----- Forwarded Message ---- From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, October 9, 2010 7:21:23 PM Subject: Re: Rockwell (upcoming tv program)
I agree with Kate's assessment even though our separate reasons for agreement don't really match up. Rockwell worked a lot from photos, set up photos, and thus the compressed space in his work is common to photography that represents objects in closer positions to each other than is possible in actual space. This compression is strengthened by the uniformity of the photographic edge around objects even though they occupy different focal positions in real space. Of course photography can imitate the different positions of things in real space but the ways the lens work tend to put diverse positions on the same plane. This is most evident when one looks at "3-D" photos. where objects tend to appear two dimensional but separated from each other spatially ---like a series of cut-outs. At any rate I won't fault Rockwell's drawing "accuracy" since we are not sure if that accuracy ought to be measured by the photograph or direct observation or some combination. Each mode has its own codes Furthermore, we should be skeptical of codes themselves because they imply a static set of rules or signs unaffected by context or interpretation. I still think that Rockwell's habit of pasting elements onto his paintings was primarily due to the instrumental use of his work. For him the final work was not the painting itself but the painting in reproduction. In just the same way, many thousands of commercial artists from the days of advertising illustration discarded their work after it was used in a reproduction mode. Of course Rockwell knew that he was a special case commercial illustrator and he knew that his popularity and fame gave his work an independent market value. I suspect that he was frustrated by the odd distinction between his role as illustrator and the role of the serious artist. His illustration of the puzzled museum viewer in front of a look-alike Pollock surely brings to mind the public chagrin over seemingly unskilled abstract splatters and squiggles of paint touted as high art while Rockwell's transparent and skilled art was ridiculed by the elite. Rockwell's painted viewer is likely a surrogate of himself doubling as a surrogate of his audience. I want to give Rockwell his due. And that is in the domain of advertising illustration and populist sentimental imagery which is really no less significant to our visual culture than a Caravaggio. There is much more to say about him in that context and little to say about him in the context of high art. Some people want to encapsulate Rockwell with the genre of American Scene painting of the 1930s and 40s. But doing that weakens the case for Rockwell's art, not because the American Scene painters were more skilled as artists but because the best of them presented a complex view of American life, often dark and troubling, satiric thinly disguised masked by optimism. Rockwell is a wonderful icon of the apotheosis of ruthless American materialism packaged as endearing quaintness and God-fearing innocence. We need to know that too. wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Sat, October 9, 2010 4:58:50 PM Subject: Re: Rockwell (upcoming tv program) In a message dated 10/7/10 8:25:04 PM, [email protected] writes: It won't do to simply discuss his complicated life or soulful >struggles since there's no noticeable causal relationship between those facts >(if they are facts) and the context he created for his work. The two realms >of >Rockwell, the man and his work, would need to have a truly integrated context >to justify a reinterpretation or re-contextualization. > There is no causal relationship between Rockwell's personal life and his work. I read a biography-there aren't many and this was the thickest-and it was clear that Rockwell was not drawing upon his personal angst for his pictures. The closest he got was in the patriotic ones. If he pasted a cereal box cover on a painting it was to save time. I went to the Rockwell museum this summer. The quality of the paint deteriorates over his lifetime, the drawing is a little off-he was good at cut and paste but not brilliant and some of his figures are occupying each other's space. There are surprisingly no remarkable still lifes in the array of stuff in his paintings in the museum. I hope the good ones are somewhere else and this was what remained to show in Stockbridge. Conger said:It remains to be seen if Rockwell's depth as a commentator on life can withstand the stew of sentimentality and banality that soaks his work. He isn't a commentator on life, he is a remarkable depictor of banal sentiment. Where it might seem that he reaches any depth, it is his subject which overcomes his primary intent. Kate Sullivan
