Allan Kaprow Art Doesnt Have to Look Like Art
©ALLAN KAPROW ESTATE/COURTESY THE ALLAN KAPROW ESTATE AND HAUSER & WIRTH/ALEXANDRE CAREL, LONDON
When the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock died in 1956, the New York art world knew, almost immediately, that it had lost one of the 20th century's near important artists. But what, exactly, was the touch on of his work at the fourth dimension? This was the artist Allan Kaprow's question when he wrote the essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," originally published in the October 1958 consequence of ARTnews. In his essay, Kaprow writes nearly what he calls "the Act of Painting"—the way in which Pollock turned painting into a ritualistic functioning of sorts, rethinking the fine art-making process as an activity that took place in time and made use of the trunk. This was something that Kaprow himself would come to rely on in his so-called "happenings," in which paintings became props in larger, temporary events that cast viewers participants. Yet Kaprow'south essay also takes Pollock to task for the cult of personality he had adult—perhaps he was not quite the genius that he seemed to be. On the occasion of a Kaprow exhibition at Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, the artist's essay follows in full beneath.—Alex Greenberger
"The Legacy of Jackson Pollock"
By Allan Kaprow
October 1958
The problem of Jackson Pollock, 2 years after his death is of paramount importance. The examples of his life and revolutionary style are increasingly, and not always benignly, influential, for his career has encouraged some artists in the perilous belief that cocky-destruction is necessary to the integrity of a work of art. Here a young vanguard painter attempts to separate the man from the myth, and too to suggest what Pollock volition mean to artists in 1960.
The tragic news of Pollock's expiry two summers ago was profoundly depressing to many of u.s.. Nosotros felt not only a sadness over the death of a neat effigy, merely in some deeper style that something of ourselves had died also. Nosotros were a piece of him; he was, possibly, the embodiment of our ambition for absolutely liberation and a secretly cherished wish to overturn one-time tables of crockery and flat champagne. We saw in his example the possibility of an phenomenal freshness, a sort of ecstatic blindness.
But, in addition, at that place was a morbid side to his meaningfulness. To "die at the top" for being his kind of modern artist was, to many, I think, implicit in the work before he died. It was this bizarre outcome that was so moving. Nosotros remembered van Gogh and Rimbaud. But here it was in our time, in a man some of us knew. This ultimate, sacrificial aspect of being an artist, while not a new idea, seemed, the way Pollock did it, terribly modern, and in him the statement and the ritual were then k, so authoritative and extensive in its scale and daring, that whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected by its spirit.
It was probably this latter side of Pollock that lay at the root of our depression. Pollock's tragedy was more subtle than his decease; for he did non dice at the top. One could not avert the fact that during the concluding five years of his life his force had weakened and during the final three, he hardly worked at all. Though everyone knew, in the low-cal of reason, that the man was very sick (and his death was perhaps a respite from almost certain time to come suffering), and that, in indicate of fact, he did not dice as Stravinsky's fertility maidens did, in the very moment of creation/annihilation — nosotros even so could not escape the disturbing itch (metaphysical in nature) that this death was in some direct manner continued with art. And the connection, rather than being climactic, was, in a way, inglorious. If the stop had to come, it came at the incorrect time.
Was it not perfectly clear that modern art in general was slipping? Either it had become dull and repetitious qua the "advanced" mode, or big numbers of formerly committed contemporary painters were defecting to earlier forms. America was celebrating a "sanity in art" movement and the flags were out. Thus, nosotros reasoned, Pollock was the center in a neat failure: the New Art. His heroic stand had been futile. Rather than releasing a freedom, which it at first promised, it caused him not only a loss of power and possible disillusionment, but a widespread admission that the jig was upward. And those of usa even so resistant to this truth would end the same mode, hardly at the top. Such were our thoughts in Baronial, 1956.
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But over two years have passed. What we felt then was genuine enough, only it was a limited tribute, if it was that at all. It was surely a manifestly human reaction on the function of those of united states who were devoted to the most advanced of artists around united states and who felt the daze of being thrown out on our own. Simply it did not actually seem that Pollock had indeed accomplished something, both by his attitude and by his very real gifts, which went across even those values recognized and acknowledged by sensitive artists and critics. The "Human action of Painting," the new space, the personal marker that builds its ain class and meaning, the endless tangle, the neat scale, the new materials, etc. are past now clichés of higher art departments. The innovations are accepted. They are becoming part of text books.
But some of the implications inherent in these new values are not at all equally futile as we all began to believe; this kind of painting need non be called the "tragic" style. Not all the roads of this mod art lead to ideas of finality. I risk the guess that Pollock may have vaguely sensed this, but was unable, because of illness or otherwise, to do anything about information technology.
He created some magnificent paintings. But he also destroyed painting. If we examine a few of the innovations mentioned above, it may be possible to see why this is so.
For instance, the "Act of Painting." In the final lxx-five years the random play of the hand upon the canvas or paper has get increasingly important. Strokes, smears, lines, dots, etc. became less and less attached to represented objects and existed more and more on their own, self-sufficiently. But from Impressionism up to, say, Gorky, the thought of an "club" to these markings was explicit enough. Even Dada, which purported to be free of such considerations as "composition," obeyed the Cubist esthetic. I colored shape balanced (or modified, or imitation) others and these in plough were played off against (or with) the whole sheet, taking into account its size and shape—for the virtually function, quite consciously. In short, function-to-whole or role-to-part relationships, no affair how strained, were at least a skillful fifty pct of making the picture. (Nigh of the time information technology was a lot more than, maybe ninety pct). With Pollock, however, the so-called "dance" of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing and whatever else went into a work, placed an almost absolute value upon a diaristic gesture. He was encouraged in this past the Surrealist painters and poets, but next to him their work is consistently "artful," "arranged" and full of finesse—aspects of outer command and training. With a choice of enormous scales, the canvas being placed upon the flooring, thus making hard for the artist for the artist to see the whole or any extended section of "parts," Pollock could truthfully say he was "in" his work. Hither the direct application of an automatic approach to the act makes it clear that not only is this not the old craft of painting, but information technology is perhaps bordering on ritual itself, which happens to use paint equally 1 of its materials. (The European Surrealists may have used automatism as an ingredient but hardly can we say they really practiced it wholeheartedly. In fact, it is but in a few instances that the writers, rather than the painters, enjoyed any success in this manner. In retrospect, nearly of the Surrealist painters appear to be derived from a psychology book or from each other: the empty vistas, the bones naturalism, the sexual fantasies, the dour surfaces and then feature of this catamenia take always impressed most American artists every bit a collection of unconvincing clichés. Hardly automated, at that. And such existent talents as Picasso, Klee and Miro belong more to the stricter discipline of Cubism than did the others, and mayhap this is why their work appears to us, paradoxically, more free. Surrealism attracted Pollock, as an attitude rather than as a collection of creative examples.)
Merely I used the words "near absolute" when I spoke of the diaristic gesture every bit distinct from the process of judging each movement upon the canvas. Pollock, interrupting his piece of work, would judge his "acts" very shrewdly and with treat long periods of time before going into another "act." He knew the difference between a skilful gesture and a bad one. This was his witting artistry at work and it makes him a role of the traditional community of painters. Yet the distance between the relatively cocky-contained works of the Europeans and the seemingly chaotic, sprawling works of the American betoken at best a tenuous connection to "paintings." (In fact, Jackson Pollock never actually had a "malerisch" sensibility. The painterly aspects of his contemporaries, such as Motherwell, Hofmann, de Kooning, Rothko, fifty-fifty Still, point up, if at i moment a deficiency in him, at another moment, a liberating characteristic—and this one I choose to consider the important one.)
I am convinced that to grasp a Pollock'due south touch on properly, one must exist something of an acrobat, constantly vacillating between an identification with the easily and trunk that flung the paint and stood "in" the canvas, and allowing the markings to entangle and assail one into submitting to their permanent and objective graphic symbol. This is indeed far from the idea of a "complete" painting. The creative person, the spectator and the other earth are much too interchangeably involved here. (And if one objects to the difficulty of complete comprehension, I insist that he either asks as well petty of art or refuses to look at reality.)
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And so Form. In gild to follow it, it is necessary to get rid of the usual thought of "Class," i.eastward. a kickoff, middle and end, or any variant of this principle—such as fragmentation. Yous exercise not enter a painting of Pollock'due south in any one place (or hundred places). Anywhere is everywhere and you tin dip in and out when and where you lot can. This has led to remarks that his art gives i the impression of going on forever—a true insight. It indicates that the confines of the rectangular field were ignored in lieu of an experience of a continuum going in all directions simultaneously, beyond the literal dimensions of whatever piece of work. (Though in that location is prove pointing to a probably unknowing slackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of his canvas, he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around the back of his stretchers.) The four sides of the painting are thus an abrupt leaving-off of the activity which our imaginations continue outward indefinitely, as though refusing to accept the artificiality of "ending." In an older piece of work, the edge was a far more precise caesura: here ended the world of the artist; beyond began the world of the spectator and "reality."
We have this innovation as valid because the artist understood with perfect naturalness "how to practise information technology." Employing an iterative principle of a few highly charged elements constantly undergoing variation (improvising, similar much Oriental music) Pollock gives united states an all-over unity and at the same fourth dimension a means continuously to respond to a freshness of personal choice. But this type of form allows us just besides an every bit strong pleasure in participating in a delirium, a boring of the reasoning faculties, a loss of "self" in the Western sense of the term. It is this strange combination of extreme individuality and selflessness which makes the work not only remarkably strong, but also indicative of a probably larger frame of psychological reference. And information technology is for this reason that any allusions to Pollock's being the marker of giant textures are completely incorrect. The point is missed and misunderstanding is bound to follow.
But given the proper approach, a medium-sized exhibition space with walls totally covered past Pollocks, offers the most consummate and meaningful sense of his fine art possible.
Then scale. Pollock's choice of enormous sizes served many purposes, primary of which for our discussion is the fact that past making mural-scale paintings, they ceased to become paintings and became environments. Earlier a painting, one's size as a spectator, in relation to that of the movie, greatly influences how much nosotros are willing to give up the consciousness of our temporal existence while experiencing it. Pollock's choice of keen sizes resulted in our being confronted, assaulted, sucked in. Yet nosotros must not confuse these with the hundreds of large paintings done in the Renaissance. They glorified an everyday world quite familiar to the observer, often, in fact, past ways of trompe l'oeil, continuing the actual room into the painting. Pollock offers us no such familiarity and our everyday earth of convention and habit is replaced by that i created by the artist. Reversing the above procedure, the painting is continued on out into the room.
And this leads to our concluding point: Space. The space of these creations is not clearly palpable as such. I tin can become entangled in the web to some extent, and past moving in and out of the skein of lines and splashings, tin can experience a kind of spatial extension. But fifty-fifty and then, this infinite is an allusion far more vague than even the few inches of space-reading a Cubist work affords. It may be that we are as well aware of our need to place with the procedure, the making of the whole thing, and this prevents a concentration on the specifics of earlier and behind, so important in a more than traditional art. But what I believe is clearly discernible is that the entire painting comes out at the participant (I shall telephone call him that, rather than observer) correct into the room. It is possible to meet in this connection how Pollock is the terminal result of a gradual tendency that moved from the deep space of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the building out from the canvas of the Cubist collages. In the nowadays case the "picture" has moved so far out that the canvas is no longer a reference point. Hence, although up on the wall, these marks surroundings united states as they did the painter at work, and then strict a correspondence has in that location been achieved between his impulse and the resultant art.
What we take then, is a type of art which tends to lose itself out of premises, tends to fill up our earth with itself, an art which, in meaning, looks, impulse, seems to intermission fairly sharply with the traditions of painters back to at least the Greeks. Pollock's virtually destruction of this tradition may well be a return to the point where art was more than actively involved in ritual, magic and life than we take known information technology in our contempo by. If so, it is an exceedingly of import step, and in its superior style, offers a solution to the complaints of those who would accept us put a bit of life into art. But what do we do now?
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There are two alternatives. I is to go on in this vein. Probably many good "near-paintings" can exist done varying this esthetic of Pollock's without departing from it or going farther. The other is to surrender the making of paintings entirely, I mean the unmarried, apartment rectangle or oval equally we know it. It has been seen how Pollock came pretty close to doing so himself. In the process, he came upon some newer values which are exceedingly difficult to discuss, yet they bear upon our present culling. To say that he discovered things like marks, gestures, paint, colors, hardness, softness, flowing, stopping, space, the globe, life, death—is to sound either naïve or stupid. Every artist worth his common salt has "discovered" these things. Simply Pollock's discovery seems to have a peculiarly fascinating simplicity and directness about information technology. He was, for me, amazingly childlike, capable of becoming involved in the stuff of his art every bit a group of physical facts seen for the first fourth dimension. There is, every bit I said earlier, a certain blindness, a mute belief in everything he does, even up to the end. I urge that this be not seen as a simple issue. Few individuals can exist lucky enough to possess the intensity of this kind of knowing, and I promise that in the near time to come a careful study of this (perhaps) Zen quality of Pollock's personality will be undertaken. At whatever charge per unit, for at present, we may consider that, except for rare instances, Western fine art tends to demand many more than indirections in achieving itself, placing more or less equal emphasis upon "things" and the relations between them. The crudeness of Jackson Pollock is not, therefore, uncouth or designed equally such; it is evidently frank and uncultivated, unsullied past training, trade secrets, finesse—a directness which the European artists he liked hoped for and partially succeeded in, but which he never had to strive afterward because he had it by nature. This past itself would be enough to teach us something.
Information technology does. Pollock, as I encounter him, left united states at the point where we must go preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, dress, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street. Non satisfied with the proffer through paint of our other senses, we shall apply the specific substances of sigh, sound, movements, people, odors, affect. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electrical and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a canis familiaris, movies, a grand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not simply volition these bold creators show the states, every bit if for the start fourth dimension, the earth we have always had about us, but ignored, but they volition disembalm entirely unheard of happenings and events, establish in garbage cans, police force files, hotel lobbies, seen in shop windows and on the streets, and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odour of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend or a billboard selling Draino; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler chapeau—all will go materials for this new concrete art.
The young artist of today demand no longer say "I am a painter" or "a poet" or "a dancer." He is merely an "artist." All of life will be open to him He will discover out of the ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Merely their real meaning will be stated. Just out of nothing he will devise the extraordinary and and then peradventure nothingness as well. People will exist delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or tickled, but these, I am sure, will be the alchemies of the 1960s.
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/archives-allan-kaprow-legacy-jackson-pollock-1958-9768/
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