What Is?

Manhattan's abstract expressionists have a new forum in the shape of a magazine with a softly assertive title: It Is Editor and Publisher: Philip G. Pavia, a Greenwich Village sculptor blessed with a private income, who loads his $2 magazine with full-page reproductions, offers ample space to the artists to explain, defend and expand on their own efforts. After three issues and yards of prose. It Is seems to have proved that the painters are at least as confused about their work as the public is. Sample quotes:

P: Philip Guston: "Only our surprise that the unforeseen was fated, allows the arbitrary to disappear. The delights and anguish of the paradoxes on this imagined plane resist the threat of painting's re-ducibility."

P: Milton Resnick: "It could be said that art is not visual and that this is the most important facet for an art that does not appeal to the eye. I mistrust myself as an 'eye,' and in general feel unsympathetic to anyone who 'can see.' "

P: John Ferren explains his seemingly heretical deviation into symmetry: "My symmetrical paintings were an emotional experience and an individual conclusion. To me personally, the central form was 2-necessary. I, myself, see through it."

P: Jack Tworkov stands for not standing for anything: "If I have a slogan, it is 'No commitment'; at a moment when there is admittedly little common ground, the best morality is not to have any."

P: Michael Loew favors the primordial: "Because the geometric aspect of the rectangular structure can be both tyrannical and primordial, the problem of reducing the former quality and increasing the latter becomes a challenge . . ."

P: Hans Hoffman: "The pictorial life as a pictorial reality results from the aggregate of two-and three-dimensional tensions: a combination of the effect of simultaneous expansion and contraction with that of push and pull."

P: Bob Richenburg: "To paint is to participate in a poised absurdity. It is the taking of the hand of tenderness into the fearfulness of aspiration."

P: George McNeil sounds a note of caution: "Perhaps we need a reactive motive, some restraining influence to compress creative energy antecedent to its spontaneous and meaningful discharge."

P: Philip G. Pavia himself waves the new banner of forgetfulness, or "non-history": "Associating present sensations with past experience is normal and even necessary in everyday living, but such associations are poisonous in creating art. When the process of association fills the initial intuition with the pastness of dead data-stuff the impact of this intuition is reduced to that of general experience." intellectual confusion prevailing among painters springs partly from "critical permissiveness": "Our esthetic yardstick is geared largely to the novel. We expect the same kind of dramatic discoveries from our artists that we do from our scientists. The wide-open mind which accepts anything in the name of art is one of the worst threats that artists face."

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