‘Decorum’ in the Arts

The Academie Francaise made rules defining high art in the 17th century. In addition to creating a hierarchy of types of subject matter (history painting over genre painting) and styles appropriate, they created a kind of grammar called decorum. With this word a moral responsibility is introduced as well.

In a play by Racine for, example, the events needed to take place within the time frame of the story. Similarly with history painting, then considered to be the apogee of painterly effort. In other words, a set of guidelines within which to make and to judge a work of art relating it to its purpose and place.

Media are freely mixed now as they are in this work. Using colored neon tubes attached to abstract very sensitive and very large paintings is to mix different media and their characters.

Such mixing began within the throes of Modernism. Unless we consider frames and settings as part of the work.

However, the neon suggests a realm quite opposite to that of the paintings. Light emitting mechanical structures which we quickly associate with gas stations or movie theaters or Dan Flavin who first used neon as a medium. These neon tubes produce colored light that is reflected from those of the painting underneath. Floating paint elides into other paint, flesh like, cloud like, sky like, expressive of a sensitivity at antipodes from, say, marquees of neon.

This harsh juxtaposition is entirely intended I suppose. To what avail?

The viewer is placed at a crossroads. Is the primary association painterly or conceptual? We can decide to go one way or the other. But not both, for the one excludes the other.

This sensitive painter might think to leave well enough alone without adding the discordant glow (to me) of a neon lit conceptual playground, a visual tilt-a-whirl. Because neon tubes have nothing to do with painterly painting and vice versa, a uniting concept must be introduced. No such concept exists. We could give up. But we have had to think more than see in any case.

Of course this is the 21st century. It is worthwhile considering whether the ideas of decorum still have any validity in the era of anything goes. And where would we find it. Is the experience of the viewer simply an experience of the new as Robert Hughes might have said.

But the new what or the new where? Just the new new is unsustainable. Perhaps in 2024 in America, Planet Earth, that is the point. And then one cannot paint a moment, sorry to say.

But what an extraordinary career on going. How grateful we must be for Mary’s determination and for its generous display in PAW, all too rare, of a graduate’s experience in the visual arts.