Hix Nix Stix Pix
John Berger gave the initial devastating dismissal, or diagnosis, of Abstract Expressionism. He said it is the suicide of art as capitulation to capital. The artists are just making capital assets that are nothing else. The point is well taken, but finally I disagree with this: there is content, even figure per se, in some AbEx. Much of it embarassing. Like Freudism, it is more than merely fixated on infancy and childhood, conceived as ferociously egoist; it is a wholesale rejection, subversion, and suspicion of adulthood, to which it imputes mere disguises of same. As I’ve noted in the past, this painting is clearly an ejaculation for mommy’s fridge. With the traces of the wrestling and writhing and the whole fantasy conquest writ huge. So yes, capital assets, but one thing we can say about all Abstract Expressionism is it protests its innocence. It makes capital assets — it expropriates labor — and protests its innocence. So American. So bourgeois. The ejaculation as the cover story generalizes although it’s not always the main event.
Started to read Rachel Cusk’s Parade and think it’s an embittered and resentful (maybe, not sure yet, early days) homage to Berger’s G. That’s G for [Don] Giovanni. A soft G, like in the pronunciation of his own surname. Cusk’s multifarious subject/s is/are also G. One of the G’s is a painter who revives his flagging powers by painting things upside down. Somehow I think of this G as likely hard in its absent context. He’s depicting an inverted world — not simply paintings signed and hung upside down, Cusk is careful to explain.
Early on we get this line:
It was because of the forests that G. found a way out of his artistic impasse, caught as he had felt himself to be between the anecdotal nature of representation and the disengagement of abstraction.
I’m reading a terrific book by James Hyman called The Battle for Realism, which is teaching me something, or unteaching something I was wrongly given impressions of. That is, it is about how the real political struggle in postwar art (this book deals with Britain, and a British scene defending itself again Americanization) was the battle over practises of representation, figuration, realism, and not between realism and abstraction. Abstraction was kind of a side show. Everyone got it, got why it hit so big and why they shouldn’t bother with it except financially. The political struggle was between schools and approaches to non-abstract art.
more shortly…