peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)

 

 

 

Jackson Pollack’s Spaces                                              

 

 

 

 

 

Line and space… and time: what is there? What possibilities are there? The endless passages … that are not there…

 

 

What the artist puts in and what the brain finds. Once we found things as resemblances, as when people named configurations of stone, rock formations, and other natural features (stalactites and stalagmites in caves are a favourite of this kind of apostrophe, this kind of name giving). Something is said resemble x, to resemble something else; like a visual pun, a visual second meaning or metaphor. Now we after a century of Abstract Art, we find form itself enough, find relations between line and colour and frame as such, as enough; finding these alone is regarded as sufficient – there is no longer any need for the vraisemblable , the search for resemblance: form alone is enough (as per Kandinsky and Kant…). Perhaps we now no longer need the reference to the real (in a picture anyway, in the safe confines of the picture frame). No longer need to find a resemblance to something; the mere suggestion of form is enough – perhaps as a hint of createdness, of agency, of an author (again the implication of the frame). Or that is what we tell ourselves; because as we know, the finding of significant form, even of any form, is actually the result of our own meaning making propensities… (the suggestion of a creator, of intention, again the function of the frame) gives us permission to look for, as it were, something there…). Attempts deny the subjective, or reader aspect of this process, actually the work of the creativity of the onlooker, only depend on the very thing they try to replace (transgression again); so in Jackson Pollack, the unconscious (his unconscious) may be said to do the work, to be the guide to his motions, his actions in ‘action painting’ – the meanings we found, the forms we perceive, where put there by his unconscious. Perhaps. But much more likely it is the years of art training that did this job of directing the spraying and splattering, dripping and dropping, with which we associate his finest work - augmented on the spectators side by the constitutively human desire to make meaning (where there may not be any) to find form (where before there was none…)

 

Unconscious in art… the role of the unconscious in art, from abstract to surreal requires a ‘Nature first’ philosophy as its base, another form of ‘essentialism’ if you like… Anyway, another bad case of ‘authenticism’, repository of all our clichés and easy beliefs… the exotic in art, as in travel … the fantasy of being first and new and ahead, the myth of the avant-garde; the lure of this view for the ego, and not least for politics (right and left…). Authenticity (of one’s self, one’s real nature, one’s Nature-given self, of course, and so one’s natural ability to choose a guru or event that is… (authentic). And perhaps to spend ones time and money on it, whether translated into travel or religion or political organisations… or just fashion. (Self-image…). Fashion and travel; the neo-romantic ideology; the mass fantasy of a mass society… the bigger the lie…

 

So we are left finding or creating meaning… in the meaningless (Grice’s axioms are a reflection of this mental habit or mode of cogitation: a mode of cognition). Looking for the signified, when we should be looking for signifiers (when we are looking at signifiers). Form as meaning, as beauty, as chaos and as adventure… tunnels and passages, and plazas of the soul, all possible referents from the exterior worlds of sci-fi to Byzantine interiorities, maps of ‘interior experience’.

 

The religious in art, Kandinsky and abreaction again; a bit of an appropriation? Or the truth of a barely post-religion world (and have we really advanced beyond this; there seem to have been a surprising number of ‘returns’…). Art on the other hand may be taken as an alternative religion… (or as an alternative to religion). Witness the many readings of Rothko and abstract art (Although, perhaps again, Kandinsky got there first… in practice and in theory, in image and in words…). Culture as bearer of the sacred after religion (but was religion not always the key to, a key adhesive of any culture… symbol of the Social (after Durkheim) so raising the question of the nature of its replacements). Religion after religion… (and what of the other replacements: commodity and nation, other identities, other life-styles). And art…

 

Something after all must be put in the frame… must be found in the frame…

 

(…the frame of the self as well as the frame of the picture…)

 

Finding space/time, and temporality (past, present and future, as the place of human identity - along with their metaphysical shadow, the place of the immortals, of our modern day universals, eternity) also there, and not there… a mark of creativity on both sides…

 

 

Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2017