In art, as in most other matters, the ’70s have not yet been named. Historians looking back on American art in the ’60s see movements and orthodoxies—Pop art, minimal art, conceptual art, Op art, color-field painting, doctrines about flatness and framing edge, proscriptions, mandates. The categories rattle briskly like punch cards in their slots. Art in the ’70s is more polymorphous, less ambitious, harder to sort out. The present creed proclaims belief in the Either, the Or and the Holy Both. During the 1960s, formalism conferred an almost messianic exclusiveness on taste. If one was “for” one kind of art, one was expected to be “against” others. Besides, a new class of collectors, anxious to commit their money only to sure bets—to what would be Historically Inevitable, to the mainstream of culture—wanted authorities. Not today. The American mainstream has fanned out into a delta, in which the traditional idea of an avant-garde has drowned. Thus, in defiance of the dogma that realist painting was killed by abstract art and photography, realism has come back in as many forms as there are painters. From the cool, detailed gaze of photorealism on its plastic environment to romantic landscapists in Maine to the obsessive stare of the California painter who took seven years to finish a small picture of a few inches of sand, grain by grain, the variety is infinite. Photography has acquired a status unimaginable a decade ago. Meanwhile, abstract painters, released from the severity of their mission, are no longer embarrassed by pattern and decoration. As the desire to paint one’s way into history recedes, a new subjectivity has replaced it, a free permit to import life whole into art through video, performance and participation. A broad and knowing eclecticism prevails. Inside it, a symbolically charged event is the retrospective of some 160 works by Robert Rauschenberg, which opened last month at the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
