“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
So begins Guy Debord’s lengthy and fragment musing around the society of the spectacle. We can package and labelling Debord as a number of things: a neo platonic deconstruction of twentieth century social conditions, a Marxist attack on the ramifications of the mechanics of Western capitalism, a leftist critique of the reduction of all experience to a fetishised consumption of commodity, a typically French form of post structuralism in which he muses around the death of meaning, the announcement of visual culture as merely simulacra of the total separation of the signifier from any point of original or new signification, the divorce of the carrier from meaning, an egotistical idealised vision of the current state of affairs, a needlessly confusing, idealised and romanticised pessimism of the conditioning of our consciousness, a poetic searching for the zeitgeist, an account of the unification of a society through technological advances which paradoxically lead to our separation and isolation, our collective lose of empathy and the deadening of the human condition. It’s all very perilous. It’s all very self consciously confusing. It’s an attack masked in a mazed structure and convoluted language in an effort to hide its flaws. Many of Debord’s claims are accurate but there is a lack of any clear solution. It’s a Marxist call for revolution which seems to ignore the fact that things are as things are and all we can hope to do is find a way to manipulate aspects towards something more positive or subvert elements of a system.
How does Andy Warhol’s art relate to Debord’s ideas? Are they aligned with his criticism, are they part of the situation Debord criticises or can they potentially be both? Does Warhol perhaps offer both an acceptance of the methods but a critique of the effects of the society in which he exists.
Warhol draws his subject matter directly from the world in which he lives. It is a direct affront and opposition to the solipsistic closed door on association on the abstraction which preceded Pop in the History of Western art. Warhol takes on the avant-garde baton, continuing the modernist obsession with ploughing new ground, of pushing on. Just as the American public had grown to accept and embrace the webbed drips of Pollock or the empty holes and blank walls of Rothko, they were confronted with its antithesis. Greenberg had worked tirelessly to convince the public of the need and existence of a new split between high and low culture, to raise fine art back to an elite level of separation from the everyday. Pop comes back and shatters the divide, pushing the everday and lowly into art in a manner never seen before. The barriers had been destroyed and the door, previously pushed open by numerous movements including Dada and Cubists collage (and then slammed shut by Greenberg) had been burst open. This was the platonic critique at its worst, the copy of a copy with seemingly no transference through the process of skill or concept. The most iconic and mundane aspects of the everyday were celebrated, seemingly in an acknowledgement on the banality and vacuous nature of of society. Campbell’s soup cans or Marilyn Munroe, the world was just being shown right back to us, mirrored without mediation.
In Warhol we just, therefore, presumably continue the empty, unconscious consumption of imagery, unaware of its degenerate effects: The death of feeling, the separation of the individual from society, the commoditisation of our every experience. On a base level Warhol’s work seem to merely perpetuate a problem, just shoving a new layer on a plague of our collective consciousness.
Such a reading does not take into account the clearly careful and deliberate choice of subject matter by Warhol. This is not the blank selection and reproduction that Warhol’s cliam to be like a machine would suggest. As has been stated in ‘Art from 1900’, ‘Warhol selects moments when the society of spectacle cracks’. Warhol hunts for points where the pervasive manipulation of our psyche comes on the verge of collapsing or implosion. By selecting Americas favourite food, and by depicting and capturing its most iconic star Warhol manages to ensure he finds the points where the condition has reached a peak, a point of resonance. It’s like a History painter searching through the narrative of a classic searching for the point of highest dramatic tension. Warhol searches through society, looking for the imagery which by being at the very core of the modes of production has a tension, which while not narrative certain is dramatic.
So are Warhol’s images merely a copy of a copy. Are they just a perpetuation of the society of the spectacle. Are they devoid of meaning, incapable of awakening us from our slumber, a repetition of the images which just wave over us, an affirmation of the lose of affect and empathy. If they are this then would it be obtuse to see them as a knowing comment and accurate to write them off as a needless excess layer of junk food visual and empty calorie sensation leading to the cultural and psychic obesity of the age?
Such high minded and polemical dismals seem to both simplify the condition and to search to pigeon hole Warhol in order to be able to package him up as an easy to digest product. There is an irony in such motifs which Debord would surely not appreciate? His reduction of the social condition to such extreme and myopic claims seems to be a repetition of the very process he criticises. Perhaps a realisation of his simplification sis what leads to the seemingly purposeful confusion he creates through his language and structure.
The truth is that Warhol, and the society in which he lived, cannot be easily packaged. Warhol carefully created a situation where he become a riddle, an enigma. His statements don’t easily help us understand him or his art, as the constant contradiction and paradoxes which he sets up lead to us doubting the validity of any one statement. He uses this vary confusion as one aspect of his brilliant marketing of himself as a product. Warhol is the godfather of Koons and Hirst, and any artist who has managed to turn themselves into a product. We should perahsp see Warhol’s own life as a work in its own right, and try adn avoid using any individual comment as a way in to understanding his work. Instead we should look at the workings of the comments as a whole, the construction and destruction of meaning in his claims is also apparent in his work.
If Warhol’s work is more complicated than a mere perpetuation of the society of the spectacle, then what is its impact and relationship to the situation Debord discusses?
In Art from 1900 the claim is made that Pop, and we can apply this very directly to Warhol, “does not register the death of affect so much as the affect of death” If we apply this statement to Warhol’s American disaster series then it opens up some interesting ideas.
I am moved by Warhol’s images of electric chairs, so the claim that they deal with the affect of death would seem true. Yet it is also true that they, like most of his work, seem to play on and enhance the emptiness of much modern imagery. They seem to repeat the idea of the simulacra, of the separation of the signifier from any signification and therefore the destruction of any emotional connection with the viewer. These two observations seem to be a contradiction., here is a work whose visuals clearly have a kind of removal of affect but which simultaneously seem to have a profound affect. Are the statements mutually exclusive, or can this paradox be explained both states being symbiotic?
How do these images work? Whether consciously or not, what professes do we go through when engaging with them for any period of time?
When we are first confronted with Warhol’s repeated images of electric chairs we are immediately aware of the kind of imagery we are dealing with. They are just one of a million of the images of horror which flood our screens and newspapers on a daily basis. Through screen printing the image onto canvas Warhol has been able to transfer the original relatively unchanged, perhaps only exaggerating its original quality as a clipping form a newspaper through the sharp imaged, areas of broken print and high tonal contrast that screen printed offers. Are both just sign of the bankrupt nature of modern imagery, stripped of emotive power and affect, ripped of its human values and associations, and turned into merely another image which we mindlessly filter through our retina.
The difference is one of perception, and this difference is created, predominantly, by the repetition of the image. We keep being hit by an image of true horror which has seemingly been emptied of affect until we become aware of this vary emptiness. The same image keeps hitting our retina, as if we keep flicking the channel, keep moving past another image, but it remains the same. It is only through the repetition that our consciousness is awoken. It remains empty but it is our awarenss of this emptiness which provides the shift.
Once we are aware that the image is empty as profound shift happens. We then do some simple emotional maths. We realise we are looking at an electric chair, an image which should be horrofici, but then we also realise we are looking at an image seemingly devoid of any emotional impact or resonance.
When an image keeps being emptied it eventually becomes full. When an image keep being killed if it comes back to life. The resurrection follows the crucifixion. The Zombie follows the martyr. When we become aware that we are feeling nothing towards an image of horror, we are appalled. WE awakening to our lack of empathy is the trigger for a new deep empathy, on create by guilt. It is as if the mage is reborn.
Our retina has been so attacked that the image retakes on all the values it has lost. The single isolated chair becomes a void into which the isolated separate consumer can take a seat. Warhol has activated us in the process of viewer, he has made the image relate directly to our very existence and experience and to engage us over time.
Warhol is not an artist merely perpetuating, blindly, the society of the spectacle. Warhol deals with tragedy. To claim he is subverting the system is too symplisitc, for he clearly is not as detached as that. Warhol becomes a part of the system, revels in it, but he also remains an ability to osilliate between an utter intoxication and a detached object realisation of its processes. In doing this he presents us with a image which sees the society of the spectacle weapons turned back on itself. It is not so much a critique but a presentation of circumstances. Warhol holds up a mirror, and sometimes it is only when we see a reflection of reality that we are able to understand its appearance and impact.

Ellsworth Kelly- La Combe I
C.S. Peirce was a semiologist who categorized signs into three groups, the Icon, the Index and the symbol. The notion of the index is that of a sign which has an un-coded relationship to it point of signification. When we see smoke we think of fire, when we see a foot print we think of a foot, when we see the shadow of a bottle we think of a bottle. These are signs which are not read primarily as themselves but as a direct relationship to a related being. The phenomenon of these signs creation requires a causal link, where one is a product of the other through a transference which does not take a removed step.
Rosalind Krauss discusses the idea of the index in regards to a series of artists. Once artist she does not discuss at length, but whose work her principles have been extensively applied to is Ellsworth Kelly.
Kelly’s work, such as ‘La Combe I’ (1951) initially appear to be images of pure abstraction, fitting in closely with the hard edged rigidity of post painterly abstraction. Yet the works are the product of a direct relationship with the indexical sign.
‘La Combe I’ is a large paneled work, consisting of a series of varying black stripes across the vertical of each white panel. Each strip is tightly painted on, devoid of any clear relation to the artists touch. The patterns are a direct translation of the patterns of light which came through Kelly’s apartment window and sat as shadows against his bedroom wall. He recorded the patterns rigorously and has represented them here.
Such shadows, when seen in the context of his room, are clearly indexical signs, referring primarily to the sensation of light piercing the window frames. Yet it would be incorrect to describe Kelly painting as an indexical sign. Once divorced of the spatial context of his rooms the patterns are separated from their direct and unfiltered or coded association to the passing of light through a window. They find a certain aesthetic autonomy. The index is broken through the fracturing and destabilizing of the sign, as the point of signification is lost once the signifier is relocated.
This linguistic trick is the core of Kelly’s work. What is enables him to do is capture the phenomenon of the natural world but to move beyond mimetic and illustrative representation. He is able to produce something with the aesthetic freedom of abstraction but the visual sensations of everyday light.
Our eyes dance up and across each panel, celebrating the musical opticality of the drawn line. A visual sensation which would have been transient and passing is held still by Kelly process.
It is no coincidence that Kelly keep returning to windows as a source of inspiration. The shadows from windows which sit on a wall have a unique spatial interplay. They read first as flat lines across a flat surface, but then there is a movement and depth to them created by the perspective and overlaying of lines. The passing of light through a window becomes a vehicle in which to transfer the two fold quality of painting, a surface which speaks to us both as flat and as a frame into which we can read depth. Thus Kelly’s transference of these lines of shadows creates a spatial field which we read both through and across.

Kelly’s deliberate depersonalization of the creation ensures this phenomenon is devoid of any of the express layers which exist in abstract expressionism. Kelly wants to remove any veils or codes between the viewer and a direct experience of the sensation he first saw in his bedroom. By removing both the artists touch and the indexical link to the patterns source, Kelly allows us to read the pattern entirely in optical terms.
For all Michael Freid’s myopic formalism, it can’t help be noted that this comes about as close to possible to his ideal values in painting. The irony is that it has been found through a deep and personal engagement with the real world, rather than the Modernist ideal of a purely formal obsession with the spreading of the medium over a two dimensional support.

Eight sheets of fabric dipped in latex and suspended in fibre glass hang from the ceiling. They are all roughly human scale, varying between about nine and ten foot in height. Some hover just above the floor whilst others just tickle its surface, one bends at the base, seemingly under the force of its contact with the floor. The fabric dipped in latex tends to reach from about a quarter to three quarters of the sheets entire length. At each end, therefore, is a crumbled, transparent area of fibreglass, which allows light to flood through. Light is able to pierce the more opaque central sections, occasionally working its way through chinks in the fabric or occasionally glowing through an area where the surface is stretched like a membrane.

The process of viewing these objects is both optical and physical. We start by circumnavigating the collective, our attention drawn to the repetition of form and the shifting interrelation of parts, in terms of their materiality and scale. We become aware of both their similarities and their differences. Broadly they are all the same, fitting into the generic description above. Yet the shift in scale and thickness attests to both the natural qualities of the materials and the handmade nature of their production.

Upon circling the whole we are drawn into the constituent parts. There is something deeply seductive about the surface, it is almost irresistibly tangible. We become slightly mesmerised by the shifting qualities of light within and through the surfaces. We are aware of the inherent contradiction in the work. It is seemingly fragile, ephemeral and delicate, yet there is a certain rigidity and weight to the pieces. In spite of their fragility they intimidate us through their scale. There is just enough room for us to move between each sheet, but we dare not. We are both intimidated by the seemingly claustrophobic space and worried about breaking or disturbing the surface and stillness of the forms.

The experience is one of seductive allure and uncomfortable intimidation. The ambiguity of the emotive experience is a paradox, but it is the space between these two psychological registers in which we find the constant framework for our experience. The seduction and intimidation are merely factors, signs, which direct us towards an enveloping sensation of ambiguity and uncertainty.

We can almost drown in the multiple associations these eight hanging sheets induce, almost all of which are anthropomorphic. They appear like dresses, beautiful fabrics weighting for the final tailoring of the designer. The whole reads like some mystical clothes line, with static forms seemingly capable of blowing in the wind. They are flayed skins, the trophies of some ritualistic torture or punishment. They are hanging carcasses of some unknown animal, the display room of a butchers of some unknown abattoir. They are sheets of honeycomb glowing and in the process of decaying or vague resemblances of bodily forms floating just above the ground. The rough human scale, the sense of skin in the surface, the fragility of the materiality’s, the translucency of the parts reading like autumn leaves held up to the sun. It is all of these properties which lead to us making such human associations.

All of these associations have an inherent contradiction. They attest to the material beauty of the surfaces and forms and the seemingly horrific associations of the whole. Somewhere in this dialogue lies the works meaning.

‘Contingent’ (1969) is one of Eva Hesse’s most iconic works, completed not long before she became terminally ill. The above readings make more sense when placed in the wider context of her production. She had a continued fascination with fragile and ephemeral materials. She liked having fun with the ability to transform materials, playing against their natural quality. She used surface and form to play linguistic games, situating her sculptures in position where visual slippage was possible. A form might read both as an internal organ and a phallus. The ambiguity caused by this, leaving us feeling uncertain and possibly uncomfortable was crucial to her practise. The potential for the repetition or doubling of the sign was often central to creating this ambiguity, creating a sense of the absurd in her work. She was certainly consciously looking for the absurd, we only need to look ‘Hang Up’ (1965-6) to realise this. Her work was imbued with a humour, sexuality and sensitivity, all of which point towards a poetic sensibility.

Situating Hesse’s work into a wider context can also be helpful. The label ‘Post Minimalism’ is often applied to Hesse. It does not give a conclusive picture of her practise, but it does point to a interesting relationship with the minimalism of the recent past. As Lippard points out, Hesse takes a number of the devices and approaches of minimalism and uses them to new ends. Industrial materials are used, but handmade rather than made to order. Repetition is taken on, but the play on subtle differences becomes as importance as the exactitude of repetition is to the minimalists such as Judd. For all Judd’s celebrations of a materials natural properties we have Hesse’s celebration of the ability to transform a material into a state which goes against its natural suggestions and being.

Hesse’s work is certainly no cynical deconstruction and critical commentary on Judd et al. Rather it attests to the evolutionary quality of art, where one artist takes ideas from another and positions them in a new context, both at the stage of production and consumption. Hesse’s work also happens to throw new light on artists such as Judd, showing up the inaccuracies of much of the criticism and ideology surrounding the work. For all the singularity and visual purity of Judd’s specific object, there remains a definite spatial ambiguity to his practise which becomes more apparent when we have seen Hesse’s work.

It would be wrong to harness Hesse merely as a tool to reinvestigate minimalist work. Equally it would be wrong to project certain biographical details of Hesse’s life, which has been done excessively, onto the sculptures. They have an independence which is above and beyond this.

When viewing them we are placed in a position of uncertainty, both aroused by the beauty of the work and intimidated by the possible associations. The careful balance between fragility and structure makes us aware of the own works transience and thus our own mortality, as both an individual and humans in general. By creating a situation and feeling which is clearly neither illustrative or specific, Hesse is capable of tapping into an aspect of the human condition which is universal. We are left feeling awe and fear over the very vulnerability of existence as a whole. The fact that the work now only exists, from the original, in photographic form, means that this feeling is experienced at one step removed. Yet if we are able to bridge that gap, then this reality feeds even deeper into the works being.

Jackson Pollock, a Zombie Michelangelo. This is not a believe in reincarnation, but more the notion that both can be seen to exemplify a Hegelian process of emergence; the ethereal Zeitgeist working itself out into the corporeal world through an unconscious interplay between the ‘genius’ artist and his social/political/historical context.

Pairing these artists might seem needlessly grandiose and obtuse, looking to establish links between the two grand traditions of Western art which are often positioned as antithetical. A search for continuous histories rather than specific differences, however, reveals that aspects of art, and therefore perhaps the human condition, remain constant.

The analysis of Pollock within this framework requires a consideration of Clement Greenberg Modernist doctrine. Greenberg’s position is navigated by a reading of classical art which seems to align itself with Vasari’s account of the Italian Renaissance.

Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’ provides a three stage account of the Italian Renaissance, culminating in 16th Century Central Italy, and in particular Michelangelo. Vasari labelled great art as having a focus on the intellectual properties of design, the use of draughtsmanship for purely mimetic, figurative ends. Multiple figures placed in a convincing box like space were arranged to relate to some grand biblical or historical subject. A painting was to be a window which denied its reality as a two dimensional support with paint spread across it.

Greenberg describes a historical journey which moves in the opposite direction, with painting returning to itself. He describes a move from Manet, through Cubism and to the Nadir of abstract expressionism.

Greenberg stated:

“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”

This Kantian methodology is the nub of Greenberg’s argument for a Modernist approach to painting. The argument is for a painting which celebrates its flatness and the spreading of paint across a two dimensional support. Subject matter is to be done away with in place of a singular focus on the formal properties of the discipline.

The work of Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock is thus held up as the ultimate example of each doctrines ideal. Seen through the eyes of Vasari and Greenberg, therefore, Michelangelo and Pollock are the total antithesis of each other.

Such a standpoint needs to be filtered through a realisation of the limitations of both writers. Both are bastadisations of history, myopic assessments made to justify their position. The work of the artists preceding Pollock and Michelangelo is manipulated to fit into a preconceived narrative. Both make the presumption that the ideals they espouse for their historical and geographic context can be accurately and liberally applied to past art from different locations. Cubism is reduced to a mere step towards abstraction, rather than an intense testing of the limits of realism. Piero Della Francesca’s spiritual stillness and geometric flatness is seen as an inability to create the depth and dynamism of a Michelangelo. An in depth analysis of the misreading of the art which precedes their respective demi god’s is not necessary here. The implications such mistakes have on their readings of Michelangelo and Pollock are what is at stake here.

Numerous other reassessments of Greenberg criticise his analysis and implementation of his findings, but not the findings themselves. David and Cecile Shapiro and Eva Cockcroft make detailed accounts of political implications of Greenberg’s doctrine and Pollock’s work. They highlight a paradox in the account, that the idea of the works as autonomous, solipsistic closed doors on association, is exactly what made them such potent political weapons; as symbols of American liberty and the freedom of the individuals expressionism. This is held in direct opposition to Soviet Socialist realism.

Fur gives an account of Greenberg’s amnesia over the importance of Surrealism both to Pollock and Modernism in general. She reassess his work, particularly the ‘cut out’ pieces’ within the context of his connection to surrealism. Her psychoanalytical approach, not of the biographical type but rather the pychology of the works and their impact on the viewer, reinvigorates Pollock’s practise.

New Art historical approaches, particular gender studies, provide an almost limitless critique of Greenberg and the whole process of production and consumption in which Pollocks work was produced. There is not enough room to even summarise those here, but Michael Leja and Anna C. Chave are of particular interest.

What these various revisionist accounts reveal, however, is a common condition. The Greenbergian doctrine ignores the clear importance of Pollocks imagery within fields of thought outside the frame. They are not closed doors but potent images which resonate through every level of the social and historical context in which they were produced. They emerge from and engage with the real tangible world in numerous and profound ways.

The mythologizing of Pollock and Michelangelo has been covered in much depth. Barbara Rose gives a good account of the role of Greenberg and Namuth in the sublimation of Pollock image. Krauss’ scathing account in the ‘Optical Unconscious’ demonstrates the exact mechanics of the creation of the Pollock myth.

The problem with much of the new literature on Pollock is that it takes Greenberg’s account as its basis rather than Pollocks work. The shift in this hierarchy moves the work from what should be a secure position at the centre of analysis, and instead focuses on the possibilities of errors in Greenberg’s application of his analysis. What is almost always taken for granted, therefore, is the visual analysis itself.

It is the presumption that Greenberg’s visual observations are correct that I wish to dispute, so reclaiming new ground for the possible understanding of Pollock’s work in a wider history of painting. The sheer flatness of the works, the visual power of the imagery and the balancing of formal content are all crucial to the dynamics of viewing a Pollock.

Harold Rosenberg’s account of Pollock and the other abstract expressionists is often dismissed, partly for its madcap notion that the objects themselves are subordinate to the process. Rosenberg’s dismissal of the finished product is clearly flawed, but his analysis of the importance of the process and the shift in the manner in which artists approached the canvas, is of deep importance.

Rosenberg famously stated:
“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than 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.”

His claim that what was to go on was merely an event, and the picture lacked importance was incorrect. But it is true that Pollock’s works should be read in the terms in which they are created. They are recorded of an event, which is true of all paintings, but a Pollock expresses this truth at every stage of the viewing process.

We cannot escape the physicality of Pollock’s gesture. Our eyes trace the journey the paint made from the stick to the canvas. Each curved line talks of the movements of his arms across the surface and of his body around is perimeter.

The is a distinct musical quality to the way our eyes move up, across and through a Pollock. We engage in an optimality which has various rhythms, paces and melodies. Our eyes transverses a great swath of canvas, as one sweep grabs us, then we are held in a congested cluster before finding a way out and around the canvas again. The hypnotic quality of this journey sees us coming in tune with the pulse, beat and sensations of Pollock, like we might settle into the patterns of a signers voice or a drummers beat. We are not afforded a total detachment from the process of the images creation, instead we are actively involved in it, particularly as the image still seems alive, in the process of shifting and moving.

Biographic projector onto images is widely, and rightly, dismissed, but this engagement cannot fail but to open up some kind of reading and understanding with the mythological character of Pollock. There is something overtly masculine and sexual about the manner in which these images are made, and this something violently assaults our eyes on viewing the finished image. The great Amercian hero, all energetic, all action, athletically parading around the canvas, sticks held as if extensions of the penis, wildly ejaculating over the bare skin laid across the floor.

Rosenberg was wrong to dismiss the finished object as secondary to the process of the images making, but Greenberg and others are wrong to forget the importance of this process. The object and the process are always intrinsically linked, and in Pollock this link is central to any reading. The final object is, as much as anything else, a potent index of its own creation. Pollock’s paintings are monologues, providing autobiographies of their own making.

Perhaps the most common misconception of a Pollock is the notion that they speak entirely of flatness, a singular description of the spreading of the material across the surface. This is heralded as a modernist ideal. The reality of the images comes closer to a permanent ideal of painting.

View a Pollock in the flesh. Your eyes travels up and across the canvas, attaching itself to a single line, moving at pace across the surface. As the line moves over or below the webbed lattice our eyes moves with it, shifting across subtle illusionistic and physical depths. Our journey is often broken but arrival at points of coagulation. Our eyes shift from attention on a single line to awareness of a web area, this shift in registers creates the illusion of depth. Suddenly a space is opened up which our eye can fall into, dependant on the area and the painting, this depth various from very shallow to infinitely deep. It’s akin to the depths we find in a forest as our eyes search and move between layers of trees.

We are constantly oscillating between a reading across the surface to a reading through the surface. This two fold play between the reality of flatness and the illusion of depth if not new, but is a permanent truth of painting. The second we lay any mark on a canvas a sense of depth is created. The second we lay any mark on a canvas an awareness of flatness is created. The job of the painter is to harmonise these two registers.

This two fold play is something Pollock and Michelangelo both do. Look at Lavender Mist and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ (Sistine Chapel). Is the viewing process that different? In the Last Judgement our first reading is not to go through the wall, but instead for our eyes to travel up and across, running up, around and across the spiralling mass of forms in the sky. It is a secondary, although equally as strong, reading which takes us into the picture. Like with a Pollock, we are aware of the image as a window and a wall, no viewing is spatially singular.

Both achieve these through their use of line. Michelangelo’s line is obviously harnessed towards exquisite mimetic ends, a figurative master class. Pollock’s line is, clearly, liberated from any direct figurative concerns. Yet for both there is a grammar of vision, there is an importance in using line as a sign with a multiplicity of references. They are aware of the role of line in the mechanics of viewing a painting. They use it to navigate us across and through the canvas, always fluctuating between both spatial registers.

It is the shift between two points of opposition which underpins Pollock’s work. The basic construction of Pollock’s work resides in a careful balance between order and chaos. Krauss’ essay on Pollock in ‘The Optical Unconscious’ reveals a history of criticism on the work which looks to polarise our reading. The language seems to veer towards a focus on the intrinsic order within his work or its seeming chaos, each being used as a device with which to either denigrate or subliminate his work.

The aggressive accusations claim ‘A dog or cat could do better’, they are ‘painted with a broom’, Pollock has just pissed on the canvas. They are labelled as the daubings of a pissed spider excreting paint.

The apologists praise the works relation to natural ordering systems, to the tight patterning of classical compositions,

The reality is that both statements are true of the works, they seem to sit precariously between utter chaos and a beautifully composed order. Just as our eye settles into a rhythm, defined by the seeming consistent ordering of the lattice of lines, the whole image breaks down. The image then becomes a sheer mess of lines in front of our eyes, just as it seems to be incomprehensible, our eye takes on a new line, bringing the whole into a new focus. We rediscover potential orders and patterns within the work.

Krauss correctly relates the distinction between the two points in regards to the shift in the works from a horizontal mode of production and a vertical axis or consumption. She discusses the shift in terms of the sublimation of Pollock. Yet it seems to reach further than this. In shifting from the horizontal to the vertical Pollock shifts gravity. A line of paint which sits flat, without dripping, goes on a journey from a mere index of Pollock’s process and past presence to a floating phenomenon of liberated line. It is the shift from the framework of the works making to its viewing, which raises the makes Pollock makes beyond a mere record of his presence and into a world of otherness. There is a certain magic within this new gravity defining pattern, a kind of unconscious energy which seems to sit beneath the line. They seem alive, but they seem to speak of mystical internal forces rather than being mere autobiographical accounts of their making.

In laying his canvas across the floor Pollock was able to liberate line, to reinvigorate his range of marks, to find his signature expression. But it is in the shifting of the plane back to the vertical for the purposes of viewing which allows his webs of lines to transcend themselves and to find a moving power which is akin to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. The word ‘Terribalata’ was used to describe the sense of awe which the Last Judgement induced on viewers. Its closest translation is perhaps to the 19th Century ideal of the sublime. It seems that this is the best frame in which to read Pollocks work, as if it is a sublime landscape, and we become Friedrichs wanderer, looking across and into a force of nature.

Cecily Brown

I like Cecily Brown’s work. Her figures emerge and get lost within dense painterly surfaces, which often have a nod to the alloverness of abstract expressionism. Sometimes they are masses of figures, piled up like abstract shapes in some filthy orgy. Other times the spatial setting is more literal, the classic window box setting put through a de Kooning blender, pastoral idylls recalling renaissance depictions of figures ‘courting’ in the idyllic countryside.

The slipperyness of her surfaces attracts me, its not the meaty flesh of Saville, the ripped open flesh of Bacon or the fleshy flesh of Freud. It’s a sexual flesh, the very spreading of the medium, its seeming fluidity, as if on the verge of coagulating. It speaks lucidly of the transformation between states of matter, be that paint or flesh. The eroticism and sexual allure of both is not presented as some academic diatribe, but merely presents itself as the result of a painter instinctively aware of both.

I don’t know how much more Cecily Brown’s work does for me. Certainly anything else it does is in direct association with this kind of sensibility, delighting in the playfulness of her understanding of matter, colour and mark. They don’t seem to engage me beneath the surface. It’s more like a night of passion, which whilst you might come back for more, you don’t see yourself developing a truly meaningful relationship.

Martin Kippenberger was one of a series of younger artists from the 1980’s influenced by the influx into Berlin of renegade artists such as Richter and Baselitz. Berlin, whilst a centre of political and socail unrest, became a melting pot of creative forces. Kippenbergers death at 43 in 1997 has made him an iconic figure of this period. His open embrace of a wide variety of media and methods heralded new levels of creative liberation.

Martin Kippenberger Selfportrait

Underlying the hetrogenous nature of his approach is a contextual framework of deconstructing and rebelling agasint systems and idealism.

The above work, with Kippenberger himself the model, sees the figure respond to a history of self agrandising heroism and myth making. He presents himself as middle aged, stripped down to some kind of nappy, scruffy and chubby. No idealistic youth, musculature of stature. Not even the grandeur of the occult or the signfiicantly deformed. The parody of the two limp ballons improbably lifting his lardy torso is has a certain melancholic wit, the melancomic. The wit comes from the our understanding of the imbalance between the reality of such physics and the illuded possibility.

A certain triggering of shadowed pasts flickers into our heads. A middle aged, lumpy Icarus with ballons instead of wings, no grand ascent or decent. Instead a rise and fall so small that rather than a narrative ark we are left with a moment in flux.

Like in past works of grand subjects, the single figure becomes a metaphor for wider conditions. Kippenbergers floating man seems to resonate with certain conditions which seem to ooze out of the discourse of the Western world towards the end of the 20th Century.

Everything she references, whether consciously or not, appears to be contained in quotation marks but the citational act is almost inconspicuous, happily lacking the pomp or pious irony so prevalent in much contemporary art. It’s as though the artist is telling us “here’s a shipwreck in the manner shipwrecks apparently demand”, or “let’s pretend that painting this way is still possible and we’ll see what the result is”. And the result is somewhere between playful questioning and genuine emotional investment, the ghosts of past pictorial conventions making themselves present in and through a practice that is “absolutely modern”, receptive enough to entertain – but also transform – selected moments from the art historical archive, reactivating these borrowed or stolen signs of painting so as to recharge and regenerate painting itself. (Letting the Ghosts In: Nadia Hebson, Peter Suchin)

The proposition of the title to this blog, taken from Peter Suchins essay on the artist Nadia Hebson has a massive pull for me at the moment. So much of my research has taken me towards this fundamental question about the problems of knowledge in contemporary society. The notion that we now “know” so much, conversely leaves us with not very much to say other than cynical put downs and ironic quips. The interesting artists around at the moment are the one’s who arrive at their subject with geniune fondness.

For me this problem has resulted in an interest in religious iconography, childhood play and the practice of Shamanism in indigenous communities. I will put some of my works up when I feel they start to succeed in capturing some of the honesty that belief bestows, at the moment they appear to be commenting on the problem without engaging with it. When you look at work by the old masters, or anything up to the modernist period, there is a conviction in the production, the belief that their work means something and can fundamentally change someones perception of the world, the work of today is struck in its majority by a crisis in confidence and often it appears to be the case that the artist avoids opening themselves up to the criticism that they are naive, by finding ways to avoid commiting themselves utterly to their art.

The problem is manifest in 2 ways however, not just is it the artists unwillingness to commit fully to their craft, it is also the audience and their knowingness of the same issues as the artist. There is a certain fear in the audience to be visibly moved by art, although it is ok to be cerebrally moved. I find this strange when the original conception of art was all fire and brimstone, to tell in pictures the stories of religions, to have an immediate emotional impact upon the viewer. Artists have thus attempted to escape from the habituation of cerebral lethargy by the audience by breaking the traditional boundaries of active and passive participation, shocking the viewer into a response.

As an artist I think this space should be explored more thoroughly. Perhaps a healing needs to be performed, the boundary of belief needs to be reinstated between viewer and the artist.

I had a truly great experience when I went to London last week, visited 2 shows that are 2 of the best I have seen in a very long time, Gerhard Richters portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and Annette Messagers retrospective at the Hayward.

Messagers retrospective, The Messangers,centred around her successful pavilion at the Venice Biennale which they have transferred to the Haywards space.  It is astonishing to me that this important artist has not had much previous recognition in the UK considering the validity and sensitivity of her output over the past 30 years. 

In my eyes (a masculine eye I consede) there are not many other artists who have succeeded so well in decoding and reviewing the mysterious quality of the female rhythm.  By this I refer to the problem facing female artists in a still largely male dominated arena and the difficulty they may face in finding their own true voice, where so much in the peripheral vision of their sub-conscious remains masculine. In musical terms I would describe the female rhythm quite literally in the rhythm of Laura Nyro’s music, it is not the boom cha-ca throbbing rhythm of much music, which I would describe as having masculine origins, but is more various, harder to pin down and relies much more on the flight of the melody leading the rhythm rather than vice-versa, a bit like a very complex song thrush. 

Annette Messager’s work speaks to me on these terms; it is at once whimsical, delicate and lyrical but is just as likely to flip suddenly to a forlorn melancholy or an aggressive and voracious sexuality (akin to P J Harvey at her best) .  Quite simply, it was an intoxicating experience, liable to cause a man to well-up or have to sheepishly walk out of the gallery space like a teenager with his bag in front of his crotch.

Richters show was a different experience.  As a painter I can’t begin to explain the importance that this man has had in defining my thinking on this, the most complex of practices. 

I was stunned first of all by the sheer painterliness of his portraits which I had been led to believe were much more closely reliant on their photographic roots.  It made my heart sing to see the tensions created on the surfaces between flat areas and thick gloopy masses, and I left feeling utterly dejected at the prospect that there was no way of topping his achievements. 

The thing that struck me was the deep expression and sensitivity within the clarity of his vision, by maintaining such a cold stance in the face of ideology I was wary that by seeing his works close up they would hold nothing more than all the other second rate photorealists that have been and gone.  I should have known this wouldn’t be the case, from looking at his abstracts you can clearly tell he has a deep relationship with the matter of paint, only with his portraits he plays with the lines of his diatribes so cleverly.  When talking about emptying out the idealogy of his work he succeeds in creating works that are more isolated in their completeness, even when they appear to be very similar, each image seems to have been approached successfully on its own terms and the reason for painting it is found within the diversity of one’s personality.  One image finds its sleazy core, another, a surreal whimsy whilst another finds a delicate tenderness and this is all in one room where the curators have hung them because of the similarity of their handling.

A painter par excellence, I can’t rate this show highly enough.  I want to go back.

Tintoretto’s use of space reminds me of Caravaggio’s use of light, its excessively theatrical. It is interesting that Tintoretto should chose an almost square format in which to create, through the use of architecture, an incredibley deep recessive hole. Rather than being a perverse challenge, its as if he wants the power of the depth, without provide total distraction from the central drama in the foreground. Logically we are aware of this deep impression of space, but the square squeezes the life from it, so pulling our eyes, or keeping them locked to, the foreground action.

On the left a quite brilliant figural arrangement takes place. One figure stands tall and flat to the picture plane. The other lies flat, horizontal, and pierces the picture plane with the kind of foreshortening of a man trying to out do Michelangelo at his own game.

In Caravaggio’s ‘David and Goliath’ (1610) the hero presents the viewer with the screaming head of Goliath; David remains stoically calm despite the obvious magnitude of his heroism. Viewed from today the image, whilst great, seems ludicrous in the depth of its theatricality.

I restaged the image, performing a series of dramatic poses and gestures which similarly looked hold out a hand as if presenting a victors trophy to the audience. These performances lead to a series of prints.

The emptiness of the hand exposes the figures dramatic self importance to ridicule. His heroic nudity if castrated by his wearing of socks and boxers. Is there anything more pathetic than socks and boxers? The regal crimson and red is merely meant to provide another clash between the figures ideal self image as a hero and the reality of his ineptitude.