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. Spontaneity is given34 particular value by Pollock, its presumed occurrence a sign that his35 unconscious has spoken or call it Pollock s sexuality.Clark notes36 that Greenberg believed the artist s uncastrated emotions got into his37 earlier pictures, though Clark believes this is Pollock somehow trans-38 lating class issues into those of gender.44 I shall move on to Clark s39 account of Abstract Expressionism shortly, where he offers in polemic40 form the outline of a political-economy of post-1945 American painting.1 Ideology and social class are inescapable themes in this account and,102 POLL OCK, OR ABSTRACTI ON1 like Fried on Manet, Clark believes that Pollock is, in effect, trying to2 paint his relationship to the world an effort which somehow must3 entail figuring both consciousness and self-consciousness.4 However preposterous this hypothesis might appear, its pursuit5 must be grounded in some description of how these paintings look.6 Clark introduces the concept of vulgarity in his attempt to pursue this7 question, which he links to social class, and to death.After all, he8 observes, modernism has always been about endings of one kind or9 another be it Beethoven scratching out Napoleon s name on his Eroica10 symphony , or Rimbaud departing from Marseilles for the Orient. Every11 modernism has to have its proximate Black Square. 45 Pollock and Franz12 Kline have a repetitive compulsion, Clark says, traceable in formal not13 biographical terms.It is a constant (fruitful) drive towards emptiness,14 endlessness, the non-human, and the inorganic.46 The compulsion is15 thrown there, somehow, in the sheer scale of Number 32, 1950, and16 in the metallic paints and sundry debris that find their way into Number17 1A, 1948 and Untitled (Cut-Out) [Plate 4].But these are parts of some18 world , too, if not a human one.The critic Parker Tyler, Clark asserts,19 put his finger on this when he d remarked, apropos of the drip-20 paintings, that something which can not be recognized as part of the21 universe is made to represent the universe in totality of being.47 Some22 recalcitrant wholeness will always try to creep in!23 The scale of the drip-paintings, that is, is ambitious, and the24 language they use aspires to be public and declarative.Not just a world,25 indeed, according to Tyler s humanism, but a whole universe somehow26 manages to get figured.If Fried, in contrast, plots an alternative signif-27 icance for Pollock in his dream-world of formal art criticism , then28 Greenberg, like Clark, sees a more mundane positing and posturing29 of subjectivity, sexuality, and carnality.And, like Clark, Greenberg30 sees Pollock and American abstract painting after the Second World31 War as meaningfully part of, and part response to, the historical and32 social situation.The same could be said for the place of the critic.333435 Criticism s subjectivities3637 Pollock came out of a situation of isolation that, according to Greenberg,38 writing in 1948, all American artists had to embrace and content them-39 selves with.(The following, however, might represent the standard40 description of the lot of avant-garde artists since the mid-nineteenth1 century):103 POLL OCK, OR ABSTRACTI ON1 Isolation is, so to speak, the natural condition of high art in America2.Yet it is precisely our more intimate and habitual acquaintance3 with isolation that gives us our advantage at this moment.Isolation,4 or rather the alienation which is its cause, is the truth isolation,5 alienation, naked and revealed unto itself, is the condition under6 which the true reality of our age is experienced.And the experi-7 ence of this true reality is indispensable to any ambitious art.4889 Note Greenberg s personifications here! At one level he seems to be talk-10 ing about the US nation and its relations with Europe at the beginning11 of the Cold War.But then this isolation is given some kind of brood-12 ing subjective identity, it is naked and revealed unto itself , somehow13 half-person (artist?) and half-thing (artwork?).If Bohemia had been what14 Greenberg calls only an anticipation in nineteenth-century Paris, then15 it has come into actuality in 1930s New York.Though the easel paint-16 ing is on its way out , abstract pictures rarely go with the furniture17 and the canvas, even when it measures 10 ft × 10 ft, has become a kind18 of private journal.49 (Clark will open his essay on Abstract Expression-19 ism with a photograph showing abstract paintings by Hans Hofmann20 going or is that not going? with the furniture in an apartment.) By21 1961, with the market for Pollock s paintings soaring , Greenberg is22 musing on the way Pollock posthumously has become, like Van Gogh,23 an exemplification of the artiste maudit, the damned or cursed artist,24 self-destructive in his impatience with the ordinariness of life, self-25 consuming in the service of his art.5026 Modern artistic subjectivity can slide, then, into solipsism 27 as Hauser had suggested and it is easy to see how Pollock s drip-28 paintings entertain this kind of reading.Clark s note on the paintings29 drive towards emptiness, endlessness indicates how a form of self-30 consumption in art may come, finally, to signal death death, that is,31 as the final, killer, metaphor for a complete absence of meaning or32 communication.Pollock s paintings may figure or gesture towards some33 ideal totality call it Body or Nature but their other side, remember,34 is what Clark calls annihilation : a meaning-freezing cancelling and35 negating of world, figured both in actual paintings, and in the practice/36 situation of modernist painting understood as social relation between37 artist and others.Clark reminds his readers that the nineteenth-century38 poet and critic Flaubert had dreamed of3940 a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external,1 which would be held together by the internal strength of its style104 POLL OCK, OR ABSTRACTI ON1.a book which would have almost no subject, or at least where2 the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing was possible.5134 Pollock is in the grip of a similar determination, Clark believes,5 to dispense with externals and visibilities , in order to fasten more6 strongly on to his paintings objectivity.What results, he says, is a7 deadlock.between a language so fine and cold that it hopes to anni-8 hilate the emotions it describes as it describes them, and an absolute9 subjugation to those emotions and the world of longing they conjure10 up.52 Clark, unlike Fried, does take Pollock s titles seriously
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Tematy
IndexHarris Charlaine Harper Connelly 04 Grobowa tajemnica
Sam Harris Koniec wiary. Religia, terror i przyszłoœć rozumu
SS Harris Oliver Podwojne zycie
Joanne Harris La Abadia de los Acrobatas
Harris Robert Imperium Rzymskie 2 Spisek
Michael John Harrison Nova Swing
Harrison Kim Zapadlisko 02 Dobry zły i nieumarły
Diablica Coulter Catherine(1)
Somoza JosĂŠCarlos Trzynasta dama
John W. Campbell The Mightiest machine