Reading over a 2002 Artforum essay on Barnett Newman by Yve-Alain Bois I was struck by a detail that I'd either missed or forgotten:
Perhaps the most lethal label is Newman as Conceptual artist, for it prevented people from paying attention to the extraordinarily varied quality of his touch, to the wide range of his pictorial effects. Sadly, it also provided a good excuse for what can only be described as a criminal lack of care for his canvases—Mondrian's work dramatically suffered from a similar misconception: Why worry about painterly qualities if everything is just cosa mentale? Newman's paintings almost invariably came back damaged from exhibitions and have been frequent victims of outright vandalism—perhaps more so than those of any other artist in this century. What's more, they have not always been afforded the best treatment by restorers.Fascinating. I wouldn't know how you'd go about putting a quantitative label on the damage done to a painting since you have no great basis for comparison between, say, an acrylic on gessoed canvas and an oil on ungessoed linen. Maybe a label measures the absolute amount of effort a conservator puts into a piece of work—but then, it's imaginable that certain techniques require far more effort than others outside any proportion to the actual restorative work that they do.
Isn't it something, though, that a conservator would get her hands dirty like that? Mucking around with the whether and the how of art rather than eyeing strictly the what of the pigment and support. By that same token the image is charming: a spurned conservator, frustrated by this notion of a conceptual art that does not require execution, compelled finally to lash out in passive-aggressive rage against the thing itself.
Posted by Kriston at October 23, 2007 11:47 AM