Louis Proyect continues his series on art about Abstract Expresionism, and a single artist, Jackson Pollack.
Louis Like any other businessman, Pollock had competitors. In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, it was possible for one artist to leapfrog over another in terms of fame and fortune.
Doyle I would use professional artist not businessman to refer to Pollack. The usual class associations that go with being a lawyer or doctor hardly applied to the sort of life that Pollack led, but others after Pollack who were successes in fine art circles live similar levels of consumption to doctors, lawyers, ballplayers, etc.. The business operations would have been the gallery owners authority. So I think this was a slip on Louis¹ part trying to characterize the class role Pollack had in life.
Doyle Louis gets it that Pollack was obsessed with the South West, and with Native American methods of work. But Louis doesn¹t seem to get that Pollack couldn¹t draw very well. In terms of skills Pollack couldn¹t really perform on a level with his mentor Benton. When Pollack shifted toward abstraction, Pollack would have been moving toward areas where his thinking processes could have participated where his motor skills couldn¹t go. It is clear enough that Pollack who focused upon peeing as an inspiration for drip painting, and also thought well of Navajo (I believe this is the right tribal reference) sand painting was moving away from traditional painters skills. If you look at these types of self expressions, peeing, sand painting, they have considerable chance and contingent elements of a lack of control. This would have been in the air as a major surrealist drive in the leftwing art circles of Pollacks times. In addition because Pollack seems to have had numerous sexual encounters with men an emphasis upon penis like expression might have enthralled him. But such things lack a raison d¹etre in the sense that one could easily grasp where things might lead to. While socialist realism had a drive to expand the expression of working class content in realist work. There is about "typical" content as socialist realism aspires to, an inability to conceptualize some kinds of abstract qualities such as chance and how it fits into a system of socialist relations. It would be hard for a Pollack to reground himself in left views if Pollack felt drawn to things like gay sex which had little open relationship to the accepted view of what the working class entailed at that time.
Doyle Secondly, the social roles that are created by capitalism are not so determinant in the sense that Louis makes it seem for Pollack. Pollack was notoriously inarticulate. He didn¹t know how to voice his own interests, rather it was his wife, Lee Krasner who successfully managed and promoted Pollack after his death. One can get a sense of the limitation of Pollack¹s social life because he was so often drunk and alienating everyone around him. But Pollack might easily have disappeared from sight if Krasner hadn¹t managed his very limited output. The same could be said about Van Gogh. Both artists were so socially damaged that themselves couldn¹t have shaped a professional career. Instead Van Gogh had his brother manage his, then when Van Gogh died, and his brother Theo, Theo¹s wife similarly promoted and managed Van Gogh¹s ouevre.
Doyle A lot of the same thing could be said about musicians. Or actors. How does one then make a political point about social roles concerning Jimmy Stewart as opposed to say Yves Montand? I would think that the comparison between group work as in movies or television and solitary activities such as writing, and painting would be important. Another thing is that during Pollack¹s generation there was an organized left, but what about artists today? Are we to judge them under the banner of being progressive in the sense that a comparison between Ben Shahn and Pollack might suggest?
Doyle There is a famous quotation from Engels about how he likes Balzac (the Royalist writer) over Zola, because Balzac wrote about typical persons in typical stories. (Letter to Lassalle, May 8, 1859). In this case Engels admired the honest portrayals of Balzac in a realist manner over the "empiricist" methods of the fragmentary snapshot methods of Zola. What I am driving at is that it has always been so, that the left considered not so much that an artist was politically correct, but rather from their work we can understand things best. For Engels, Zola was too abstract. But I would emphasize that Engels was trying to get across that understanding things best is what was important to him. That can be an abstract goal, for example, the calculus is in many ways highly abstract, but it allows a deeper understanding of expressing the laws of motion.
Doyle The position that Pollack exemplified was the first triumph of Imperial status of the United States in terms of European styles of painting. After that brief period, painting in the U.S. became inclusive in a very diverse pluralism. One can see themes of Pollacks contemporaries being played out in the next decades, but there is very little resemblance between the "quality" work of AE and mechanical work of Warhol, and other kitsch, and Pomo work.
Jim Heartfield
Maybe Bloom oversold his argument, but he had something to work on, which is that art needs standards of excellence, which are not the same thing as social elitism. Why should we want sub-standard workmanship, in our arts any more than in our plumbing? Of course there is always the possibility that elites will decorate their own shabby institutions with the excellence that they monopolise in the arts, but that does not mean that you should destroy the Winter Palace, just seize it. Discrimination in culture is a good thing, just as discrimination in society is a bad thing.
Doyle I bring up Jim¹s comment here because like Louis, Jim misses how little skill and excellence matters in American art, and why this might be happening in making pictures. For one, this whole era is about the decline of individual skills, a sort of proletarianization of the artist. For another as computing arose during this period it drove the subject matter of art more and more toward what sort of conceptual background goes into making an image. In other words to question what consciousness is. Excellence is irrelevent to that direction. In fact while I agree with Jim we don¹t want to burn down history and previous art, we aren¹t really concerned with excellence anymore as a cultural imperative. I don¹t think that is an issue of decadence either. Rather it is an issue of questioning what is the deep purpose of communication.
Doyle Jim made a point that surrealism was parasitic to the art it reacted against. I don¹t think so. I think abstraction led to areas which painting can¹t ultimately succeed at. These areas are what writing systems were invented to express. That is; images that can¹t be successfully painted such as states of being, or motion. But I don¹t think one could properly say that surrealism was parasitic to previous styles. Rather, those styles decayed when the rest of cultural output made them superfluous. The emergence of surrealism was an acknowledgement that Victorian attitudes failed to express many important issues in the post WWI era.
Doyle Money for culture is divided up by the big corporations and their government allies who support their interests. Movies, and television, the internet all take their share. In that situation older displaced forms of expression such as painting will feel the pinch. Movies felt the pinch of television during the fifties. Movies gradually stopped being made in the b grade and that became televisions arena. Realism stopped being important to painting, and those specialized researches and explorations that individuals can do were the niche that painting had. These broad communal decisions aren¹t up to Pollacks to dispute. When congress cuts NEA funding it dries up the financial support for artists. But the reasoning for drying things up is well worth exploring. I¹m not sure that Pollack demonstrates anything much about those issues.
Louis The Abstract Expressionists were interested in one thing and one thing only: success. Whether the means to get there were American Indian artistic techniques, Jungian subconscious images or splattering paint across a canvas, the end was what counted. These artists, just like the working class who had discovered wartime prosperity, were reconciling with American society and all its blandishments.
Doyle Actually most of those people didn¹t expect that success would happen to them. They instead looked at themselves as an Avant Garde who history would judge, not material success. They were lucky in the sense of an imperial power showered them with goodies. But I don¹t think those things happen now like they once did. Professionalization of the culture is effective in taming such purist motivations in a way we don¹t realize now compared to the reality of their world. Pollack had next to nothing most of his adult life, and sabotaged his success with self destructive addictive behaviors. Regards, Doyle Saylor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19990110/4291050a/attachment.htm>