelings by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping?
It is just as easy to explain “The Syrian Bull”, as a new interpretation of an archaic image, involving unprecedented distortions. Since art is timeless, the significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity today as the archaic symbol had them. Or is the one 3000 years old truer?
But these easy program notes can help only the simple-minded. No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment. The point at issue, it seems to us, is not an “explanation” of the paintings but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list:
Note point four: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.” That’s the whole war right there. Not dumbing it down, not complicating it up, finding the shape of the thing itself. The unequivocal form. Because equivocation is death. Hedging is for cowards and academics. And they knew the difference between being difficult and being true.
But here’s where it gets bloody: they’re also full of shit in the most necessary way. All that stuff about “tragic and timeless” subject matter, the primitive and archaic, that’s them building their own mythology while claiming to strip everything bare. They’re posturing even as they reject posture. They’re creating their own academy while burning down all the others.
The really vicious part? That last paragraph, that list of insults, “pictures for over the mantle,” “the Corn Belt Academy,” “trite tripe.” They’re not just rejecting the marketplace, they’re spitting in its face and then wondering why it doesn’t understand them. But maybe that’s the only honest relationship an artist can have with a culture that wants to neuter everything into decoration.
These three understood something that gets forgotten: the audience doesn’t complete the work through interpretation, they complete it through collision. You don’t explain a wreck. You either walked away from it or you didn’t.