writings

Meditation No. 1: Chasing "The american infinite"

F.W. Kent Collection University Archives The University of Iowa Libraries

Here is a wonderful image… a photograph taken at my alma mater, in one of the painting studios of The University of Iowa in 1952.

The University had recently acquired Jackson Pollock’s vast and revolutionary Mural (1943), originally commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim for her apartment in New York City. This extraordinary work of abstraction constituted, as much as anything, a kind of agitated, high voltage portal to infinity, past which the artist would push so far in the years to come, that he would eventually lose himself… and his way. In 1952, the university had no other place to hang the work…it ended up high on this studio wall for quite a few years… and it does perhaps look just a tad bit incongruous in this setting, I must say, but probably may have leaked into some students’ heads while they were working on their portraits or still-life paintings? Perhaps the professor here has referred to Pollock’s work… what might he have said, I wonder… the walls are hung with student works echoing Picasso, Braque, Utrillo, and Derain… how about the young chap painting the Cézanne-inspired still-life with 'interrupted perspective'—that's very clever... Someone is using an antique mirror to work from, turned on its side, the fellow on the far right is painting an upturned rural postbox and a cog wheel, the woman in the bottom left corner, with her Sylvia Plath hair style, is applying paint to the forehead of her portrait in three-quarter view, and everyone has brought their metal toolboxes full of art supplies…you can almost smell the oil paint in the room… I don’t think there is a sound in this very serene space, except the hushed critique we see going on... the image of the professor and student in the foreground, is just iconic, isn’t it? In the student’s painting there is a standing figure pointing upward…towards something in the sky, and there is a seemingly infinite pause taking place as the professor, dressed in his double breasted suit, considers this work in progress… my own sensory apparatus is being stimulated for some reason, by the shine of that woman’s shoe in the middle of the photograph…she stands, paintbrush in hand, and stares at her work… what will be the next move? It’s quite likely that that is the question going through most everyone’s minds in this picture— for every action taken, while painting, requires this reflexive question… often accompanied by feelings of extreme doubt as to whether the last move was the right one. The seeming serenity of this scene is belied by what every artist and student of art knows to be the true condition of the creative process: the anxiety which one feels as one moves into unknown territory. The problem of being stuck in the present moment and not feeling able to see things objectively… one gets lost, over and over again. And there is often this pitched battle between feeling and analysis…

There is just so much going on, here, albeit quietly in this image, and it seems as if it is happening right now, but this photograph was taken almost seventy years ago, and probably most of these people are dead or very old, in their nineties… and yet, here they are, with all the possibilities of the lives and careers that lie ahead of them, earnestly working away in the hazy afternoon light of this studio, and there, hanging on the wall above them, is one of the seminal paintings of the twentieth century… like some strange creature which has entered the quietude of this moment and is dancing, shouting, writhing, demanding to be noticed…

Beyond the walls of this studio, in that momentous year of 1952, a host of extraordinary developments and events are taking place… As America’s postwar economy booms and the nation's march of progress gains ever greater momentum, the United States flies for the first time, its long range jet-powered strategic bomber, the B52 Stratofortress. It tests its first hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, detonating a device almost a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb, completely destroying the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll and the wildlife and vegetation of the surrounding islands.

As The Cold War evolves, and the Korean War rages on, Americans prosper…three out of five families own a car, two out of three families now have a telephone, one in three homes have a television. A Polio epidemic affects fifty-thousand American families, killing more than three thousand people and paralysing fifty-seven thousand children, before a vaccine is found. The University of Tennessee admits its first Afro-American student and communist teachers are banned from teaching in public schools. The first “Don’t Walk” sign is installed in the streets of New York City, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet is opened,, the first issue of MAD Magazine is published, and John Cage’s composition 4’33” is premiered in Woodstock, New York…

From the unimaginably destructive power of the hydrogen bomb to the “silent prayer” of Cage’s 4’33”, the endlessly possible seems, well, almost natural— to be expected. This is America, after all, a truly new world, a nation of infinite possibility, fitfully rising up out of Faulkner’s “unstoried wilderness”, to invent itself in less than two hundred years… conjuring its being through “self-evident truths” and the enduring notion of Manifest Destiny…

Pollock’s Mural eventually found its way into the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art, when it opened in 1969. Its significance grew and it became a centrepiece of the Permanent Collection. The painting greeted you as you entered the front door and it really was a knock out… The Graduate Printmaking studios were situated right across from the museum and my buddies and I in grad school used to go and sit and gaze at it, as they’d placed a big comfortable bench in front of it…

Jackson Pollock standing beside Mural at Vogue Studios

It was, for Pollock, a very significant work as it represented a kind of bridge from his earlier surrealist-inspired bio-morphic abstraction to his more gestural “drip paintings”. He was apparently very excited about the work when he was making it…there were rumours that he painted it in a single night, which were most certainly not true, and that Marcel Duchamp had cut half a foot off the end of the painting when he helped Ms. Guggenheim hang the work, as it was apparently too long for her hallway (it is nine feet by twenty feet long, the largest painting he ever made). In 2008, the Iowa River flooded the museum, and Mural was removed and stored in Chicago for a time until it was decided that it should be restored by The Getty Institute in California. It took two years to restore (it did receive a lot of UV light after all, as it hung up on that studio wall all those years), and when the restoration was complete, it was valued at somewhere between 140 and 150 million dollars… It was then shipped around the world and shown in various museums including the MFA in Boston, The Guggenheim in Venice, and The Royal Academy in London, where it was included in the Abstract Expressionist Retrospective there a few years ago… It was wonderful to see it there again after not having seen it since the early 1980s back in Iowa…

“Surging to the edge of the canvas, sailing past it, Pollock’s loops and swirls of color draw the imagination into a region of boundless space. Evoking a sense of limitless possibility, the best of his canvases gave us—for the first time—a pictorial equivalent to the American infinite that spreads through Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Depicting neither landscape nor figure, Pollock pointed the way into a realm as vast as Whitman’s, and his gesture made him one with it.”

- Carter Ratcliff, in his introduction to The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art

After Mural, Pollock’s radical gesture was to lead him into the unknown in a manner which allowed him to abandon traditional techniques and to dismantle established norms of composition. It enabled him to become, in Ratcliff’s words, ”the artist as Nature, coincident with the universe.” Ratcliff again:

“In Pollock’s aesthetics, creative self and created world are one. Making that unity visible, gesturing it into being, he felt redeemed. Idle, he felt damned.”

And this became Pollock’s intractable problem. By the late 1940s, no matter how hard he pushed the edges of the envelope, he was beginning to repeat himself, something that the painter Hans Hofmann had warned him would happen if he “only worked from the inside” and refused to recognise and acknowledge his relationship with the outside world and the art of the past… What would be the next move? By 1955, the year before his death, he would, by his own admission, go to the studio and "nothing would happen". His increasing torment would inevitably lead him into extended alcoholic stupors, deep frustration and explosions of rage, finally to weeping, and ultimately, to seeking psychiatric counseling.

Pollock wanted desperately to trust his intuition, his instincts. How else could he go forward? In the early 1950s, he re-introduced into his paintings, some of the mythological/figurative elements he had worked with in the 40s, and found himself heavily chastised by the the art-critical establishment for doing so… he seemed to have hit the wall. His predicament was perhaps also Walt Whitman’s, who, late in life, hoping with all his heart that America might eventually find reconciliation with Nature, that ”Nature and man Shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more”, asked:

"But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?"