primitive art is too monolithic; it is based on a knowledge so prescribed
as to be ignorance by another name. By reducing the human figure to its
generic shapes, people become a redundant collection of physical land-
marks; it’s all nipples and navels and genital differentiation. Art’s great-
est strength lies in specificity. The unexpected chord, the surprising
highlight, the sly adjective, all startle us into adjusting our perception. A
generic performance only elicits a generic response. Detail differenti-
ates; it transforms tragedy into my tragedy. Unfortunately, the artist
acquires the general only by sacrificing the specific.
The art of Matisse suffers from this reductive impulse as well. Shorn
as they are of his vital sense of color, Matisse’s drawings are often too
generalized to be truly affecting. One can admire the elegance of some
of the lines, but again this deflects attention back to the artists (the less
art, the more artist). Matisse’s decorations for the Dominican Chapelle
du Rosaire are an example of this. It’s impossible to invest these ovals
on rectangles with the emotional freight the artist intends them to carry;
the connection is simply too remote between these stick figures and liv-
ing, breathing human beings. All one is left with are the empty gestures
of religious deference and ardor; if allusions could create their own real-
ity, a dab of cologne would be enough to transform a woman into a gar-
denia. Dehumanizing the human may seem like objectivity, but it lacks
the vitality of engaged inquiry that marks true objectivity. One can
maintain a critical distance without leaving the room.
The impulse of generalizing the specific to conform to the tyranny of
design reached its apotheosis in twentieth-century art’s other great land-
mark: abstraction. Sold at the time as art reduced to its purest elements,
it does eliminate all the conventions of visual experience and the narra-
tives that inevitably derive from them. Here was a language in which
meaning was removed and only grammar remained, in which nouns and
verbs were banished so that articles and participles might flourish. The
trouble with purity, however, lies in the way it makes everything else
seem impure. Art that referred to visual experience would be no longer
tolerated as it was compromised by extraneous, extra-visual elements.
The perpetrators of this movement rejected all that proceeded them from
sincere idealism, but few ambitions are as self-indulgent as high ideals.
Were the abstract expressionists accurate in saying that any portrayal
of incident is unduly literary? Is depicting landscapes and casually
arranged objects hopelessly sentimental? Far from offering a truer alter-
native, abstract art is riff with artifice. One never encounters pure color
and objectless compositions in real life; in a concrete world, everything
has a corporeal context. This is not to deny the decorative appeal of
More Matter and Less Art 189