The Paintings of Martin Berkovitz - In the sixties, during my years in New York, it became very gauche to ask “but is it art?” this was considered not only naïve but dismally uninformed.
Essays / Criteria & the Visual Arts
In the sixties, during my years in New York, it became very gauche to ask “but is it art?” this was considered not only naïve but dismally uninformed. If you had to ask such a question you exposed yourself as a know-nothing.
This seeming absence of criteria grew over the years to the point where anybody who fancied themselves an artist could claim anything as art. Artists were in a great hurry to throw overboard any classical criteria for art making. There was a new criteria, however, and it was to get as far away from anything that looked like traditional art as fast as possible and as completely as possible. Painting had to be freed from frames and sculpture from pedestals and that was just the beginning.
When I first went to New York, I had been working on a series of paintings called “Waitresses”. My father had an older sister who was the family black sheep. As a young woman she had gone to New York and had spent her life as a waitress. I was very close to my aunt and had a natural empathy for her and her hard life. In those days I would take night walks through the city and would often stop in all-night coffee shops. There I would see those black and white uniformed women in fluorescent environments and they would put me in mind of my aunt. I used the waitress motif as a metaphor for loneliness and alienation. Not very original but sincere.
When I completed this series I invited a friend over who was one of the early conceptual artists. He looked at the work with obvious boredom and then he said, “if you're going to use traditional materials why not use them in a new way?” I inquired as to what he meant and he continued, “Why not buy a dozen cheap easels, mount identical sized canvases on them with only the drawing complete. Then in the easel troughs place the required number of tubes of color and brushes all neatly laid out and exhibit all the easels with their canvases in a row.”
“Why would I do that?”
He continued, “What you are doing is not only creating an installation but expressing an idea. And the idea is that a collector can either leave the picture unfinished or paint it in with the paint and brushes provided. In this way a buyer is not simply a passive viewer but is invited to become a participant, an artist himself. That is an example of a conceptual work of art.”
This was a whole new way of thinking. As I walked the city streets that night I felt my mind was going up in a mushroom cloud. What excitement, an entirely new way of approaching art. One idea and installation after another exploded in my head, what freedom!
Then I suddenly stood still. A reverse process had started. Wait a minute just wait a minute. Maybe the waitresses were not particularly good or original works but they meant something to me. They emerged from empathy and caring. They reflected years of feeling and association. Isn't that what art is all about?
But here was a totally different approach based on the mere putting forth of disembodied ideas illustrated with appropriate props. Anybody could do it, it took only a clever idea and some ability for organizing objects. Surely such an approach was hardly more than a manipulation of raw materials, mental and physical. Art had been truly democratized. New criteria had emerged and those criteria made it possible to be an artist with only a bare minimum of traditional skills.
I still believe there is a place for such work. But surely no more than as an adjunct to art that emerges from a classical distillation of the life experience supported by true art skills.
Most of this work is really a kind of display mentality illustrating some simple and obvious idea or perhaps some obscure one. The problem is that this direction has been promulgated for over forty years so that generations of art students have been educated to approach art in this way. It has allowed the generally untalented to hold the illusion they are creating cutting edge art while inspiring a contempt and condescension toward classically created art. This has resulted in a great impoverishment of culture and has inspired acres of emptiness and decades of vacancy.
In a very real way art has been gutted. The baby was thrown out with the bath water. If in football the goal posts were eliminated, if in baseball the bases were done away with, then those games as we know them would cease to exist. In a similar way art was altered and has morphed into a kind of confused enigma.
So, there have been criteria all through these years, its just that they have been stood on their heads. As I have already stated, there is room for this kind of conceptual installation work. It has become a new category in the inventory of art just as photography and video have.
However, what must be restored to art is that universal criteria that is its very heart. Art is the reflection, the distillation, the core of an artist's life experience. This reduction of the years must function on all the human levels of emotion, mind and spirit. Such art is true, solid and timeless.
