| The origins of this book can be traced to a time when writing one would have seemed an absurd ideaeven as a projection for my distant middle age. It was the time when I slowed my sophomoric drift by deciding not to join the merchant marine and, instead, became an art student. The circumstances of my study were quite adventitious; they included being born in Brooklyn and attending the city university. As it also turned out, among my teachers were important figures in the then-burgeoning New York School of American painting: Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, Mark Rothko, and Harry Holtzman. They were the first, really, to show me what a wider world could be like, and I want here to indicate my debt to them. These artists were not at ease with the then-standard connotations of "teacher": Having anticipated Rorty by some decades, they opted, in their own teaching, for good conversation over studio procedures. Not that we didn't make "things," you understand, but there seemed no point to the making unless it was found in what was said. And, as much was being said, the things that were made gained, lost, and traded their artistic identities in the course of the conversations. We did not take what was said as merely "explanation'' or "justification''; it seemed more central, to be taken, rather, as a proper part of what we identified as a work. Thus, the juncture of "art and concept" was among my first experiences of art. How this juncture actually occurs seemed clear and unproblematic to me then; that it is not so now is one reason for this book. |
| I remember that one of the consequences of this way of teaching was the "dignity" the evoked concepts gave to all our effortsfrom the casual to the ambitious. The fact that, retrospectively, such dignity was often misplaced seems unimportant now. Actually, there were few histrionics involved in the situation, for there was little audience. What mattered was that, in this way, we students were effectively shielded from the notion of accumulated skills and, thus, from any residue of academic training or, even, from procedures of the European atelier. So we were, from the beginning, "artists" not "students"; our youthful limitations seemed to have no necessary relation to the value of what we produced, for the things took on their own identities |
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