AESTHETIC
PARADOXES OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND POP ART
FANCHON
FROHLICH "Aesthetic Paradoxes of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art,"
British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 6, pp. 17, 25, 1966.
This
paper is about the new relations that arise between contemporary works
of art and the person concerned with aesthetics or the observant observer
or the ideal critic or whatever you call him. Perhaps it is itself
aesthetics in that it examines this relation and points out the paradoxes
inherent in the relation and in the activity of the artist himself.
Like
many of the barriers between what were formerly separate branches
of art or even completely different practices for instance, between
painting and sculpture or between literature and painting or between
music and speech the barriers and divisions between painting or creation
in the visual arts and aesthetics or criticism are collapsing in an
illuminating way in contemporary art. So are the once clear distinctions
between "art" and "life" and between "art" and "nature" and with this
collapse of distinctions in the concrete subject matter of aesthetics
the distinctions between critical activities such as ethics and aesthetics
also dissolve. Such merging, regrouping and reversal of usual functions
lead to paradoxes which can be concretely presented as absurd questions.
The exploration of the way such paradoxes necessarily arise from the
operations and intentions of contemporary art can be darkly illuminating
of the way modern artists operate near or on the edge of the impossible
in the field of the absurd its has been said and of their new, more
complex and intimate relation to the observer.
The
field of contemporary art might be described as being concentrated
at two poles of creative activity. At the one pole that which is externally
given by the urban environment is selected and accepted as creation.
This is popularly called "Pop Art." The other pole consists of a creation
out of no given, or the minimum possible given out of the act of painting
itself what is called abstract expressionism or action painting. These
two involve diametrically different interrelations between the art
work and the critic or the act of criticizing. In between these poles
lie many intermediate activities such as conventional or non conventional
representational painting where the objects represented are presented
by the external world but the artist does the painting himself by
his own activity and the phenomenologically interesting "op" art where
the artist works more or less as an engineer and the activity of the
work of art occurs as an optical phenomenon in the viewer's eyes.
But consideration of the extremes should be most illuminating.
Pop
Art is in a way a return to the object as an avant garde movement
after abstract painting by literally presenting the ordinary object
itself, not a painted representation of it, or else by making large
images for serious or satiric contemplation from the banal images
of advertising and newspapers to which one normally gives only fleeting
attention. One of its first exponents, Robert Rauschenberg, had a
large retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery two years
ago. Into the context of an abstract painting he fastened photographs
of objects, clocks or radios that were functioning, and made subtle
visual puns between painting and everyday objects or between levels
of images, For instance one of his paintings embodied the visual pun
between an orange spot and a still life painting of an orange and
a photograph of an orange and the written word 'orange'. It forced
the spectator to shift his way of looking at things several times
within the same picture, as a good joke does. He formulated his activity
aptly in the statement: "I act in the region between art and life."
Other painters and sculptors, in the way in which avant garde artists
do, hurried to the extreme of this position by giving up more and
more of the painterly context and interplay with the object and presenting
either the object increasingly on its own or merely the image of a
banal environmental image say from the comics or tabloid papers. The
tendency was well exemplified in an exhibition of post-war art at
the Tate Gallery last year and also in the American section of the
Venice Biennale. For instance, one pop artist presented earlier in
an elegant formal context of geometrical painting a bathroom shower
spray with real light from a concealed electric bulb spreading from
it as water would an almost poetical "conceit." This was partly transformed
and commented on by juxtaposition and paint. Later he presented barely
a white washbasin attached to a black canvas just by itself, no comment.
Or Warhol presented first a complex of overlapping and richly interfering
silkscreen copies of a tabloid photograph that had a certain painterly
richness in their accidental irregularities and color interferences
and even a certain formal structure in the irregularly repeated rectangles.
Later he carried this to the extreme, presenting only an enlarged
silkscreen reproduction of a photograph of a film star. A pop sculptor,
Chamberlain, "presents" obsolete or wrecked cars, which have been
crushed into a more or less neat rectangular shape by a car demolition
machine, as themselves readymade sculpture. The complete self destroying
extreme of this activity is in the Artists' Supermarket in New York,
where ordinary supermarket items tins of Heinz soup signed by artists
or plastic replicas of them can he bought for very high prices.
The
Pop Art movement is not a straightforward critical satire of society
as was the somewhat similar Dadaist movement between the wars. It
is more a delight or satisfaction in what is in the modern city and
an endless repetition of it or a participation as artists in the endless
repetition of industrial production. In pop art a great proportion
of the creative activity or that activity involved which is different
from what any non-artist or non-critic could do in buying a washbasin
or a smashed up car or a photograph of Marilyn Monroe consists in
making the aesthetic judgment: "This object is worthy of detached
sustained contemplation. This is beautiful out of all context of its
place and use in ordinary life stop and look." This attitude demands
the cessation of the ulterior motives with which one normally looks
at useful articles or commercial images. The veil of utility and intentions
is rent and one sees them new in their forms and is sophisticatedly
aware of the joke of their being there. Thus the spectator can exactly
repeat the experience of the artist. looking hard for the first time
at something banal without being excluded from the mysterious act
of actually making it. His activity is in seeing significances into
it, seeing the joke or making up apt jokes of his own, his own, seeing
it as a form. In a sense, if he has appreciated it, he has done it;
he has by his attention transformed an ordinary object into an object
of art.
This results in various paradoxes. Is a given object a work of art
or not depending on who says it is? Is the same object a better work
of art if it is found or selected by a better critic or artist or
placed in a better Museum? Is a broken up car a work of art in a museum
and a broken up car in a car dump not or vice versa? (Was a particularly
elegant and spectator involving object in a recent exhibition at the
Tate, which consisted of a white translucent curtain and a red sign
with "Fire Exit" written on it, less a work of art than the white
washbasin attached to a black canvas which was its companion, simply
because it was a fire exit?) Thus arise absurdities which are, however,
in a way apt because this kind of art functions partly by making witty
or ironically or simply hysterical comments on its environment. Thus
it is that such paintings, like jokes that cannot bear repetition
or like a shock of surprise which is not a surprise the second time,
become rapidly obsolescent. (in a recent discussion of avant garde
art on the third programme it was commented "Art aspires to the condition
of cooking.")
But
such paradoxes are more importantly illuminating of the new and different
relations between spectator and objects the object is not in itself
an object of art; it becomes one only through its relation to him.
This is the inverse of the usual situation in which the artist or
collector becomes such through the works of art he hits made or collected.
The work of art might be said to exist in the logical space between
the spectator and itself-as-an-independent-object. He creates it as
art by the attention he brings to it. So these paradoxes bring the
art object, the artist and the spectator closer together. And then
what happens when artist, art object and spectator do come together?
What becomes of the critic's function when the artist has appropriated
his usual function of saying, "This object is worth looking at," and
thereupon signing it? In the detached serious or sophisticated contemplation
of any object one can find some illuminations about the civilization
which produced it or the civilization which produced the industry
which produced it, the beauty of cracked and twisted metal, the interplay
of violent accident and nature as corrosion and industrial design,
or sociological reflections on the love of speed, death in violence,
planned obsolescence and the destroying industry. The spectator shares
the world of the artist and of the art object that is, the given everyday
world of an industrial urban society and lie can articulate new insights
gained when full, long attention is focused on any one of its details
presented in a pop art work. This might be like a sort of aesthetic
sociology. In a wider context such art might be judged as a social
phenomenon What are its environmental and social causes? Does it merely
reflect them or embody them or comment on them? If the last, what
does it say? Where did it come from and where is it going? Is it worth
going there? Such questions can be pertinently asked about it by the
reflective observer and may illuminate more than that section of the
world isolated in a museum. Or the critic may describe the new attitude
towards the world or the new way of being in the world when art and
life become continuous, when useful objects are isolated from their
use and the everyday world in the artist's studio gets attached literally
to his canvas. The situation in which one can no longer tell whether
a given object is a work of art or a used up useful object is absurd.
As the ultimate absurdity is inclined to do, it leads to a sort of
science fiction state of utterly detached observation of an environment
meant to lie used. Like an archaeologist from another planet, one
can look at the paraphernalia of life without involvements in its
functions. One can thus start to look at everything independently
of its use and context in a detached aesthetic frame of mind. The
extreme stage of this state of mind would he paralysis in pure stunned
contemplation of all surrounding objects and industrial products abstracted
from their proper purposes and rise. This was beautifully exemplified
in the film The Bed Desert, but in the film mental paralysis or dissociation
was taken as cause rather than as effect of aesthetic contemplation
of the industrial landscape.
But must the aesthetic observer or critic be thus limited to describing
and reflecting on what is in the gallery or can he also judge whether
it ought to be there? Once the artist has taken over the critic's
essential function of aesthetic judgment, how can the critic take
it back again? Suppose the critic or spectator were to draw the line
sharply and say: "This washbasin is not a work of art, it is a washbasin."
In the present situation this might seem like usurping authority,
might somehow turn him into an unlicensed artist. But then who does
issue artists' licenses? The whole question of the source of authority
becomes problematical once the work of art is more or less defined
by having been selected by an artist rather than the artist being
distinguished through the quality of the work of art he has created.
Indeed, this is a circular definition and leads to the internal contradiction
from which the movement at present seems to be dying oat. For if all
the objects in ordinary life are essentially worthy of aesthetic contemplation,
then there is really no need for artists to select them nor for museums
to isolate them. One is surrounded by relatively inexpensive objects
of art in the kitchen, and everybody can he his own artist and any
place a museum.
In fact, following this dialectical path with admirable logic, the
movement has degenerated literally into an artistic supermarket where
one can buy for a hundred dollars or so tins of soup, etc., or replicas
of them, signed by artists. But it has had the effect of changing
the way of looking and the attitude involved in looking at the industrial
environment and turning much that was irritating and hideous but fairly
inescapable into something which can be enjoyed with amused detachment
as Pop Art.
The other tendency of contemporary art goes in the direction opposite
to that of selecting the given as creation. It moves towards creation
out of no given or the minimum possible given. The artist creates
not only his own paintings but also his own world and the laws in
which it operates, its own intrinsic aim and even himself, out of
the act of painting. He simultaneously creates and destroys paintings,
the possibility of painting, and himself. This painting is called
Abstract Expressionism and was illuminatingly named by the American
critic Harold Rosenberg "Action Painting." At a certain moment the
canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as all
arena in which to act rather than as a space in which to reproduce,
redesign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was
to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." Such painting
might be likened to the exploration of a land that does not yet exist
which comes into being by being explored or more abstractly to the
series of real numbers in which new operations create new kinds of
numbers. For instance the mathematician who decided that it was a
permissible operation to subtract a larger number from a smaller number
thereby created negative numbers and all their possibilities. Jackson
Pollock who decided (by doing it, not by thinking it) that it was
possible to paint a picture with his own bodily movements and paint
which left a trace of them, created a new field of possibilities in
painting.
This
sort of painting also generates its own group of paradoxes. (Perhaps
all movements in painting contain their own intrinsic' paradoxes from
which they eventually die or are transformed, and a dialectical history
of painting might be written. But it is a characteristic of contemporary
art that it rushes to its own extremes, so the intrinsic paradoxes
become more rapidly and vividly evident.) For the critic the paradox
is: if painting is essentially an action without any extrinsic goals,
then how can the resulting painting be judged as an aesthetic object?
A consistent critic of this conviction could only logically distinguish
between real actions and unreal actions (what would they be?) or pretended
real actions those whose aim was really thought out beforehand but
slyly concealed. As with Pop Art, the possibility of making a clear
distinction between "good" and "bad" paintings tends here to get lost
in metaphysically arguable distinctions between real action and pseudo-action,
new or not new, moral good and bad. Thus it is that Rosenberg, considering
such painting as essentially actions or segments of life, tends to
judge them almost morally. I quote Rosenberg again: "With traditional
aesthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas
its meaning is not psychological data but role, the way the artist
organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a
living situation. The test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness
and the test of its seriousness is the degree to which the act on
the canvas is an extension of the artist's total effort to make over
his experience Action Painting has extracted the element of decision
inherent in all art in that the work is not finished at its beginning
but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of 'right' gestures.
In a word, Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral clement
in art; its mark is moral tension in detachment from moral or aesthetic
certainties; and it judges itself morally in declaring that picture
to be worthless which is not the incorporation of a genuine struggle."
But these are not the criteria usually given or accepted. This real
criterion of the excellence of a painting is whether doing the painting
has transformed the artist the effect of the act of painting on the
artist. According to such a criterion one ought to be able to find
traces of the painting's transforming power in the personality of
the artist. But suppose that you meet the artist afterwards and find
that he isn't transformed. Would you judge the paintings by the personality
of the artist or because of the qualities of the paintings themselves
would you say that the artist must have undergone some inner transformation
whether it is noticeable or not that in life he 0nly exhibits his
superficial mask or external concerns? The first alternative seems
excessively superficial, but the second seems to drain the assertion
of all empirical content. Paintings and painter define each other
in a way that becomes circular. One would want to say not that the
value of the paintings could be found in the quality of the artist's
life, but rather the opposite. The paintings are what one actually
sees. So it is really the moral quality of the objects of the paintings
as given objects which one is trying to find and judge. And at the
same time it is the more or less aesthetic qualities of the artist's
life that are relevant and illuminating. Thus considering paintings
its essentially actions has the effect of reversing the activities
of ethic's and aesthetics or at least dissolving the boundaries between
them. In this way ethical terms, in fact ethical "good," become applicable
to objects of art and aesthetic' terms aesthetic "good," become applicable
to the life of the artist. The question "Can a bad man paint a good
picture?" embodies this new and more intimate relation between life
and art and between ethical and aesthetic good. In this context it
would seem that one must deny the logical possibility of a bad man
painting a good picture. For if he could paint a good picture, then
he must in some interior way not necessarily in his relations to society
or to non-artists be a good man. This might suggest a glimpse of an
aesthetically modified conception of a good man, and of an ethically
modified conception of a good painting. They define each other in
a way that is more illuminating than a simple circular definition
it might be called a spiral definition.
For the artist at work the corresponding paradox is a concrete problem.
How do you know whether you have succeeded when you don't know what
you have set out to do? How do you know when an action that has no
predetermined end and purpose is finished Confronted by something
really new, the result of his own action the artist may well ask himself
"Is that what I wanted to do?" Perhaps the only answer here is "It
must be because I have done it." For the working artist the only kind
of resolution he can find between the demands of ultimate Freedom
and ,ultimate precision is complete acceptance of what he has done.
Paintings of this kind go in series, developing, affirming "This is
what I wanted to do," finding piece by piece precisely what it is
he wanted to do, and learning how to do it. They are a kind of self
exploration. The unspoken unstatable intrinsic "intention" of an act,
which is its motive force, can only become apparent in a series carrying
on the act. If the artist could say what his intention was apart from
the act, then he could fulfil it in one act but it wouldn't be a genuine
exploratory act. But once the artist has understood it, mastered it
and is able to do it, then he logically and psychologically ceases
to be able to do it. Then doing it ceases to be an act of discovering
by exemplifying new laws, but a production according to them. Within
the framework of this art production is the opposite of creativity.
Once one already knows the terrain exploration turns into leading
safaris. The act becomes a making, and the artist becomes a craftsman.
Psychologically this is the problem and danger of becoming uncreative
by repeating oneself. So there is the paradox logically speaking or
the very delicate balance psychologically speaking between repeating
a similar action frequently enough to define and affirm what one wants
to do and repeating it too often once one knows what one wants to
do so that it becomes production instead of discovery. Such painting
is ultimately tragic because it lives by consuming its own possibilities.
The artist must always be working on the verge of the impossible.
One can see this in the work itself it has a quality of tragic intensity
and involvement, as opposed to the "coolness" and comic detachment
of Pop Art.
This paper has been a sketch of the limits of the impossible. Since
most contemporary avant garde art exists in this region, near or at
the limit of the impossible, it is filled with paradoxes, which are
sometimes destructive, sometimes animating, sometimes both at the
same time. Indeed it is probably in the latter way, as simultaneously
self-destructive and life giving that the paradoxes within contemporary
art function to keep it perpetually new. Such paradoxes within the
processes of contemporary visual art itself propagate more paradoxes
in the relation of the judging spectator to the work of art and in
his traditional activity of judging "This is a good or a bad work
of art." Indeed, they obliterate or render obsolete this detached
independent-spectator judging-independent-object attitude and introduce
new, more intimate relations between aesthetic observer and work of
art, which relations themselves arc filled with paradoxes. Such paradoxes
turn the traditional relationships inside out. Thus in the case of
Pop Art the observer now assigns part of the active role of making
the object into an object of art, and the artist undertakes a more
connoisseur like role of selecting objects for aesthetic contemplation.
But if anything can be an object of artistic contemplation, then why
does one need to have artists to select some things rather than others
or museums to isolate them? Or in the case of action painting, if
the painting is to be judged as an action a segment of life, an action
which transforms its doer then the moral or spiritual state of the
artist rather than the physical state of the picture becomes in a
way the ultimate criterion. Then the meaning of "good" and "bad" as
aesthetic terms are altered and shifted into another category, that
of ethical good and bad, and aesthetics is transferred into a kind
of ethics.