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Friday, June 27, 2008
Pollock
One question: in what sense is this action painting? I suppose the obvious answer would be: well, we’ve all seen footage of Pollock himself leaping and dancing above his supine canvas spooling paint in great dribbly gouts. OK, that’s action, right there, although it would be mere tautology to point out that there’s necessarily action in the activity of any painter as they paint. But look at the Pollockian result: about as far, visually, from action as it is possible to get. This isn’t to deny that it’s an image of great textural interest; and it’s not to deny that it constitutes a brilliant intervention into artistic traditions of form, as the art historians remind us. But the image: a century’s accumulated spiders’-webs; the brambles occluding passage to the princess’s castle; the plughole-hairball to which scores of residents in an appartment have contributed. It is, surely, an image of blockage. I don’t mean to suggest, quite, that it is a representation of blockage ... that those lines of paint ‘represent’ hairs in a hairball, or whatever. I mean that, formally, it embodies entanglement, webbing, obstruction. Now, that’s not to dismiss it of course, as a painting, or suggest that it’s bad art; on the contrary, I think it’s very fine. It is just to suggest that it’s, perhaps, rather ironic to describe this as action painting.
Comments
You know, Adam, those canvases are big. They don’t look so much like spider’s webbery when you’re 5 or 10 feet away. When you’re at that distance there really is a sense in which you “see” the picture with your body, feeling it in your trunk and arms. Looking at a small image on the web, yeah, “hairs in a hairball...two bits!”
Point taken, although I find msyelf tempted to say: OK, jungle creepers, Shelob’s lair, large-scale obstruction. I don’t see the activity.
Jackson Pollock as Indiana Jones?
The term, of course, is a gimick--not to be taken too seriously; the famous shots in Life were orchestrated--but as Bill Benson said, when you see the canvas in front of you, those lines are not static, they seem to vibrate. The distinction between spaces and the lines that would define them doesn’t hold--creates an optical illusion of motion. Makes me feel like I’m viewing the synoptic network in my own brain.
synoptic
Clever, very clever.
Yeah, that’s the part of my my brain I use when I try to read Mathew Mark and Luke at the same time.
Guess I was thinking about synoptical illusions.
It’s only a matter of time before we have direct fiber optic connections to the brain. A jillion gigabits right to the hypothalamus. Zowie!!!
The palette reminds me of Anselm Kiefer’s Bohemia Lies by the Sea--another very large painting that owes a lot to Pollock & other abstract impressionists. An interesting comment re: the difference between seeing Pollock in reproduction versus in person--I think the opposite effect typically occurs with Kiefer’s paintings: reproduced, it’s easy to see the movement because he generally uses some kind of perspective, and the chaos and weight of his absurdly thick emulsion get smoothed out to discrete images in a way that they don’t when you’re standing ten feet from them.
Kiefer needs to be seen in a very large space. Interesting things happen when you slowly increase your distance from the canvas.
The term ‘action painting’ was coined by Harold Rosenberg in the 1950s and it comes out of his left-wing resistance to capitalist mass culture. For Rosenberg, the action in the painting comes from the artist’s own barely-conscious physical action (as seen in Hans Namuth’s famous photos) in creating it, as well as in the artist’s active resistance to the diktats of mass culture. It is through these actions that the we can see a way for modern individuals to offer resistance to the powerful conformity and drudgery of mid-20th century life.
Thus when Kaprow and the Gutai group re-interpreted Pollock’s practice as centered around the physical motion of the body and its ideological possibilities, they were suggesting a conclusion that was only implicit in Rosenberg’s ideas: that the painting is only a side-effect of the important stuff, a trace left when the performance is over. The ACTION is what counts. c.f performance art from 1955 onwards (passim)
It seems to me that seeing Pollock’s work primarily as surfaces evokes Clement Greenberg’s ideas on art (road to flatness and all that). I prefer to use the term ‘Action Painting’ over Greenberg’s ‘Abstract Expressionism’ so that I can tip my hat to Rosenberg (and whip once more the dead horse that is Mr. Greenberg’s reputation).
Yes, I am an art historian. Why do you ask?
Yes, I am a pedant. Why do you ask?
Some art historians are historians of the art. Some are historians of critical thought. A few manage to deal with both--with a nod to the art itself.
I judge the credibility of writers on critical theory, whether of the visual or literary arts, by how they deal with what directly confronts them (mediated to be sure by what went before) foregrounding the artifact itself from its historical background, rather then displaying a mission to sublimate virtually all of what is seen and read to what has been done before.
I am not a professional art historian, and don’t assume anyone would bother to ask--or that it matters outside of those assigned the task of reading submissions to peer review publications.
I do understand all that stuff about the painting being “only a side-effect of the important stuff, a trace left when the performance is over. The ACTION is what counts.” Even thought I’m not an art historian… but thanks for the lesson.
Translated: the painting matters less than what the “informed” (informed of what, remains an open question) critic has to say about it. A displacement from the work to its interpretation.
This would not be altogether objectionable, if what was intended was merely to highlight the importance of interpretation, and impossibility--and certainly, the inadequacy, of an unmediated response, rather than a criticism that becomes in itself a generative phenomenon, where the works are merely adjuncts to the progressive pseudo-critical conversation.
I’m a historian. And a historicist. So I’m very much interested in what Hal Rosenberg thought he meant when he came up with the term Action Painting. In fact, I think that the germ of his idea that Kaprow and the Black Mountain College crowd picked up on is the opposite of what you indicate in your translation, Jacob: “the painting matters less than what the informed...” That is, Action Painting and the centrality of actions to performance art are supposed to be democratic and allow a point of entry for all viewers, thus leveling the interpretative playing field. No “informed” observers; everyone becomes an informed observer.
I’m not sure what you mean when you write, “foregrounding the artifact itself from its historical background”. Are you suggesting taking the object out of its historical context? If so, I will have to disagree that it represents a valuable interpretive strategy for understanding Pollock. In my field, at least, there are altogether too many art historians reading Theory and trying to “theorize” art instead of doing historical research--whether on the 1950s, on the present, on the art, or on critical thought. It was Greenbergian formalism that cemented the art critic as the center of artistic meaning, via his notions of supposedly unmediated encounters with the work of art. That’s why I’m partial to Rosenberg. Because he reminds us of the sense of possibility and liberation that was there when abstract expressionism was born, possibility that was both inherent in Pollock’s moving body and in Kaprow’s later interpretation of it.
I must disagree. While I am new to the term “Action Painting,” and the critical discussions thereof, when I look at a Pollock all I see is action—the apprehension and perception of a Pollock is inherently dynamic and active—looping the loops, dancing with the lines, stepping back and taking account of the totality, wrestling with the totality to discern form and pattern, allowing your eye to dart backward and forward and up and down—dancing, DANCING!—and by doing so, you as perceiver re-enact the action of the artist in creating the work.
I would respectfully submit that to see nothing but a static blockage is an interesting perspective, but an incomplete one. Oh, there is blockage and frustration, certainly—the frustration of the blank canvas. I would suggest that Pollock’s drip paintings dynamically attack the frustration of the blank canvas, and convert the potential energy (in the resistance) of the blank canvas into the kinetic energy of wrestling with it. The wrestling match becomes a neural network, a manic unthreading of a ball of twine, and then a physical dance that enacts frustration by refusing to submit to its containment.
Back in 2000, the Tate Modern exhibited a particularly transcendent Pollock in an innovative way: there was a bench before it, and stands upon which headphones rested. When you put on the headphones, you heard Charlie Parker. And when you listen to Charlie Parker and look at a Pollock, I can fairly guarantee that the last thing that will occur to you is static blockage. I highly recommend this experience to anyone.
to see this painting as static interests me because I find such a viewing completely unavailable: it’s a thoughtful, non-philistine response to a Pollock (I say this only because his work draws so many dumb-ass responses) that nonetheless completely floors me--I find myself able to respond only in some sub-Wittgensteinian way, by pointing at the canvas and saying “but LOOK at it!”
it occurs to me, AR, that while you read this painting (given your cluster of metaphors) as an image of obstruction, it’s not clear on your account who is obstructed--the painter, or the beholder? do you read the paint as blocking illusionistic space, as a kind of scrawling on the window, as it were? or as a figuration of entrapment--"let me out of here!"--?
(I do think that the painting’s actual scale, which allows one to see the trace of various gestures in the work, might change your sense of things...)
I appreciate being called thoughtful and non-philistine, despite presenting what is clearly a minority-of-one reading of the canvas. I do indeed rate Pollock very highly.
I have, of course, seen various Pollock canvases in real life, at the Tate Modern and elsewhere (though I never had the Charlie Parker experience David describes). Nevertheless I’d suggest that there aren’t any canvases of any kind that disclose simple unitary readings, and abstract canvases least of all. I take the force of what’s said in the comments here: yes synapses, yes lots of dynamic diagonals, yes a composition that seems to compose and discompose and recompose before our very eyes. Insofar as that’s a way of reading the visual text, then, yes, ‘action’. But it seems to me equally valid to note that the image here is compositionally entangled, and entanglement is something that happens to (eg) flies in spider’s webs. It has the cross-hatching quality of Victorian steel engravings (and those are rarely anything other than strenuously posed). Many of the individual lines here seem to me stretched, taut like guyropes, rather than fluid and running-along. So, I look at it and, duck! it’s in motion, until, rabbit! (in headlights) it seizes up, visually.
Now, I’d suggest it would be hard to insist that one reading here is right and the other wrong. What’s interesting, surely, is the extent to which preconceptions shape our response. Pollock was a celebrity, as well as an artist. If we have in mind the images of him dribbling the paint, and then look at the paint as (in nick’s words) ‘tracing’ that motion, we’re going to take it as somehow in motion. But imagine seeing the canvas with no idea who Pollock was, or how it had been produced. Would it look so lively then? Dried paint on a canvas, after all, is literally motionless.
clearly, to get outside of art history, what we need is empiricism: a Pollock retrospective, a bunch of fourth-graders, and a multiple-choice question on the bus home....