Table Of ContentArtist as Author
Artist as Author
Action And intent in
LAte- Modernist
AMericAn PAinting
Christa Noel Robbins
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by Christa Noel Robbins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in
the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For
more information, contact the University of Chicago Press,
1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 75295- 2 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 75300- 3 (e- book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226753003.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robbins, Christa Noel, author.
Title: Artist as author : action and intent in late-modernist American
painting / Christa Noel Robbins.
Other titles: Action and intent in late-modernist American painting
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press,
2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040704 | ISBN 9780226752952 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226753003 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Painting, American—20th century. | Modernism
(Art)—United States—History—20th century. | Art, Abstract—
United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC ND212.5.M63 R63 2021 | DDC 759.13/0904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040704
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction. The Artist as Author 1
PArt i
1. The Act- Painting 23
2. The Expressive Fallacy 42
3. Rhetoric of Motives 63
PArt ii
4. Self- Discipline 89
5. Event as Painting 114
6. Conclusion: Gridlocked 142
Acknowledgments 159
Notes 161
Select Bibliography 193
Index 207
Introduction: The Artist as Author
What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self?
—W. K. WiMsAtt And M. c. BeArdsLey,
“The Intentional Fallacy” (1946)
The evening, by most accounts, was a disaster. Gathered at the Ninety- Second
Street YMHA one night in late February 1967, an audience of New York sophisti-
cates was confronted with a visually and audibly chaotic event. Film projections
above and to the sides of the audience’s seats, television cameras, monitors, and
intermittent performances all swirled around a finely set dinner table at which
were seated seven artists (and one dance critic) dressed in formal attire (fig. 0.1).
With four of the artists seated with their backs to the audience, the evening’s
program was synchronized with a five- course dinner, apparently planned by the
art critic Michael Fried, and served to the artists by tuxedoed waiters.1 Though
each of the diners was miked, with the intention of broadcasting their dinner
conversation to the audience, so were the cutlery and dinner settings. The audi-
torium was filled with an increasingly disorienting din, which caused the audi-
ence to first grow restless and then to openly revolt.
The lack of context for what it was witnessing must have added to the audi-
ence’s frustration. A modest advertisement in the New York Times promoted
the evening as an “illustrated discussion.” It promised an encounter with
seven “contemporary” artists: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the poet Robert
Creeley, the New York School painter Jack Tworkov, the experimental filmmaker
Stan VanDerBeek, and the electronics artists Billy Klüver and Len Lye. While the
Ninety- Second Street YMHA was known as a venue for advanced art practice,
only Cunningham would have been a familiar figure to regular attendees. They
might have seen him dancing with Martha Graham’s company. But this anar-
chic spectacle was a far cry from Graham’s minimalist choreography.
Titled TV Dinner—Homage to E.A.T. (Food for Thought), the dinner- cum-
performance was the final event in the traveling program “Contemporary Voices
in the Arts,” which had been organized by the New York State Council on the
Arts. Described by Grace Glueck as “the most exotic intellectual road show
Figure 0.1. Jack Tworkov, TV Dinner—Homage to E. A. T. (Food for Thought), final event
of “Contemporary Voices in the Arts,” sponsored by the New York State Council on the
Arts, at the 92nd Street YWHA in New York, February 25, 1967. On stage a five- course din-
ner was served, at which the performers’ voices and the clinking of the silverware were
electrically amplified. Tworkov’s painting Barrier No. 4 hung above the table. Seated at the
table, clockwise starting with Stan VanDerBeek in the background left, are Jack Tworkov,
Billy Kluver, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Creeley, David Vaughn (who man-
aged the group’s tour), and Len Lye. © Adelaide de Menil; courtesy Estate of Jack Tworkov.
ever to hit the College Belt,” the program visited college campuses around the
state in order to promote dialogue across the arts and to cultivate an interest in
“new media.”2 Creeley, who wrote a report on the program for Arts Magazine,
describes the difficulties faced at each performance, including the conflicting
goals of the seven artists and a perpetual struggle with equipment and facilities.
According to Creeley, however, the “most continual limit” was the intransigent
“habits . . . of the audience,” as the traveling group insistently defied audience
expectations of both performance and professionalism. The final event at the Y,
with a crowd made up of “neither students nor faculty,” but, rather, of “sophisti-
cated” Manhattan art patrons, was no exception. They met the “Contemporary
Voices” group, as Creeley reports, with a “fairly discreet rage.”3
Suspended above it all, like a banner signaling a newly banded league,
was Jack Tworkov’s large- scale Abstract Expressionist painting Barrier No. 4
(1961; pl. 1). In this context, the expressionist canvas may have been read as
announcing the evening’s purpose: to proclaim, once and for all, that such all-
engrossing, uncomposed, and performative experiences were the true “legacy
of Jackson Pollock,” as Allan Kaprow had put it a decade before.4 Indeed, the
evening’s indeterminate boundaries and cultivated chaos would have looked a
2 | introduction
lot like a “happening,” the art form that Kaprow predicted would take the place
of painting in Pollock’s wake and which had, that very month, turned up as a
cover story by Barry Ferrell in Life Magazine. Happenings, according to Ferrell’s
report, “exist only as experiences, moments in which art is torn away from the
context of culture to become a part of life.” They defy our compulsion to always
discover a “craftsman” or “artisan” behind the art object—indeed, they defy our
compulsion to discover an object in art at all.5 That much was clear from the
hectic “feedback” that grew out of the evening’s antics, which rendered the TV
Dinner production increasingly incomprehensible to its audience and ever more
absorbing for its artist- participants—“I don’t think I ever had a better piece of
meat,” Creeley concluded.6
It was Tworkov’s suggestion that the program culminate in an onstage din-
ner, in the hope that the format—part discussion, part performance—would
offer a compromise between the participants’ divergent aesthetic commitments.
A close friend of Willem de Kooning’s and a “first generation” New York School
painter, Tworkov admits in his journals to often feeling at odds with the other
artists. On the tour, he was reluctant to show his paintings, which were occa-
sionally projected as slides, worrying that they appeared “staid and static” when
set against the “visual and oral excitement” that characterized the series.7 That
worry was realized with a kind of hurting clarity when Tworkov first saw Barrier
No. 4 installed above the stage for the final evening’s performance. Upon entering
the auditorium as it was being prepped for the dinner, Tworkov discovered Van-
DerBeek and Klüver hauling in electronic equipment in anticipation of another
new- media extravaganza. Tworkov, imagining how the evening might unfold,
was filled with doubt: “My painting . . . was hanging like a stage prop ready to be
lowered or raised. It looked dirty and needed to be cleaned and varnished. What
possible relation can this modest painting have to this hap pening?”8
The static quality with which the energetic Barrier No. 4 presented itself to
Tworkov seems to be the product of painting’s inability to synchronize with
a shift in the terms of artistic temporality. That shift was exemplified in the
“Contemporary Voices” program by John Cage’s commitment to an aesthet-
ics of indeterminacy. Cage stressed the “process” of performed composition in
a manner that stood apart from what he called the “object in time.” Such an
object—a musical recording, for example—could be nothing but a token of a
past experience. The important thing was not to look back, according to Cage,
in an effort to preserve the known, but to rest in “non-k nowledge,” the “not yet
happened,” the indeterminate.9 In relation to Cage’s celebration of indetermi-
nate process over and above the static object, Barrier No. 4 could not help but ap-
pear to be the residue of a past event, an object frozen and circumscribed by its
static frame—the thin wooden edge constructed around its exterior—as much
as by its identity as a self- consciously Modernist work of art. More than ever, it
struck Tworkov that painting and performance are two deeply divergent prac-
tices. “Painting is feeble as a performing art,” Tworkov writes. “It hardly has any
role as such. It is rarely shaped by any conscious intention to produce an effect.
3 | the Artist As Author
