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.60 But which plane is this? Is it Gary Power s plane going37 down, while spying, in 1960 or Dr Strangelove s B52 bomber crashing38 in 1964? If Newman s and Rothko s canvases signal, for Clark, this39 bloated and vacuous individualism though he reserves his real venom40 for Hans Hofmann then what is it that separates all these painters from1 Pollock?107POLL OCK, OR ABSTRACTI ON1 Clark s answer is negation , or bad complexity: a self-cancelling2 of metaphor in the drip-paintings that does not occur in the work of3 the other Abstract Expressionists who manage competently and crassly4 to represent their abstract sublime wholenesses whether it is the ideals5 of God, or Being, or Expression, or Art itself.Pollock is not completely6 immune to this reading, Clark concedes.The Action-Painting -7 existentialism tag is inevitable, because part of Pollock is tawdry.(It8 is just that Rosenberg could not see any other part). 61 Greenberg gets9 Pollock right that is, identifies him as by far and away the best of10 all the post-war American painters because, like Clark, he sees that11 the drip-paintings like modernism are materialist deep down , and12 Pollock is prepared to dwell, like Picasso and Matisse before him, in13 the world of immediate sensations.62 Greenberg, I ve noted, identified14 this painting s attendant sexual and emotional American stridency.The15 titles of the mid-1940s pictures are indicative here, too: Male and Female16 (1942), She-Wolf (1943), The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle (1943),17 Gothic (1944), Totem Lesson 2 (1945), Two (1945).The 1947 195018 drip-paintings pull away from these titles and their pictures narrative-19 figurative symbolisms towards the dissonant convolutions of annihila-20 tion and totality.The paintings that manage to achieve this state for21 instance, Number 1A, 1948 and Untitled (Cut-Out) are the ones that22 are great, as far as Clark is concerned, because they both posit a world23 and brilliantly disavow it at the same time.24 At several points Clark acknowledges openly the operations and25 contingencies of his own subjectivity in seeing and accounting for26 Pollock s paintings.It is as if this acknowledgement is required because27 abstract painting in particular appears to admit so many different and28 possibly contradictory readings.Such contradictions occur within specific29 readings as much as between them.Take Pollock s One: Number 3130 (1950).Clark says that its paint has been more poured than thrown,31 and more splashed (rained) than poured.Spotted.Sprayed.Which does32 not mean that its surface looks straightforwardly liquid.Finding words33 for the contradictory qualities of Pollock s surfaces is, you see already,34 a tortuous business. 63 On encountering Number 1A, 1948 in the35 Museum of Modern Art in New York, Clark declares catching sight of36 it, I am struck again by the counter-intuitive use it makes of [its] dimen-37 sions.To me it always looks small..64 Of a particular section of its38 surface in relation to the shape of the painting, he notes:3940 The central black whiplash with its gorgeous bleep of red, and1 the final black spot to the right of it, seal the belonging of every108POLL OCK, OR ABSTRACTI ON1 thing to the easel size and easel-shape.I do not understand why2 these of all shapes and velocities do this kind of work.Still3 less why the incident should strike me, as it does each time I see4 it, as condensing the whole possibility of painting at a certainmoment into three or four thrown marks.6556Here I am more interested in Clark s declared self-bafflement than with7anything else.With these remarks he is, in a way, putting himself mani-8festly into these pictures, and conspiring to erode or, at least,9complexify the distinction between an attitude towards these paint-10ings and towards everything else, including his own doubting self.11Listen again to the observations that Newman and Still made in12order to dramatize their sense that their abstract pictures were victims13of such critical interlocution of critics getting into the pictures:1415Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paint-16ings could possibly mean to the world.My answer was that if he17and others could read it properly, it would mean the end of all18state capitalism and totalitarianism.19(Newman)2021My contempt for the intelligence of the scribblers I have read is22so complete that I can not tolerate their imbecilities, particularly23when they attempt to deal with my canvases.Men like.24Greenberg, etc.are to be categorically rejected.25(Still)662627There is an air of desperation about both statements here Newman s28 could read it properly seems particularly hopeless.I detect a similar,29though much reduced anxiety, in Clark s self-reflective statements.At30one point he even says he knows his opinions on Pollock are banal31and that he hates what has become his confessional tone.At the same32time he declares his belief that the drip-paintings have come to epito-33mize our and their time.67 All these statements are ways of affirming34that value is inevitably subjective, and that this subjective quality to35value-judgements is somehow more nakedly visible when one considers36abstract art.But this recognition does not constitute an admission from37Clark that his account is not truthful.38Though Clark says he relishes the fact that Pollock in Greenberg s39words, was a goddamn Stalinist from start to finish , as far as he is40concerned I know my interest does not count much in understanding1 what [Pollock] did as [a] painter..68 Clark is hinting here, I believe,109POLL OCK, OR ABSTRACTI ON1 at his own a priori beliefs and responses, deep down beneath layers2 of negation and doubt.These beliefs and responses have somehow3 managed to find (recognize?) themselves on the surface of certain4 paintings.Clark is partly talking about himself, then, when he says:5art will eternally hold us with its glittering eye.Not only will it6forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will7accept the role that has constantly been foistered upon it by false8friends: it will become one of the forms, maybe the form, in which9the world is re-enchanted.691011This re-enchantment is an ideological phenomenon, as Clark fully12knows.The term false friends also suggests the Marxist Georg Lukäcs13notion of ideology as a false consciousness : a mistaking of one thing14for another, a getting things upside down.Clark begs a lot of questions15with this statement.In one sense he appears to wish to exempt Pollock16from this ideological reality, yet in another he knows and says clearly17 that Pollock s bad complexity is bound up with the ideological role18his paintings, as part of Abstract Expressionism, came to play in the19Cold War period
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