The Brooklyn Rail

It might just be whatever it is not supposed to be.

 

I recently read Amy Newman’s new biography of Barnett Newman. Somehow it is the first biography of Barnett Newman, only coming out 55 years after his death. Barnett Newman lived to be 65. He was already 45 when he had his first one person exhibition of paintings. In his entire lifetime he had only 6 one person exhibitions of paintings. If Newman rarely exhibited he also rarely painted. When Newman had his first institutional exhibition of 18 paintings in 1958, he included no paintings made in the previous 7 years, the prime of his life. In total he made little more than 100 paintings. From his first one person exhibition he sold only one painting and from his second one person exhibition he sold only no paintings.  Throughout Newman’s life his paintings were nearly constantly being damaged and destroyed, not simply because they were too big for the customs of transportation but also because of a misunderstanding of what they were. Throughout Newman’s death his paintings have been slashed open with knives numerous times. Amy Newman’s book is mostly filled with Barnett Newman’s extensive grievances of all the negative and incorrect written accounts of his work and all the negative and incorrect physical handlings of his work.

 

Unlike many of his brand name contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Newman paintings don’t make good posters or hats and they don’t post very well on social media. Unlike many of his brand name contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Newman doesn’t make a good protagonist as he is neither tragic nor flashy. It seems he spent most of his time writing angry letters at curators, critics and other artists for damaging and misunderstanding his work.

 

Even Amy Newman, who just dedicated over a decade of her life to researching his biography, wrote that Newman was a “somewhat unnatural artist without an innate facility”.

 

For much of his life Newman’s art was just not functional for the functions the world wanted for art.

 

Art these days is just so damn functional, so damn administered. It doesn’t even fucking matter if it is so called conceptual art or painting art or political art or installation art or any of it, it is all just so damn administered. It is so safe and well behaved and designed and engineered for its user’s ease and program. [By user I mean not just the increasingly vanishing public visitor; but also the gallerist and the curator and the director.] The user needs an art that signals this, the user needs an art that fits in this room, the user needs an art that is made by this date and ends at this date, the user needs an art that can post, the user needs an art that stays inside this line. And so it is made. An administrative monogamy is made between artist and user for function.

 

Rare although existent is the art that is not functioning for the functions the world wants for art.

 

Just fucking do it wrong already. And for the rare [real] ones that are doing it wrong, just fucking let them.

 

Maxwell Graham is the owner of the now eponymous gallery, formerly known as Essex Street, in New York.