[PEN-L:2056] A Nation Magazine review of the Pollock show

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From Arthur Danto's review of the Pollock show in the current Nation
(http://www.thenation.com)

"If I am right about the drips in Blue Poles, Pollock must have painted it
on a vertical canvas, using runny paint, at least in part, the way Mitchell
was to do. Why then this return to verticality? On this I have nothing to
offer, other than the thought that he must have felt he had gone as far as
he could within the Zeugganz of the canvas on the floor. There are other
regressions evident as well. The figure begins to come back, for example.
So it may have been a case of taking a backward step in order to advance.
To an artist committed as Pollock was to the Original Creative Principle,
the faith would have been that sooner or later a set of forms would well up
from the unconscious--and indeed in one case they did. There is a powerful
late painting of 1953 called The Deep, as vaginal as Courbet's Origin of
the World, in which the female opening is monumentalized and detached from
the woman's body, like something with a life of its own. The orifice--see
if The Deep means something else to you--is a dark cleft in a field of
white paint seemingly scrubbed on. There is a minimal use of interlacing
strings of white paint across the orifice, which conveys a kind of wetness.
There are no drips, but there are some fierce dashes of yellow in the
surrounding white."

----

God, what a load of hot air. I stopped subscribing to the Nation just
recently after reading it on a weekly basis since the early 1980s. Danto is
a professor here at Columbia University and is habitually unreadable and
obscure, which I suppose is no obstacle to being an art critic. What amazes
me is that this review makes absolutely no reference to political context.
The Nation Magazine used to have art critics who were quite keen on the
political associations of the various artists they were reviewing. Danto
seems bent on depoliticizing everything he writes about.


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)