Jay mentioned on the episode being profoundly affected a short film from 1951 where Jackson Pollock shows how he works. Here's a clip from it (Jay says it's almost impossible to get one's hands on a decent copy of the whole thing, but in the Ed Harris movie about Pollock they depict the making of the clip.):
Jay told us:
All I can say is that I always thought the guy's art was garbage until I saw this film, which is much longer as a whole. It blew me away. Changed everything in how I saw art and very much defined my "art world" view. Give it a look. All that American Abstract Expressionist stuff is pretty fantastic and, at least in my mind, was the last great era of painting.
You can check out a number of Pollock's works here.
Here's a taste, from '39 or so, as I personally prefer this pencil work to the paint dripping shown above: "Untitled (Psychoanalytic Drawing)," which to me looks like someone who ate himself:
-Mark Linsenmayer
Looking at the follow up youtube, I see where the get the ideas for all those $125 5’x7′ area rugs at Lowes.
Pollock mentioned pushing back against his teacher Thomas Hart Benton. Most or all of art history follows this pattern, most or all of philosophy too. Each generation inherits the forms and ideas of the previous generation and through critique we reconcile the life we are living with the things we are making. This is my favorite definition of what it means to be modern.
Modernism rooted itself in the early to mid 20th century and the push back against it was brilliant. Instead of touching G-d through material means (my definition of the high modernism of the 50’s), we touched everyday life through conceptual means… and called this through its various manifestations, postmodernism.
Doesn’t revolution have a curious tendency to degenerate into orthodoxy? After 60 years since the last revolution against modernism (Pollock was a bad ass, but in an art historical blink of an eye, what he represented aesthetically/theoretically, was eclipsed), we have come to a place -late postmodernism- where a genuine push back is no where to be found, or perhaps more accurately: the general desire of young artists to overhaul received ideas has generally evaporated. This to me seems to be another end of history, the idea that once one has arrived at the beginning of utopia, push back is seen as obscene. This is troubling for me (I am an artist, btw) not only because I consider all utopias too good to be true, but because I read the end of history as an end of art history, the end of art itself. (Apologies to Danto, but I disagree to some degree with his picture of art history.)
Has the same thing occurred in philosophy too? (I’m not sure.) Who was it who said something about footnotes to Plato? Once you come to the end of a book, all that’s left is to add pages of endnotes and bibliography, which is another way to describe contemporary art today. No more new chapters filled with new ideas. No more new ideas.
All of this leads me to these questions: How can one critique postmodernism and not become a reactionary? In what ways can two apparent antithetical binaries be fitted together into the compliments that I suspect they really are? How can one surmount the material/conceptual divide? ( A fist pump for episode #20.)
I trot this train of thought out to see how it sounds to all of you. What do you think?
Dennis, I think I like what you’re thinking, but could you summarize what you posted in two or three sentences that would help me better understand your post.
BTW, it was Whitehead who said that about footnotes – he was a paradigm-shifting maverick pragmatist, as was my hero, Pirsig, who had a lot to say about Art (actually, the bedrock of art was all he had to talk about(
Specifically, these thoughts:
Instead of touching G-d through material means (my definition of the high modernism of the 50′s), we touched everyday life through conceptual means… and called this through its various manifestations, postmodernism.
In what ways can two apparent antithetical binaries be fitted together into the compliments that I suspect they really are? How can one surmount the material/conceptual divide?
Do you equate scientific objectivity and rationality to material, and subjective experience to conceptual?
Thanks for asking, Burl.
Scientific objectivity and rationality in art is usually instrumentalized for an imaginative leap of some kind. Conceptualization in art is usually about the idea that the art experience is at root, a cognitive act. I’m not sure if a one to one mapping of rationality-material/subjectivity-conceptual is all that helpful.
The high modern art of the late 50’s was preoccupied with some transcendental arc that was rooted in the material nature of art. There was a revolution against it that was brilliant in that it sidestepped the issue by reversing polarity on every point in its value system. Marcel Duchamp was a progenitor for all this, it’s fascinating to map out how he made his turn from painting to ready mades. If there was some kind of identification with a transcendent agent (G-d)/independent reality in the former, the latter rooted itself in rootlessness, or, as if fashionable to say in art circles today: rhizomic-ness.
Yea, it’s a mind/body split alright. Old news after all. What I am saying here is that this is, in my art world, all very long in the tooth, overdue for critique. I’m finding many ideas here at PEL that nourish my desire to shake down the current discourse and perhaps find a way forward, another chapter if I am lucky.