So Roberta and I have continued talking about abstract and bodies, and where abstraction lost the popular vote and forgot about the power of flesh, pheromones, biology and nature (shown, Fernand Leger’s Le Mecanicien, painted when abstraction still contained a little real world).When abstract abstracted itself from the body and our world of reality and started to talk to itself about painting and art issues instead, it fell off the radar of the majority of people in this world.
I’m thinking here about Jackson Pollack and his drips (shown, Pollack’s Autumn Rhythm). No matter how I stare at those things, I read paint. So this paint is drippy and gestural instead of brushed and gestural. But Pollack’s subject in my view is how to apply paint. (I hear hollow laughing out there, so my advice, if you’re laughing, is send us a post showing how wrong I am.)
But I’m not going to buy the argument that Pollack’s drips are about the body because they’re about piss and semen. Piss and semen as mere fluids, excreted and then dried up, raise not a lot of interest. And frankly, how paint is applied raises not a lot of interest, unless how it is applied is part and parcel of something bigger and better.
And by bigger and better, I ain’t talking about the size of the canvas. Nor am I talking about the size of Jackson’s body parts, which are no where to be seen.
