Robert Williams Essay
#45 Rives Granade (Visiting Painting)
#46 Robert Williams (Response Painting)
In keeping with the ever-changing sequence of 49 artworks, this painting, number 46, takes previous painting number 45 in an oblique direction. The oddly colored Colt .44 pistol is exploited as an objet d’art – a painting inside a painting. But, the handgun’s relevance ends there. The subject is now the objective observation of the subject. In fact, the academic critique has upstaged the whole picture this painting portrays.
The central figure in this work is a cartoon character of absolute cultural principals. Depicted as the demigod of accepted precepts, the blue characterization, formed from socks, sandals, and an oversized buttocks, epitomizes the unquestioned pillar of aesthetic sophistication.
With respect to the historic tradition of art educators, critics, and museum management functionaries, many art cognoscenti have exceeded the fame and notoriety of legendary artists themselves. Literary figures such as John Rukin, Oscar Wilde, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, William Wilson, and Robert Hughes have risen to heroic status – and this without dirtying their hands with brush or chisel.
Nonetheless, their scholarly machinations are justified. This becomes more obvious as scholastic acceptance of Dada continues and certainly, more recently, with the creation of conceptual art theory. Conceptualism allows the unheralded theorist to simply become the honored art conceptualist, thus freeing the artist from the nuisance of hands-on art drudgery – creative genius knows no bounds.
However, there is one higher accolade above theoretic art brilliance. Not only is this master-hypothesizor the artiste, he has unwittingly become the art. And, being such, he’s opened up the vulnerability for being himself rejected.