Man is driven by essentially two gross classifications of impulses: fear and desire. Desire is the most primal, for fear elicits the cognitive mind in its machinations. It is a natural connection since our cognitive abilities developed first for the purpose of avoiding danger. Desire sometimes elicits fear and thereby cognitive thought, but it is only in a secondary manner, thus fear is the dominant motivator for our social lives.
Fear can be divided into two basic forms. There is cultural fear, perpetuated in our times by the media, and there is natural fear, causally induced by direct danger. Cultural fear tends to be a high pitched neurosis that contains us in perpetual consumerism, which is what we will focus on. The dominant media outlet in our culture is television, and television plays predominantly on our two basic impulses, yet fear is by far the most utilized technique for marketing and entertainment. Art has never held the position of the greatest cultural influence, as it has always been overshadowed by the opiate of the people. In the past this was the church, and now it is television, movies, magazines: the media industrial complex. Just as the church utilized fear and desire to exercise control, so to does the media.
Leon Golub’s work must be first discussed in the context which it was intended to be viewed, as a social reaction against the powers that wage war, and their major tool for public relations: the media. The Vietnam War greatly differed from other wars in that it was the first time that such graphic and disturbing images were available to such a great number of people. The simplicity and intensity of Golub’s statement reflected the dumb didacticism of the media in an attempt to counter it with the same intensity, yet it reads now as the futile attempt of wrestling a bull by the horns without the superb training or red cape of the matador.
Art cannot compete with the popular media on the same terms. It can only offer its greatest impact as a social discourse, whether satirical or otherwise, in offering what the media does not: subtlety, intelligence, and depth.
Divested of its social context, and the inherent glamour of the abstract expressionist movement of the time in which it was created, Golub’s work must now be discussed formally for the work to stand alone. We may, however, compare it with other work from this movement for contextual reference.
At first glance, the large murals of figures on raw, un-stretched canvas, performing powerful yet unreadable gestures, struck me as nothing more than the crudely drawn, dissonant palate and lack of composition indicative of the juvenilia made by angst ridden teens often encountered in the cultural backwaters of the Georgian suburbs. Upon closer inspection, I realized that my initial impression was entirely accurate. The bold lines had no variation; the colors, straight out of the tube had no apparent evidence of mixing or relation to one another optically. Each brush stroke was applied with a consistent and monotonous brevity in length and width. The composition lacked any kind of rhythmic relationship that one might find in Pollack’s Blue Poles or the relationship of abstract forms and colors in De Kooning’s Woman one. Further, both of these artists utilized a variation of line quality for the purposes of expression, whether they were drips or brush strokes. Both of them used color and form to produce some degree of coherence compositionally. At least in these pieces, each portion of the painting flowed in to each other portion of the painting. Yet in Golub’s work you find none of these things, only the lack of any concern for the actual quality of the painting. To make it worse it is obvious from two of his other pieces that he had some degree of facility. Burning man IV and Head XXXII exhibit some knowledge of these formal qualities in the layering of oil pigment to produce a textural variation, which does not occur in the other works. These are the only pieces in the show which transcend the rather infantile crudity of the other work to become a sublime example of mediocrity. They rest solely on their textural beauty but appear completely contained upon the raw canvas, with no relationship to the remainder of the picture plane. They are simply singular objects centered within a frame. His only success at a cohesive visual language is mitigated by the lack of any other supporting elements.
There is a place for this kind of art, but it’s definitely not in public exhibition. There are a multitude of greater works in the same genre that would have been beneficial to view, but as I see it, Golub’s work merely took up space. As Andy Warhol said in the book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, I paraphrase, ‘I think space is much better without art to clutter it all up’.
As always I look forward to comments and even counter-arguments to my views.
