Mark Rothko “Statement”. 1947 reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 573
With two others
“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. it is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!” p. 573
Rothko explains the meaning and efficacy of art as a function of the public in which it operates. Each viewing enables and endangers the meaning of the particular work, and any real meaning/efficacy must be renewed and re-instated with each moment. For this reason, the efficacy of art can be measured only contextually, and rhetorically in terms of its micro-politics, rather than in terms of a sweeping, larger political change.
Adoph Gottleib “Statement” 1947 reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 573
“the role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is or reality. To my mind, certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.” p. 573
Gottleib proposes thinking about art as the condensation of aspirations of a time in the image. It seems his understanding of effective art is somewhat historical and post hoc, whereby a distanced critic who discerns whether the artist effectively captured the spirit of their time with a particular work of art.
Barnett Newman “The Ideographic Picture” reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. p. 573-574
“The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hid did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene, nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. the abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding. the everday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of non-objective patter to the solemn basket wavers. to him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-compels a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal ‘abstraction’ of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudo-scientific truths.
The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist’s problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight an narrow, nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery – of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.” p. 574
Newman provides a larger frame for thinking the symbolic process that explains what both Gottlieb and Rothko understand as the purpose or meaning of art. the connection of the pure idea in relation to chaos shows how aesthetic expression confronts the unknown by giving it definite form and at least temporary stability. Newman abstracts from the varying forms of expression the notion of pure idea that confronts the unknowable and makes it intelligible to the artist and human form.