Page 2 - The Second Space . . .  / September

Actually, the cubists left poised in mid-air the major art problem of the century. Their failure to deduce their space experience to a purer abstraction became the constant challenge to all original minds - except the surrealists who were blind to space and its attributes. After cubism, raw space was ready.

Eight Street Particulars:

The answer to the challenge to refine space was born on Eighth Street. Here, raw space was first treated as a problem.

To start at the beginning - the early abstractionist reversed the cubist�s idea. Instead of the object the space was pushed out into the room. Unaware themselves of just how germinal their work was, they suggested, hinted at, hovered over, but finally did not actually commit themselves to space-on-space. Their paintings and sculptures were like didactic masterpieces of primitive art: expendable. (This is the cruelest word in the artist�s vocabulary.)

Overnight, however, American abstract art has matured. An array of individuals is revolutionizing many of the basic characteristics of plastic experience.

All artists have four elements in their inner make-up. . . just as the Greeks reduced nature for simplicity�s sake to four elements - fire, water, air and matter - so can we reduce the nature of art to drawing, space, color, and light. If no real four-cornered earth exists anywhere, we nevertheless know that the artist possesses such reality in his studio, where his four walls become as his imaginary four elements. Everything outside these boundaries exists either as a form of attractive journalism or only in the flowing vocabularies of the numerous ex-or-would-be writers turned into art-critics.

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It is the one-to-one changes of the four plastic elements in the nature of art that make the awareness of the �full� sense of space a real revelation. Whether we call it a sub-space, a second space, or a sur-space remains a matter of individual identification. One earmark is immediately apparent, however, the experience is purer than before. A second characteristic of this second space is that its area or volume is not fixed on the canvas by position: in front, behind, under, over, or on the side of the main plane. One can tag this space to a position on the canvas no more easily than one can finger-point the �light� of Turner or the Venetians. It is an experience only for the exposed sensibility. (Moreover, finger-pointing at space and light died with the primitive neo-plasticists.)

Another characteristic: sub-space has changed the movement of color. No longer harmonious, color has become a high-keyed, more tactile, yet more subtle experience. John Ruskin�s premise for the �great colorists� was the theory of �interference�. Colors, he noted, interfere with one another, thus seeming to create a harmony with their negative side-ward movements. (Certainly a most profound and beautiful observation on color harmony.) In American abstract art the movement is fixed but directed towards the on-looker . . . like a stare. It is a frozen aggression - even the muddy grays have open eyes. Color has been given a more personal role. Like drawing, it takes on or partakes of the abstract-artist�s strong individuality.

Light has lost its symmetry with space. The new sense of space has forced the refinement of light to its purest state. If the new sense of space has decreased the ration of light to be found in it, this imbalance has made the experience of light original and fresh. Light and space, in their dispersal, are like the symmetry of hands - except that one is closed and the other opened.

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